


Does setting spray or hairspray work better in a rainstorm?




Does setting spray or hairspray work better during exercise?







9 Lip Plumpers Reviewed: Get Bigger Lips



lips mother pucker b4 after


Contents (click to go straight there):

Method for Plumping Lips
My top picks for plumping
The “plumpers” that didn’t work
Products I want to try
What about natural lip plumpers?
How do lip plumpers claim to work?
Does lip plumping really work? The evidence.

Method for Plumping Lips:








Reviewed!  Here’s my top picks for lip plumpers:

Plumping ingredient: Sodium Hyaluronate. See it here

Plump lips



Plumping Volume Sensation
Collection Volume Lipstick


Physicians formula lip plumping potion



Reviewed:  Products that didn’t work for me:









What about natural plumpers?



How do these plumpers work?





Where’s the evidence for these plumpers?


Future ingredients to look out for:

back to reviews of lip plumpers.

Photographs of Salzburg, Austria


The rathaus and a golden ball in the square


Mozart perfume Salzburg


the rocky hill salzburg is built on


plaque commemorating Christian Doppler effect Salzburg


The fountain in the square Salzburg


fountain Mirabell gardens salzburg


war memorial plaques salzburg




Salzburg padlock bridge



Can a whitening toothpaste really whiten your teeth?




How whitening works:




Is peroxide safe on teeth?









Which products did I use to whiten my teeth?







How does Protein Filler For Hair Work?



Got rid of my white hair (neat science video): SCIENCE! Friday

Today, I bring you… hair science!

No more white hair for me!
I had to dye my hair darker again because it’s time to renew my passport, and if you look different to your old photo, they make you get people to sign that they’ve known you for x amount of years.  I don’t want to have to do that, and because of our racist immigrant laws in this country, I have to produce my passport every time I go for a job interview, to prove I have the right to live and work in the UK.
Since I’m renewing it because of my name change, it seemed prudent to give them as little as possible to say “you’re not the same human being as the person on this passport, your name and face are different.”
Because of some weird trick of my face shape, I look totally different when I change my hair colour, so I have had to get rid of the silver hair.

I did a little tutorial of how I did it, and then today I’ve done this science video – for SCIENCE! Friday – explaining how hair dye, bleach and coloring all work on the hair and why it’s important to put the red back in with a permanent red dye.

I’ve done a full explanation of the science in a video, the gist of it is written in the rest of this article (but since I don’t script my videos, it’s slightly different in the wording, although the science is the same), there’s diagrams and everything!  I’ve explained it all in the most straightforward way possible, so if you love science as much as I do, and love hearing it in plain English, it’s a really interesting watch!


If you like my youtube channel and find it relevant I’d love it if you could subscribe!

So how do you get rid of white, silver or platinum blonde hair?
Those of you who are astute will know that colour remover isn’t how to get rid of silver or white hair – it has, effectively, already had all the colour removed by the bleaching process, that’s why it’s so light.

To get rid of white or silver blonde hair, then, you need to put the colour back in. That’s what I explain in the wrecked your hair article – I haven’t actually wrecked my hair this time, but the process is the same (the results are much faster and better on hair that wasn’t wrecked).

So here’s what my hair looks like now:

My hair is this colour now.
My hair is this colour now.

As you can see, it’s not my best hair colour because it really doesn’t suit my skin tone (I need a bluer red and this is an orangey red), so I now (after it’s settled for a week) have two options:
I can either dye my hair a dark true-red red, or I can stick with the plan and go for brown.
Either will probably wash out in 2-4 weeks to a color I don’t like any more. So I’m thinking brown for the passport pictures, then let that wash out a bit, then true-red red.
I’ve never been a proper red before, I’ve only been ginger for years and years then dark brown for 6 months before I whitened it.  Oh and a bunch of temporary rainbow colours from time to time.

Since I’m basically artificially reconstructing the core of my hair, I need to stick with warm colours so blonde is off the menu for a while.

How does one artificially reconstruct their hair core, you ask?
The video I linked to above (which I made today) is a model showing what hair looks like when it’s been bleached. The loss of colour molecules is only part of the problem – the shaft now has holes burned in it where the chemical has gotten into the shaft to do its work and the colour molecules have departed (this is the same in any hair colourant – that’s why when you dye your hair dark brown or black loads of times, then use colour remover, instead of going to your natural colour, it turns a pale caramel type of colour).

