
What you need to know about lash growth serums
Devotees claim eyelash growth serums are the Holy Grail, giving you long, fluttery lashes that will have your friends wondering if you’re wearing falsies. It will probably come as no surprise that TikTok has been flooded with videos from users showing off their impressive transformations after several weeks of daily use, with 114m views under the search ‘lash growth serum’. There’s now a huge variety of products on the market – from big name beauty brands to companies that specialise in lashes and brows – and prices vary massively. But do they really work for everyone? Experts run through everything you need to know about lash-boosting serums… What is the science behind eyelash growth serums? All lash serums, whether they’re applied like eyeliner or with a mascara-style wand, are designed with essentially the same aim. “To promote the growth of natural lashes, resulting in longer and thicker lashes with regular use,” says Nima Pourian, founder of UKLash. “By nourishing and moisturising the lashes with ingredients like Panthenol, peptides, and biotin”, serums can “enhance the absorption of nutrients into the bloodstream, leading to healthier and fuller lashes”. Some serums on the market contain hormones called prostaglandins – or a synthetic version – that extend the growth phase of the lash cycle, meaning the hairs get longer before they fall out. Others, such as The Ordinary’s Multi-Peptide Lash and Brow Serum, use peptides to achieve the same aim without hormones. Gabriella Elio, founder of Sweed Beauty, came up with a hormone-free serum after learning some people can “get allergic reactions, pigmentations and are sensitive to serums since they contain prostaglandins”. As with any new beauty product you’re trying, it’s sensible to perform a patch test first. “Although reactions are rare, the eye area can be sensitive, so it’s best to check for any sensitivity beforehand,” says Pourian. “Apply a small amount of the serum to a small area, such as a corner of the forehead, behind the ear, or the side of the neck. Wait approximately 24 hours to observe any skin sensitivity.” It’s particularly important to be careful with products used so close to the eyes, so do your research and buy from a reputable retailer. How long does it take to see results? “The time it takes to see results may vary individually, depending on the stage of the lash growth cycle when the serum is started,” says Pourian. “That’s why it is recommended to use eyelash and eyebrow serums once a day for eight to 12 weeks, which aligns with a full growth cycle.” You’ll have to be patient, because you can’t simply double up to get lengthy lashes twice as fast. “It is crucial to follow the instructions provided with the serum and avoid overuse,” he continues. “Like any other topical skincare product, proper usage and adherence to the recommended application frequency will ensure the best results.” Do you have to keep using the serum forever? “If you discontinue using the product your lashes will continue to go through their natural growth and shedding phases,” says Claire Larsen, global master educator at RevitaLash Cosmetics. “So the new lashes that come back in will be untreated and will appear the way they originally did before starting your lash serum. If you love the results, you are a lifer!” However, you can reduce the frequency of use once you reach the maintenance phase. Pourian advises: “Once you have achieved your desired results, it is recommended to use the lash serum three to four times a week to maintain the length and health of your lashes.” Are there any reasons why a serum might not work? Proper application is key to making sure the serum can get to work quickly and effectively. “If the serum is not applied properly, such as being applied like mascara instead of reaching the roots and hair follicles, it may not yield desired results,” says Pourian. “It’s important to avoid using other products like oil-based cleansers or serums before applying the lash serum, as they can create a barrier, preventing proper absorption.” And remember, you’ve got to be consistent with daily use for at least a few weeks before you’ll see a noticeable difference. “Certain medical conditions, health issues, hormonal changes and lifestyle factors can influence the results of lash serums,” Pourian adds, meaning your lashes might not reach TikTok-worthy proportions, or may take longer to do so. “Genetics also play a role, as individuals naturally have different hair, lash, or brow growth genetics. This doesn’t mean the serum won’t work at all, but it may result in less significant outcomes.” Go long: 8 highly-rated lash serums to try 1. The Ordinary Multi-Peptide Lash and Brow Serum, £12.40, LookFantastic 2. L’Oreal Paris Clinically Proven Lash Serum, £11.99 (was £14.99), Superdrug 3. Mavala Double Lash Night Treatment, £17.50, Boots 4. UKLash Eyelash Serum, £37.99 5. RapidLash Eyelash Enhancing Serum, £39.99, Escentual 6. Sweed Beauty Eyelash Growth Serum, £42 7. Olaplex Lashbond Building Serum, £64 8. RevitaLash Advanced Sensitive Eyelash Conditioner, £109 Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Sex Education star Patricia Allison: I’ve learned boundaries are extremely important Non-binary influencers share what they wish people understood about their experience Camilla will not receive £360,000 annuity from parliament like Prince Philip did
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Inside the 'Are We Dating the Same Guy' Facebook groups exposing cheats across the world
