Jessica Assaf, co-founder of the blog BeautyLiesTruth, has dedicated her time to visible public activism, advocating the boycott of parabens and other toxins in cosmetic products. She recently received a recruitment email from L'Oreal, a company that definitely uses toxic ingredients in their products and has …

And your dad told you that you'd be unemployable with a degree in green screen hair flipping.

Well, that's one way to get people talking about black goopy body hair makeup that comes in an opaque tube.

Adulthood is a series of time sucking precursors to moments of enjoyment — traffic jams, that spinning pinwheel of doom that your computer shows you when it's thinking, standing in lines at airports, outside of clubs, at the grocery store. For women, there's also the omnipresent time suck of Getting Ready, or…

First, the good news: Goldman Sachs sponsored a conference with the express purpose of getting women interested in the typical sausagefest profession that is computer programming. Now, the bad news: they placated attendees of said conference with some kind of feather-rufflingly stereotypical swag: mirrors and nail…

Much virtual ink has been spilled over the past few days over the Oxford Dictionary's choice of "selfie" for 2013 word of the year. But I've noticed among the chorus of opinions on the social media self portrait an annoying trend: the selfie evangelist. Selfies are just dandy, they say, because they're a way for…

Confession, guys: unless I'm in the shower and I feel particularly grimy that day, I rarely wash my face. I figured my face skin was sort of like dirty laundry — if stuff lays around for long enough, everything just kind of cleans itself (I realize, typing this out, that my logic is flawed). Anyway, long story short,…

Burlesque performer and fan dancing extraordinaire Jezebel Express once shared her realization that “sexy is a set of skills.” While I wholeheartedly believe this, I think it extends beyond sex appeal. Pretty, too, is a set of skills.

Last September a horrific-sounding "intimate bleaching product" gained popularity in India and Thailand, which promised to make vulvas "fairer within four weeks." While the shock value garnered this a lot of coverage, sadly, skin bleaching has actually been immensely popular for quite some time.

In a capitalist society, "gender equality" sometimes means "men can have their physical insecurities exploited for profit, too." As such, cosmetics companies that have spent the better part of the last century convincing women that their products will make them presentable enough so that maybe another human might love…

In China, plastic surgery shows you've made it. And more and more people are making it.

You know all those parental arguments against tattoos? Well, take those for what they're worth, but shouldn't that kind of go double for permanent makeup? Except, wait, that's pretty. Standards of beauty: arbitary since the dawn of human consciousness.

So last Wednesday, the Society for Women's Health Research hosted a Capitol Hill briefing called "The Make Up of Your Make Up" (see what they did there?) to discuss, "the science of cosmetics and its impact on women's health." They sent me a press release right after, so I could know what a great time they all had.

"Before and after makeup" shots are a weird Internet phenomenon, and this gallery of "Asian Girls Before and After Makeup" is noteworthy both in that it exists and the uniform standard of beauty on display.

"To understand what it takes to be beautiful," writes Amy Alkon for Psychology Today, "we need to be very clear about what being beautiful means — being sexually appealing to men." She then commands: "burn those muumuus." Uh-oh.

"'Not a lot of brands talk to a 28-year-old,' said Daniel Giles, the senior vice president for marketing at Perricone. 'that's where Super is positioned, to 25- to 30-year-olds.'" Welcome to the next phase of aging-phobic marketing.

Earlier this month, Hugh Hefner was asked whether he objectifies women. His answer says a lot about our culture's confused attitude to female beauty.

Contrary to what every courtroom procedural, TV police force and pretend hospital would have you believe, in the real-world work-force, "beauty" is indeed a liability in male-dominated fields:

It's true! In fact, "it is not in fact illegal to hire only attractive waitresses." We should clarify that "ugly" here translates to "not blond, pneumatic and slender." This was all part of a serious academic study, you see.