Category Archives: Beauty

‘Hydration is a simple thing’: has the quest to improve water actually worked?

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From alkaline waters to beauty elixirs, added oxygen and probiotics, many brands claim they have ‘enhanced’ water – but what do the experts think?

Today, when I woke up, I made myself a cup of warm lemon water. After lunch I dropped a Berocca into a glass to power me through the afternoon haze. Running errands I considered treating myself to a Coke but opted instead for an expensive, vegetable-tasting water.

H2O classic may be a prerequisite to all known forms of life, but countless brands insist they have found ways to “improve” water. From a business standpoint, it’s working. Industry researchers IbisWorld estimate Australia’s “functional beverage” industry is worth $445.6m; and as people become more health conscious, the growth of the sector is outpacing the economy overall.

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The forever ponytail: woman shares ordeal after using Gorilla Glue on her hair

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Tessica Brown has gained a captive audience on TikTok and Instagram after mistakenly using super-strength adhesive on her hair

“Stiff where?” Tessica Brown asked TikTok, one week ago, before the world was aware of her struggle. “My hair,” she finished.

And stiff it has been, for more than a month now, as Brown continues battling against what so far seems to be an irreversible decision: mistakenly using Gorilla Glue to hold her hairstyle in place.

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Brazilian butt lift: behind the world’s most dangerous cosmetic surgery

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The BBL is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world, despite the mounting number of deaths resulting from the procedure. What is driving its astonishing rise?

The quest was simple: Melissa wanted the perfect bottom. In her mind, it resembled a plump, ripe peach, like the emoji. She was already halfway there. In 2018, she’d had a Brazilian butt lift, known as a BBL, a surgical procedure in which fat is removed from various parts of the body and then injected back into the buttocks. Melissa’s bottom was already rounder and fuller than before, and she was delighted by the effect, with how it made her feel and how it made her look. But it could be better. It could always be better.

On a recent afternoon, Melissa visited the British aesthetic surgeon Dr Lucy Glancey for a consultation. Glancey had performed Melissa’s first BBL at her clinic on the Essex-Suffolk borders, a suite of rooms boasting shining white cupboards, a full-length mirror and drawers stuffed with syringes. As she waited for Melissa to arrive, Glancey showed me a picture of Melissa on the beach in Dubai, wearing a palm-print bikini and posing in a kind of provocative crouch – arms, breasts, thighs and buttocks all arranged for optimum effect. “Look how good she looks,” said Glancey, admiring Melissa and her own work. “I said to her, I don’t see what else we can do.”

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From ancient Egypt to Cardi B: a cultural history of the manicure

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Nail art dates back millennia, taking in complex social codes, cultural appropriation, modern slavery and the sexism of lockdown rules for beauty salons

“How to Take a Nail Selfie!” “Fruity Manicure Inspo!” “Kylie Jenner Slammed by Fans for Nearly Poking Out Stormi’s Eyes With Ridiculous Claw Nails.”

The glut of hyperbolic nail-related headlines online points to our obsession with the endless possibilities open to the plate at the top of our fingers. In the internet age, the manicure, in all its incarnations, is a traffic winner. It peppers a plethora of Pinterest boards; the hashtag #nails has been posted 151m times on Instagram; nail artists are stars in their own right; and countless women will assert that manicures are a form of self-care. Detractors dismiss it all as frivolity.

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Seasonal makeover: from couch potato to festive diva

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Lockdown has not been kind to our beautiful selves, but now it is time to shape up. Emma Beddington gets to work on her pre-Christmas, full-body makeover. But where to begin?

How do you look at the moment? It’s a loaded question, I know. “Asking me to choose one physical feature I feel bad about is like asking me to choose my least-favourite family member since lockdown,” says my friend F. An unscientific poll of friends and acquaintances reveals a tally of 2020 woes: worry wrinkles, “maskne”, “Zoomface”, “presidential” hair and Covid kilos. “Weird grief seeps out of me and my eyes are tired,” read one extremely relatable response.

Eating more, exercising less, sleeping badly, scrolling and worrying constantly… barring some boastful Instagram blowhards, we are all looking and feeling suboptimal as 2020 draws to a distinctly unfestive close. My own tally is standard but dismal: I look like a parboiled potato, in both face and body.

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Go with the Flowbee: George Clooney reveals how he cuts his hair

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Award-winning actor admits cutting his own hair with device long before salons closed this year due to Covid

With salons largely closed until this week, male grooming has been in freefall since the start of the spring lockdown. DIY haircuts have not been successful for all. Yet one Hollywood star has proved that even in a global pandemic, bad hair is not the great equaliser we hoped it would be.

