Do appetite suppressants like hoodia work?

This week’s cover story on the New Scientist magazine is about sexual strategies – the different approaches men and women have to sex.  At the time of writing you can still read the original article here, but New Scientist tends to take stories down after a while so the link may not work when you [...]

I have already posted about the features of an attractive female face. But what lies behind these observations? A few years ago scientists at the University of St Andrews took photos of 59 women aged between 18 and 25 every week for six weeks. They also took urine samples and measured their oestrogen levels. By [...]

A recent piece of UK research has found that women rate men with small facial scars more attractive than the same men without scars. The study was carried out in Liverpool and Stirling. 115 women and 64 men rated the attractiveness of eight strangers of the opposite sex. Half were given original face shots, the [...]

Losing weight is very easy if you have a lot of will power. Perform some vigorous exercise. The body will burn your fat and you will weigh less. No problem. Well there is a bit of a problem. Your body has evolved over millions of years to make you hungry when you have burnt fat. [...]

Slimming is a bit outside my area of expertise as a cosmetic scientist, but a product that could slim in a selective area does sound very appealing. What could do this? The xanthine family of chemicals springs straight the scientist’s mind – the best known of which is caffeine. This can be shown to increase [...]

Scientific American reports the results of a study into the effect of genes and exercise on body weight.  It is confirmation of something that I think we all knew, which is that some people just put on weight more than others.  Researchers have been able to identify some of the genes involved.  But it turns [...]

If you are a man and want to become more attractive to women the best strategy is to become taller. See my post on longer legs. Obviously this isn’t a straight forward thing to do, and I have previously suggested that you can’t simply stick a fw inches on your legs. But it turns out [...]

If like me you were brought up in a fairly protestant work ethic sort of culture, you might well regard concern for one’s appearance as a superficial sort of thing. Grooming oneself might seem a form of vanity. Well maybe it is – but it turns out that potential employers don’t see it that way. [...]