Science of Beauty: How to make yourself more attractive

Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder. We have evolved to find particular things attractive, and it is fascinating to work out why and how we can use this knowledge to increase our own attractiveness. I am a working cosmetic scientist who has been reading the scientific literature for many years. I hope that I can use this website to share my interest, and to share my tips for what you can do to make yourself as attractive as possible.

Science and Beauty

Science is often used to sell cosmetics. How much faith can you put in the scientific sounding claims made by cosmetic companies? Certainly the big cosmetic companies do employ large numbers of scientists and do carry out a lot of research. But they spend much more on marketing. For example, L’Oreal spends about a third of its turnover on advertising. For every £10 they get from selling a skin cream about £3 is going to be used to sell you the next one. Only 3% of their turnover is spent on research (admitedly given the amount of money they make this is still a huge amount of money). This is one of the reasons I usually recommend beauty products from smaller independent companies. More of what you are paying for is the actual stuff rather than the advertising pizazz.

This doesn’t mean that the research into beauty carried out by the big companies isn’t worthwhile. They have made some big advances in our knowledge and have developed products that can help in making you look more attractive. I will try to pick out the real science from the marketing hype. I don’t plan on doing too many product reviews. There are plenty of those on the net so I will concentrate on reviewing products that illustrate some aspect of the science of beauty that seems interesting.

Don’t Panic!

The beauty world is often gripped by panics about particular chemicals. There have been scares in my lifetime about lanolin, parabens, phthalates, propylene glycol and SLS and SLES. Sometimes these have some justification, sometimes they don’t. I will share my opinions on them as they come up.

I enjoy reading primary scientific research. Often I come across interesting facts that can be turned into tips that you can use to increase your own attractiveness. I am going to build these into a ready reference set of tips.

Science of Beauty: laboratory equipment

colin@colinsbeautypages.co.uk

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