Make your own lipstick

For the health-conscious among us.

Of course, wearing lipstick is hardly a modern phenomenon: Babylonian beauties were puckering up in ancient Mesopotamia 5000 years ago. Back then, lipstick could be rather hazardous. The ancient Egyptians created theirs using a mixture of a plant dye called Fucus-Algin, a dash of iodine and some bromine mannite. It produced a lovely red colour, but was unfortunately quite toxic, and often led to serious illness.

Other popular ingredients included a red dye made from crushed cochineal beetles, and fish scales - added for their pearlescent effect. Surprisingly, both of these are still used in commercial lipsticks and lip glosses today. And though bromine mannite isn't on the ingredients list any more, modern products may still contain substances we'd rather avoid. A recent study by Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, an American pressure group, raised concerns about the amount of lead found in one third of red lipsticks tested. Castor oil, used as a base ingredient in many lipsticks, can cause abdominal cramping and diarrhea if too much is ingested.

How much lipstick would you have to ingest, do you think, to come down with diarrhea? And what's the matter with fish scales and crushed beetles? We can all use the extra protein.

I'm skeptical

Writer Anne Kreamer goes gray, writes a book about it and concludes that men are more attracted to older women with gray hair.

Men find grey hair sexy. Men read youth in “attitude and energy and vitality, and the way a woman carries herself”. She experimented with theoretical internet dating: posting herself as 50, separated, living in Brooklyn, no children – first as a brunette, then after three months posting the same information but substituting “silver hair”. “And do you know, four times as many men ‘winked’ me – which is the online term for wanting to know you better – with my hair grey! Maybe this is unique to New York, I thought. So I tried it in Chicago and LA as well: and the national average was that three times as many men were interested in me with grey hair.

“I was dumbfounded. It was counter-intuitive! We’re scared of losing our sexual attractiveness, but the exact opposite happened.” Perhaps, she concluded, at the age of 50, honesty and authenticity is valued by mature males.

Hmmm. I wonder.

Also: What's with this tendency among women, particularly these so-called creative women, to take a personal decision and attach global significance to it. Go gray. Dye your hair. Do whatever you want. But your personal decision has nothing to do with the rest of us. It's not a harbinger of some sort of gray liberation movement, empowering gray-haired women throughout the land. Nor are you particularly courageous just because you don't (or do) dye your hair.

Beauty is in the hand of the surgeon

Introducing the Beauty Enhancement Awards, which celebrate the best in plastic surgery.

More than just an entertaining event, the mission of the Beauty Enhancement Awards is to shine a light on the science and art of cosmetic surgery. The Beauty Enhancement Awards aims to educate the public about how to make informed decisions about these important life choices and to empower people with information and resources about everything from how to choose the right physician, what procedure options are available, to what are the best of today's techniques, and how one should prepare and best recover from a procedure. The event will not be a parade of unattainable beauty, but rather a display of real people who have had great results which can be realistically achieved if one educates themselves and makes the right decisions and moves with respect to having cosmetic surgery. By putting a spotlight on people who were voted to have excellent cosmetic surgery results, the Beauty Enhancement Awards hopes to help and be of service to the public and the cosmetic surgery industry by setting some "standards" for excellent and natural-looking aesthetic results.

It is also the goal of the Beauty Enhancement Awards to demonstrate how plastic surgery can have a positive impact on people's lives beyond the physical -- on the inside. To underscore this intent, contestants will have an opportunity to get personable and intimate by discussing how their makeover may have had an effect (small or large) on them from personal, social, career respects, and other ways in which making this life decision bettered their lives. The Beauty Enhancement Awards does not advocate life changes through cosmetic enhancement, but it does celebrate people and beautiful aesthetic results along with the self-improvement that resulted in the experience. We don't condone self-improvement through plastic surgery but we want to showcase people who have had positive experiences and educate the public about how they can also take the right steps to get a satisfying result that they're happy with.

Categories include best female (and male) liposuction, best tummy tuck and best rhinoplasty.

Anyone can enter--provided, of course, that you've undergone the requisite procedures. And anyone can vote. My vote goes to the first photograph here for the most improbable breasts on a live human being.

Via Metafilter.

The latest must-have product for women

"A sticker for your bits."

I've decided that the philtrum may be the sexiest part of the face

Case in point:



According to Wikipedia, the ancient Greeks considered it an erogenous zone. Here's another fine philtrum:



That is all.

ADDED: The Jennifer Lopez Philtrum Page.

Drop cloth not included

With this handy dandy beauty tool, an airbrush.

GlowFusion Airglow
What it is:
Your best shot at a totally seamless, sunless, sexy, head-to-toe tan.

What it is formulated to do:
Ready, aim ... glow!
The first and only at-home and fully rechargeable airbrush gun blows out a sheer, vapor-light, even mist in an all new, cocoa-infused GlowFusion Micro-Nutrient Tinted Protein Tan Mist that dries on contact. No need to smooth, spread, or touch.

Creatures from the wax museum

A wedding photographer inveighs against Photoshop abuse.

The images of celebrities on the covers of magazines are another source of irritation to me. In most cases the people responsible for creating them have used the Photoshop “heal” tool—or whatever it’s called; I’m not a Photoshop user—so aggressively to smooth away any inhomogeneity in their subjects’ skin that the women (it’s usually women) they depict might as well have been extruded from a rubber mould.

I hate the way the women on those covers look, particularly their skin. It no longer looks like skin. In this photo, for example, doesn't the before look much better than the after? She doesn't look like a living human being in the after. The same thing is true here. It's absolutely creepy.