When you add a new color to that, it packs the inside with color, but because of the holes in the hair shaft (which are irreparable) the color washes out easily. Not only that, but it’s designed to go on hair with color molecules in it (because normally you’d put it over your natural coloured hair), so it tends to be designed to simultaneously lighten the existing molecules and add some new pigment molecules, but there aren’t usually enough new pigment molecules to produce a realistic result on very bleached hair. And each time you use it, it burns more holes in the hair shaft.

In the process of artificially reconstructing the hair, then, you can do more damage if you’re gung ho about it which is why I’m going slowly, letting my hair recover each time (it doesn’t heal itself, but it does get its protective oils back over time, and they are way underestimated as to how useful they are) and gradually building up to the color I want.

Once it’s been done, it obviously can’t be bleached again past a certain point, because the bleach will keep blasting open the shaft which will eventually turn the hair to jelly, at which point you just have to cut it off. This has never happened to me.

Why am I so focussed on red, you ask?
It’s standard hairdressing knowledge that in order to move someone’s hair from blonde to brown, you have to put the red back in first. This has to be done with permanent colour (I’ll explain why below) and it has to be done because the blue molecules are smaller and have been mostly unaffected by the bleaching, they’re the last ones to get taken out (when hair is bleached, it goes through these stages: black> dark brown > caramel > weird orangey colour > weird bright yellow > pale yellow > white. If your hair’s not black, it picks up to the nearest stage on this sequence, eg if you’re a natural blonde, it will go weird bright yellow > pale yellow > white depending on when you wash it off).

To make your hair pigment, “nature” (or whatever) throws together a bunch of melanin (yes, vaguely something to do with melatonin) of different shades (it comes in 3 colours), and the combination of those 3 shades and the quantity of individual molecules are what produce your hair colour.

To restore the hair to a believable darker colour, then, you have to go through the other colours and replace those first. I could have replaced the yellow before the red, but most hair colourants to achieve blonde hair are either semi-permanent or have very aggressive developer (to get lighter results for darker hair), so doing that would blast holes in my hair shafts like there’s no tomorrow, and not really put much colour into it for the trouble, so I went for a yellowy-red instead of a true red, and that’s why I always go to ginger instead of bright red (ginger has the red and yellow molecules in it, bright red has very few yellow molecules) for the first thing I do to my hair after I’ve had it very light blonde for a while.
And that’s why, now, I can either let the red build up to restore my hair or I can make it brown to restore it. If I hadn’t bothered with the red, the brown dye would most likely give my hair a disgusting green tinge.
And that’s why I don’t say I can “repair” it (because nothing does that, hair is dead when it grows out of the scalp, you can’t “heal” a dead thing), I say “restore” or “fix” because I can make it look like it’s fine, but if you put my hair under a microscope it would probably look awful.

You mentioned semi permanent colours – I’ve been told they’re really good for my hair, why don’t you use those instead?
Semi permanent colours only affect the outside of the hair shaft. They don’t have the chemicals they need to penetrate the shaft and add colour to the inside. If you imagine my white hair is an empty drinking straw, the semi-permanent is like getting a felt pen and colouring the outside of that straw – it won’t make it more stable on the inside, and the hair is still left too fragile.
The permanent colours put the pigment inside the hair shaft – so they’re less “healthy” if you have perfect, undyed hair, but they’re more “healthy” if your hair has no pigment in the middle.

I cant visualise all this crap about molecules, can you explain it with some diagrams?
Yes!  Here’s a video I made, that explains it with diagrams and a whiteboard (in case you missed it above):

What is Micellar Water? CAUTION: SCIENCE!!

I’m away until Mon/Tue, this is prescheduled.  What is micellar water?
Are you someone who sees a new word and wonders what it means? I was looking into whey protein substitutes today and learned that the word “micellar” isn’t just a brand name. It’s a biological term, and I’m going to explain it to you in the most straightforward way I can, without dumbing it down. For me, it’s been interesting to put a name to a scientific process that I know well – it happens every time I wash my hands.  There is a glossary under the first picture to help with key terms.

What is a micelle?
It’s a collection of surfactant molecules that are dispersed in a liquid colloid. In an aqueous solution (a liquid made of mostly water), the surfactant usually has a head that is attracted to water (called a hydrophilic head) and a tail that is repelled by water (a hydrophobic tail). Soap forms surfactants, and the tail buries itself in the dirt in your hands, then the head pulls that dirt away by being attracted to the water from the tap.

