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Glossary
Definition: Tint-Back
Have you ever colored your hair, been displeased with the results, and immediately had the desire to revert your hair back to its original color? I hear you. Or, perhaps you have been coloring your hair so long, you don't even know the true tones of your natural locks any longer.
Definition: Occipital Bone
Place your hand on the back of your head. Do you feel that distinctive bone between your skull and your neck? That's called the occipital bone, a curved protrusion that makes up the back of the skull, right above the nape.
Definition: Ylang Ylang
Ylang ylang is the sweet smelling oil obtained from the yellow flowers of the Asian cananga tree. Pronounced "EE-lang EE-lang," this distinctively repetitive name comes from Tagalog, most likely from "ilang," meaning wilderness, or "ilang-ilan," meaning rare. With notes of custard, rubber, neroli, and jasmine, the spicy, ethereal scent is often found in floral and oriental fragrance classifications.
Definition: Attar
Attars are the world’s oldest perfumes, incredibly concentrated elixirs extracted from the juices of flowers, spices, and barks. They can contain anything from hundreds of ingredients to a simple, single note, sometimes distilled over years. Rose attar is probably the best known, but there are as many attars as there are fragrant herbs.
Definition: Kohl
Used across the Middle East (where it's called kohl), South Asia (where it's kajal or surma), and West Africa (where it's kwalli), this ubiquitous eyeliner made of soot has been used for thousands of years with little change in its formulation. In fact, the smoky eye is older than the pyramids, and there are recipes for it dating back to the Bronze Age. Traditional kohl preparations still popular in many other countries are banned by the FDA because they're made with lead.
Definition: Lunula
Look at the base of your thumbnails. You probably have a crescent-shaped white marking at the end, scientifically known as the lunula. While most people possess this half-moon shape on their thumbs and big toenails, it's less common to have lunulas on your other fingers and toes.
Definition: Greenwashing
You've probably heard of the deceptive terms white lies and whitewashing, and now you can file away greenwashing in your brain's internal dictionary. Greenwashing is the practice of making a product seem more environmentally friendly than it might actually be.
We all know that buzz words like organic, all-natural, and green are attractive adjectives for companies to use, particularly in this day and age, but since the laws aren't as stringent in the organic beauty industry as they are in the food industry, manufacturers often get away with putting an eco-friendly twist on product descriptions that might not actually deserve it.
Definition: Kola Nut
When it comes to colas, I'm a Coke kind of gal. What about you? Kola nuts, which are seeds that come from a tropical African tree, are often chewed for their hunger-quelling properties.
Definition: Mascary
The unconventional web-based dictionary known as Urban Dictionary features slang and other subculture phrases you won't find in your typical run-of-the-mill glossary. This offbeat definition comes to us courtesy of Fab, who forwarded me one of the site's recent words of the day — Mascary:
When a person wears a scary amount of mascara. "Although Melanie thought her mascara application was flawless, her eyelashes really looked like scary spider legs."
Horsetail Extract
Contrary to what you might think, horsetail does not, in fact, come from a horse's ass. Horsetail, a plant that is fernlike in quality, has been used since ancient Greek and Roman times for medicinal purposes, such as healing cuts and treating tuberculosis.
As far as beauty is concerned, the extracts from the horsetail plant help stimulate the skin and the production of elastin and collagen and protect the skin from oxidation.
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