Lifestyle Choices

There are three kinds of permanent hair colourants: vegetable dyes such as henna, metallic dyes such as those used to gradually cover grey hair, and the aniline dyes or oxidation tints, which include most of the colourants used professionally in salons.

The Vegetable Dyes

Henna is the best-known, since its use dates back thousands of years. Taken from the Lawsonia plant, which is indigenous to Africa and Asia, henna varies in colour depending on which country it comes from. It can be strong orange in colour, as Moroccan henna, or a deep red, as the henna that comes from Iran — the most sought-after in the world. The plant is harvested, dried in the sun, and then crushed into a greenish powder, which is what one puts on the hair. It coats the hair shaft’s cuticle a reddish colour. (more…)

The Causes

Although allergies and allergic reactions to particular substances are not inherited, a tendency to them can be. If, for instance, both your mother and your father suffered from allergies, you have a 57 percent chance of them too. Approximately 15 percent of all women are said to be highly prone to allergic reactions, 25-30 percent are less easily sensitized (which means they will react adversely only to some substances, sometimes), and 55-60 percent are relatively allergy-free or only rarely prone to allergic reactions. But, on the whole, allergic complaints are on the increase, and cosmetic dermatitis and skin sensitivities are leading the field. For instance, in one study of skin ailments in the mid-seventies it was found that where, four years before, only 3 percent of the patients in Britain seen by dermatologists were suffering from skin reactions, in the space of a very few years it had risen to 14 percent. (more…)

One of the simplest and most effective ways of changing your appearance is to change the color of your hair. As we get older, the color of hair tends either to fade or to go darker, so that a once shimmery golden mane or deep mahogany tresses can become lackluster and dull. One of the best ways of remedying the situation is with a color boost. Hair coloring these days is effective and reasonably priced and can look even better than most natural hair—provided, of course, it is done correctly. Otherwise it can end up looking like a burnished haystack.

There are two categories of hair colorants: permanent colorants, which enter the cortex and cannot be washed out, and the temporary and the semipermanent, which can be used to highlight and intensify your own hair color but won’t alter the cortex.

The Temporary Colorants

These are the easiest to use. They coat the cuticle of the hair with color that washes away with the next shampoo. You can get temporary highlighting shampoos and color rinses in a great variety of colors that don’t disturb the cuticle imbrications. Most of them have a shine- promoting pH, too. But what you can do with them is limited, for while they will darken the hair—say from blond to red or to black—they are really designed for minor color changes only. If you try to go too many shades away from your natural color, they tend to streak and give uneven coverage. They also cannot make your hair lighter than it is, because they have no action on the cortex, where the melanin granules are —they merely coat the outside of the hair shaft. (more…)

The Products

Makeup products offer you two things: coverage, which to some extent will conceal minor flaws and blemishes in your skin, and most important, color. There are literally hundreds of different makeup products on the market. From the amount of advertising that accompanies the launch of each of them—the new wand-lipstick or foam cheek color or moisture- encapsulated powder—you would assume that to do a good job of making up her face a woman needs all of them. You don’t. In fact you need very few.

Neither do colors change a great deal from season to season, in spite of the fact that each cosmetic house brings out new autumn or spring collections. If you gather together a simple range of shades for eyes, cheeks, and lips that you know look good on you, there is no reason to replace half of them with each new season’s arrivals. Yes, there might be the new shade of fuchsia lipstick which you fancy or a new-formula foundation (foundations seem to get better and better each couple of years), but the quality of a makeup product is not dependent on its price, although the package—including the little compacts, mirrors, and applicators—is usually better the more you pay. (more…)

How much hair you have, the color of it, the thickness, curl, and length it will grow before a new hair is begun all depend on your genetic inheritance. There is nothing you can do to change that. The diameter of each hair (its fineness) is determined somewhat by its color. Blondes tend to have more than anyone else (about 150,000 hairs), but the hairs tend to be finer. Brown hair is usually second with about 115,000, followed by black with 110,000 and red at about 90,000. How full your head of hair looks depends on both the number of hairs there and the thickness of the shaft itself. You need a lot of fine hairs, for instance, to give the impression of fullness but considerably fewer thick ones to give the same impression. If your hair is fine, you can make it look thicker by increasing the diameter of each strand with protein shampoos and body-building conditioners or by coloring your hair and giving it a permanent to swell out the shaft. (more…)