Category Archives: Beauty

The person who got me through 2021: Larry David helped me embrace life as a bald man

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I have finally admitted that my hair has gone for ever, and taken great comfort from the reigning king of baldness

This year will go down in history as the year I went bald. Well, actually, 2018 went down as the year I went bald. But still, 2021 will go down as the year that I stopped fastidiously brushing three long wisps of cobweb over my scalp in the berserk belief that it somehow made me look less bald. I am bald now. Hello.

Obviously, being bald is rubbish. A bad roll of the genetic dice means I am now conclusively unattractive in the eyes of most of the world. Of course I am – I’m 85% forehead now. I can never go out and commit a crime, because a witness would only have to draw a face on their thumb and show it to the Photofit guy and I’d be in handcuffs by teatime.

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‘I’m happy to lose £10m by quitting Facebook,’ says Lush boss

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Losing 10m followers on sites such as Instagram is a price worth paying for co-founder of ethical beauty empire

Quitting social media is hard to do, even when it doesn’t cost you anything. So when Lush’s chief executive, Mark Constantine, shut its thousands of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok accounts on Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, he knew dropping off millions of customers’ screens would damage his business.

Its Facebook and Instagram accounts alone had 10.6 million followers and the void will result in an estimated £10m hit to sales but Constantine, one of the business’s co-founders, said it had “no choice” after whistleblowers called attention to the negative impact social media sites such as Instagram are having on teenagers’ mental health.

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No school, no hair cut: one girl’s journey through one of the world’s longest Covid lockdowns

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Antonella Bordon’s hair was her family’s pride and joy. But as the pandemic kept her out of school for 18 months, the 12-year-old Argentinian vowed to lop it all off as soon as she could return to class

When she finally cut her hair, Antonella Bordon had trouble sleeping. At the age of 12, her first haircut meant more to her than a simple change of style.

For most of her childhood, Bordon’s silky hair ran all the way down her back to her calves, such a deep brown it looked like a black mane. Her mother and sister would comb it every day, rubbing the locks with rosemary oil, and helping her style it in a way to keep her cool during the hot Argentinian summer.

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This is Pleasing: Harry Styles sets out to ‘dispel the myth of a binary existence’

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The musician’s newly launched beauty brand is an extension of his trailblazing look

With Lady Gaga, Pharell Williams, and Selena Gomez all in on the act, the marker of success in 2021 is not a star on Hollywood Boulevard, it’s the launch of a beauty line. Trust Harry Styles to blow the rest out of the water.

Yesterday, the boyband star turned cultural and style juggernaut announced the launch of Pleasing – described as a “life brand”. Styles’s first business venture includes a range of nail polishes, an illuminating primer serum, and a dual-purpose eye and lip oil.

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‘The bikini line is still a no-no’: why does dance have a problem with body hair?

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Chests must be de-fuzzed, armpits shaved, legs waxed. But as dance becomes more diverse, should it stop policing what grows naturally? Top performers speak out about their body hair

The ideal dancer’s body is unrealistic in many ways: bendier than a Barbie, incredibly lean but super-strong, with very particular proportions (in ballet, small head, long legs, short torso, high insteps). And also, it’s hairless. As with swimmers, athletes, gymnasts and others who wear leotards for a living, constant depilation is part of the job.

That goes for men as well as women. “I choose to shave because it gives me a sense of readiness,” says dancer and choreographer Eliot Smith. “I believe it gives me better outlines of the body against the stage lights.” On ballet message boards, it’s not uncommon to find parents of teenage boys asking what to do about hairy legs showing under white tights (wear two pairs of tights, or paint over hairs with pancake are two suggestions, if shaving isn’t an option).

But is there an alternative? When pole dancer Leila Davis was pictured in an Adidas campaign in March showing off armpit fuzz, as well as toned abs, there were plenty of online haters, predictably, but lots of lovers, too. And there are a few – although not many – contemporary dancers who are happy to let their body hair be seen on stage.

