What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. Also instantly makes your hair look amazing. Like, really fucking amazing, don'tyouthink? From Head... Blow dry: Admittedly, I've never tried to smuggle 24 pounds of liquid cocaine into Logan International, but I'm still surprised that pouring it into hair product bottles would be described by the feds as "creative." Like, wouldn't that be the first thing anyone would try? (Have I missed my calling as a drug mule?) ...To Toe... Sole sisters: Word aficionados will delight in learning about the turn-of-(last)-century shoe brand Sorosis, whose name may have stemmed from sisterhood, or pineapples, take your pick. ...And Everything In Between: Whiter shade of pale: A reminder from the Philippines that even when a nation manages to implement cosmetics regulation, that doesn't mean retailers stick to the rules. (The culprit here is skin whitening creams, of… Read More...

ZEN. (via) I used to be a pastry chef. It didn’t last—doing what you love for money ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, folks!—but it was an intensely gratifying experience. My very first gig was at a vegan restaurant more than an hour by subway away from my apartment, but I thought nothing of hopping on the train after my magazine job finished for the day, arriving at the restaurant, baking until near-dawn, getting an hour of sleep on the ride home, showering, and going back to my magazine job. I did this two or three times a week for months, and despite my cross-eyed fatigue, I loved the process. I loved—and still love—watching the magic of chemistry and labor. Chemistry: the rising of cake, the shortening of crusts; labor, measuring, the mixing, the juggling of pans, the exquisite… Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. From Head... Hat head: I don't enjoy wearing things on my head—scarves, hats, fascinators. I like the look of them, but they always slide around and leave me with a headache. So I was particularly intrigued by this account from a Jewish woman who wanted to cover her hair after marriage to fit in better with her community, but who found it a pain, quite literally—and the response of Maya Resnikoff (who does cover) is equally interesting.   ...To Toe... Babies underfoot: Can getting a pedicure induce labor? (Spoiler: No.)   ...And Everything In Between:   Anti-drone burka, Stealth Wear collection by Adam Harvey   Under cover: Fascinating Q&A with the designer of Stealth Wear, a counter-surveillance collection of clothes and accessories that subvert thermal-imaging… Read More...

Judgments, Rosea Lake By now, you’ve probably seen art student Rosea Lake’s photo Judgments, which went viral earlier this month. Unlike, say, videos of children on laughing gas, this went viral for a very specific reason: It does what the strongest images do, namely that whole “worth a thousand words” bit. Judgments communicates the constant awareness of, well, judgments that women face every day we leave the house (and probably some when we don’t), and I won’t say much more about the actual image because it speaks well for itself.  That said, I’ve read commentary on the image that has also struck a chord, specifically Lisa Wade’s spot-on post at Sociological Images about how Judgments pinpoints the constantly shifting boundaries of acceptable womanhood, and then relates that to something women are mocked for: all those darn clothes (you know women!). “[W]omen constantly risk getting it wrong, or getting it wrong… Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.  House of Vestal Virgins, Rome. (The best hairstyles are ones you get to imaginate!) From Head... When in Rome: Video on re-creating the intricate braid style of the Vestal virgins. Awesome. (via Maya Resnikoff)   ...To Toe... Toeing the line: An undercover cop in Iowa got a pedicure and then busted a salon owner for illegally serving alcohol to clients, and the nation stays safe for another day.   ...And Everything In Between: Going glocal: With the news of Chinese and Korean brands surging forward despite competition from established Western lines, it's easy to forget that smaller economies don't have the marketing power of their Chinese or Korean counterparts. The domestic Vietnamese cosmetics market is ailing, with Western corporations like Unilever buying out local lines and cannibalizing them entirely. Green machine: What the "greening" of the… Read More...

