Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Adam Taylor, Professor of Anatomy, Lancaster University

Collagen has become a staple of skincare advertising and social media wellness trends. But it is not just a buzzword.

It is the most abundant protein in the body and helps support structures throughout the body, including skin and bone.

For women, collagen loss can become especially noticeable during perimenopause and menopause. Some studies suggest that skin collagen may fall by as much as 30% in the first five years after menopause, with further losses of around 2% a year after that. On social media, this is sometimes called the “collagen cliff”, but the underlying idea is not new. Researchers have been writing about the effects of menopause on skin for decades, with papers from at least the 1940s pointing to the connection.

This sharper drop happens on top of the gradual changes that come with ageing. Collagen appears to decline over time, with some estimates suggesting a fall of around 1–1.5% a year from early adulthood.

Oestrogen helps regulate many processes in the body, including the production of collagen. In animal studies, oestrogen has been shown to increase collagen production and skin thickness. Human research has also found benefits for skin thickness, elasticity and wound healing.

This is partly because oestrogen acts on fibroblasts, the cells responsible for making collagen in the skin. When oestrogen levels fall during perimenopause and menopause, this signalling becomes weaker. The result is less collagen being produced, along with thinner skin, reduced elasticity and lower water content.

Collagen loss cannot be stopped entirely, but some factors can speed it up. One of the most important is ultraviolet radiation from the sun and tanning beds. This increases enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases, which act like the skin’s demolition crew, breaking down structural proteins such as collagen. These enzymes are found at higher levels in skin that has been damaged by the sun.

Ultraviolet radiation reduces the amount of new collagen that fibroblasts produce. People with darker skin tones tend to show less wrinkling, probably in part because higher melanin levels offer some protection against ultraviolet damage. But darker skin is not immune to photo-ageing, which means skin ageing caused by sun exposure.

Smoking appears to accelerate collagen loss. One study found that smoking reduced skin production of type I and type III collagen by 18% and 22% respectively, contributing to premature ageing of the skin.

Vitamin C is essential for collagen production. Around 100mg per day is enough for most adults, although smokers may need more. Many wellness supplements provide much larger doses, often around 1,000mg a day, but more is not necessarily better; around 2,000mg a day causes unpleasant gastrointestinal issues.

Products that claim to boost collagen are increasingly popular, but the evidence behind them is mixed. Topical collagen creams are unlikely to replace collagen lost from the skin because intact collagen molecules are too large to get through the skin barrier. They may help moisturise the outer layers of the skin, but they are unlikely to make a major difference to the skin’s own collagen levels.

Oral collagen supplements have been linked in some studies to improvements in skin hydration and elasticity. However, the scientific literature remains mixed. Reviews point to limitations in the evidence, including small study sizes, potential conflicts of interest and inconsistent findings, leading researchers to urge caution when interpreting the results. In the same way that collagen can’t be absorbed through the skin, the body has to digest it to absorb the amino acids that make collagen and there is no way to ensure the amino acids that made that collagen go to the skin or wherever you hoped it would. Hydrolysed collagen is better for absorption but there is still no guarantee that the body uses it where you want it to.

Hormone replacement therapy may offer more consistent benefits. As well as helping with other symptoms of menopause, HRT has been shown in some studies to improve skin thickness, elasticity and hydration. One study reported that women receiving HRT had a 48% increase in skin collagen content compared with untreated women, and other studies have reported similar trends. Some evidence suggests that transdermal (through-the-skin) oestrogen may also have measurable effects on skin collagen. But the overall risks and benefits of HRT always need to be considered on an individual basis.

Some dermatologists and cosmetic practitioners also use procedures designed to stimulate collagen production. Laser resurfacing treatments aim to trigger repair processes in the skin and remove damaged collagen. Newer versions of these treatments are designed to reduce side effects.

Microneedling is another commonly suggested option, although it is not risk free. Potential complications include pain, bruising, bleeding, infection, changes in skin colour, and in rare cases abnormal growths. It can also cause hyperpigmentation, which means patches of skin become darker than the surrounding area.

By the time menopause begins, collagen has usually already been declining for years. Protecting the skin from ultraviolet damage, avoiding smoking and getting enough vitamin C may help support the body’s natural collagen levels.

Menopause may speed up collagen loss, but the picture is more complex than social media slogans suggest. While collagen supplements remain popular, the science behind them is still developing. HRT has a clearer scientific basis for improving skin thickness, elasticity and hydration in some women, although it is not suitable for everyone. When it comes to collagen, the science is more helpful than the hype.

