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Just to give you an idea about your score, a score of around 160 is nearly impossible to achieve, and you shouldn’t think of that as a goal. Just as you probably don’t know anybody with an IQ of 160, you probably don’t know anybody with a YOU-Q of 160. If your YOU-Q is 100 or above, then you are pretty typical of people who take this test. Finally, don’t pay a lot of attention to small differences between scores. If you got a 105 and your best friend got a 110, that is essentially the same score. It does appear that having a younger Real Age than biological age helps you achieve a higher score—and more happiness. (Take the Real Age test at www.realage.com.)

To validate the YOU-Q, we gave the survey to 1,174 women and 533 men who had taken it on the RealAge website. The average YOU-Q score for the women was 95 and for men was 99, so both genders have about the same happiness score. This average stays the same across our lifespan, but individuals can increase and decrease their score as they age. If your YOU-Q is way above 100, congratulations! You’re already well on the path to beauty. If it is well below 100, then you have got some work ahead of you. Luckily, your YOU-Q differs from your IQ, because your YOU-Q is easy to change. So no matter what your YOU-Q, you’ll find plenty of great advice in the pages to come that will help that score go up.

As you make changes in your body, your health, and your inner self, you will also experience changes in your life satisfaction and self-esteem. All of these factors will increase your YOU-Q. Periodically come back and take the YOU-Q again, and watch the YOU-Q grow—just as you do.

Part I
Looking Beautiful

Glowing Skin

Luscious Hair

Marvelous Mouth

Nice Digits

Sexy Shape

Quick, think of a place that doesn’t have a mirror. Pretty hard, right? Bathrooms, of course, have them. So do cars, department stores, gyms, supermarkets, hotel lobbies, bars, subway cars, purses, bedroom walls, and bedroom ceilings. In fact, you’d almost have to be living in solitary confinement or a single-seat submarine not to have the opportunity to judge your own appearance through your reflection.^*

Besides constantly being judged by your own gaze, your face and body often serve as the target for other people’s eyes (and perhaps whistles). While it may seem unfair to be under such constant visual scrutiny, the fact remains that beautiful people have more advantages than unattractive folks. Sounds harsh, we know, but just consider the evidence:

 Mental acuity, interpersonal skills, and moral goodness are all associated with physically beautiful people.

 Beautiful people are believed by others to have happier marriages and more rewarding jobs. And they’re more likely to be hired, have a higher salary, and be promoted sooner.

 Better-looking people are more likely to marry sooner, as well as to marry people who have more money and higher social status.

 More attractive babies have even been shown to be rewarded with greater overt maternal affection.

In this part of the book we’ll be examining the elements that primarily determine whether or not you’re perceived as beautiful or not—things like skin, hair, and body shape. But before we start any specific discussion of various wrinkles and jiggles, we’d like you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Though we’ll have plenty to say about the body’s anatomical wonders, the most important body part of all when it comes to beauty isn’t a luscious lip or hardened glute. It’s your brain.

Now, we’re not suggesting that the pituitary gland and hypothalamus are party-stopping body parts the way a silky mane or a plywood-flat waist may be.^* What we are suggesting is that beauty is always on your mind. In fact, your brain needs beauty.

Your brain—under intense demand to process an infinite amount of information at any given moment—must make choices about whom to trust, whom to mate with, and whom to run from. It does this by dispensing with unnecessary stimuli—and drawing conclusions from a select few pieces of info. So we’re not programmed to not worry about whether a strand of hair is out of place but are programmed to note the subtleties of facial expressions, whether the slight curve in a lip is conveying anger, sadness, or fear. That process, really, is the foundation of perception—how you perceive and contextualize the facts and faces all around you.^† Beauty is not as much a physical property of the person, as the end product of a complex mental process that translates millions of meaningless dots of light on the back of our retinas into 3-D shapes, objects, and faces. Embedded in the software of the mind is a set of rules that are used to decode these raw “bytes” of visual information. Think of these “bytes” as the letters in the alphabet. The perceptual rules are like grammar; they determine how the parts are combined to create a whole.

