Blog Posts by Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine

Are you single and still planning your wedding? (Photo: Corbis)Take a look at Pinterest and you'll find plenty of boards dedicated to amazing weddings. The perfect dress. Gorgeous engagement rings. Romantic up-dos. Awe-inspiring do-it-yourself decorations that would put Martha Stewart to shame. But among all of the wedding offerings, certain boards stand out: Ones created by women who are proudly and publicly planning for the big day even though they're still single.

LOOK: Celebrity Wedding Dresses -- What Should They Wear?

They're not pretending otherwise, either. With titles like "How single girls plan their wedding," "Planning my wedding while single," and "Single with BIG wedding plans," the boards are packed with Cinderella dresses, party theme ideas, and pictures of enormous diamond solitaires -- playing up the myth of the perfect wedding while ignoring the reality of real-life marriage.

Related: Couple Has 23 Weddings Around the World

"Finding somebody who wants to be plugged into your life exactly the way it is, and all the choices you've

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If we were Derek Benson's kids, we'd never buy lunch at school -- we love his hand-drawn lunch bags way too much to pass one up. The Atlanta-based dad started drawing on his kids' brown paper lunch bags in 2008, and they've become such a hit that his kids' friends and teachers have started collecting them (and he's gathered quite a following online). A video game developer with a background in graphic art, Benson finds inspiration in the TV shows and books he shares with his kids Dana, 12, Dylan, 8, and Liam, 6 -- lots of Japanese animation and other "geeky" stuff, he told Yahoo! Shine. Take a look. -- By Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine.

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Those faint lines on her left lens show that Hillary Clinton's glasses aren't just a fashion statement. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) The chunky glasses that Hillary Clinton wore during this week's Benghazi hearings were much more than a fashion statement. A member of her staff confirmed on Friday that the Secretary of State had to switch to specs in the aftermath of the concussion she suffered last month.

"She'll be wearing these glasses instead of her contacts for a period of time because of lingering issues stemming from her concussion," State Department spokesman Philippe Reines told ABC News. "With them on she sees just fine."

Clinton, 65, has been criticized before for wearing glasses and forgoing full makeup, but the former First Lady has said "If others want to worry about it, I let them do the worrying for a change."

"I feel so relieved to be at the stage I'm at in my life right now,"she told CNN in May, after she was taken to task for appearing at a press conference with dark-rimmed glasses on. "Because you know if I want to wear my glasses I'm wearing my glasses. If I want to wear my hair back I'm

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Giovanna Plowman (Photo: Twitter)A video posted by West Seneca, N.Y. teen Giovanna Plowman in which she seems to, um, remove and then snack on her own tampon has sparked a wave of disgust, disbelief, and even outrage online. And the desperate-for-attention high school freshman seems intent on making it her claim to fame.

Related: Why Do People Love Honey Boo Boo?

"I just want to say, I'm not pulling any tricks," she says softly in the (very NSFW) video, which seems to have been shot in her bathroom. "This is obviously going to be disgusting."

It is.

She posted the video online last week, and both Facebook and YouTube quickly took it down for violating their terms of service -- but not before it was mirrored elsewhere and thousands of people watched it.

It may be the grossest stunt she's pulled in public, but her Facebook page -- which currently has 198,000 followers -- shows that she's been going for shock value for a while. Her profile photo is of her with one hand on her hip and her boobs pushed up to her neck;

Read More »from Tampon Girl Giovanna Plowman: Honey, You Didn't Have to Go There

Smoking can shave 11 years off a woman's life -- but quitting before age 35 can get most of them back. (Photo: Getty Images)We already know the toll smoking can take on a our health. Women who smoke are at higher risk for stroke, cataracts, osteoporosis, early menopause, menstrual problems, and several different kinds of cancer. Now, a new study shows that smoking takes about 11 years off of a woman's life -- but if you quit smoking early enough, researchers have found, you could get most of that time back.

Related: 6 Ways Quitting Smoking Will Make You Prettier

According to study co-author Tim McAfee, director of the Office on Smoking at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking is the number one preventable cause of death in the United States.

25 Ways to Stop Smoking

"There's the old saw that everyone knows smoking is bad for you," McAfee told the New York Times. "But this paints a much more dramatic picture of the horror of smoking. These are real people that are getting 10 years of life expectancy hacked off - and that's just on average."

The study, published Wednesday in the New

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Are you paying more for fake food? (Photo: Thinkstock)Does that fish taste funny? A new report on food fraud shows that American consumers may be getting ripped off, since many of the items on their grocery lists -- including olive oil, honey, coffee, and fish -- may be full of fillers and fake ingredients.

WATCH: How to Spot Counterfeit Food

The report by the nonprofit United States Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) lists 1,300 incidents of "food fraud" going back to 1980 -- and 800 of them were added in the last two years alone.

Related: Is Your Ketchup the Real Thing?

"While food fraud has been around for centuries, with a handful of notorious cases well documented, we suspect that what we know about the topic is just the tip of the iceberg," Dr. Jeffrey Moore, senior scientific liaison for USP and the database's creator and lead analyst, said in the report.

According to the USP database at Foodfraud.org, spices like chili powder, saffron, and black pepper are often cut with cheaper spices in order to maximize profits. Less-expensive

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Your old friend Is Facebook making you feel bad about yourself? New research says: Probably. (Photo: Thinkstock)from high school just announced her engagement on Facebook. So why don't you feel happier for her? According to new research, it turns out that pouring over friends' vacation photos, gushing status updates, and career successes is making people miserable.

Related: Dumbest Facebook Post Ever?

In a study conducted by Humboldt University in Berlin and Technical University in Darmstadt, German researchers asked 600 Facebook users how they felt while navigating the social networking platform. More than a third of the respondents reported feeling negative, but it had nothing to do with Facebook's ever-changing privacy policies and advertisements—most of those bad vibes were rooted in jealousy.

Related: 10 Things We Learned From Facebook's Graph Search

"We were surprised by how many people have a negative experience from Facebook, with envy leaving them feeling lonely, frustrated or angry," Hanna Krasnova of the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt University told

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While Kelly Clarkson and James Taylor performed live at President Barack Obama's second inauguration on Monday, Beyonce opted instead to lip sync her way through the National Anthem, offering up a flawless performance that many viewers were upset to discover had actually been recorded earlier.

"We all know Beyonce can sing," Master Sgt. of the U.S. Marine Band Kristin duBois told ABC News on Tuesday. "We all know the Marine Corps Band can play. We do not know why she decided to go with the pre-recorded music at the last minute."

All music for the inauguration ceremony is prerecorded "because there are so many eventualities and conditions that day," DuBois told the New York Post. The band had to fake it along with the singer, The Washingtonian reported, and Beyonce hurried off stage the instant the music ended.

Beyonce's performance wasn't the main event, and it's incredibly difficult to sing live in cold and windy weather, so why does everyone seem so betrayed? Big stars lip sync

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