Because the heads love water and the tails hate it, if you put a collection of surfactants in water, the heads which love water all want to be as close to the water as possible, and the tails want to get away, so if there’s enough of them and its warm enough, they form 3D balls like this one:

micelle diagram
This is known as a micelle.

surfactants: These are something you find in soap, shampoo, and household cleaning products such as washing up liquid, laundry detergent and bleach, it’s a type of molecule that cleans things. Imagine it looking a bit like a tadpole, except it’s not a living thing.

dispersed: When molecules split up and move around in a liquid without dissolving, they are said to have dispersed. Football fans disperse after the game ends.

colloid: A colloid is a liquid that is full of particles that haven’t dissolved but have still mixed into the liquid so it doesn’t feel grainy or gritty usually. An example is milk. Another example is any emulsion such as paint.

How do scientists get them to form in micellar water?
It takes two things to make them form, because naturally, the surfactants just float to the edges of the liquid where the tails can be away from the water. To make a micelle, you need (drum roll please, these two factors are what makes most chemical reactions happen)… higher temperature and higher concentration. That’s because of something you should have learned around age 15 in school science – collision theory. You probably know the process even though you might not have been able to put a name to it. Basically, all chemical reactions can only happen if two things collide with each other. If they don’t make that connection, they will go about their separate ways and nothing changes. It’s like how two people can’t make a baby if they’ve never met (assuming they’re not doing it in a lab). So collision theory says there’s a few things that can increase the chance of those collisions taking place, which increases the amount of a product we can make with the ingredients. The three things that affect the rate of a reaction (usually) are temperature, concentration of reactants (ingredients), and pressure. Technically, it all comes down to pressure, but we usually split it out into the causes of the pressure (temperature and concentration) to make it more clear so people can repeat the experiment. Experiments have to be repeatable.
So they heat the water and surfactants, they add loads and loads of surfactants to the water, and they get these micelles, which are basically balls of soap that are effectively stuck in the water, because the water-loving heads are all facing outwards.

What’s so special about micelles? Why is micellar water the Next Big Thing?
Firstly, it’s got the word “water” in the name so it appeals to the all-natural crowd. Secondly, it’s got soap in it. So it’s going to get you clean.

Micelles, as we said above, are only formed in very high concentrations of your surfactant, and because it forms those protective spheres, it’s less harsh on your skin, your hair, etc, than lower concentrations. A good example of this is sodium laureth sulphate. I’ve said before that, as a surfactant (a cleaning thing), it’s pretty damn good. In lower concentrations, it’s known to be quite harsh on the skin and hair – so the less you use at any given time, the more it will dry your skin or hair out. How can this be? How does this possibly make sense? Imagine the surfactants, the tiny molecules of sodium laureth sulphate, as sharp sticks:

surfactant sticks micellar

When the sticks are on their own, and facing in every direction, they will poke you and hurt you. When they are arranged like this, they can’t hurt you because the sharp bits are all facing each other in a big sphere that protects you:

micelle diagram sticks sphere
In detergents, soaps, and other surfactants, the pointy end is not a sharp stick, it’s actually a tail (although technically that’s still an analogy). It doesn’t like water, so it buries itself into the dirt in your hands, so that, when the water is washed off, the heads (which love water) swim away and the tails are still holding the bits of dirt. The problem comes when there isn’t enough dirt and that’s when it causes dry skin and hair – when they bury themselves in the natural oils of your skin and hair, the ones you want to keep, and then they swim away with them.

So what use is a micelle in water? If there’s no tails, how does it get the dirt off?
It makes surfaces easier to clean, by lowering the surface tension of water. This makes it easier to get into all the nooks and crannies (when you wipe a cloth over a surface, for example), and is also used for washing clothes. It has loads of uses inside the human body such as to get pharmaceuticals to release in a certain place or at a certain time, and special micelles in your liver (formed from fatty acids) are what absorb key vitamins including vitamin E, vitamin K, vitamin A and vitamin D. What it can’t do, is get grease out, or anything else that won’t just wipe off. So micellar water will work a bit better than plain water, but not as well as real soap, but the micellar water will be less drying to the skin or hair.
So effectively, Micellar Water is very watered down inactive soap. It will get you clean because it has the exact same properties as any surfactant, and it will be gentle because it’s very watered down and all the pointy bits are facing inwards.

Have you tried micellar water? What do you think of it?  Let me know in the comments and I’ll reply when I get back 🙂