The good news is that the confusion will soon be over.  Because of Whole Food’s leadership, other health retail organizations will follow suit, so when a consumer buys a natural skin care product, they will know exactly what they are getting.  No more worry about deceptive advertising.

The bad news?  Right now, not many products will make the cut.  Consumers will be surprised at the products that have been fooling them all along on the “natural” shelves.  Unless they change their formulation, some of the most popular natural brands will be gone.  Zia Naturals?  Last of the alphabet becomes first out the door.  Nature’s Gate just got shut. Kiehl’s gets keihl-ed.  Derma E?  Derma gone.  100% USDA certification is hard to get, expensive, and here’s the real kicker – the skin and hair care products that have it, don’t sell well.

In 2009, there was no growth in the sale of organic beauty products.  None. Zip. Zilch. Research company Tabs Report pointed to three major issues: price, efficacy and “low overall importance of organics”  in that industry.  In other words, people have found that truly organic grooming and beauty brands cost too much, they don’t work, and consumers are losing interest in their social value. On top of that, they don’t smell good, either, since they can’t add perfume or blockers.  So what we will get from Whole Foods are brands you have probably never heard of and will find very different from the products currently residing in your medicine cabinet.  Look for Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, Terressentials, Trillium Organics and Vermont Soap, as some of the top brands.

The good news is that a trusted retailer has stepped up to demand truth in labeling in personal care products, the first of hopefully, many.  The bad news is that if you want pure products, your choices are about to get a lot smaller.

The study was done on mice who, as it turns out, have similar sex-based fat distribution pattern to humans.  But there were some definite surprises in the data, particularly for the men.

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First, fat tissue is completely different between men and women.  “”We found that out of about 40,000 mouse genes, only 138 are commonly found in both male and female fat cells,” said Dr. Deborah Clegg, assistant professor of internal medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and senior author of the study.  Since the substance of fat is so different between the genders, the treatment must be different as well, and in that way, women have the advantage.  “Fat on the hips, thighs and butt is subcutaneous and therefore treatable with liposuction. However, belly fat in men is typically visceral and too deep to be treated with liposuction. The only way to reduce this kind of fat, which is considered a health risk, is with diet and exercise,” New Beauty reports.  Get on those bikes, boys!

But women got some bad news in the study as well, and dang, we knew this all along, too.  “In the female mice whose ovaries had been removed — a condition similar to human menopause — put on the high fat diet, weight gain was greater and more likely to be in the belly,” UPI reports.  So women’s fat cells relocate!  Just when we think we’ve got a solution to our “problem area,” it changes neighborhoods!

But Dr. Clegg gives us some hope.  “Although our new findings don’t explain why women begin storing fat in their bellies after menopause, the results do bring us a step closer to understanding the mechanisms behind the unwanted shift.”

Thanks, Dr. Clegg.  But at the risk of sounding vindictive, I’d feel better if those guys had some kinda “shift,” too.  Just once I’d like to see a man whose fat gut slipped to his backside.  But every woman knows – that ain’t going to happen.  It’s in our genes.

One day not long ago, a crack FBI agent found that Greig had some plastic surgery done before she disappeared.  Whitey likes his girls young and sassy, evidently.  She had a facelift, a nose job, liposuction, and breast implants, and she was only 43 years old then.  It must have been an AHA! moment when the agent also realized that it was highly likely that she (and perhaps even HE) might be a candidate for cosmetic adjustments in the future.  So, what did the Bureau do?

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They took out an ad in the April-May edition of Plastic Surgery News, a newsletter that goes out to nearly 6,000 plastic surgeons around the world!  It was a full-page color ad with pictures of both fugitives and details of all Greig’s nips/tucks, right down to the product and lot number engraved on each of her implants!