George Clooney, the 59-year-old award-winning actor and human rights activist, has admitted to successfully cutting his own hair at home using a device called a Flowbee. “My hair’s really like straw, so it’s easy,” he told CBS Sunday Morning.

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‘I stopped trying to control my body’: the women who gave up grooming in 2020

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From shaving to threading to dyeing to painting, the little touches that used to seem so important have been squeezed out by the pandemic. And many Britons are all the happier for it

During the first lockdown Afsaneh Parvizi-Wayne, a 55-year-old entrepreneur, went for a drive around London. “I remember looking in the rear-view mirror,” she says, “and I noticed all these little hairs coming out of my chin. That was a bit of a shock. Like, bloody hell, I’ve really been growing these out.”

Parvizi-Wayne is of Iranian heritage, and hair removal is a big part of her culture. “Grooming, for Iranian women, it’s essential,” she says. For her entire life, from puberty onwards, Parvizi-Wayne had scrupulously removed her facial hair. “It was like a jack-in-the-box reaction,” she says. “If I saw a hair, I’d go to the salon.” If she failed to do so, a relative or family friend would take care of it for her. “Iranian aunties literally pin you down if they see a stray chin hair,” she laughs. “They pull out a piece of string to thread you then and there.”

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Pharrell Williams announces gender neutral skincare line

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Musician’s Humanrace skincare products described as being for “every individual”

The musician and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams has announced the release of Humanrace, his long awaited skincare line. Significantly, it is gender neutral.

The Humanrace products, a powder cleanser, lotus enzyme exfoliator and humidifying cream are described on the website as being for “every individual,” subtly avoiding any pronoun definition. Williams told Allure magazine: “We want to democratise the experience of achieving wellness.”

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Working from home made my descent into decrepitude harder to avoid | Elizabeth Quinn

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Confronted by my reflection at every turn, I armed myself with expensive beauty products

I have a theory – largely untested – that everyone is mentally “stuck” at a certain age: the one that best reflects their outlook. Mine is 17. At my core, I see myself as youthful, enthusiastic and not yet tainted by the bitterness of experience. I’m optimistic and forward-looking. A woman in my prime.

But increasingly, the face and form I see reflected back in the mirror are none of those things. At first I blame harsh lighting for my transformation. Then I realise it’s natural light coming in from the skylight, not the gentle artificial light of a boutique store change room. There is, quite simply, nowhere to hide.

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Wash your mask daily: the ultimate guide to face coverings

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Experts explain the best way to wash masks, how to handle them – and how to prevent ‘maskne’

We hook them on to our faces, laugh, sneeze and sputter into them, then crumple them into our bags or pockets only to retrieve them and do it all again. Yet despite official advice that we should be wearing a fresh face covering each time we enter an enclosed public space, a YouGov poll revealed many people are going several wears between washes – and 15% of Brits don’t wash their reusable masks at all. Similarly, more than half of those opting for disposable masks are rewearing them – 7% of them indefinitely so.

Face coverings are designed to catch the respiratory droplets we emit from our mouths and noses, but given that they’re our own respiratory droplets, is this really so bad? We examine the evidence.

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Baldness and rashes? Experts split over unusual Covid-19 risk factors and symptoms

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Academics analyse whether hair and hearing loss may also be linked to coronavirus

From hearing loss and rashes, to being tall and bald, as the Covid-19 pandemic develops, a host of new symptoms and risk factors are being linked to the virus. We take a look at the evidence.

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No going back to normal after the pandemic? Don’t bet on it | Gaby Hinsliff

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After every crisis, great thinkers declare life will never be the same again. But don’t underestimate the pull of old habits

As the US army rolls into a newly liberated Paris, a woman sits serenely under the only working hairdryer in the city. The war photographer Lee Miller’s iconic shot of a salon reopening amid the rubble in the summer of 1944 could easily have become an image of heartless vanity when Vogue published it. Who cares about a hairdo, when millions have died?

Yet at the time it somehow managed to convey both ingenuity and hope, in a world far enough steeped in death to long for a little frivolity. The return of being able to care about something that doesn’t actually matter must have come, in the circumstances, as a blessed relief. When Boris Johnson announced the reopening of British hairdressers this July, Miller’s picture sprang to mind.

