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15 Pinterest beauty hacks that are bad for your skin
- DIY Fruit masks
- Using cooking oils as moisturizers
- DIY salt scrubs
- Burning face mask
- Strengthen nails by soaking in lemon juice
- Aspirin, toothpaste, baking soda for acne
- Petrolatum grows lashes
- Apple Cider Vinegar as toner
- DIY dry shampoo
- Bleach your armpits with lemon juice
- Use deodorant to prevent face sweat
- Plastic tape eyeliner stencil
- Vaseline lip balm
- Heat eyelash curler with blow dryer
- At home pore strips
Does moisturized skin give you more wrinkles?
I always think it’s interesting when we find a scientific study that gives results that are counterintuitive. For example here’s a study that seems to enjoy suggest that moisturizing skin may lead to deeper wrinkles. This was published in the Journal of Clinical Anatomy and it looked at the difference between wrinkles on the forehead versus those around the outer edge of the eye.
They studied about 100 cadavers (?) and found that the wrinkles around the eye on average were deeper than those on the forehead. Actually I find that a little confusing because if you’re talking about the furrow lines and your forehead does seem deeper to me but I guess they’re talking about minor wrinkles, I don’t know.
Anyway, the Cosmetic Design article concluded that “the presence of oil-secreting glands and a thinner inner layer of skin, or dermis, may let the skin deform more easily and might be a cause for the development of wrinkles.”
So they hypothesize that all that extra oil on thin skin makes it softer and more plasticized and therefore more prone to forming wrinkles. If that’s true then wouldn’t applying moisturizer around your eye also cause more wrinkles? It seems like they’re not taking into consideration other factors that contribute to wrinkle formation like the collapse of collagen and elastin fibers.
But when you read the actual study, it says this:
“…the findings of this study suggest that sebaceous gland density is one of the multiple factors that prevent wrinkle deepening, and that is why wrinkles are deeper in skin on the lateral canthus than on the forehead,”
It seems like the study is saying the opposite! But nonetheless it makes me wonder if you could formulate a more effective anti-wrinkle eye cream by reducing some of those moisturizing plasticizing ingredients and increasing ingredients which are thought to boost collagen like some peptides.
Would you clean your face with living bacteria?
Would you spray living bacteria on your face to make it cleaner? Well the makers of Mother Dirt hope consumers will. They’ve just launched a new line of cleansers that contain live Ammonia-Oxidizing Bacteria. It is supposed to be a skin biome-friendly cleaner that cleans your skin and hair without harming the beneficial bacteria on your skin.
They claim that you need to protect your biome by first restoring the beneficial bacteria and second by using only products that are compatible with that skin biome. The centerpiece product of the line is the AO+ Mist which is the live bacteria you spray on yourself.
They say the shampoo and cleanser have been formulated, tested and screened for compatibility with the skin biome. I wonder what that means. It sounds like marketing speak to me.
Another interesting approach is that they claim to not use preservatives so the products have an expiration date printed on them. That’s a little unnerving. But they claim that preservatives negatively impact the skin biome (which is probably true).
I don’t know. This sounds pretty gimmicky to me but we’ll see if people are ready to embrace their bacteria and start bathing in it. I know my wife isn’t.
Does your face get redder when you ovulate?
I am super excited about this next story because it may solve a long-standing mystery on the Beauty Brains program which is how Perry is able to detect when a woman is ovulating. That’s one of his superpowers that we’ve talked about the show before.
There have been previous studies that showed that men find women’s faces more attractive when they are fertile. But new research just discovered something that we never knew before. That women’s faces get slightly more red when they are ovulating. But here’s the catch that increase in redness is not perceivable by the human eye I assume they measured it instrumentally. It’s below the threshold of our visual acuity apparently.
So my thought is that his superpower is to be able to see into that part of the red spectrum better than other people so when he sees an increase in redness he somehow subconsciously realizes what’s going on with the woman.
I don’t want to over analyze this but I think it’s important to understand how this power works because if he ever uses it to become a super villain this might suggest a way that we could defeat him. It’s kind of like how Batman keeps a small supply of Kryptonite around in case he ever has to take down Superman.
So if you ladies in the audience are ovulating and you’re going to be around Perry Romanowski and you don’t want him to know what I would suggest wearing a foundation with a little bit of a yellow color which will mask the redness.
If skin regenerates why do we still get scars?
I was reading through a discussion board about skin, that’s what I do in my spare time, and saw an interesting question about scars. This commenter wanted to know why do scars stay visible for so long? If skin is constantly regenerating, why don’t they just heal up?
To understand why this happens it’s helpful to know how the skin works. Pretty much everything on the outer layer of your body (your skin) is dead. It’s just dried out skin cells. This level is called the epidermis and the outer most layer of the epidermis is the Statum Corneum. These layers are dead. But below that is the dermis and this is where living skin tissue resides. Here are skin cells and stem cells that continually divide and grow. As they grow they push out cells towards the epidermis where the cells will dry up and eventually fall off your body, either down the drain or under your pillow. This cycle just continues.
Now, when you get a scar that come from an injury that goes all the way into the dermis. The body trie to quickly heal the hole by producing unidirectional collagen to just fill it in. That is what a scar is. A scar is not like your regular skin. But now you have a cover where the new skin cells can’t go through so the scar remains for a long time. Scars can go away over time and some of the ones you got when you were a kid are probably much smaller than they were, but some never go away.
I know this because the scar on my face when I cut my nose off with a chain saw is still there. It ruined my chances of becoming a model. I really should have sued that chain saw company don’t you think?
Do vitamins cause acne?
Let me ask you something: What is the one type of ingredient that we have found everybody loves to have in their cosmetic products? Whenever we would test the concept for a new product idea if you said this product had this type of ingredient in it people would always increase their chances of purchase intent.
That’s right vitamins. In shampoos, conditioners, skin moisturizer’s people want vitamins and those products right? Even in acne products vitamins are a good idea right? Wrong! According to this study vitamin B12 may actually cause you to have more acne. Here’s how that works.
According to this paper, “Vitamin B12 modulates the transcriptome of the skin microbiota in acne pathogenesis.” apparently vitamin B12 alters the way certain genes behave in facial bacteria. I wasn’t able to access the complete paper so I can’t give you the exact mechanism. I assume it has something to do with the genes of the P. acne bacteria. Apparently this work was done with vitamin supplements not topical skin creams. There are numerous skin lotions that contain B12.
Ref: Huiying Li et al. Vitamin B12 modulates the transcriptome of the skin microbiota in acne pathogenesis. Science Translational Medicine, June 2015 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aab2009
Can foods make hair stronger?
I read this story about whether certain foods can help make your skin and hair stronger and I was just appalled by the things I was reading. The thing that was most troubling was that they were being said by a doctor who was the director of cosmetic and clinical research.
This doctor said for example that eating whey protein will boost your hair keratin growth. But not any more than any other protein. The body doesn’t know where the protein came from and when it gets in your stomach it is broken down into component amino acids. The type of protein really doesn’t matter. Then there is the suggestion to eat red meat.