I won’t get started about implants being used as tracking devices (“Lieutenant, I think we’ve picked up a signal from her left nipple!”), but only because these people are seriously dangerous citizens.  In fact, I want to be helpful, so it occurs to me that the FBI might not know that plastic surgeons readily use the Internet now to “capture” customers.  They should simply ask physicians to be alert for particular kinds of questions in email correspondence from potential patients.  Questions like:

1)    Are you willing to do house calls?  If yes:

a.     Do you mind being blindfolded during the trip?

b.     Are you claustrophobic?

2)    If you are not willing to travel:

a.     Can you do this surgery without actually looking at me?

b.     How many exits are there in the recovery room?

3)    Do you take unmarked bills for payment?

4)    As a gesture of your commitment to doctor/patient confidentiality, please include with your reply, the location of the schools where your children attend classes.

The story of Whitey Bulger and Boston’s Winter Hill Gang is filled with treachery, murder and corrupt law enforcement officials.  There are already best-selling books and it’s almost guaranteed to make a blockbuster movie someday.  And now, with the addition of tracking Catherine Greig’s implants – well, this is just the stuff of Hollywood, don’t you think?

But Paula takes the “cop” part of her job quite seriously, and I believe, like other tough cops, she is suffering post traumatic stress disorder.  After 30 years of exposing deceptive labeling, distorted claims and advertising gimmicks, she’s a little, well, testy. Consider this opening to her blog a couple weeks ago:

“Exhaustion has set in big time. I’m tired of saying so much about the cosmetic industry as I watch it endlessly spiral out of control in an ugly tangle of lies, half-truths, and just plain idiocy…”

You are my hero, Paula, but geez, lighten up. Today we sing your praises, and make sure that everyone knows all the resources you have to offer.

Her reference book, “Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me” is currently in its 9^th edition, despite the fact that she swore in her 8^th she was never going to do this again.  Each volume contains the latest skin care research, and more than 1,300 pages of product reviews in alphabetical order.  She adds little happy or sad faces next to the name of the product so we don’t have to actually read the review if we don’t want to.  It will take up more space than that dusty old Webster’s, but you will never go to the cosmetics counter without her again.

Beguon has several different websites and the branding gets confusing, but they all offer a little something different.

• Beautypedia.com is her reference book online, and requires a subscription of about $24 a year.  It has the added bonus of being updated constantly, and featuring special reports on newly introduced products, “Paula’s picks” and the animal-testing status of most companies.  Best of all, Beautypedia is available in an IPod app, so you can take it to Sephora with you.
• CosmeticsCop.com is her general website where she promotes herself and sells her own skin care line, Paula’s Choice.  A few LookinGood members are using her products now, and like them so far.  Stay tuned.
• Her blog is called BeautyBunch.com and this is where Paula gets to rant in print about ‘endless spirals’, but also subjects like eye cream and popping pimples.

Lastly, she has an online radio show every Thursday night at 9 ET, 8 CT and 6 PT.  She and her long-time collaborator Bryan Barron present a weekly theme or a guest and take callers who have questions about skin and makeup.  Subjects range from wrinkles to wraps, but the show is a little like listening to your mother lecture you about standing up straight – for an hour.

Paula Begoun is my hero but, much like my mother, she has no sense of humor (my mother’s computer is broken, obviously).  Even her products come in drab little white bottles that look like the lotions you take home from the hospital.  Nonetheless, she has done womankind a justice by indexing and reviewing all those products, and keeping the cosmetics companies honest.  Someone has to do it – it might as well be a curmudgeon.

If YouTube was considered a search engine, it would be second only to Google.  More than just a place to watch your favorite music videos about lipstick stains, it’s a how-to gold mine, with users posting clips showing you how to do everything from riding a bike to open heart surgery.   LookinGood often uses it as a reference, picking and choosing tidbits as we need them. But when we started looking for a channel to subscribe to – someone we could turn to regularly for makeup needs, we found the pickin’s to be slim.