Adam Taylor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Does menopause cause a ‘collagen cliff’? What you need to know – https://theconversation.com/does-menopause-cause-a-collagen-cliff-what-you-need-to-know-278127

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anwen Elias, Reader in Politics, Aberystwyth University

Plaid Cymru’s electoral hopes for May’s Senedd election are high. Polls suggest the party is competing with Reform UK to emerge as the largest group in the next Welsh parliament, putting it, for the first time, within reach of leading a government in Wales.

This marks a striking shift in Plaid’s electoral fortunes. At the first election to what was then the National Assembly for Wales in 1999, the party won 28.4% of the vote. That remains its strongest performance to date in what was widely described at the time as a “quiet earthquake” in Welsh politics.

Since then, Plaid has struggled to match that breakthrough in devolved elections. From 2011 onwards it has consistently been the third-largest party in the Senedd, behind Welsh Labour – which has led every government since devolution – and the Conservatives.

Even so, the arithmetic of Welsh politics has occasionally worked in Plaid’s favour. The party entered government in coalition with Labour between 2007 and 2011, and more recently struck a co-operation agreement from 2021 to 2024. But if Plaid ends up leading a government outright after May 7, it would truly set this election apart.

Positioning itself for power

Plaid Cymru’s strategy is to present itself as a credible government-in-waiting. Its focus is less about being a party of protest and more about delivery. In other words, what it would do in office, how it would tackle Wales’s major policy challenges, and how it would represent Welsh interests at Westminster after nearly three decades of Labour dominance.

In February, the party set out its plan for its first 100 days in government. This focused on improving healthcare, raising education standards, boosting the economy and reforming government.

Alongside these priorities, its manifesto calls for further powers to be devolved to the Senedd. These include greater tax powers, justice and policing, rail services and infrastructure, and the Crown Estate, which oversees things like the sea bed and mineral rights in much of the countryside.

Read more:
Plaid Cymru plans to share wind farm profits with local people – here’s how that idea has been tried elsewhere

Yet there has also been a noticeable change in tone on the party’s long-term constitutional aims. Our research examined how Plaid Cymru covered these issues in the 2021 Senedd election. Compared with five years ago, Welsh independence is significantly less prominent in both its current manifesto and campaign.

The timetable has softened too. There’s no longer a commitment to holding a referendum on independence in its first term of government. Instead, Plaid describes Wales as being “on a journey” to independence. It has committed to producing a policy on Welsh independence but with no referendum timeframe.

By downplaying its long-term constitutional ambitions in this way, and focusing on the more immediate policy challenges facing Wales, Plaid Cymru is approaching this Senedd election as many other pro-independence parties have done across Europe. A similar strategy helped the Scottish National Party win power in 2007 and remain in government for the next 19 years.

From polling strength to political power

Strong polling does not guarantee power, however, and Plaid faces several obstacles. Opponents continue to highlight its commitment to independence.

Support for independence among the Welsh public remains relatively low – only 26% of respondents in a recent YouGov poll agreed that Wales should be an independent country. Plaid’s challenge is to persuade sceptical voters that this isn’t the most important issue in Wales for the next four years.

Read more:
Voters in Wales face Senedd election amid confusion over who holds power over what

The new electoral system also presents fresh uncertainties. This election will use a fully proportional model, with 96 members elected across 16 constituencies. Success will now depend on broad support across Wales. That’s a test for a party whose organisational strength has traditionally been concentrated in the north and west.

The new system is also likely to produce a more fragmented Senedd, with a wider range of parties represented. That could make post-election negotiations decisive, shaping who is able to lead a government and how stable it is.

Anwen Elias receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.

Elin Royles has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the broader research underpinning this publication formed part of an EU Horizon2020 project

– ref. A new Welsh electoral landscape puts Plaid Cymru within reach of power – https://theconversation.com/a-new-welsh-electoral-landscape-puts-plaid-cymru-within-reach-of-power-279628

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Will Shüler, Vice-Dean of Education and Senior Lecturer, School of Performing and Digital Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London

Structurally, Romeo and Juliet is almost a Shakespearean comedy. The Bard’s comic plays tend to turn the world upside down and then neatly restore the social order, usually by means of marriage.

The world of Romeo and Juliet is turned upside down when two adolescents from warring families fall in love, and the world is set right when the families are united in marriage. But then there are three more acts and the plot veers towards tragedy, tallying six deaths by its end.

Robert Icke’s new production of Romeo and Juliet at the Harold Pinter Theatre thoughtfully interrogates the play’s structure by introducing moments of might-have-been throughout. Starring Noah Jupe (Hamnet) and Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) in the respective titular roles, Icke offers glimpses of how the story might have unfolded differently, in a kind of Sliding Doors version of the play.

