Colin's Beauty Pages

Despite frequent scare stories, lipstick will not do you any harm even if you eat large quantities of it.

Everyone knows that astronomy grew out of astrology. Both can trace their origins back to the same place, even though they don’t have much to do with one another nowadays. It is often thought, even by some chemists, that chemistry has a similar relationship with alchemy. It sounds plausible, but in fact modern chemistry developed [...]

Anyone can develop an allergy to anything anytime.  Allergic reactions vary in severity, but in rare cases some can kill you.  So when you make it to your bed tonight you can thank providence for sparing you for one more day. But lets get things in perspective.  Although in theory anything can be an allergen [...]

The UK television series QI delights in exposing facts you have always believed as being untrue.  And very entertaining it is.  If they are reading this, here is another one for them.  Which country first used gas in the First World War?  I was absolutely convinced it was the Germans.  But it turns out that [...]

It is often said that 60% of what we apply to our skin is absorbed. The true figure is far lower.

Happi reported last week that the Personal Care Products Council spent $170,000 lobbying the federal government in the first quarter, a 21% increase from the same period a year ago. Is that all? That barely covers the cost of an office and a couple of staff. I know its easy to spend other people’s money, [...]

I was very heartened by the common sense responses of the commentators on this story from the Daily Mail, sent to me by my sister. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2009890/Is-shampoo-making-fat-The-chemical-calories-common-beauty-products-affecting-weight.html Some stories are so obviously bogus you need no specialist knowledge whatever to see that they are nonsense .  The only question is why the editors at the Mail [...]

Non-UK readers, and maybe even a few UK readers may not have heard of the long running British radio series Desert Island Discs.  It is a simple but brilliant format. Guests to the show are asked to say which 8 records they would take with them to a desert island, and they are also allowed [...]

I was procrastinating like a particularly easily distracted loris with ADD fitting in a nifty bit of networking between urgent tasks today, when out of the blue I was asked a question on Twitter about whether cosmetics contained gluten.

I didn’t think that this was possible, but reading Lisa Lise’s blog the other day managed to lower my opnion of the Skin Deep database.  Given I that I regard it as highly misleading and often wrong, this is quite an achievement.  But even I would have conceded that the materials that they have set [...]