The best makeup videos out there are done, not surprisingly, by young women.  they are most comfortable with the medium of YouTube.  Many are professional and relevant to our over-39-year-old needs,  but users need to get comfortable taking advice from someone who looks like they are also going to sell you Girl Scout cookies.

• Our favorite “kid” skincare advisor is Michelle Phan, who is now a spokeswoman for Lancome.  If you can get over the fact that she does videos about “theme park makeup” (like Disneyland), she’s a real makeup artist who does excellent demonstrations on the application of foundation, the use of brushes and a whole host of color techniques.
• Makeup Geek is a bit older, with a straight-forward approach about achieving results like contouring to make your face look thinner or how to apply normal-looking eyeliner.
• MakeupByCheri is another one we found with decent how-to applications on using powder blushes or how to put on mascara.  She IS a 22 years old, however, so occasionally subscribers are subjected to chronicles of loud road trips that and unintelligible slang.
• Wayne Goss is a makeup artist from the UK who teaches both men and women all the basics as well as those special occasion-night-on-the-town looks.  It is a little odd to watch a man apply purple eye shadow, but this is 2010, what can we say?
• Women of color have The Accidental Beauty who needs some lighting expertise for her videos, and Lady Elle, who has the best personality and music.

And as for the over-40 set or over-50 set, fuhgeddaboudit, unless you want to watch a clip on “how to look like a cougar.”  Most of the videos are sitcoms waiting to happen (you read it here first), taking themselves way too seriously without offering anything useful, like Lanaindiana (“Hi, this is Lana, welcoming you back to my bathroom” or  Amy Miranda who offers bad audio and “Saturday night pub” makeup.

Because YouTube is also a social media marketing tool, cosmetics and personal care companies post a lot of how-to videos, as do salons and makeup artists, like Allison Saunders, and MAC Cosmetics.  We found this especially true when it comes to men’s grooming.  There aren’t a lot of guys in their bedrooms with their mischievous cats offering grooming and shaving tips.  Most, like AlphaM. Image Consulting or posts from the Grooming Lounge guys, are quasi-professional or professionally made.  That doesn’t mean the videos aren’t helpful, it just means they’re trying to sell you something.

Daily Makeover is a hair and makeup website that boasts 100 million impressions a month in 27 languages and claims to have a library of over 7300 hairstyles and 6500 product SKU’s.  That’s almost as many hairstyles as I have had, and about as many products as I have tried.  100 million impressions is a bit more traffic than LookinGood gets, too, so someone is using the tool.

All the websites, including Daily Makeover, use slick technology that works well when trying on new hairstyles.  You can upload a headshot of yourself, calibrate the system so that it recognizes the contours of your face – how far your eyes are away from each other, the shape of your mouth, the height of your forehead – and then select different looks.  Daily Makeover really does have a massive selection of celebrity hairstyles, as well as sketches of hairstyles that, while not actually photos, still generate a pretty realistic idea of what the hairstyle would look like on you.  Don’t have a headshot of yourself?  No problem.  You can choose from 15 different models on Daily Makeover, one of which is bound to have your shaped face.

Virtual makeup is a bit less effective simply because of browser technology.  Colors that a user might experiment with for lipstick, for instance, could look dramatically different on one computer than the next.  Nonetheless, Daily Makeover lists the top 50 brands in lipstick, foundation and eye makeup to try on, and the palettes are extensive.

Essence Magazine’s Makeover Magic is basically the same technology, but targets women of color, featuring products, hair and accessories specifically for ethnic consumers. The site is sponsored by Covergirl’s Queen Collection, but if you choose the color wheel option, you’ll get shades from Lancome, as well as Bobbi Brown, M.A.C, Nars and others that tailor palettes for women of color.  Again, you may choose a model or upload your own photo.

A few months ago we wrote about New Beauty’s Instant Makeover where you can upload your own face and give yourself a nose job, augment your lips, put filler in your cheeks, do your eyes, even lift up your neck.  Our favorite is the weight reduction tool, but of course, we wish we could upload a picture of our entire bodies so that we could put the enhanced photo on the refrigerator when we’re done.