What’s most interesting is that these observations are automatic—a beauty reflex, if you will. Most of us, especially when we’re young, have a strong sex drive—a drive so strong, in fact, that it often overshadows all of our other natural drives. But nobody instructed us to be sexually attracted to others. We didn’t have to learn about hourglass figures or chiseled jaws. It was instinctive—a genetically programmed behavior.

These instinctive behaviors aren’t conscious acts. They’re spontaneous, irrepressible, and predictable. They’re performed without evident reason, but rather with stimulation. Your beauty detectors, like Doppler radar, are able to scan the environment in real time for signs of an attractive mate and forecast a conclusion about that environment. Your assessments are fast and accurate. For example, you can observe a human face for a fraction of a second and accurately rate its beauty—and what it’s trying to communicate to you, through expressions, nuances, and all kinds of nonverbal signals. Similarly, your appearance affects the first impressions that others have of you. And that first one can be a lasting one.

So how do we make those snap judgments? It all starts with a group of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. That sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. Each new number is the sum of the two before it, and the ratio of each number to the one before it approximates the value of phi, or 1.618.^* OK, so you may be asking what in the world a group of numbers has to do with the fact that you prefer just a little bit of nicely groomed chest hair. Well, phi is the basis for what’s called the divine proportion or the golden ratio: the ratio of lengths from one element to another is 1.618 to 1 (see Figure A.1). This golden ratio is found throughout nature, from leaves to seed arrangements to conch shells, and it also figures prominently in a list of man’s greatest accomplishments, like the Great Pyramids, the Parthenon, Michelangelo’s David, and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The omnipresence of phi throughout our world creates a sense of balance, harmony, and beauty in the designs we see naturally and artificially.

Phi is also a driving force in human attraction—men and women around the globe prefer a mate whose face is symmetrical and follows this ratio. (More than 2,000 years ago, Pythagoras developed a formula for the perfect female face, which included such stats as this one: The ratio of the width of the mouth to the width of the nose should be—tada!—1.618 to 1.) In this part, you’ll see more examples of this on the human body. Now, we’re not suggesting that you move your eyeballs closer together or farther apart if they don’t meet these statistical standards, but we are suggesting that there are many easier options that can make the ratio closer.

Figure A.1 Oh, Rats! The reproductive patterns of animals gave us the formula for beauty. Each generation of life—whether flower petals or lips—reproduce with a predictable ratio. As the proportion of offspring produced increases, the ratio of one block divided by the one before it serves as the foundation for things we perceive as beautiful. So, ⁵/₃ is about ⁸/₅ is about ¹³/₈, or about 1.6—the golden ratio.

Our point: Humans do have universal (and subconscious) standards of beauty—underscoring its importance and the fact that your brain really does make reflexive decisions about people based on appearance that affect every aspect of your life.

There’s a reason why we have to use this reflex—it would take way too much time to assess others if we didn’t have it. Consider this:

Just about every situation we confront in life provides infinitely more inputs than we’re able to process productively. A classic example of this idea is chess. While the game is reasonably well defined and contained, after just ten moves there are literally billions of possibilities to consider for a next move. Assuming we could evaluate these options at a rate of about one per second, it would take about 9,000 years for us to consider all the possibilities. Not only would this make for a really long chess match, it underscores the brain’s need to keep it simple.

Safari Secrets:

Lessons from the animal kingdom

The reason we all look a little different may not be obvious today, but there’s an evolutionary basis for our genetic differences. At first glance, zebra stripes seem like a bull’s-eye for predators. In fact they’re the wild’s greatest camouflage system because predatory animals, which see only in black and white, can’t see zebras standing in the tall grass. Also, zebras blend in with the heat waves coming off the ground, which look alternating black and white against the sand, so they’re especially confusing to the pestering tsetse flies—an example of how an animal’s looks respond to external pressures.