“I want it to be normalised,” says Jessie Roberts-Smith, a performer with Scottish Dance Theatre. And independent choreographer Ellie Sikorski sees it as part of a bigger picture. “It’s not the first fight I would pick about the homogeneity of bodies on stage,” she says. “But there’s something archaic in dance – where your body is policed in certain ways. You’re taught not to have agency over your body and body hair is a tiny detail of that.”

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Embracing vitiligo: Ugandan artist dispels skin stigma with portraits

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People with the condition can face being seen as ‘cursed’ in the east African country, says Martin Senkubuge, whose art aims to make them proud of their skin

It was a confrontation with a female Michael Jackson fan that first drew Martin Senkubuge’s attention to the skin condition vitiligo.

Senkubuge, a Ugandan artist, was describing his tattoo of the musician to the woman at an art exhibition in Kampala in 2019, when he accused the pop star of bleaching his skin.

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‘I’m going to change, why can’t my body?’: tattoo removal grows up

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As tattoos become commonplace, so has the once-pointy subject of their removal. But it isn’t all exes’ names and embarrassing ink that motivates people to part with body art

A tattoo’s permanence was once considered part of the package, equally a source of frisson-like appeal and finger-wagging peril. But as tattoo removal grows more commonplace, many of those associations are now in flux.

In recent years the laser removal process – which breaks up the ink into smaller fragments that can be spirited away by the body – has been embraced by many of the celebrities who helped cement body art’s 2010s pop culture ascendancy, from the Kardashians to the Osbournes. Recently, Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson set about scrubbing his famously inked frame – which spans the gamut from stoner gags to famous exes – in order to pursue more film roles.

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‘Her biggest challenge will be credibility’: Can Jennifer Aniston conquer skincare?

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The Friends star’s LolaVie range launches this week in an already overcrowded celebrity beauty field – so how does she make it stand out?

Jennifer Aniston is to launch her own beauty brand, LolaVie, on Wednesday. But can the star of Friends and The Morning Show make it in the ever more crowded celebrity beauty space?

The competition is fierce, with Ariana Grande, Hailey Bieber, Kim Kardashian and Harry Styles all rumoured to be following Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez, Kylie Jenner and Alicia Keys into the skincare market.

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A look in the mirror: the existential threat facing beauty halls

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Covid pandemic has accelerated shift to online purchases, with big brands buying up startups

The department store beauty hall is facing a fight for survival: the pandemic has accelerated the shift to buying cosmetics, skincare and other pampering products online, and a growing number of sales are now via a smartphone rather than over the counter.

Manicured sales assistants, testing pots and makeovers are being replaced by powerful influencers and digital beauty halls that can switch up the products on offer at the tweak of an algorithm.

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‘My son reeks of Persona’: a week with a scent inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s most challenging film

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The perfume was specially commissioned by organisers of the annual Bergman Week festival on the island on which the Swedish director was born. But what does it smell like?

On Monday morning the postman delivers a parcel from Sweden. Inside is Persona, a perfume inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s most demanding, difficult, abrasive film. It gives us Bergman in a bottle; the arthouse atomised. I spray it on my wrist and then on my wife’s and we stare at each other through a mist of droplets. The perfume is distinctive, but does that mean it’s good?

After a long, anxious moment, my wife nods in relief. “This is actually all right,” she says. “It’s herby. It’s lavender. It smells like the sea.”

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Alicia Keys: ‘I’ve always had to be strong’

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Alicia Keys reflects on 20 years of stardom, going makeup free and where she gets her ‘grit energy’

In 2016, when Alicia Keys released her sixth studio album, Here, she celebrated the launch with a gig in New York’s Times Square. An article written in the Guardian by a journalist who was on the promotional junket described the machinery of her management system at the time, as functioning “like an onion”. A formidable, multi-layer of managers, confidants, coaches, assistants, a personal film crew and various people with ambiguous job functions formed around Keys, like a “shock absorber”. Fast forward to 2021. I am waiting to interview Keys via Zoom on the day she launches a special edition of Songs in A Minor, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking award-winning debut album that started it all. When she appears on screen there is no “onion”, no entourage, no shock absorber. Just her. She is sitting on a light-coloured sofa in front of a floor-to-ceiling wall of immaculately lined-up books. And she is trying to pull a jumper on. Her voice – smooth, deep and slightly gravelly – calls out, “Good morning!” and as she inches in to take her position close to the screen, she smiles so fully that every crevice of her face lights up.