I saw Anchorman for the first time the other night, and after my hysterics re: the jazz flute scene had subsided, I took note of the close-up of Will Ferrell's mouth. Here's a picture: So, Will Ferrell doesn't have the greatest teeth. The shot was played in close-up here for comic effect, but those are his real teeth (as opposed to Mike Myers' in Austin Powers), and I immediately harrumphed over the fact that a female performer—even a comic one—could never get away with not "fixing" her teeth and still be successful. The internet shows me I'm wrong. I mean, look at all the female celebrities out there with "bad teeth." Madonna! Lauren Hutton! Anna Paquin! Jessica Paré! And yet, notice anything here? Despite showing up repeatedly on collections of "celebrities with bad teeth," there's nothing wrong with these women's teeth, except that they have a gap up front, a far cry from… Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. Photo by Rémi Thériault From Head... Hijab hijinx: Sara Hagi at Worn Fashion Journal on what happens when strangers assume she wears the hijab because she's oppressed, not because she believes her hair and body are her business: "The poor woman was putting herself through mental gymnastics trying to liberate a free woman, while I was just trying to find a polite way to excuse myself from the conversation so I could go home and watch Arrested Development." Love.   ...To Toe... On your heels: No, really, what IS with the shoe thing? Ekaterina Sedia (whose blog you should add immediately to your feed if you like creative fashion analysis) lays it out. Fishy situation: The owner of an Arizona salon that was ordered by the state's Board of Cosmetology to stop offering fish… Read More...

I love the mod look! The mod look does not love me (at left). But the coral lipstick at right is nice, oui? A few months ago, I stumbled across a website that promised a “virtual makeover.” You’d upload a photo of yourself, then apply various “looks” with all manner of makeup colors and hairstyles; you could even “borrow” a celebrity’s entire look, pasting her makeup and hair onto your image. I’d seen similar tools before, of course, but they were always comically bad—more along the lines of my friend Lindsay Goldwert’s awesome collection of horror-makeover images than anything you’d actually use to evaluate whether you’d look good in, say, coral lipstick. On a whim, though, I decided to give it a try, figuring that the technology must have changed since I’d last given them a whirl.  I was right. Though the results were obviously… Read More...

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. From Head... Brow-raiser: Eyebrow transplants? I know we're not supposed to say this anymore, but...really? ...To Toe... Foot fault: Tennis player Victoria Azarenka forced to pull out of the Brisbane International semifinals after a pedicure gone wrong caused an infection, prompting emergency surgery. ...And Everything In Between: Which is more shocking: The accusation that someone might be poisoning the makeup of a former government official, or that a country ranking well below the U.S. in women's well-being has appointed a female leader before we've managed to elect one? (Nevermind that "abuse of office" charge...) Shady accusations: The former (and currently imprisoned) Ukrainian prime minister suspects that her cosmetics were poisoned. Experts examined her products and found no traces of poisons, including toxins like mercury and lead. We save lead for our makeup stateside, thankyouverymuch! Branded: Looks like Estee Lauder's Osiao… Read More...

Interviewing Tizz Wall under her guise as a professional domme was a delight, but she actually has a panoply of guises that would have made for excellent beauty chat. A speaker (she’ll be speaking at the upcoming Catalyst Con on how to ally with sex workers), sex educator (she assisted sexuality author Jamye Waxman with her most recent book), writer (including her Mistress Manners column at Playpen Report), and erstwhile advocate for survivors of domestic violence, Wall’s working lives appear diverse but all surge toward the larger goal of making the world a better place for women of all walks of life. In fact, she’s currently completing her San Francisco Sex Information Sex Education certification. She currently does her domme work independently (though when this interview took place she worked out of a BDSM house). We talked about assimilating to—and literally blinding—the male gaze, the pressures of… Read More...

  Does a dog have Buddha nature? No. The Zen koan—a paradoxical statement or dialogue used as a meditative tool by Zen practitioners—has a number of aims, if one is allowed to “aim” in Zen, which one probably isn’t. (I wouldn’t know; I used to say I was “agnostic” until I realized I was really just apathetic. But permit me to like the idea of Zen Buddhism, okay?) One aim of these riddle-like phrases is exhausting the intellect, for how can one respond analytically to the question of whether a dog has Buddha-nature, especially if the proper answer is understood to always be no? Another aim is to relax the will, allowing the mind to operate on an intuitive level. But it’s one of the koan’s tertiary goals that interests me the most: dissolving the duality of subject and object. In fact,… Read More...