Because of the immense computational complexity and impracticality of processing all the inputs a particular situation presents, the cognitive system has developed a number of mechanisms that limit the number of possibilities that are considered. How? For one, the eye takes in a limited amount of high-quality information (through a part of the eye called the fovea), which is supplemented with lower-quality info as needed. As your eye moves to process the info, it takes in only a fraction of what’s in your horizon. In a constant state of vibration, the eye repeatedly refreshes what it sees (like refreshing web pages). These movements help your brain decide what it is you’re looking at (and without the movements, we’d actually lose our vision because the rods and cones in our eyes respond only to certain changes). So you take some shortcuts and make leaps about what you see; you need cues like beauty and waist-to-hip ratio—things with scientific and universal standards—to make judgments about people. You can’t contemplate 9,000 different nuances in someone’s face in a timely fashion. You keep it simple.

For example, the most information-dense visible area in nature is the human face, so we process a small area of the face and extend our conclusions to the entire surface. The right changes (even if they’re small) can make a huge impact on how you’re perceived. Much of “seeing” someone you know is memory, since we don’t reanalyze an entire face each time.^* The richest connection of nerve and muscle density in the body is actually around the larynx (voice box), and the face is second—underscoring how important it is that you read subtle messages through speech and body language. Some argue that growth of the frontal lobe of the brain happened because of these rich connections and our ability to sense and transmit so much information beyond what most animals can.

Your face communicates whether you’re happy, sad, mad, disgusted, surprised, or ready and willing to do the two o’clock tango. Similarly, you receive information about other people through their eyes, their mouth, even their skin. The whole notion of beauty revolves primarily around nature’s hockey masks—either you’ve got a well-designed one or you don’t. Now, the question is: How do we define well-designed?

The theory is that the more symmetrical a face is, the healthier it is. As you can see in Figure A.2, that symmetry is divided into several planes, including horizontally, vertically, around the eyes, around the nose, and so on. The formula for beauty is that precise golden ratio (go ahead and pull out a ruler and a calculator on your next date). The same ratio holds for the width of the cheekbones to the width of the mouth. Scientists also believe that symmetry is equated with a strong immune system—indicating that more robust genes make a person more attractive.

Figure A.2 Divine Ruler Using the golden ratio of 1.6, we judge the beauty of other people’s faces (and other body parts). We use that ratio—subconsciously and reflexively—to decode whether someone’s eyes, face, and body are, in fact, beautiful.

Of course, that’s the element of beauty that you typically can’t control. You have what you were born with. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make changes—changes to enhance your beauty and, along with it, the way you feel about yourself.

That begs a few very interesting questions about our own beauty. What do you see when you look in the mirror? How do you think others see you? How much of your self-image has been determined not by who you are but by who others think you are? How much has your sense of the outer you influenced the inner you? To some degree your appearance influences how well you do in love, at work, and in life, but most of us feel we don’t measure up. So the question is, should you just accept yourself as you are? Or should you try to improve your appearance? How far should you go? What should you try to improve? Will it make you happier or feel more satisfied with yourself? And which comes first? Does being satisfied with your appearance lead to a higher self-concept, or does having a high self-concept create a greater sense of happiness?

In the first five chapters of this book, we’ll be showing you tips and tricks that will help your skin glow, your hair shine, and your body shrink. They’re things that we believe will not only make you look better to the rest of the world but also help you feel a lot better in your inner world.

1
In the Flesh

Make Your Skin Glow

YOU Test: Tale of the Tape

To take your facial fingerprint, pull out a roll of Scotch tape. Make sure your face is clean (without makeup, sunscreen, moisturizer, or peanut butter for at least two hours). Place a piece of tape vertically on the middle of your forehead from your scalp to the area between your eyebrows. Move it to the outside corners of your eyes, across the apple of each cheek, and above your lip. Press gently in each spot, leave it for a few seconds, and carefully remove. Check the tape for lines and flakiness.

If your tape is completely smooth: You have the skin of a typical 30-year-old.

If you have flaky or dead cells but no lines: You have the skin of a typical 40-year-old.

If you have flaky cells and small lines: You have the skin of a typical 50-year-old.