Looking at a barefaced Alicia Keys, hair pulled back into a bun, one can’t help marvel at how much she still resembles the 20-year-old who made her 2001 TV debut singing Falling on The Oprah Winfrey Show. (Winfrey, who calls herself Alicia’s “mother-sister-friend” has since said, “Even before she belted out the first soulful notes of the lyrics that made her famous, I could feel the power of her presence.”) Following the God-like endorsement of the influential Winfrey (and the backing of Clive Davis, the legendary music producer who gave Keys her big break), the song topped the charts. The album sold millions (10.5m physical sales and 645.8m streams to date) and Keys was nominated in six Grammy award categories. She won five of them and has since gone on to win 10 more. Keys is still awestruck that she, and the album that brought her global fame, still have a presence today.

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The male beauty myth: the growing acceptance of feeling comfortable looking good

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Men who want to look good used to be disparaged and labelled vain. But times are finally changing…

Until recently, male motivation for looking good or strong was often born from an inherent desire for us to feel and appear more successful, competitive, virile and powerful – what some now refer to as toxic masculinity.

Of course, there have always been men who’ve enjoyed discussing clothes, watches, even grooming regimes but, for many, this open appreciation of what they wore was often merely a game of one-upmanship disguised as an appreciation of the finer things in life. Think of the 1980s and its bullish Wall Street status stamps, such as pinstripe suits and red braces (Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko); the scene in American Psycho where rival stockbrokers battle over business cards, like a game of Top Trumps. Or in the 1990s, when showing off got even easier and even off-duty symbols such as underwear, jeans and luggage were plastered with a riot of logos.

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Hyram Yarbro, Gen Z’s skincare saviour: ‘YouTube gave me a reason to live’

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How did a boy from a Mormon farming family become social media’s most powerful ‘skinfluencer’?

Truthfully, I didn’t expect to blow up to this scale. And yes, I know this is going to sound clichéd, but if you told me, even a year ago, that it was going to be this big, I would not have believed it.” Considering the trajectory of Hyram Yarbro, the 25-year-old Gen Z skincare guru set on making skincare “accessible”, it is easy to believe him.

His success in the past year, driven by a lockdown-fuelled obsession with skincare and social media, has made Yarbro the world’s most powerful “skinfluencer”. His young, captivated, skincare-obsessed disciples – 1.2m on Instagram, 4.5m on YouTube, 6.8m on TikTok (pre-lockdown 1.0, it was 100,000) – all diligently follow his skincare recommendations via his unfiltered, straight-shooting videos. At the beginning of the pandemic, he says he was uploading content on YouTube five to six times a week and posting three TikToks a day. “But I’ve scaled it back a little,” he says now, “because I was literally not sleeping”.

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‘My hairline threatened my identity so much the ground felt shaky’: why hair transplants are booming

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Celebrity endorsements, new techniques and lockdown have led to rising demand for follicular transplants. But with patchy regulation, are men being exploited when they are vulnerable?

Hamish says he’s not at all vain. He wouldn’t consider getting his teeth whitened. He has an average life, with a happy marriage and two children. But when he caught sight of the top of his head in a family photo about eight years ago, something consumed him.

“I just saw this massive receding hairline and it triggered intense emotions,” he says from his home in Edinburgh, where he works in marketing. “I can feel my heart rate has increased just talking about it. It somehow threatens my identity so much that the ground feels shaky.”

