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Red is the color of love

Being in love has certain physiologic effects on your body: the thought of your loved one can make your heart beat faster, a glimpse can make your armpits damp with sweat, and a single flirtatious remark can turn your face a deep crimson red. Of all these effects, it’s the blushing that most obviously betrays your innermost feelings. No matter how hard you try, you can’t stop that tell tale color from spreading across your cheeks. But surprisingly, our ability to see colors may have actually evolved to help us spot these emotional cues.

Blood and blush

According to NewScientist, that’s exactly what Mark Changizi and his fellow researchers at Caltech in Pasadena, California are proposing. Realizing that blushing is caused by an increase in oxygen content in the blood, they charted how the color of blood changes with and without oxygen. They found that the color difference was most obvious in the range of 540 and 560 nanometers which just happens to be the same part of the light spectrum at which the cone cells in primates’ eyes are the most sensitive.

Red eye

This led to their theory that primates developed the ability to discriminate this shift in red color so they could read emotional cues that cause blushing. This in contrast to previous theories that presumed color vision evolved to help us pick out ripe fruits. So, presumably, there’s some evolutionary advantage to being able to read emotional cures - maybe the ability to detect blushing helps in the process of mate selection. (Of course you blush for other reasons than being in love, but cut us a break here, we’re trying to be romantics!)

So every time we brush on a little Clinique or Sonia Kashuk blush, we’ve got the power of millions of years of evolution on our side. Boys beware!

Do you have naturally rosy cheeks or do you wear blush to make yourself more attractive? Leave a comment and show the rest of the Beauty Brains community your true colors.

Tamara’s Intrigued: Smashbox’s O-Glow gel claims to generate a natural blushing effect by stimulating skin circulation. I’m intrigued, but the thought of intentionally inflaming my cheeks with a foreign substance strikes me as a bit weird. Does this really work?

The Right Brain Blushes:

Let’s take a look, shall we? According to Smashbox: “This revolutionary silicone-based clear gel works on every skin tone and is microcirculating and skin energizing to keep cheeks naturally flushed for hours.” O-Glow does change to a pink color, but not for the reasons Smashbox gives us. We captured our evaluation of this product in the following pictures:

Every picture tells a story

Picture #1 shows that O-Glow is a clear, colorless gel when it comes out of the tube.

In Picture #2 you see that when rubbed on your cheek, it does turn from colorless to a lovely shade of pink. But is a “micro-circulatory effect” really causing the color?

Picture #3 has the answer: the product changes color even when it’s applied to a piece of white paper. Since paper doesn’t have blood vessels, it’s obvious that the effect has nothing to do with the circulatory system.

How does it really work?

So how does it change color? Could it be the Red Dye #27 that’s listed as one of the ingredients? Yep. I’ll spare you the gory chemical details but essentially the red dye is colorless when dissolved in a waterless base. When it comes in contact with moisture, the change in solubility and pH causes the dye to turn bright pink. That moisture can come from your skin, or even just the humidity in the air. So really, this product uses a dye to stain your cheeks just like any other blush.

While we appreciate the clever formulation work required to make a color changing product, we say shame on Smashbox for presenting it in such a misleading way. It’s a cool gimmick, but this product does NOT do what they say it does.

Considering how they’re blatantly lying to us about this blush, Smashbox should be the ones with the red face!