The world glows all around us. There’s the celestial kind of glow—the stars, the moon, the sun. And there’s the artificial kind—the night-light inside the baby’s room and the neon lights outside the nightclub. But the most wonderful glow we can think of is the living, breathing kind—the kind that comes in the form of human skin.

We all know or have seen people who radiate—who have the kind of smooth, shiny, healthy, glowing skin that could light up Times Square. But you know what? We all have that potential. The problem is that many of us treat our skin like wrapping paper; it starts out looking pretty enough, but eventually we’re going to find a way to tear it up.

Now, this glow we’re talking about isn’t just the result of good genes. It’s also the result of making good choices to protect, heal, and clean your skin. We all have the ability to make those decisions. European cars “glow” more than American cars because the manufacturers use smaller drops of color that reflect more light than they refract. Your skin works the same way: If you ruin your reflection through a buildup of oil or dead skin, you lose the glow (and your full beauty potential).

Of course, it goes without saying that pornographic and beauty-product entrepreneurs aren’t the only people who know the value of skin. We all know the risks of exposing our bare skin to the sun, snake fangs, and camera phones. And we also know that the way our skin looks goes a long way toward determining how we feel about ourselves. If we don’t look beautiful, we don’t feel it. And if we feel beautiful inside, we reflect it in our skin. So if you have smooth skin that radiates, then you feel and look younger—and probably are younger on the inside, an important aspect of your overall well-being and health. But if you feel depressed and reclusive, you may have more wrinkles than a shar-pei or become spotted, dotted, and blemished. And that’s one of the reasons why you should read this chapter. Ultimately, your skin communicates messages about your youthfulness, your vibrancy, and your health. Face it: Skin sells.

FACTOID

We love exercise. But exercise for the face? That’s an idea whose time has not come. Exercising the facial muscles is a sure way to increase your wrinkles. The facial muscles pull on the skin to give you facial expressions. And the repetitive movements of the skin, over the years, combined with the normal thinning of the collagen and elastin of the dermis, will eventually crack the skin, causing wrinkling. Botox is the reverse of exercise; it paralyzes muscles and lessens wrinkles.

Safari Secrets:

Lessons from the animal kingdom

The reason why there are butterfly collectors and not moth collectors? The colors of moths are determined by scales that are shed, so they don’t keep their colors in the box, only in life—just like humans. The colors of a butterfly’s wings are never lost.

Your Skin: Let’s Flesh a Few Things Out

Funny, whenever we say something’s skin deep, we mean that it has about as much depth as a puddle. But that’s hardly the case with skin—it’s an amazing and complex organ that extends much deeper than the part we can actually see and touch. Your skin is the biggest and heaviest organ of your body, making up 15 percent of your body weight and covering 12 to 20 square feet. The composition: 70 percent water, 25 percent protein, and less than 5 percent fats. The obvious role of skin is to protect and to package. It protects our blood, organs, and bones from what’s outside, and it also packages our body neatly together so we’re not blobby organisms that leave trails of blood and bits of tissue everywhere we go.

And skin does more than serve as our anatomical casing. Skin also helps us with healing. How? Touching in that loving way reduces levels of the stress chemical cortisol and increases levels of the feel-good chemical oxytocin. And touching in that special way (massaging and caressing, not the touch of a slugger’s right hand) also stimulates the vagus nerve, which runs up to the brain to improve the health of our whole body.

So here’s how your skin works. While serving as an obvious barrier to the millions of chemicals and germs that want to invade your body, it also has a big sensory function. Deep in the skin, follicles grow hairs that can sense before your skin is actually touched. Eyelashes, for example, prompt the eyelid (through great nerve connections) to involuntarily close to protect the eye before you even know you’re in danger and to quickly flick off bugs before they bite.

Besides sprouting up hairs that sense things, your skin lubricates itself with oils we call sebum produced by sebaceous glands and also absorbs certain medications and hormones. But it can also absorb things, such as toxins, that you don’t necessarily want. And ultraviolet light can turn your own skin against itself by creating those much-talked-about damaging free radicals, not to mention changing your DNA (and usually not for the better).

Like many structures in your body (including your blood vessels), your skin has several components (see Figure 1.1).

