Fluffy brows that won’t scare small children
“Instagram brows” are polarising. Done well, they epitomise perfected polish: slick and beautifully defined. Done badly, they may as well be thick strips of duct tape plastered above the eyes. On a scaring-small-children scale, they are pretty high. Fluffy, youthful brows, as seen at Max Mara AW19, hold more appeal. Achieve them with light strokes of a brow pencil (define underneath, not above), a clear brow gel or Soap Brows. Dampen a spoolie, scrape across the soap bar and brush brows upwards. Resist overdoing the soap otherwise, when it dries, you’ll look like you’ve got dandruff.
Get the look
1. West Barn Co Soap Brows £12, beautybay.com2. Anastasia Clear Brow Gel £23, cultbeauty.com3. Benefit Brow
Styler Eyebrow Pencil and Powder Duo £23, benefitcosmetics.com4. BBB Nourishing Brow Oil £22, lookfantastic.com 5. Elizabeth Arden Prevage Clinical
Lash + Brow Enhancing Serum £90, elizabetharden.com
I can’t do without: a cleanser that smells of dinner, but works a treat
DHC Deep Cleansing Oil, £24, feelunique.comOil cleansers are something of an oxymoron. How on earth can oils produce clean faces? Surely it is counterintuitive to wash oily skin with oils. Won’t it clog my pores?
How well an oil cleanser works really depends on the formulation of the product. The best oil cleansers are non-clogging, water-soluble entities perfect for removing grime and makeup without stripping skin. All skins, even the breakout-prone, can benefit from them. You just have to choose the right one.
Japanese brands were the first to introduce the concept of oil cleansers to the western world. This one from DHC has a huge cult following, hence you will find it on every ‘best oil cleansers’ list. And yet when I first tried it many years ago, I didn’t take to it. It does contain a significant amount of olive oil (and smells as such) and also has a hint of rosemary. I love both but in the right context – salad and lamb respectively. And so I dismissed it.
I was wrong. I recently revisited and I am now a bona fide fan. It is balancing, removes makeup easily and quickly (I have no patience for a separate makeup remover), leaves no residue, softens and brightens my skin and cleanses so deeply that stubborn breakouts, which nothing else seemed able to shift, have been conquered. Yes, the scent is still the same but the results are so impressive, I’m totally willing to overlook it. Try it and you probably will, too.
On my radar: a night lipid, a slick salon and an incoming classic
While you sleep Say hello to one of winter’s most anticipated skincare launches. Brimming with algaes, amino acids and vitamins, it increases the skin’s elasticity and decreases the appearance of wrinkles. NIOD Copper Amino Isolate Lipid 1%, £70, niod.com
Well whipped This sustainability driven, gender-neutral hair salonmeets-music lounge caters to all hair types using only vegan, organic and cruelty-free products. If you can’t come to them, they’ll come to you. whiplondon.co.uk
French lessons Fans of the French brand Helena Rubinstein will be thrilled to hear that it is now available here. Try this smoothing, brightening serum – a global best seller. Helena Rubinstein Powercell Skinmunity Serum, £110.50, harrods.com
institutions in Russia, China and Abu Dhabi. Others may follow, but most big private institutions appear to be waiting on the economic and reputational price. A notable exception is Singapore’s investment fund Temasek, which said it would not invest in Aramco’s IPO, partly due to climate concerns.
Oversight and transparency are other concerns. The Saudi royal family is neither open nor democratic. Barely a year after being implicated in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi in October, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman is getting positive global attention for his Aramco selloff plans.
He said the sale would raise money for the state’s sovereign wealth fund to invest in a diverse range of businesses across the globe, which would make Saudi Arabia less dependent on oil.
Climate campaigners believe it is reckless to pour such money into a petrochemical giant when fossil fuel firms should be scaling back. Last month 10 environmental groups signed a joint letter to bank chief executives, including the bosses of HSBC and Goldman Sachs, urging them not to participate.
“This IPO will be a boost to a planet-wrecking company linked to a regime with a dubious human rights record,” said Adam McGibbon, senior campaigner at Global Witness.
Yossi Cadan, global finance campaign manager for 350.org, said: “Investors who expressed concerns about climate change and human rights violations must be sincere to their word and not be investing in Saudi Aramco’s climate wreckage sale.”
In a letter to the Guardian last month, Aramco’s chief technology officer, Ahmad O Al-Khowaiter, said the company supported a cut in the overall carbon footprint of the oil and gas industry and end-use markets. He said his company had already made progress. “We have achieved the lowest carbon intensity of any major oil producer.”
