Lifestyle Choices

The brushes you use, the sponges and absorbent cotton, and even your mirror and lighting are all-important in getting good results from your makeup products. You need to acquire a collection of them, keeping your tools immaculately clean and using them every time you put on

your makeup. It is always tempting to put on an eye shadow with your finger or to apply powder with a dirty puff, but the results are never good, and the makeup you put on that way doesn’t last as long as it should. Also, many of the little padded wands and brushes supplied with eye shadows and cheek colors look great in their compacts but won’t really do the job of applying colors properly. And once any applicator wand or brush is dirty, you will never get good, smooth application from it. (more…)

When you use makeup, you are practicing the age-old art of illusion. But the illusions makeup offers you are subtle ones, not complete changes of character, age, and coloring. Try to achieve that, and you carry the use of makeup too far; then, instead of being your friend, it will suddenly become an enemy and make you look foolish, too old, or simply less well than you could look. So the first rule of good makeup is simple: Never try to change your face with it.

After that has been said and after you have come to terms with the fact that whether or not you like it, your jaw is square or your eyes small or your skin a different color from what you ideally would like, then there is a lot you can do with color to make you look better. And that, after all, is what making up your face is all about. Whether you are after a freshly scrubbed, natural look (which incidentally takes a lot more artifice to achieve than you might imagine) or a more elaborate-looking, sophisticated face, the makeup you choose and the way you apply it should make you look more attractive, more interesting, healthier, and simply more yourself. (more…)

Scientists have been working for generations trying to understand how our noses distinguish one smell from another, to find a classification for scents, and perhaps to develop some kind of notation system for their description. So far without much success. One of the most interesting theories about the sense of smell comes from J. E. Moore, a British chemist. He claims that there are seven primary odors, under which all smells can be classified. Each of these, he says, has a distinctive molecular shape, which the olfactory cells in our nose recognize and react to. And this reaction is not only chemical, as you might expect. According to Moore (and several American researchers agree with him) these special-shaped molecules slot into submicroscopic pores of differing sizes and shapes in the receptor cells. The researchers claim that any change in odor is the result of a change in the overall shape of the molecule. But just how a fragrance affects the nervous system and brings about many-layered emotional responses remains yet another unsolved mystery. (more…)

Each hair on your head is made beneath the surface of your skin in a little bulbous structure called a follicle. There, a clump of cells called the papilla, at the base of the follicle, produces the keratinous cells that become a strand of hair. The papillae get good supplies of food and oxygen, since they are well furnished with blood vessels, on which the growth and health of every hair depends. When, for any reason, circulation to your scalp is decreased or interfered with, the papillae get fewer nutrients and less oxygen than they need, and your hair suffers. The function of a follicle is to produce keratin, just as your pancreas produces insulin or your stomach hydrochloric acid. The follicle also contains an oil gland, which produces oil to coat each hair and to protect it from water loss. How efficiently and how well it does this depends on a number of things such as the level of androgenic and estrogenic hormones in your system, your genetic inheritance, and your general health. (more…)