FACTOID

We can generate as much as a gallon of sweat in two hours, so we don’t have to pant like a dog (dogs don’t sweat). Also, unlike dogs, most of us don’t shed our furry coat, but we do lose nine pounds of skin a year. That’s a lot of dust.

Epidermis: Serving as the body’s primary barrier against the outside world, the epidermis is less than a millimeter thick. Your skin is your raincoat, keeping your insides dry and letting you swim without swelling. Your epidermis is so well designed that only the right-size molecules can get through. The cool thing about your skin is that it renews itself every six to eight weeks. How? Dead cells from the epidermis continually slough off and are replaced by new ones from below (that’s one major way you get dust in your home—the sloughing off of skin). Your epidermis largely determines how fresh your skin looks—as well as how well it works in terms of absorbing and retaining moisture.

Dermis: The thickest of your skin layers, the dermis is what actually holds you together.^* It’s your leather. The dermis is made up of cells called fibroblasts, which make collagen and elastin, proteins that give the dermis its strength and allow it to be stretched. Dotting the dermis are hair follicles, sweat glands, and sebaceous glands, which produce the oily sebum that lubricates your skin and hair. This sebum is really a mixed blessing; while it helps keep bacteria under control, it also attracts insects. Finally, the dermis contains tiny blood vessels (to nourish the skin) and lymph nodes (to protect it from toxins). Subcutaneous tissue: This innermost layer is made up primarily of fat and acts as a shock absorber and heat insulator for your body (many mammals, by the way, don’t have this because their fur does the same job).

Figure 1.1 Flesh Beating UV radiation damages the skin by weakening elastic collagen fibers and by preventing stem cells from rejuvenating the injured area. It also causes free radicals to damage the DNA, which can lead to cancer. UV-C is blocked by ozone, UV-B penetrates the epidermis, and UV-A goes even deeper to the dermis.

The Skinny: How Your Skin Works

Your skin can do more than get you arrested. It’s able to do many things—some good and some we’d rather live without.

IT SWEATS: In a way, our skin acts as our third kidney, detoxifying our bodies. When we exert ourselves, not only do we sweat to cool our bodies, we also increase blood flow, which releases toxins. Though it may not be so great on silk blouses and stair climbers, sweating is something you need to do regularly—not just because of the cardiovascular and fat-frying benefits of exercise, but also because of its body-cleansing function.

IT TANS AND BURNS: Exposure to sun causes an immediate release of stored melanin and stimulates the cells designed to protect you from too much sun, the melanocytes, to produce a protective pigment, melanin. But that process takes several days, by which time you have left the beach with Santa-suit-colored flesh. The sun, unbuffered by melanin, is your skin’s cancer-causing deep fryer.

FACTOID

If stretch marks make your skin look like a highway atlas, the answer isn’t to try to cover them up with creams or makeup. They actually could be a road map to something more serious that’s going on inside your body. First, you need to make sure that your adrenal gland isn’t making too many steroids (that could be a sign of Cushing’s disease). If the marks are less than a year old and still have a purplish hue, you can have them lasered to lighten them, but other than that, only surgery can remove them.

Stop the Burning

Some burns are preventable (sideburns and sunburns), some burns are accidental (darn curling iron!), and some burns are downright dumb (leave the fireworks to the pros, smart guy). No matter what the cause, you can take steps to soothe the pain—and prevent scarring or further damage. First, you’ll want to cool the burn with water or ice as soon as you can to reduce the prostaglandin response and limit the damage. Clean the area with water and a simple soap such as Ivory, Neutrogena, Dove, or Cetaphil to remove dirt and bacteria, and don’t pop any blisters that form. For the small blisters, apply a sterile moisturizer like bacitracin or Neosporin twice a day and leave them intact. They serve as the ideal sterile biologic dressing over the nascent skin that is quickly growing to cover the injured area. Scarring is always worse if the growth of this new skin is hindered. Cover blisters with a fine gauze like Vaseline gauze or Adaptic. The small blisters will dry up and flake off within two weeks.

