Archive for June 30th, 2006
There are many things to consider when getting ready to purchase an exfoliator. What should you look for in a good exfoliator? What is the difference between an exfoliator for the face versus one for the body?
An exfoliant is an important part of any beauty routine. It can be the use of a washcloth for the face or a razor for your legs, as long as you are gently rubbing your skin or even scraping it, you are removing excess dead skin cells. A good exfoliant will smooth your skin because it removes the dead cells to reveal the newer ones underneath.
When you are out shopping for an exfoliant note that they come in different shapes and sizes:
Abrasive sponges, pads, brushes are not unlike something you might use for your dishes, tread carefully and you may want to soap these up and use them on the body only, not the face. Facial scrubs are ones with very subtle grains, like finely milled apricot pits. If used gently on the face they can be very effective. Facial masks perform exfoliation, when they dry they take the dead skin cells with them. Some facial masks have a grainy texture that helps smooth the skin during the rinse cycle. Toners are even exfoliating products and work by removing dirt and cells via a cotton ball or pad. Toners are used on the face and neck.
When choosing a scrub for the face, make sure it has a light texture and fine, even particles. Chunks of scrub ingredients are best saved for the body as they will be too harsh for the fine and delicate facial skin and may leave it red and irritated. Don’t choose something with a lot of oils or you may have more clogged pores than you want to deal with. Blot your face dry when you rinse the product off and use a moisturizer at night and one with a sunscreen in the morning.
If you are using an exfoliant for the first time, use it once a day (at night) or a few times per week. Allow your skin to recover before you make another attempt and always stop if your skin is uncomfortable or you feel pain, switch products immediately and give your skin a rest.
When you are out shopping for an exfoliant, consider a cream with alpha and beta hydroxy acids because they can get deeper into the skin’s layers than a loofah could. If you use a facial scrub consider one that has some moisturizing or skin softening ingredients so when you are finished blotting your face dry, you’re not reaching for a heavy moisturizer to soothe your skin.
Exfoliating is best done a few times per week, once a day is not necessary. Some of my favorite exfoliating products are:
Fresh – Brown Sugar Body Polish
Philosophy’s – under your skin
Clinique – Sparkle Skin Body Exfoliator
Origins – Ginger Body Scrub
You don’t have to spend a lot on the exfoliation process but it sure makes a shower that much more fun. A clean washcloth soaped up will do the trick as will a dip in cornmeal and water. I find it a more pleasurable experience when a fragrance is involved and all of the above will leave your senses reeling.
June 30th, 2006
This is an article on the dangers of sun damage to skin.
Most of us know the dangers of too much sun but a lot of us seem to be ignoring it.
All you have to do is go to the American Cancer Society to see the statistics on how many more cases of skin cancer and the rate of death in the United States. This is an easily preventable disease when you figure all you have to do is use protection when you go out in the sun. Tanning beds are not the answer either, as they have the UV rays that are just as bad and now are found to also be harmful to the eyes
Why should we not take in too much sun without protection? UV exposure causes skin cancer. There are several types of skin cancer, the worst is called melanoma.
Malignant Melanoma is the quickest growing and it spreads throughout the body. Melanoma, if found early, is treatable, however, it has the highest percentages of skin cancer deaths.
There is also non-melanoma skin cancer. This cancer includes squamous cell carcinoma and basal cell carcinoma. This is the most common skin cancer but is much less fatal.
It is so easy to avoid these potentially dangerous and deadly cancers. Stay out of the sun and the UV lights of tanning beds. When you have to be in the sun, make sure that you are covered up or have adequate UV protection on. Apply at least an SPF15 lotion.
If you have a skin lesion that you are worried about, go to the doctor and get it checked out.
June 30th, 2006
By: University of Southampton
Female athletes have been catching up with men in the race to become the fastest human on the planet. But they may have to wait another 150 years before they finally overtake them, scientists believe.
Professor Peter Atkinson from the University of Southampton has been working on this ground-breaking study with colleagues from the University of Oxford and the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust research unit in Kenya.
Researchers estimate, if current trends continue, women sprinters will be the track torch bearers at the 2156 Olympics, covering the 100 metres in 8.079 seconds, leaving the men in second place at 8.098.
By plotting winning times of Olympic 100 metre finals over the past century, scientists argue that sprinting achievement may not have reached a plateau and that records could continue to be broken.
And the mathematical formula reveals that women could be crossing the finishing line first at any time between the 2064 and 2788 Olympics. But the most likely will be the 2156 Games.
The study, which features in this week’s edition of Nature, (30 September) was led by Dr Andy Tatem, from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, who worked on the assumption that athletes were drug-free and conditions were as suitable as possible. Aided by Professor Peter Atkinson, of the School of Geography at the University of Southampton, Carlos Guerra from Oxford and Simon Hay from the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust research unit in Kenya, Olympic winning times for men starting from the beginning of the 20th century were logged.
At the first women’s 100 metres Olympics event, staged in 1928 in Amsterdam, the winning time was 12.2 seconds compared to the men’s 10.8 - a 1.4 seconds difference.
By 1952 the margin had decreased to 1.1 seconds with the men hitting the tape at 10.4 and the women 11.5.
In four of the five Olympics between 1988 and 2000 the difference was under one second. But in Athens this summer, when Belarussian Yuliya Nesterenko took the title at 10.93 and American Justin Gatlin won in 9.85, the gap widened to 1.08 seconds.
However, if overall trends continue, the calculations suggest by the next Olympics (2008) the women’s 100-metre race could be won in 10.57 seconds and the men’s in 9.73.
