One of the perks of being an a-list celebrity beauty blogger is that you get invited to the launches of exciting new products. For instance this week I was in Soho for the launch of a pair of new perfumes from Arrogant Cat. (Not that I am likely to get invited to anything by the people behind Huge Lips Skinny Hips mind you)
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I will be at the Science Online conference again this year. Last year’s was great fun. I not only got a t-shirt I was also introduced to Twitter and got to meet some interesting people.
You can see me in this picture if you look carefully (and know what I look like).
The only question I have is whether I wear last year’s t-shirt or go for a more stylish fedora and cravat?
This blog is about science and beauty, but it is surprising where the research I do for it leads me. I have just read the abstract of a paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research. (No, I had never heard of it either). It is called the Anthropometry of Love:Height and Gender Asymmetries in Interethnic Marriages.
I am a slightly gawky individual. I am bit more interested in my computer than my personal appearance and I am not good at relating to other human beings. I am also well aware that the profile of my face does not conform to the ideals of Classical Greek beauty.
Despite all this, I have been reasonably successful in passing my genes on to the next generation. I have the good luck to be relatively tall, and I think that this positive has overcome all my other negatives. I am in the upper quartile for height, very nearly in the upper decile. I am taller than about 80% of other men in other words. In more ordinary language, I am tall but not outstandingly so.
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I have been looking for a while for decient photographs of the top section of the skin. It is something I often want to use to illustrate a point. I am pretty sure I looked at Wikipedia ages ago, but I have just come across this stunning photo. And best of all, it is in the public domain so I can use it freely with a clear conscience, as indeed can you if you so desire. (The original Wikipedia article has it at a higher resolution, so get if from there if you have any serious use for it. Original Reference) Thanks to Kilbad for sharing it and congratulations on a superb bit of histology.
Epidermis and Dermis
You can see very clearly the top layer of the skin, the stratum corneum, the epidermis populated with corneocytes sitting on top of the dermis.
Labelled version
I have just come across a blog devoted to lip balms.
Confessions of Balmaholic is a labour of love by someone who really loves their lip balms and has devoted what must have been hundreds of hours to testing and reviewing lip balms. Luckily she seems to like nearly all of them, so at least she is enjoying herself. She describes herself as a girl from New York who loves lip balms. She certainly does!
New York Girl who loves lip balms
One of the best established facts in the study of the science behind beauty is that men find a waist to hip ratio in women of about 0.7 the most attractive. Its a brave group that will challenge this view, but an Australian group has done so in a recently published study. They showed men pictures of average women, Playboy centrefolds, photos from escort ads and curvaceous models from the twenties and nineties. (”Yeah, of course this is science, mate”.)
I have just completed an e-book on shea butter sponsored by my friends at Artful Teasing.
Shea butter is one of the most natural cosmetic raw materials available being as it is not cultivated, it is simply harvested from wild trees. Although it is basically a vegetable fat it has a lot more components than these typically have, and some of these components have some very interesting
I am indebted to Heather B on LinkedIn for drawing my attention to this blog post – http://www.beautyschool.com/blog/green-beauty/how-your-hair-can-save-the-world/ – which gives some details of a scheme whereby discarded hair from beauty salons is packed into nylon stockings and used to soak up oil spills. It seems that the fibrous and adsorbent nature of hair is such as to make it a very suitable material for such a purpose.
This sounds really creative and I can’t help wondering how someone came up with the idea in the first place.