They are all great fun, and we love anything that will help us test out a major change before we commit.

Other sites for “trying on” a look:

• Clairol.com
• InStyle.com
• MyLifetime.com
• BeautyRiot.com

The non-governmental agency in France that oversees and regulates advertising, recently introduced a strict new code regarding what cosmetics and beauty companies can and can’t say about their products. New rules from the Autorité de regulation professionnelle de la publicité (ARPP) target numerical presentation claims, terms like “without” and “free from” and claims about a product’s natural or organic composition.

The numerical presentation refers to products that claim to make a difference in a certain amount of time, such as eliminating crow’s feet in six weeks.  Describing a product as natural and/or organic – well, we talk about that here in the States all the time. According to Cosmetic Design, ARPP’s new requirement is that

“cosmetic product(s) can only be described as natural if the complete product contains a minimum of 95% ingredients that are either natural or of natural origin. Meanwhile, a product can only be described as organic if 100% of its ingredients are derived from certified organic farming, if it has been certified organic by a certification body or if it can be proved that it was made according to a specification equivalent to those of acknowledged certification bodies.”

No such specificity has been granted to the two governmental agencies that focus on cosmetics here in the US – the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).  The FDA prohibits misleading labels and missing information, but the term “natural” is nowhere defined. The USDA can certified pure organic products, but grants no other “seal of approval”.

Most interesting in the ARPP’s requirements, is the limiting of the phrases “without parabens” and/or “free from phlatates.”  ARPP says “Non!” these words cannot be used because they imply that things such as parabens and phlatates, encourages consumer suspicion…,” writes Cosmetics Design, when in fact, the latest word from Europe, which has much tougher testing standards for its cosmetics and personal care products than we do, is that parabens and phthalates, at cosmetic level doses, might not be so bad after all.

In contrast again, the “paraben and phlatates- free” movement is just catching on here.

When it comes to regulation and standards in the cosmetics industry, France and the United Kingdom have long been on the cutting edge.  In December, Britain banned an ad for Olay featuring an airbrushed picture of Twiggy. That may have been a no-brainer in terms of a product making questionable claims about its results (airbrushing! C’mon), but it was also clear that someone was watching. That’s not always the case on this side of the pond.

How can that be true, you ask?  Researchers from Tabs Group who were commissioned to do the study, point to three major problems:

1. Price. It costs more money to make a product out of natural ingredients rather than synthetic, and consumers pay for it.  “The price for non-organic products is often 50 per cent lower than an organic equivalent…”
2. Efficacy. Consumers are not getting the results they want from so-called organic products.  They are paying a large premium for products they find equivalent or less than traditional products.
3. Give a damn. People don’t.  We think recycling our plastic bags is important, but don’t much care about our shampoo.

Horst M. Rechelbacher

I have a fourth variable the researchers didn’t get to: Smell.  Real, natural, certified, no-bull-organic products smell terrible.   They have no fragrance and no fragrance-blockers. Frankly, decomposed plant matter just plain smells bad.  Case in point – salon brand Intelligent Nutrients by Horst M. Rechelbacher.  Released with great fanfare as the truest, most natural, cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die, certified, organic hair and skin products ever produced, Intelligent Nutrients are gathering dust on salon shelves because folks can’t whiff without wheezing (I did!).  Rechelbacher is the founder of the fabulous-smelling Aveda products, which are quite natural themselves.  He sold Aveda to Estee Lauder back in 2003 and used at least some of his proceeds to buy a farm in Wisconsin where he grows his own plants to use as ingredients.  But nonetheless, his good intentions have not paid off.  His loss stinks.

Mintel, a research company that provides intelligence on a variety of consumer products, including beauty trends, says we can expect eco-friendly products with descriptions like “free from” and “sustainable” in 2010.   “Nu Natural” is the description they give the vision of companies and consumers who are “less focused on certification and more focused on results”.