Saudi oil is of high quality and close to the surface, which means it requires less energy to extract and process than fuel from Canadian tar sands, Venezuela’s Orinoco fields or Brazil’s deep sea reserves. Even so, the Climate Tracker watchdog estimates half of potential Saudi spending on new projects would not fit within even a 1.7C climate scenario.
In an earlier bond prospectus, Saudi Aramco said the firm was pursuing various initiatives to manage its carbon footprint. Tellingly, it also declared support for Saudi efforts to achieve the Paris agreement objectives. If the same is true for the equity raise, then investors and financial market regulators would be entitled to ask how it reconciles this with a plan that would break the global carbon bank.
Richard Heede, at the Climate Accountability Institute in the US, said a proportion of the capital raised should be invested in expanding Saudi Arabia’s solar electricity generation, energy efficiency and carbon sequestration programmes, at a scale that goes beyond freeing up domestic use so there is more oil for exports. “It would be prudent for investors to do climaterelated due diligence, and for the kingdom to assure investors that steps to protect the global climate will be taken,” he said.
But stock markets and asset management companies continue to champion fossil fuel firms, via listings in benchmark indices and by investment algorithms that automatically track the biggest firms.
The FTSE recently benchmarked the Tadawul as a secondary emerging market, which already puts it on the radar of global investors. If Aramco later lists in a major international stock exchange, its size would ensure it becomes a major player in any index. It would then appear in every major pension fund portfolio “benchmarked” to the FTSE All Share Index, which could mean millions of pension policyholders end up unknowingly with a stake.
“There would then be a transfer of risk from the Saudis to the rest of the world, ie London, then to every pension fund member or saver in a passive fund. Only those funds with ‘no carbon’ benchmarks are likely to avoid it,” said Mark Campanale, of Carbon Tracker.
If the financial markets are serious about climate change, they need to be reorganised to separate climate and carbon, not push them closer together.
blind randomised controlled trial – it was lacking. But you can’t do that kind of trial: you know if your teeth are being flossed or not. If you make that the standard then, necessarily, there won’t be “hard” evidence to support flossing. There is a kind of fetishism about RCTs. But there are cases including in nutrition and exercise when you can’t do them, or it would be unethical. In those cases, other types of studies, like population or animal studies, can be valuable. Or if you have some other kind of information – for example dentists’ and our own experience that flossing does a lot of good for our teeth and gums – it shouldn’t be discounted.
How can we increase trust in science where it is warranted? It isn’t by giving people more scientific information. Rather scientists need to talk about the values that motivate them and shape the science they do. In many cases, scientists’ values are less different from the people who are rejecting science than you might think. And where values overlap, trust can be built. We may think of people who reject vaccination as being “on the other side” but we all love our children. A scientist’s “biodiversity” might be a religious believer’s “Creation”, but they are cherishing the same thing. Scientists being willing to talk about themselves and their experiences can also go a long way. In my book, I talk about something deeply personal: my own experiences with the contraceptive pill and depression. It may not be persuasive to everyone, but people are much more likely to accept factual information from those they can relate to or have a human connection with.
Lots of scientists work for oil, energy, pharmaceutical, food and cosmetics companies, and often bury unwelcome results, massage their studies and so on – how do you feel about these people and are they contributing to the cynicism about science in the public? This is a big question, hard to answer in a soundbite. In the early 20th century, a good deal of important science was done in industrial laboratories, for example at Westinghouse, General Electric, Bell Labs, and Eastman Chemicals. But after the war, many large corporations cut back on their support of basic research, and some – most famously the tobacco industry – became involved in product defence and distracting research. A good deal of product defence research is now channelled through academia, and this is deeply problematic. I know from my email and Twitter feed that this has stoked distrust among some people, and rightly so.
Many scientific journals and universities have been very sloppy about taking steps to ensure the integrity of academic findings, for example by having and enforcing full disclosure. Academics have to be very clear about the soures of their support, and they should never agree to non-disclosure agreements. It is essential in science that we let the chips fall as they may.
You’ve recently been testifying in Congress. What’s the message you most want to send to politicians? Human-induced climate change is under way. It’s no longer a matter of trust; our scientists have been shown to be right. Climate change deniers have run out of excuses.
• Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes is published by Princeton University Press (£22). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15
It’s fashionable to be sceptical of experts but we rely on them: dentists fix our teeth, plumbers unclog our drains