Smooth talk

In the ’40s and ’50s, film stars and other high-profile women used tight headbands to pull their skin taut and smooth.

Efforts to look young go on. Today women have Botox, Retin-A, collagen injections and a variety of elixirs that promise youthful beauty. One of the newest to the lineup comes from upscale beauty company La Prairie, which has introduced Cellular Rose Illusion. It’s a quick-fix, pre-makeup gel with a silicone system said to plump the skin surface to fill in lines and wrinkles. The ingredients include hydrating elements and ursolic acid, promoted as a skin-firming agent, and vitamin E, an antioxidant.

Does it work? Like many beauty products, it is delivered with great promise to smooth the skin for an evening or a very good day. At $100 a bottle, it’s still less expensive than Botox. And it has to be more comfortable than a tight headband.

Paisley, please

In these nervous times, we welcome distractions where we find them. So we are intrigued by an entire page in this month’s GQ magazine on the paisley tie.

Terry Sullivan is out to “investigate the return of the paisley tie,” he writes, as if he were looking into a high-level corporate scandal. He is on the job because, he says, paisley can be mixed with any other pattern as long as you can match a color in the print to a shirt or jacket. And the other good news, he says, is that you can spill almost any food on it, and you’ll hardly notice. It’s kind of a wear-with-all.

In the you-don’t-know category, the amoeba in the print is called Boteh. But paisley was named for shawls woven by the Scotch who got it from Kashmir, where the fine goat hair was woven into fabric. To add a little intrigue, the goat hair was called “hair of the devil.”