Early in the production, Lord Capulet (Clark Gregg) gives the invitation list for his party to the Nurse (Clare Perkins). Then time freezes, we move backwards, and Capulet hands the note instead to an illiterate servant, who bumps into Romeo on the street and asks for his help reading it. Romeo learns of the party and decides to attend in order to see his current crush, Rosaline. Had the Nurse been given the task, she would never have needed help reading the list and Romeo would never have met Juliet.

In this way, the production is riddled with tiny moments that could have altered the plot’s trajectory away from tragedy. In doing so, we get to see alternate universes that make up a multiverse. The multiverse has been a regular device in recent popular storytelling, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the adult cartoon Rick and Morty.

Plays like Nick Payne’s Constellations, which had a West End revival in 2021, stage a multiverse by showing how the same scene between two characters might have happened in several different ways, across an infinite number of timelines.

I have written about theatrical multiverses, demonstrating that they offer the audience space to reflect upon how things might have gone differently in their own worlds. In 2021, just after the third UK Covid lockdown, the audience of Constellations was likely attuned to contemplating a world in which they did not expect to find themselves.

With the tumultuous state of the world, it can sometimes feel like we are living in the wrong timeline. The popularity of multiverse stories may seen as ways of reconciling living in our own world, that often feels as if it has been turned upside down.

Romeo and Juliet’s multiverse

As Daniel Swift’s programme note attests, Romeo and Juliet is very much about time. The plot is compressed into five days and it includes more references to days of the week, hours and minutes than any of Shakespeare’s other works. This preoccupation with time is emphasised by Hildegard Bechtler’s set design, which includes two moving panels with illuminated clocks, presenting the precise time and date in fair Verona.

Along with helping the audience understand when we see alternate timelines, the constant reminder of time allows us to reflect on just how quickly things escalate for Romeo and Juliet.

The lovers marry within hours of meeting each other and Romeo is already banished in Mantua before they’ve been wedded for a full day. In this way, the clock points to the youthful haste which creates so much waste. This theme is developed in the emphasis on how quickly Lady Capulet (Eden Epstein) was was made a wife and mother (younger than Juliet, and based on the text she could be as young as 26). This comes through in her subtle portrayal of depression at the thought of lost youth and cowardice in the face of her much older husband.

Jupe’s performance is standout. He is able to capture a contemporary take on the lines without losing any of their rhythm and poetry. This is in contrast to Sink, whose staccato delivery and frequent line breaks (perhaps emphasised by the American accent) jar against the poetry.

Kasper Hilton-Hille’s Mercutio – Romeo’s closest confidant – is a convincingly arrogant scamp. Throughout the production he is an active agent of chaos, always looking for trouble, mooning the Nurse and shaking his crotch at the fiery Tybalt (Aruna Jalloh). In fact he has been so relentlessly seeking out trouble across every timeline explored, that it is curious when in his death throes he calls down a plague on both the houses of Montague and Capulet. Surely he himself is to blame for his own demise?

My one criticism of the use of the multiverse in this production relates to the parts of the plot in which it is deployed. Often, Icke’s alternate timelines relate to chance, rather than the decisions made by the characters. For example, a drink is accidentally spilled, preventing Tybalt from attacking Romeo before he meets Juliet at the party. Or a messenger evades quarantine and delivers a letter informing Romeo that Juliet is actually still alive.

But what if it was the decisions of the characters that played out instead? For example, it would have been interesting to see Romeo not take revenge on Tybalt because he values his duty to Juliet over Mercutio. This would elevate the importance of the actions we take over the randomness of external factors. By emphasising happenstance over agency, Icke’s multiverses situate humans as flotsam on the waves of fate.

A more powerful call to action in our turbulent times would be to emphasise that it is the choices we make that can shape whether our story is a comedy or a tragedy.

Romeo and Juliet is at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London until June 20.

Will Shüler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Romeo and Juliet: a ‘Sliding Doors’ production that plays with time to explore what might have been – https://theconversation.com/romeo-and-juliet-a-sliding-doors-production-that-plays-with-time-to-explore-what-might-have-been-281156

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Priyal Chitale, CHASE AHRC Doctoral Researcher and PhD student in the Department of Music, SOAS, University of London

Asha Bhosle, the last surviving singing legend of the golden era of Hindi cinema, has died at 92. She debuted in the industry shortly after Indian independence in the late 1940s and is now widely considered the best-known singer in India, with more than 12,000 songs to her name. Over the course of a long and prolific career, she demonstrated extraordinary enthusiasm for reinvention, and a range and versatility that still remain unmatched.

Fans of Bhosle found joy in her singing and intrigue in her tumultuous love life. She was often associated with the trope of the fallen woman in the public imagination and pitted against her singing elder sister, Lata Mangeshkar, who famously did her best to steer clear of “vulgar” songs and was seen to embody piety, modesty, and self-sacrifice.

