BY DESIGN : All That Air Mileage Doesn’t Have to Show on Your Face : Cosmetics: To combat the woes of jet lag, the beauty industry has developed products that address how you look and how you feel.
The scientists of the beauty industry are solution-oriented. For years they have been working on cure-alls for wrinkles, pimples or bad cuticles. The latest affliction to claim their attention is jet lag.
Any woman with a passport knows that traveling and changing time zones can be the enemy of good looks. Now there are beauty products designed to counteract the effects of jet travel--enough to fill a 747.
What’s news is an awareness that the problem is more than skin deep. While some products do deal with appearance, others address how you feel. The aim is not only to look good when you arrive in Paris at 8 a.m., but to feel remotely human too. And although melatonin has been the center of most jet lag conversations lately, there are people who don’t want to take the over-the-counter synthetic hormone because of its uncertain long-term effects.
The newest products from the world of beauty are potions to inhale to ease grogginess, creams to rub on the neck and back after a long flight, and oils to spray on a pillow or dribble into the bath to lull one to sleep in a new time zone. The products can’t make medical claims, but several mimic over-the-counter medications, like smelling salts and vaporous rubs.
Although generally grouped into two categories, soothers that help you sleep and energizers that do the reverse, they vary in potency from gentle, feel-good body washes to smelling salts and inhalants that’ll slap you upside the head when you’re experiencing a mind-numbing low point.
Anything that relies on scent to change the way one feels is described as aromatherapy, the charming but suspiciously New Age-y school that maintains smells have curative powers.
“Aromatherapy is the ancient practice of using the essential oils of plants to achieve emotional and physical well-being,” L.A. authors Kathy Corey and Lynne Blackman explain in their book “Rituals for the Bath” (Warner Treasures), which charts uses for 33 oils and gives recipes for employing them as beauty remedies.
Aromatherapy’s essential oils, which are highly concentrated extracts distilled from herbs, flowers, spices and trees, are massaged into pressure points to quickly work into the bloodstream and impart their benefits.
Grandiose healing claims may be questionable, but some of these oils are effective. Strong peppermint can clear a foggy head, and a soothing waft of lavender does seem to take stress down a notch.
Among the strongest aromatic products are Aroma Therapeutics’ travel-sized, boxed Jet Set, which includes two sprays and bath oils to jump-start a weary traveler and two to enhance sleep. They’re made up of lavender, marjoram, vetiver and ylang-ylang oils prized for sedative properties; geranium, ginger, grapefruit, mint and rosemary for recharging. The set is available at Barneys New York for $68.50.
Origins’ relief cream, with the odd name Peace of Mind, acts on the same principle as Ben-Gay to soothe an achy neck and sharpen the senses with the sinus-clearing smell of rosemary, menthol and basil.
A good snort of Aroma Vera’s new Vital Energy Aromasalts works almost like old-fashioned smelling salts to snap a sleepy body to attention, and its Aromatic Topicals are mini pulse point roll-ons that fit in a purse and come with names like Clear Mind and Meditation.
Origins and Aroma Vera are available in some department stores and their own free-standing boutiques. Aroma Vera shops in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica are called the Bey’s Garden, after the painting by J.F. Lewis.
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Virgin Atlantic Airways was a pioneer in offering beauty therapy to its passengers in flight and in its Heathrow airport salon, beginning in 1990. Virgin sells an Aromatherapy Associates travel kit (about $40 U.S.) aboard its planes. The kit contains a number of oils, including lemon grass stimulating oil, eucalyptus inhalation oil, and lavender and juniper berry relaxing oil. The same oils are used in the Upper Class complimentary on-board massages (available on some L.A. to London flights) to increase circulation and ease stiffness.
Jane Breeden, Virgin’s London-based manager of beauty therapy, is a strong believer in the power of oils to combat common travelers’ complaints.
“Lavender is a key oil I’d always travel with,” she says. ‘It helps you sleep. If you get a sunburn at your destination, you can put 10 drops in your bath. Nervous passengers can use it to calm their nerves on board.
“Peppermint oil, inhaled, can calm the stomach if you feel a bit churny on the flight,” she suggests. “The inhalation oil, which has eucalyptus, protects you from germs in recycled air.” Breeden says similar oils can be purchased in health food stores.
Swollen feet can be another misery of air travel. To ease that, Breeden recommends carrying a small roller massager for feet to stimulate circulation or using the Chinese remedy of putting brown paper bags on the feet under socks. It sounds silly, but, “It does work,” she insists.
Circulation, energy and sleep disruptions are among the problems the traveler copes with. The effects of nasty recirculated airplane air present different challenges.
“Pressurized cabin air is extremely dry, less than 25% humidity,” says Dr. James Sternberg, a Westside dermatologist and associate clinical professor of dermatology at UCLA. “It will evaporate water out of your skin into the surrounding air.”
While it won’t cause permanent damage, he says that “drying the skin can exaggerate existing wrinkles.”
Sternberg recommends using a biphasic moisturizer, “so you don’t walk off the plane looking like a prune.” Biphasic means it does double duty in moisturizing the skin as well as laying down a fine protective coating on the skin’s surface that thwarts evaporation.
Bioelement’s Jet Travel gel, Clinique’s Moisture On-Call and Estee Lauder’s Time Zone are all designed to do that. Because they don’t fully absorb, they stay moist on the skin long after application. They’re the heavy artillery of moisturizers, far too rich for daily use on normal skin.
The frequent flier favorite is Prescriptives’ Flight Cream, a medium-weight skin hydrating cream. This pioneer moisturizer was introduced in 1979, and although many imitators have come out since, Flight Cream has its own cult following. The formula has never changed: It contains old-fashioned ingredients such as yeast, butcher’s broom, horse chestnut and vitamin E. Those who are hooked on it say it brings back the skin’s glow. Some also use it on their faces after a night of drinking as a hangover remedy for the skin.
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While everyone agrees that drinking lots of water while flying can help rehydrate a parched body and make you feel better, spritzing the face with water is now considered taboo, at least by Breeden, Virgin’s expert.
“If you spray your face with water, you must put moisturizer on top. If you don’t, the water will strip your face of natural oil as it dries,” she says. Her evidence is a simple analogy: Those people who wet their hands frequently have drier hands.
Once off the plane, the weary traveler can turn to products designed to reduce the visible signs of fatigue, dryness and ashy skin. Nearly every cosmetic company makes some sort of a grainy face wash and either a hydrating or wake-up mask that’ll do the trick. Prescriptives’ Flight Cream can also do double duty as a hydrating mask if applied in a thick layer for 10 minutes.
Most companies also make gels that can minimize the last visible sign of travel: puffiness around the eyes. Lauder’s Stress Relief Eye Masks, for example, are 10-minute disposable patches that diminish swelling under eyes and come in individual travel-sized packets. They can be just the thing to ease a transition between hassling with lost luggage and a meeting with a new client.
A great-looking pair of sunglasses would seem to stylishly camouflage tired eyes. Breeden says donning dark glasses is the worst thing to do on arrival. Because without light, the body’s inner circadian rhythm will take longer to adjust. “The true secret of jet lag is light,” she says. “The sooner you can get light on your face, the sooner you’ll adjust.”
That means anyone planning to seek nature’s light cure needs to pack one more beauty essential: a tube of sunscreen.