Note: If the burn is on your hands, face, or genitals (we won’t ask) and is bigger than a nickel, it’s a good idea to let a doc look at it. She may want to treat it with an antibiotic cream called Silvadene that kills bacteria and keeps the wound moist.

IT WRINKLES: We all know that wrinkles generally don’t look all that good—not in dress shirts and not on your skin. In fact, one main indicator of body aging is wrinkles, especially vertical lines above the lips and between the eyes (each of these stereotypically means different things; cigarette smoking and inflammation in your blood vessels cause lip wrinkles, while vertical lines between eyes reflect stress). How do we get wrinkles? In a couple of ways, actually. Since skin is attached to the muscle beneath it, your skin creases when your muscles move. Over time, that creates a well-worn groove. It’s actually like a stress fracture—the repeated bending of skin over the underlying muscle creates inflammation and the collagen gets squeezed together. Young skin stretches and recoils over the muscle, but thinned, old skin loses this ability. And, like an overbent piece of cardboard, it eventually cracks. As we get older, the connections between the skin and underlying connective tissue stretch out, which can cause sagging of the skin. When that happens, gravity pulls down, and the sagging contributes to the formation of wrinkles (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Fine Lines Many things can cause wrinkling, including cigarette smoking and sun exposure. Ultimately, it’s caused by thinned, damaged collagen and a loss of elastin fibers (think of it as a kind of stress fracture). When skin loses its elasticity, gravity pulls down on it, and the sagging causes even more wrinkles.

How Skin Ages

When it comes to skin, most of us can spot the good kind a mile away. That’s because we can instantly identify all the characteristics of healthy and beautiful skin—it’s well hydrated, tight and elastic, not overly oily, has clean pores, and all that. But here’s the big myth about skin—that you can stop your skin from aging. No matter what products you use or procedures you undergo, you can’t stop time from pulling, tugging, and tearing at your skin. What you can do, however, is slow it down considerably and encourage all of those things that make your skin appear and be healthier.

Skin aging can happen in the matrix between cells, within the dermis, or on the surface. Here’s how:

 In the matrix: Skin aging happens when your collagen becomes damaged and loses its tight weave, and your elastin loses its zing. The fibroblasts (and their DNA) that produce both collagen and elastin are prone to damage from UV radiation, and as they falter, that DNA, which makes collagen and elastin, makes less and/or defective collagen or elastin. Also, glycosaminoglycans (say that three times fast) are large sugarlike molecules that plump up a bit and fill the skin when they bind with water. As you get older, they become more like an old sponge and don’t suck up water as efficiently. The decrease in water content means that the skin becomes like a bad keynote speaker—dull and dry. And those old glycosaminoglycans can link up with proteins and cause yellowing (or browning) of your skin (that’s called glycation, and though it happens to all of us, it’s especially visible in diabetics).

 On the surface: Your skin secretes fat (the technical term is lipids). Fatty acids called ceramides help protect an outer layer of your skin called the stratum corneum, so that you have better skin hydration and are less susceptible to irritation. Think of these fatty acids as a coating on you, like the slimy coating fish have on them; they serve as an extra buffer layer between you and the outside world. Ceramide concentrations decrease with aging and with washing with fat emulsifiers like soap and alcohol—our mantra isn’t “use just water” if you touch people and dirty objects, but using just water helps save those ceramides to help you.

Thinner, duller, less vibrant is what you can expect from your skin as you age, but you can control how fast those changes occur in your skin.

FACTOID

Most of the day, gravity pulls your skin down (contributing to facial sagging and wrinkles). When you sleep faceup, gravity exerts a light stretching effect on your skin; when you sleep face pressed to the pillow, you’ll look puffier in the morning and develop sleep lines. There are other reasons for puffiness upon waking. Allergy to dust mites or dust mite poop is common, as are allergies to feather pillows and laundry detergent. These all cause repeated nighttime eyelid swelling. You can prevent leakage of mite poop protein or mites by covering your pillow with a 1-micron case that feels like a pillowcase or a latex cover that feels a bit plasticky; both work to decrease mite allergies and the subsequent puffiness.