And they will smell better, too.

So, what did I learn in 2009?  One word:  Skepticism.

Particularly, skepticism in the use of the word “natural” in personal care products.  Just because it says “natural” or “organic” or even “hypoallergenic” on the label, does not make it any of those things.  Only one government agency certifies organic products – the USDA.  Without that seal on the label, those herbs may have been cooked up in a lab.

Further, I’m skeptical about those who take the natural movement to the extreme.  Some chemicals belong in cosmetics.  Preservatives belong, for instance, so that your product doesn’t go bad.  Thickening agents belong in some, too, to make the product rich for smoothing on the skin.  New research has backed me up on my support of some synthetics recently, when the UK gave the green light to the preservative paraben in cosmetic and grooming products.

Lastlly, natural products, if that is what they actually are, are not necessarily good for you.  Some plant extracts can irritate the hell out of your skin and are much oilier than a facial product should be.  As I have said before – arsenic is a natural ingredient, but that doesn’t mean it belongs in your spouse’s coffee.

So, what’s a consumer to do?  A helpful way to make a quick assessment is the nose on your face.  If it has a heavy fragrance, you need to be skeptical, particularly if you are in your childbearing years.  There is nothing wrong with smelling good, but in the cosmetic manufacturing industry, chemicals we don’t know about are hidden in the word “fragrance” on the label.  Companies don’t have to disclose what ingredients make up fragrance, because they can claim it falls within their “trade secrets”.  Ingredients already known to be in some fragrance or fragrance blockers (herbs smell bad), are the ones considered high in reproductive toxicity by the Environmental Working Group, our safety watchdog for personal care products.

Mintel, a research company that supplies intelligence on consumers and products, predicts that 2010 will be the “Nu Natural” year, where consumers will be focused less on certification and more on “results, efficiency and safety.”  They, and LookinGood, suggest we look for labels like “free from” and “sustainable” rather than the often abused Mother Nature endorsement.

Of course, you can always ask LookinGood.  That’s what we’re here for.

1.  Pedicure, manicure or both.  We have known countless men who just would never do such a thing unless someone bought them a gift certificate. Now they would not go two weeks without hitting the salon.  It feels good. It looks good. And they don’t have to admit they do it.

2.  Nature Calls Toilet Drops, by Ritual ($9.00 per bottle.) This is probably the greatest invention since the bathroom fan, but more effective.  It’s a little black bottle of magic potion, and just two drops of the liquid into the toilet water will destroy any smell, no matter how much chili was consumed.  Grooming Lounge even has whole kits dedicated to grooming disasters.

3.  Menscience Daily Body and Hair Wash, by Menscience Androceuticals ($59)  You can’t get a man a basket of bathroom goodies like you can a woman, but this kit has just three simple products:  Body Wash, Hair Shampoo and a pair of Buffing Gloves that are worth the price of the kit.  Refreshing, clean smells for a manly man.

4.  Liposuction. If you have the disposable income, why not?  More than 30,000 men had lipo of some kind in 2008 and the results for 2009 aren’t in yet.  How about little off the love handles to greet the spring of 2010?  Maybe slim down that belly over the belt for summer?  Or a shave off the double-chin so that he can shave that beard?  He can learn all about it here.

5.  “Age Erasers for Men” by Joel Weber, and the editors of Men’s Health. Thirteen chapters of advice for stripping away years, such as The Age Eraser Workout, The New Science of Hair Growth, with some good suggestions about hair dyes (use women’s); skin care, back and prostate information and of course, a chapter on sexuality that has this clever chart describing Penis Ages, using little colored balloons. That alone is worth the price of admission, though they ain’t admittin’ it ages.

So, LookinGood advices that you pamper men just like you might pamper yourself.  Remember one of Mae West’s great lines – “It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men.”