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Kylie Jenner in row with Forbes over billionaire status

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Kardashian family member reacts angrily to magazine’s claim she spun ‘a web of lies’

A row has broken out between one of the world’s leading business magazines and the youngest member of reality TV’s most famous family over the value of her cosmetics company.

Forbes magazine has accused Kylie Jenner, the youngest half-sister of Kim Kardashian West, of spinning a “web of lies” to inflate the size and success of her business. It claimed her family went to unusual lengths to present its youngest adult member as being richer than she was.

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Parr’s makeup ad for Gucci has a brush with controversy

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The shoot, featuring musician Dani Miller in mascara, has reignited debate about realistic standards of beauty

One is famed for warts-and-all realism, the other for high-end gloss, so there was always going to be something spectacular in the offing when British photographer Martin Parr was asked to shoot a make-up advertising campaign for the Italian fashion house Gucci.

The imagery – for the brand’s new L’Obscur mascara – features New York punk musician Dani Miller and her now-famous gap-toothed smile. With lashings of heavy black mascara, natural eyebrows (complete with, shock horror, regrowth), and minimal foundation, it has divided customers and started yet another debate about diversity, even in these times of increased body positivity.

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New boiler, £0? The plumber, hairdresser and beautician who work for free

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Haircuts for rough sleepers. Beauty treatments for cancer patients. Boilers for disabled people. A wave of specialists are providing skills – and hope – for those in need

Goodwill, it appears, is in high demand. One thing all the altruists I met while researching this article have in common is that they’re on the phone the whole time. Perhaps if mobiles had been around in Robin Hood’s day he would have had one pressed constantly to his lughole. “Marion … yes, love. I’m just having a fight on a bridge with Little John … sorry, you’re breaking up, terrible reception in here, all the oaks... What, the Sheriff’s abducted you? OK, I’m coming!”

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Beauty and the beam: the future of LED therapy looks bright

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It’s non-invasive and has been proven to work. But can LED therapy really be a miracle cure for everything from acne to tired skin? Rachel Cooke sees the light

If I said I knew of a sure-fire way to lastingly improve your skin and that all you would have to do to experience this seeming miracle would be to sit for 13 minutes every week beneath a gently pulsing light with your eyes closed, what would be your response? Would you whip out your credit card and rush to book yourself an appointment? Or would you silently mark me down as yet another decadent, middle-aged, straw-clutching desperado who feels bad about her complexion?

To be clear, I don’t feel bad about my neck – not yet. But perhaps I am a middle-aged desperado all the same, for how else to explain my appearance at the Light Salon, a clinic that offers the very treatment I’ve just described? The child of scientists, I’m a natural sceptic when it comes to the claims of the multi-billion-pound beauty industry. I still wash my face, just as I’ve always done, with soap and water. I would no more spend a lot of money on moisturiser, Botox or anything else in that vein than I would run down the street in my underwear. Even if I didn’t have strongly feminist feelings about facelifts, I would still find them alarming both in theory and in practice. Yet here I am, hoping that I will shortly look a little rosier: a better version of myself, if not precisely a younger looking one.

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#AllIsFineWithMe: Russian women fight strict beauty standards with body-positivity

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Social media trend was started by a teen to push back against unrealistic beauty standards

In a new wave of Russian feminism, thousands of women are posting selfies on social media showing their pimples, cellulite and hair loss to challenge beauty stereotypes that women’s rights activists say fuel low self-esteem and eating disorders.

The #AllIsFineWithMe trend – started by a Russian teen who has struggled with anorexia – is the latest initiative to push back against unrealistic pressures on women and girls to look perfect, often driven by airbrushed images on social media.

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Faking it: how selfie dysmorphia is driving people to seek surgery

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Filters have never been more prevalent – and it’s leading some people to have fillers, Botox and other procedures. What’s behind the obsessive pursuit of a flawless look?

People used to call Anika the Snap Queen. Between the ages of 19 and 21, she was “obsessed with Snapchat, to the point where I had 4,000 followers”. At the peak of her “tragic” behaviour, she reckons now – a year after quitting the image-sharing app – she was taking 25 selfies a day.

She liked the sense of having a platform, she says, with the average selfie getting 300 replies. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so popular – I’ve gotta show my face.’” But the filters were also part of the appeal. The Londoner had long been insecure about the slight bump in her nose. Snapchat’s fun effects, which let you embellish your selfies with dog ears, flower crowns and the like, would also erase the bump entirely. “I’d think, ‘I’d like to look how I look with this filter that makes my nose look slimmer.’”

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