Blog Posts by Allure Daily Beauty Reporter

The news that Prince William is starting to lose his hair made headlines in England. If that's considered shocking, what about when women experience thinning? It can be even more difficult psychologically.

If you notice thinner ponytails and more hair in your drain, the best way to gauge if you need to seek medical attention is to perform a brush test before three consecutive shampoo sessions. It goes like this: comb your hair forward over a pillow or towel from the crown to the front of the head for 60 seconds using a timer and a clean brush. If you collect more than 50 hairs, see a doctor to help you determine the cause and the treatment.

Top 10 Holiday Hair Mistakes

In the meantime, there are ways to camouflage the thinning. Garren of the Garren New York salon shared some tricks with Allure:

-Keep your hair shoulder-length or shorter, and with a blunt cut.

-Side-part your hair for more coverage over the crown.

-Coloring your hair can actually make it appear

Catholic schoolgirls and maître d's no longer own the exclusive rights to dress codes. This season, getting an invitation to a holiday party means you'll probably have to follow a few fashion guidelines as well. Here, we break down the most popular codes:

COCKTAIL
Yes, you could throw on a little black dress and call it a day (or a night), but you'll feel more comfortable if you go the extra mile, since many partygoers do. Rebekah McCabe, senior VP of public relations for Chanel, plans to wear "my Chanel blazer over my new Alexander Wang cropped satin pants, like a modern tuxedo." Any detail that's slightly special or unexpected, like over-the-knee boots paired with a sleek minidress, works too.

Top 10 Holiday Hair Mistakes

FESTIVE
This basically means cocktail attire, dialed up a notch. "The point is to mix up the fabrics, prints, or silhouette in some way," says stylist Tina Chai. "Basically anything but a little black dress or jeans."

8 Holiday Party Makeup

Turns out there's a truth to thinking that the prettier a woman is, the happier she must be-at least for ladies like Carrie, Samatha, Miranda, and Charlotte. A new study in the journal Personal Relationships found that women who live in cities are more satisfied with their lives and personal relationships if they're beautiful, whereas women who live in the country have no correlation between their levels of happiness and attractiveness.

Related: The fragrance most likely to attract a man.

"City women who were the most attractive got a lot of bang for their appearance buck," the study's lead author, Victoria Plaut, a visiting assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, told MSNBC. "And if you were even slightly below average, you were very clearly worse off."

Tell us where you live, and what you think-do you think your life is better or worse because of your looks?

7 Makeup

You may have gotten a forwarded email or two in your life saying that women ingest pounds and pounds of lipsticks in their lives-and back in 2005, Allure reported on an estimate of around 4 to 9 pounds. The people over at Raw Beauty remembered that-and in a video meant to illustrate the importance of knowing what's in your cosmetics, they took it pretty darn literally.

10 "Bad" Chemicals to Watch Out for in Your Beauty Products

After we saw the crazy video, we had to know exactly how they filmed it-and Raw Beauty gave us the behind-the-scenes story. First off, the actress (Stevie, who has a following on YouTube) didn't actually swallow those tubes of lipstick-but she did bit them off and spit them out between takes. And when she starts truly eating the makeup, that's chocolate and frosting. Phew.

Related: Eat Your Way to Better Skin with These 5 Foods.

More from Allure:

• 10 Beauty Mistakes That Add 10 Years
• The 13 Hottest Haircuts to Get Right Now
• 10

We watch MTV's Jersey Shore as amateur anthropologists, posing important questions about culture and language-and pontificating on how much like a burnt-sienna crayon a man can become if he has a tanning bed in his residence.

The beauty habits of the Shore housemates can seem a bit shocking to an outsider: Snookie wears full makeup to the gym; Paulie spends 25 minutes on his hair ("and it comes out perfect every single time); and 23-year-old JWoww had her cellulite and stretch marks lasered off before taping the show.

Kim Kardashian and Cindy Crawford Say "So What!" To Cellulite

But we'll cop to having our own weird beauty tics: Like plucking our eyebrows...nightly. (No, we don't over-pluck. It's just that you catch things one night that you didn't see the night before. A quick scan for strays before bed prevents an accidental unibrow the next day.) Sigh. It felt good to get that off our chest. Do you have something to share, readers? What's your most outrageous beauty

We all know the right foods can boost brain power and affect our moods, and we recently learned the ones that can help us live longer. But have you ever thought about how what you put in your mouth shows up your face (beyond that whole pizza/acne myth). Here, dietitian Jae Berman dishes out how you can truly eat your way to better skin:

1. Vegetables: Think green and orange foods (spinach, carrots, sweet potatoes, citrus). They contain the antioxidant vitamin C which facilitates cell turnover and aids in collagen production. Carrots also contain vitamin A which, combined with the C, helps increase the skin's natural sun protection-and they help prevent breakouts by getting rid of dead skin cells.

2. Berries: The flavinols in cherries, blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries (and in dark chocolate!) act as an antioxidant and improve skin texture, leaving it soft and smooth.

Related: Eat More of These 9 Foods and Weigh Less

3. Fish: Skip the facial and eat fish two to

Here's something that will give you a little confidence boost: A study published in the professional journal Body Image found that people prefer normal leg-to-body ratios to the mile-long legs that walk down the runway every season (Sorry, Gisele.) Researchers showed over 1,000 men and women pictures of women to demonstrate eight different LTB ratios, and the mid-range combination were deemed the most attractive. Combined with the recent news that men consider women at a "normal" weight the prettiest, do you think women might start to love their bodies more?

Related: How to Find the Perfect Shorts that Flatter

More from Allure:

• 10 Beauty Mistakes That Add 10 Years
• The 13 Hottest Haircuts to Get Right Now
• 10 Hairstyles That Make You Look 10 Years Younger
• 5-Minute Holiday Hair and Makeup Tricks
• Top 10 Holiday Hair Mistakes
• 8 Holiday Party Makeup Mistakes to Avoid

We've always suspected (and lived in denial) that our highest stilettos are probably doing a number on our feet-but now there's proof. A new study published in Foot & Ankle International (the official journal of the American Orthopedic Foot & Ankle Society [AOFAS]) spells out in excruciating detail the specific harm that heels can do. The study found a significant increase in pressure on the edges of the bones that connect to the toes as heel height increased-a problem that can lead to pain, calluses and (yikes!) bone deformities.

Related: How to Get a Great Pedicure

Though, of course, the study authors suggest limiting heel height to no more than .8 inches (sorry guys-not going to happen), there are other improvements you can make besides retiring your Louboutins. AOFAS suggests adding padding at the ball of the foot to reduce discomfort and injury risk, shortening your heel height even a little (a two-inch heel, for example, causes fewer problems that a four-inch heel), wearing