Seeking to see other millennia when you look in the mirror? Janet Stephens is a master of what she calls forensic hairdressing — shown via a series of YouTube videos, she ingeniously recreates elaborate coiffure from ancient history, including the style of Roman empress Julia Domna, the Flavian-Trajanic “circle of hair”, and the complex braiding of the priestesses known as the Vestal Virgins:
Historical hairdressing tutorials based on archaeological research and primary sources.
Via Boing Boing, the ideal David Icke-approved holiday gift for the important people in your life is up for sale on Etsy:
Shapeshifting from lizard to human form is great for controlling Earth so you can mine gold to save your dying homeworld, but it’s not so great for your skin.
When you’re juggling appointments and global depopulation deadlines, you don’t have time for an exhaustive skincare regime, especially after you’ve been up all night sodomising infants on a blood-soaked altar.
That’s why there’s new Hypoallergenic Shapeshifting Lizard Skin Cream. Never again spend hours removing crusty nodules from your armoured eyelids or sandblasting your segmented underbelly. Instead, spend your life-cycle on the things that really matter to you: eating babies, manipulating financial markets and basking on rocks in the warm glow of Earth’s home star.
CV Dazzle is a project to develop a toolkit of styling and beauty-based methods to fight back against camera and computer facial recognition, allowing you to hide in plain sight:
The primary objective [is] thwarting face detection under the guise of high-fashion aesthetics. While there are several obvious approaches to hiding from face detection, some of these can be dismissed.
Sunglasses, for example, are a known occlusion which some algorithms account for. Wearing masks in public can be illegal. Hoods are popular and effective but make the wearer’s intent to hide too obvious. As an alternative, this project explores ways using ambiguously deceptive fashion.
CV Dazzle™ is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs. The name is derived from a type of camouflage used during WWI, called Dazzle, which was used to break apart the gestalt-image of warships, making it hard to discern their directionality, size, and orientation.
When the quest for the outward appearance of vibrant health hastens death. AFP reports:
Sunbed users run a 20 percent higher risk than non-users of developing skin cancer, according to a report that blamed some 800 melanoma deaths in Europe every year on indoor tanning.
About 3,400 of some 64,000 new cases of cutaneous melanoma diagnosed in 18 European countries every year are related to sunbed use — more than five percent, said a statement issued by the BMJ medical journal. The risk doubled if tanners started before the age of 35.
The findings were based on an analysis by researchers of 27 studies on skin cancer and sunbed use conducted between 1981 and 2012 in Britain, France, Germany and other countries.
Emanuella Grinberg writes on CNN:
Here’s the fantasy: A half-naked woman lies across a couch, lips pouty and cleavage prominent as her sultry gaze implores you to buy this bottle of perfume.
The reality: Women make up 51% of the United States yet only 17% of seats in the House of Representatives. They’re 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 7% of directors in the top 250 grossing films.
What’s the connection? We live in a sexualized society where the gap between fantasy and reality is vast and harmful, director and activist Jennifer Siebel-Newsom says. “Women are aspiring to do great things in leadership, yet the glass ceiling is still there because of the way media depict women,” Siebel-Newsom said. “It influences our culture and dictates our gender norms and values.”
Siebel-Newsom’s documentary, Miss Representation, is the latest cinematic foray in the movement to challenge portrayals of beauty in “the media,” a term used to describe all forms of mass communication, from the internet, TV, film, magazines, radio and advertising …
Read More: CNN… Read the rest
Is being hideous a disability? Severe unattractiveness may be the final frontier in regards to discrimination based on physical characteristics. In the New York Times, economist Daniel S. Hamermesh makes the case for affirmative action for the ugly:
The effects are not small: one study showed that an American worker who was among the bottom one-seventh in looks, as assessed by randomly chosen observers, earned 10 to 15 percent less per year than a similar worker whose looks were assessed in the top one-third — a lifetime difference, in a typical case, of about $230,000.
In addition to whatever personal pleasure it gives you, being attractive also helps you earn more money, find a higher-earning spouse (and one who looks better, too!) and get better deals on mortgages. Each of these facts has been demonstrated over the past 20 years by many economists and other researchers.
Why this disparate treatment of looks in so many areas of life?
With the aim of highlighting the “cosmetic overkill” prevalent in modern life, directors Lernert & Sander applied the quantity of makeup typically worn over the course of a year, 365 layers, onto a model in a single day.
(Surely she will be 365 times as beautiful?) The results of the experiment are fairly unsettling.
Down in the dumps? Stuck in a rut? It might be because your eyes aren’t white enough, making you unattractive and unlovable. Luckily, there’s a serious medical procedure to fix this; ABC reports on the growing popularity of eye-whitening surgery. It costs $3,000 to $5,000 (that’s per eye), possible side effects include dry eyes, scarring, and infection, and it’s almost as effective as using eye drops:
As a lawyer Steven Smith works long hours and reads a lot of fine print. But he blames years of sun exposure for making his eyes red.
It irritates him when people tell him how tired he looks. So when his ophthalmologist, Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler, described the new eye-whitening procedure called I-BRITE, Smith decided to give it a try. I-BRITE is basically a procedure called conjunctivoplasty, a procedure that’s been around for decades. Surgeons use this to remove pterygium, or growths in the eyes.