Modern-day dating feels like a complicated sport. And now, with a whole new vocabulary to describe every trial and tribulation, it’s becoming even more challenging to break out of the amateur dating division. Is it a red flag, a beige flag, or an amber flag? Is he ghosting me? Breadcrumbing me? Lovebombing me? Who knows, maybe he’s on the verge of delicate dumping me? Welcome to smart dating in the digital era. So, you’ve learnt the zeitgeisty lingo and have a newfound confidence in identifying certain behaviours. Things are seemingly going well with a third Hinge date on the horizon – then BAM. You find your promising beau’s face splashed across a Facebook group filled with tens of thousands of strangers asking: Are we dating the same guy? Originating in New York with over 110,000 users, the Facebook group has since branched out to London, Paris, Dubai, Toronto, Dublin, Los Angeles and Boston. For the blissfully unaware, Are We Dating the Same Guy works like this: Women share screenshots of dating profiles and ask for intel or red flags. The Facebook posts are often inundated with personal experiences ranging anywhere from STI claims, cheating allegations and toxic behaviours. To join the groups, women are asked a series of questions before agreeing to a set of robust rules and digitally swearing they will not leak any of the group’s contents to outsiders. Among the rules are no doxxing (publicly sharing someone's personal details), no roasting, and no naming of the men. That said, it's become all too easy to identify people online through reverse image searches and word of mouth – to name a few. “The popularity of these groups are in alignment to the increase of smart dating – this is a phase that I think society is in,” dating expert Paul Brunson tells Indy100. “We’re becoming more aware of dating behaviours – a prime of that being the word ‘toxic.’ Twenty years ago, no one was speaking about ‘toxic dating’, but now there are many people who believe they can define it.” The intention of Are We Dating the Same Guy is to keep women safe and create awareness about toxic behaviours. “These groups have great intentions because ultimately it is about identifying dangerous people and behaviour, which is a good thing,” Paul explains, citing that while women are going through an incredible “empowerment phase” with “more time and command over the dating space,” it is still is very much “far tilted on the man’s side.” “We still are living in a society that is far greatly tilted towards men when it comes to dating, and it’s not just men from a general standpoint,” he continues. “It’s even some of these terrible nuances in dating.” These include narcissists, psychopaths, Machiavellians, and sadists – people that contribute to the psychological theory of personality. Furthermore, a recent study from the charity Plan International worryingly revealed that a third of German men still find physical violence against women to be acceptable. A staggering 34 per cent admitted to violence against their partner to “instil respect in them.” Meanwhile, a further 33 per cent thought it was acceptable if their “hand slipped” during an argument. “The fact that we still have survey results like that shows that we definitely need spaces to protect and empower women,” Paul adds. Paul, who recently added Global Relationship Insights Expert to his impressive matchmaking resume in addition to Married at First Sight and Celebs Go Dating, explains how we’ve got “much more information and content around dating than ever before that goes beyond anecdotal.” There's now empirical evidence, with researchers who have been conducting studies for 10-20 years, which Paul believes to be the “driving force behind smart dating.” Paul highlights that women are becoming exceedingly great at dating which is often driven by feedback loops due and open discussions about their experiences. They've become more emotionally available, more courageous, and understand how to be less neurotic when dating. Men, on the other hand, hardly have any feedback loops, and Paul believes we could actually benefit from mixed-gender groups, as men need to catch up and “have a higher dating IQ.” “We know that guys suck when it comes to emotional intelligence, compared to women – so a lot of it is poor execution.” Ultimately, there are “far fewer bad guys than there are good guys.” We know bad men exist, but according to evolutionary psychologist Dr David Buss, the highest percentage of men that fall into the dark tetrad personality types is 15 per cent of the population. "That's the group that has evil intentions," Paul continues. This is not to get confused with misalignment and miscommunication when dating. When intentions aren't communicated, you could end up with two people seeking two different things. Subsequently, the person who seeks long-term commitment views the behaviour of the short-termer (i.e. casual sex and friends with benefits) as toxic. “Ultimately, I think we have a lot of guys that their intention is not fully outlined, and because of the misaligned intention you have the interpretation of their behaviour as being ‘toxic’, when in actuality, sometimes it’s not,” Paul explains. To make dating a more positive, safer and enjoyable experience, Paul shared three invaluable tips to have under your belt: Don’t exchange personal information right away A dark tetrad or a straight scammer will try and move you off the app quickly. And the reason they try and do that is because the apps are really good about safety now. If someone is asking for your personal information, the safety features will inform you not to send that information, thanks to the AI built into the app. If you have given up your information, the app can no longer protect you. Stay on the app and let it protect you. Be cautious when people ask for things The moment you have anyone ask you for anything, mainly money, that is a huge red flag. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a grand amount, it could be as simple as “I don’t get paid until next week, please could I have five pounds." Meet in a public space Meet in a public space, never get picked up from your personal address and inform friends about the date details. Most importantly on the first meet-up, set boundaries. You can very quickly see how respectful someone is to your boundaries. An example being, you meet up on your lunch break and you only have until 2pm. When that time comes, do they try and push you to stay even longer – despite informing them you have to leave because you have something to do? Anytime someone is disrespecting your boundaries, that is also a red flag. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.
