show elsewhere that a more appropriate treatment of the relaxation times recovers also the relaxation time given by equation (54a) in Ref. [8]. Thus, a non-conductive and thin shell/membrane produces a large relaxation of the com- plex permittivity of the suspension [31]. The experimental evidences further support these theoretical facts: when attacking the membrane with a membrane disrupting compound ( for example a detergent) the relaxation almost vanishes as the cellular membrane is permeated [32]. For frequencies higher than 1 /T$_{k}$$_{1}$ the cell permittivity is essentially determined by the dielectric properties of the cytoplasm, and does not depend on membrane’s properties. The second Debye relaxation occurs at higher frequencies than the first (membrane) relaxation, and has the relaxation time derived from the pole of equation (23). The corresponding dielectric decrement is The last two equations are similar to the ones that are given for spherical particles in Ref. [8] (equations (46) and (49) in the aforementioned reference). The relaxation given by T$_{k}$$_{2}$ is basically the relaxation of a homogenous particle embedded in a dielectric environment and was also discussed in Ref. [22] by a closely related spectral method. If the conductivity of the cytoplasm is comparable to the conductivity of the outer medium, the decrement of the second relaxation is small such that it cannot be distinguished in the spectrum. On the contrary, if the conductivity of the outer medium is much greater or smaller that that of cytoplasm, than a second observable relaxation occurs. Unlike the membrane relaxation, this second relaxation depends only weakly on the shape. By assuming that σ$_{0}$ ≪ σ$_{1}$ and by using a finite-difference method, this resonance was also obtained in [3] and it was instrumental in explaining the experimental data on the fission of yeast cells of Asami et al. The shape of the particle is important because it affects the number of dipole-active eigenvalues and their strengths. In principle, each dipole-active eigenvalue introduces a new 11 [33] by Lei et al. [22]. T$_{k}$$_{2}$ ≈ ε$_{vac}$ (1 / 2 + χ$_{k}$ ) ε$_{0}$ + (1 / 2 − χ$_{k}$ ) ε$_{1}$ (1 / 2 + χ$_{k}$ ) σ$_{0}$ + (1 / 2 χ$_{k}$ ) σ$_{1}$ (29) Δ ε$_{k}$$_{2}$ ≈ f p$_{k}$ (1 / 2 − χ$_{k}$ )( ε$_{1}$σ$_{0}$ − ε$_{0}$σ$_{1}$ ) 2 × ((1 / 2 + χ$_{k}$ ) ε$_{0}$ + (1 / 2 − χ$_{k}$ ) ε$_{1}$ ) − 1 × ((1 / 2 + χ$_{k}$ ) σ$_{0}$ + (1 / 2 − χ$_{k}$ ) σ$_{1}$ ) − 2