The painting of Mangeshkar’s good sister to Bhosle’s bad reflected the distinct categorisation of female characters as either submissive women of virtue or self-serving women of vice, which prevailed in Hindi cinema well into the 1980s. This was mapped onto the singing voices of the sisters by music directors. For instance, Anil Biswas, the pioneer of playback singing, quipped that “Asha has body while Lata has soul”.

However, it was precisely this penchant for breaking the rigid bonds and boundaries of acceptable femininity that always drew me, as it did many other queer south Asian misfits, to Bhosle’s songs.

Possibility and Plenitude

Bhosle belonged to the first generation of star playback singers. These were singers who record songs for actors to lip synch over in films – a common practice in south Asian cinema. Although she was behind the scenes, the quality of her singing made her, in many cases, more famous than the actors who mimed along to her voice.

The hundreds of songs Bhosle sang in the voice of “the other woman” moved sapphic (women and non-binary people who are attracted to women) listeners like me not because they were literally addressed to women, but because they gave voice to women whom Hindi cinema often treated as excessive, dangerous or disposable.

The actors who lip-synched her pre-recorded vocals on screen were frequently women who stood just outside the moral centre of the film: cabaret dancers, courtesans, mistresses, club performers and women whose desire was too intense to be easily domesticated. In their films, such women were often punished, abandoned or contained. In Bhosle’s voice, however, they became vivid, thinking, feeling subjects.

This is why Aao Huzoor Tumko from romantic thriller Kismat (1968) is so revealing. Sung by Bhosle, composed by O.P. Nayyar and written by Noor Devasi, the song is an invitation into intoxicated romance during a seduction scene in the film. Its refrain may be translated as: “Come, my lord, let me take you among the stars; let me take you into such springtime that your heart begins to sway.”

The actor Babita Kapoor performs the song on screen for her beloved, who is played by the debonair Biswajit Chatterjee. But what I hear in Bhosle’s performance is not simply a woman offering herself to a man. I hear a woman luxuriating in the textures of her own desire.

Bhosle laughs, hiccups, sighs and croons languorously through the song. These are not merely ornamental flourishes, but also small acts of vocal acting: ways of turning a film song into a miniature performance of mood, body and selfhood.

When she lingers on the word “mein” (“in” or “into” ) in phrases such as “sitaron mein le chalun” (“let me take you among the stars”), “baharon mein le chalun” (“let me take you into springtime”) and “hazaaron mein le chalun” (“let me take you among thousands”), she makes each repetition feel slightly different. She carefully infuses each “mein” with a distinctive flavour of longing, turning an intoxicated declaration of desire into an intoxicating invitation into female interiority.

For me, the space of this song was never only straight. The song invited me into an elsewhere: into stars, springtime, crowds, intoxication, laughter and the strange privacy of a woman’s pleasure. It allowed me to imagine desire not as shame, sin, or plot device, but as atmosphere. This is what Bhosle so often made possible: the reimagining of a spectacle of seduction as a scene of emotional complexity.

Bhosle herself seemed to understand the power of such performances. In later years, when asked to name her favourite actor to sing for, she chose Helen, who appeared in countless films as a dancer. She remembered Helen as so beautiful that she would stop singing when she entered the room, and joked that, had she been a man, she would have eloped with her.

To me, this felt like a gift to queer women: not because the remark makes Bhosle queer in any simple biographical sense, but because it acknowledged the force of female beauty, female performance and female fascination without embarrassment.

Bhosle did not merely sing women who desired men. She made female desire itself sound artful and alive: playful, pensive, hungry, theatrical, contradictory. In her voice, levity became a mode of serious identity construction, melancholy a means of knowing, and seduction something more than a narrative device designed to punish the woman who performed it. Time and again, she made room for coyness, brazenness, restlessness, satisfaction, anger and hunger to coexist within the same sonic space.

If the pure and pious heroines of Hindi cinema were often permitted only dignity and devotion, Bhosle’s women were granted appetite, ambivalence and ambition. Her singing offered us possibility and plenitude: complex ways of feeling, sensing and relating to love and life that the moral world of Hindi cinema could neither name nor contain.

Her singing was often sinuous and sensuous, and deliberately so, but it was also playful, pensive and passionate in equal measure. She embraced and enlivened the full spectrum of femininity, and rendered women profoundly, excitingly and almost achingly human in ways that were often unthinkable in the narratives that her songs animated. For me, she will always be the greater sister.

Priyal Chitale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Asha Bhosle: the bad sister whose singing opened up a world of queer possibility for me – https://theconversation.com/asha-bhosle-the-bad-sister-whose-singing-opened-up-a-world-of-queer-possibility-for-me-281215