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‘It resembled a chinchilla’: 10 men who changed their hair radically in lockdown

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From the film extra who now gets parts as wizards rather than lawyers to the office workers who just decided to go for it, readers who have tried something new with their locks explain why

Before the pandemic, my personal image was dictated by the constraints of corporate office culture, and I always felt tense. But while furloughed, as I was for most of the last year and a half, I found myself with a lot of time to relax, go for walks, listen to jazz and spend more time in the kitchen experimenting with vegetables. I realised that my hair was changing, too, and there was no pressure from anyone to get it cut. The length of my hair became symbolic of my new ability to appreciate the simple things in life. I’ve retrained, and my capacity for self-expression has multiplied. I have so many more options when I style it in the morning. Will, plumber, Bristol

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‘Pray for Myanmar’: Miss Universe pageant gets political

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Thuzar Wint Lwin, in dress of besieged Chin minority, highlights brutal repression since coup in Myanmar

In the months leading up to the Miss Universe pageant, most contestants were busy making promotional films and rehearsing for their moment in the limelight. Thuzar Wint Lwin of Myanmar was on the streets of Yangon, protesting against the country’s brutal army.

As the military used increasingly deadly force to crush rallies opposing its February coup, she visited the relatives of those who had been killed, donating her savings. Online, she raised awareness of military violence, despite the risk of retaliation.

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‘Teeth have become the new boob job’: the rise of oral tweakments

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With $55 toothpaste and whitening treatments road-tested on TikTok, looking after your teeth is becoming fashionable. It’s even been rebranded as ‘oralcare’

If, once upon a time, going to the dentists was routine at best, your local dental practice is on the way to becoming something of a destination. At the same time, previously unglamorous dental products such as toothpaste, toothbrushes and mouthwash are more likely to be deemed worthy of a bathroom shelfie posted to Instagram. Teeth – and the right products and treatments for them – are now part of the self-care beauty boom.

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‘Own your grey hair and be powerful’: women on no longer dyeing their hair

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With hairdressers closed for most of the pandemic, we asked you to tell us why you stopped dyeing your hair and what it means to you

I had an epiphany one day. I couldn’t stand the demarcation line. My hair had been so damaged from all the processing. Covid had everything shut down. It was time. I didn’t feel it was necessary to hide behind hair dye any more. I took the shears to my own hair and mowed it all off. The second picture is two and a half months of new, fresh, regrowth.

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‘Virtual meetings aren’t going anywhere soon’: how to put your best Zoom face forward

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Has a year of video calls made you self-conscious? Don’t turn your camera off: just relax and deploy a few of these beauty tips

Thought we were a nation of narcissists pre-Covid? Well, a global pandemic has taken things to a whole new level. It’s safe to say nobody planned to spend quite so much of the past year staring at their own grainy reflection, but with everything from weddings to work meetings forced online, our bid to stay connected with others has meant being constantly confronted with our own faces.

And not all of us like what we see. There’s a big difference between sharing a carefully filtered selfie on Instagram, and catching yourself slumped in front of the screen during your fourth video chat of the day, the cat cleaning its paws in the background as you stare in horror at your dark circles. What with the unflattering lighting, unforgiving camera angles and the fact that none of us has been inside a salon in months, it’s no wonder we’re sick of the sight of ourselves. But what effect does it have on our self-esteem? And can we do anything to boost it?

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‘It can leave your self-image fractured’: how hair loss hits men – and what they can do about it

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Michael Segalov is only 27, but already fears baldness isn’t far off. He talks to experts and scientists about hopes for a hirsute future

My dad is bald, and always has been. He’s had a shiny, hairless head with some growth protruding around the edges for the 27 or so years that I’ve been around. Throughout my childhood, his father always had the same carefully crafted combover – grey locks pulled forward neatly hid the tanned, hairless crown which sat underneath.

Mum’s dad – my Grandpa Oskar – just had a giant forehead for as long as anyone can remember: rear bushy follicles formed what could generously be described as a highly pronounced widow’s peak. Mum’s two brothers are the only other older male blood relations in my immediate family. They’ve both fared better. Receding? Yes. But still, hair is hair.

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