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Scientists make surprising discovery that could help boost the global population
Infertility is a problem that afflicts more than a billion people across the world, which is why treatments such as IVF are so important. The procedure (in vitro fertilisation, to use it’s full name) involves the extraction of an egg from the woman's ovaries to be fertilised with sperm in a laboratory and returned to the woman’s womb. The goal is that the resulting embryo will then grow and develop into a foetus, blessing the parent or parents with a baby. However, success rates for IVF – as in, the percentage of treatments that result in a live birth – remain somewhat unencouraging: 32 per cent for women aged under 35; 25 per cent for women aged 35 to 37, with the numbers continuing to drop the older you get, according to the NHS. Nevertheless, a major new study has revealed a striking new finding which could help boost the hopes of countless aspiring mums and dads across the world. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter After analysing 3,657 frozen embryos over a period of eight years, researchers in Western Australia found that IVF was much more likely to work when eggs had been harvested in the summer. The team clarified that it didn’t seem to matter when the embryos were transferred to the mother’s womb, just when the eggs were collected. Indeed, the likelihood of babies being born when the eggs had been retrieved in the summer was 30 per cent higher than when they had been retrieved in the autumn, according to the scientists. The team also found that the temperature on the day of egg collection didn’t seem to have an impact on success rates, but the number of sunny hours did. Of the embryos they tested, those harvested on days that had the most sunshine were 28 per cent more likely to result in a live birth compared to the darkest and most overcast days. “Our study suggests that the best conditions for live births appear to be associated with summer and increased sunshine hours on the day of egg retrieval,” the study’s lead, Dr Sebastian Leathersich, of Perth’s King Edward Memorial Hospital, said about the paper, which was published in the journal Human Reproduction. Still, he noted: “There are many factors that influence fertility treatment success, age being among the most important. “However, this study adds further weight to the importance of environmental factors and their influence on egg quality and embryonic development." He further explained: “We effectively separated the conditions at the time of egg collection from the conditions at the time of transfer, demonstrating that environmental factors when the eggs are developing are as, if not more, important than environmental factors during implantation and early pregnancy.” The expert obstetrician and gynaecologist added: “Optimising factors such as avoiding smoking, alcohol and other toxins and maintaining healthy activity levels and weight should be paramount. However, clinicians and patients could also consider external factors such as environmental conditions.” Despite Dr Leathersich and his colleagues concluding that the temperature on the day of egg collection had little bearing on the success of the process, they also found that the temperature on the day of embryo implantation did make a difference. The chances of a live birth rate decreased by 18 per cent when the embryos were transferred on the hottest days (when average temperatures measured between 14.5C and 27.8C) compared to the coolest days (0.1C to 9.8C), and there was a small increase in miscarriage rates, from 5.5 per cent to 7.6. The finding that miscarriage rates were highest when embryo transfer took place on the hottest days is consistent with other studies showing higher rates of miscarriage in the summer months. “This suggests that the negative effects of high temperature are more likely related to early pregnancy rather than egg development,” Dr Leathersich concluded. When it comes to the disparity in success rates between eggs retrieved in summer and autumn, he and his team pointed out that melatonin levels could be at play. Differences in lifestyles between the winter and summer months may also play a role, he and his colleagues acknowledged. "It is possible that there are differences in activity, diet, and lifestyle in different seasons which could underlie the observed differences in live birth rates, though such data were not collected in this study," they wrote. "It is also possible that other environmental factors, including pollutants, may impact clinical outcomes." Whilst the study’s findings are compelling, Dr Leathersich and his team admitted that it did have its limitations. The research was done in hindsight, using eggs that had been frozen, then thawed, so it could not draw watertight conclusions. “Ideally, these findings should be replicated in other sites with different conditions and different treatment protocols to confirm the findings,” Dr Leathersich said. “It would also be interesting to look at the impact of season and environmental factors on sperm parameters, as this could have contributed to our observations.” He added: “We are now planning to analyse this same group of patients using air quality data, as there may be seasonal changes in exposure to harmful pollutants which could negatively affect reproductive outcomes. “Finally, given the huge increase in so-called 'social egg freezing' for fertility preservation and the fact that this group generally have flexibility about when they choose to undergo treatment, it would be very interesting to see if these observations hold true with frozen eggs that are thawed and fertilised years later. “Any improved outcomes in this group could have big impacts for women making decisions about their future fertility, but the long-term follow-up required means it is likely to be some time before we can draw any conclusions for this population.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.
2023-07-10 23:22
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