Beauty Picks

Beauty homerun

MANILA, Philippines - Here’s proof that there’s hope for the beauty-obsessed yet: Japanese brand Fairydrops Mascara, one of the most popular mascaras in Asia known for its cute, colorful packaging and really unique lash applicators, was created by a Major League Baseball anchorwoman from a local TV station in Los Angeles. Her name: Aya Yasuda. Her motivation: co-workers who had big, photogenic eyes with long, upward-sloping eyelashes. She longed to have eyelashes that made an impact on camera, so she started experimenting and cutting application brushes into all sorts of shapes until she came up with the “3-teardrop,” now a trademark shape of Fairdrops mascara wands. Her newest product is the Platinum Mascara T2 Film Type, which gives you double the eyelash treatment — resulting in eyelashes worthy of national TV. (Available at Beauty Bar and shop.beautybar.com.ph for P1,195.)

Pixies not dead

Just when we were all getting tired of the same pixie cut on the same celebs, Beyonce cut off all her hair (I wonder what Sasha Fierce had to say about that), and then this! Coco Rocha also got a haircut, one seemingly Tilda-inspired — brushed up in the front and sleek, not buzzed, in the back. While poor Bey has gotten mixed reactions via social media, (such as, “Sorry, but short hair doesn’t suit you,” or the backhandedly supportive, “I still love you, Bey!”), Coco Rocha has gotten nothing but praise. “Why didn’t she always have short hair?” said one random follower. But you know, there will always be women with short hairstyles. It’s nothing new. What’s amusing here is how we react toward women chopping off their hair, like it’s so major — may-pinagdadaanan-kind-of-major. Sometimes girls just want a haircut, no internal struggle there. Coco’s new look though… Someone get her on the cover of something, please!

From OPI with love

Who’s your favorite Bond girl? Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, immortalized in OPI’s new Bond Girls collection, had me at “I am the money.” OPI’s grainy, deep aubergine is Vesper in a bottle — mysterious, sleek and a little snooty. It’s loaded with black specks, like nail caviar — a quality common in all of the shades in this collection (also known as Liquid Sand) but in varying degrees of glitter, though this one has no glitter at all. It goes on the nails like liquid sand and distributes the grains fairly. You need at least two coats for maximum effect; add a top coat if the grainy texture bothers you. Personally, I think the “liquid sand” effect works best with Jinx, which is a semi-sheer coral with gold and coral glitter. Other shades are Pussy Galore, Solitaire, Honey Ryder and Tiffany Case.

Taking the lead

It ins't news to know that plenty of commercial lipsticks, both drug store and department store brands, contain traces of lead. But according to the Well section in The New York Times, there are a total of eight metals contained in major lipstick brands, namely cadmium, aluminum, cobalt, titanium, manganese, chromium, copper and nickel. In an interview with the Times, Linda Loretz, chief toxicologist for the Personal Care Products Council, insisted that these trace minerals were "too small to be a safety issue.” However, according to a study published by Environmental Health Perspectives, women touch up their lipstick up to 24 times a day, which can't be healthy. “It matters because this is a chronic long-term issue, not a short-term exposure,” said Katharine Hammond, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Berkeley and the lead author of the new analysis. “We’re not saying that anyone needs to panic. We’re saying let’s not be complacent, that these are metals known to affect health.” In an study published in MotherJones.com, lipsticks by Maybelline, Cover Girl and NARS were found by the FDA to contain the most amount of lead. However, don't despair — Wet n' Wild, Bobbi Brown and Shiseido contained the least, so you can still throw some lipstick on without worrying about pre-cancer. —Cai Subijano