The world 100 metre records are currently held by Tim Montgomery - 9.78 seconds - and Florence Griffith-Joyner - 10.49.
Professor Peter Atkinson from the University of Southampton said ‘The data show that women’s times for the 100m sprint are falling at a more rapid rate than men’s times. By fitting curves to the data we have been able to show that, if
current trends continue, female athletes will run faster than male athletes in the 2156 Olympics.
‘There is no denying that women are closing the gap on men. The trends over the last 100 years or so show no sign of tailing off, so women are currently set to run faster than men in 152 years time.
‘Of course, there is uncertainty about this prediction, and our analysis has taken that into account. Interestingly, there is a small chance that women might run faster than men within 60 years.
‘It will be fascinating to see how women and men fare in Beijing in four years time. Who knows what will happen in the future?’
Dr Tatem said, ‘People often argue that athletes have reached their limits but in this study at least, that doesn’t seem to be the case. However we have no idea how low times for the 100 metres could go.
‘We have to assume that athletes in the future will be drug-free but who is to say what the rules will be in 2156? It was once considered ungentlemanly to even train for athletic events, so who knows what will happen.’
June 30th, 2006
By: Pravda.ru
When spring comes, women buy new clothes and try to lose as much of excessive weight as possible. As a rule, they do not have a wish to achieve that in a gym, although the desire to have a slim figure is so very strong. Russian women, as many other women in the world, buy various pills to lose weight.
Some of those pills, as the latest events on the border of the Primorye region of Russia showed, can undermine women’s health a lot. According to frequent occasions to smuggle so-called Thai slim pills across the Russian state border, a lot of female residents of the Primorye region keep buying a lot of those pills.
Russian and Chinese citizens attempted to smuggle phenfluramine (the basic chemical constituent of Thai fat loss pills) six times over the period of one week only – February 20th – February 27th. The press service of the Far East Customs Department reported, six hundred of yellow colored pills of phenfluramine were withdrawn from a Chinese national at a Russian railway customs. The total weight of those pills was 125 grams. If the expertise proves that the pills contain the substance, which has been banned in Russia since 1997, there will be criminal proceedings instituted against both Russian and Chinese “dietitians.” Phenfluramine is a constituent of the illegal medication that is available on the black market. People call this medication “Thai fat loss pills.” However, the pills are manufactured in China.
As specifications of the pills say, they are made of various herbs. This is the only thing that can be learned about their ingredients. They have herbal components indeed, although for the sake of appearances only. The pills are basically made of phenfluramine. As a matter of fact, it is possible to lose some weight with the help of Thai fat loss pills. However, a woman will notice various side effects a year or two after she stops taking pills. Those side effects seem horrible to any woman: she will start losing hair, her skin will peel, nails will have their color changed. In addition to that, a woman will suffer from bad sleep, and she will be constantly irritated for no reason. Furthermore, Thai diet pills are very bad for liver and metabolism. To crown it all, a woman might lose her weight to death.
June 30th, 2006
By: Harvard School of Public Health on Jun 29 2006 09:36:02
In the first national study of the effects of intimate partner violence on the health of women during pregnancy and the health of newborn children,
researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) demonstrated that violence from male partners, both in the year prior to and during a woman’s pregnancy, increases her risk of serious health complications during pregnancy. Such abuse also increases a woman’s risk of delivering prematurely and that her child will be born clinically underweight and in need of intensive care. The paper appears in the July 2006 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (www.medical-library.org/j_obg.htm).
Although it has been previously documented that intimate partner violence against women affects one in four U.S. women, and numerous health consequences have been associated with being a victim of such violence, this is the first study to conclusively demonstrate that physical abuse from husbands or boyfriends compromises a woman’s health during pregnancy, her likelihood of carrying a child to term and the health of her newborn. Women experiencing abuse in the year prior to and/or during a recent pregnancy were 40 percent to 60 percent more likely than non-abused women to report high-blood pressure, vaginal bleeding, severe nausea, kidney or urinary tract infections and hospitalization during this pregnancy. Abused women were 37 percent more likely to deliver preterm, and children of abused women were 17 percent more likely to be born underweight. Both of these conditions pose grave health risks to newborns, and children born to abused mothers were over 30 percent more likely than other children to require intensive care upon birth.
The researchers, led by Jay Silverman, assistant professor of society, human development and health at HSPH, and senior author Anita Raj, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, examined data on more than 118,000 women who gave birth to live infants during the years 2000 to 2003 from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to gather information from women around the time of pregnancy.
The authors propose a number of possible mechanisms to explain the association between intimate partner violence and maternal and infant health. “It may be that stress resulting from abuse is having a negative impact on the reproductive endocrine system and leading to poor outcomes during pregnancy,” said Silverman. “Depression, known to result from abuse, has been shown to negatively affect fetal development. Sexual assault commonly co-occurs with physical violence from male partners and may lead to both greater risk of bleeding and urinary tract infections. Also, sexually transmitted infections are significantly more common among women abused by male partners, and such infections are known to compromise health during pregnancy and fetal development. We need to conduct far more research in this area to understand the mechanisms at work, but regardless of the mechanisms, it is clear that abuse from husbands and boyfriends represents a serious risk to the health of women, their pregnancies, and their newborn children.”
The study builds on previous research showing the risks posed to women by male partners. “Although we have known for some time that men who abuse their wives and girlfriends also pose a serious risk to the children of those women because they are more likely to abuse children than other men, we now know that the risk to children from such men extends back into the prenatal period. As a society, we cannot afford to allow prevention of this grave threat to so many mothers and children to remain a low public health priority,” Silverman said.
June 30th, 2006