Colin's Beauty Pages

Benzyl alcohol ends up in your skin care product for two reasons. It is either added deliberately as a preservative, or it is a component of a fragrance or an essential oil.  It is one of those organic compounds that turns up pretty widely in nature, so I suppose you could call it a natural product if you wanted to.  It is also manufactured from petrochemical sources so you can describe it as a synthetic chemical with just as much justice.  Both types end up in cosmetics, and quite often in the same formulation.  But Colin’s Beauty Pages is an equal opportunities kind of a blog, so we’ll judge this molecule on its properties not its origin. Read the rest of this entry »

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 don’t share their brains of their readers who spotted straight away that no, your shampoo is not going to affect your waistline. Read the rest of this entry »

My followers on Twitter are a smart self confident, sassy, sometimes sarky bunch of well informed with-it hipsters who know what they want and aren’t short of an opinion or two.  Its a bit of shame really.  I was hoping for a bunch of adoring fans who doted on my every word.  I suppose my idea of ‘followers’ is a bit old fashioned.  But it does mean that I get some good ideas from them.

One such came from a follower who described herself on her bio as an unapologetic product tart.  What a great thing to be I thought.  Are you one? I think you should be.  Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a roaring trade in hot dogs from street sellers in Oxford Street. Who doesn’t love a hot sausage and onions?  The cheery vendors rarely have a good grasp of English, but there is nothing wrong with their grasp of economics.  The London police often have to cope with violence between rival hot dog salesmen over pitches.  The more sellers the more choice for buyers and they have to work harder to earn their money.

The spammers and scare mongers who latch onto the natural and organic skin market market are rather similar.  They don’t actually beat each other up, but they are quite happy to rubbish one another’s green credentials, and even take one another to court.  I think this is what is behind what is on the face of it a rather curious story that was e-mailed to me by a friend in America a few days ago.

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Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but a good lip gloss isn’t bad either.  In fact, lip glosses and diamonds have something in common. They both reflect the light in that uniquely female pleasing way for the same reason.  Both possess a high refractive index.  Diamond in fact has one of the highest known refractive indexes.  A material with a high refractive index has a lot of internal reflections so it captures and reflects light very efficiently.

It isn’t really practical to use diamonds in lip glosses. Instead a polymer with a high refractive index called polybutene is used.  This isn’t ideal either, it is a bit sticky and unmanageable.  But thanks to its high refractive index it is shiny, and that is the important thing.

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 to take a luxury.  This popped into my head the other day when I was reading about the latest (unofficial) draft of the proposed American Safe Cosmetic Act over  on Personal Care Truth.  This is incidentally even in this much modified form about the daftest thing to come out of the States since M.C.Hammer’s trousers, but I digress. Read the rest of this entry »

The tropical uplands of Somalia and the Yemen are a hard and unforgiving environment.  To survive there the Frankincense tree has had to develop some nifty abilities.  One of these is a thick resin that exudes from damaged parts of its trunk and branches. The sticky substance rapidly provides a defence against the teeth of hungry goats, and it later hardens into a solid protective plug to protect against germs and insects, and to stop the plant drying out in the arid conditions.

Nature is remarkable isn’t it.

The solidified lumps of resin are known as tears, and for centuries have been gathered by tribesmen to trade with.   In fact the frankincense trade is one of the oldest known with the trade route from the Horn of Africa to the Mediterranean having existed from prehistoric times to the present day.

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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.

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A reader has been advised by her doctor to use products for sensitive skin following an episode of folliculitis under the arm.  What should she look out for, she asks.

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All great ideas are about solving a problem.  And great as perfumes are, they have a bit of a problem.  When you apply them to your skin they gradually wear off.  But don’t worry, intrepid inventor Christine Martz has an answer.   In a 1998 patent she divulged her solution.  She has designed nifty heart shaped sponges on an adhesive backing.  You spray your favourite scent on the front, then stick them inside your bra.  The heat from your skin gradually releases the fragrance and also the oils pressing against the patch modify the smell to make it less pungent.  Sorted!

I wonder why it never caught on?

Patent for Perfume Patch