Colin's Beauty Pages

This may not come as a huge surprise, but when it comes to profiles on dating sites, people tend to lie a lot.

Studies are revealing what goes on in his brain when a man looks at an attractive woman.

I am probably one of the few men in their fifties who can spend a lot of time online reading blogs by young women and exchanging messages with them without having to clear my browser history before my wife sees it.  I do of course have a perfectly legitimate reason to do so, and I [...]

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 [...]

Today it is possible to use sophisticated software to produce images of faces so realistic that you can’t tell them from photographs of real people. A group of German researchers has taken advantage of this to investigate the precise features that make a face attractive or unattractive. You can read their work in full on [...]