How Do Your Eyes Focus?

The eyes function kind of like a complex camera. They snap a picture of whatever is in the field of vision and send that image to the brain. Just like a camera, the lens regulates the focus. By definition, focus means the point rays of light converge. In human optic terms, focus defines the way light refracts to hit the retina. It is a combination of factors that allow you to focus on what you want to see. Understanding how the eye works is a valuable asset when considering whether LASIK surgery is right for you.

Eye Basics
The eye is a hollow globe composed of several critical elements. The part that makes you a brown-eyed girl or a blue-eyed boy is the iris. In the center of the iris is a black dot, or pupil, that opens up to the inner chamber in the globe. The white part is the sclera, and in front sits a clear, fragile skin known as the cornea.

Included in the globe is a gel-like substance, the vitreous body, that gives the ball its shape. The back wall is where you find all the sensitive building blocks that make up the retina. Directly behind the pupil rests a transparent, biconvex lens that is a major component in the light refraction necessary to focus your vision.

Light Refraction
Refraction is a vital term to understand when considering eye focus. Refraction is essentially the bending of rays. When light passes through a medium, like a lens for example, it changes direction. The shift alters the wavelength of the beam. It is the job of the lens to refract light to focus on the retina.

If the lens were a solid piece with no flexibility or mobility, your vision would be limited to a specific distance. The lens changes shape to allow you to shift your focus when looking at something. By altering shape, the lens adjusts to the focal distance.

Focal Distance
The lens of a camera moves back and forth to focus a picture. This is to accommodate the bending of the light rays. Technically, the closer a lens is to the object within the field of vision, the more powerfully it bends the light. When the lens moves farther away, it loses some optical power. The same principle applies to the lens in the eye. The closer you are to an object, the clearer it appears.

The eye lens does not have the space to move back and forth in the globe. Instead, it changes shape to adapt to the focal distance.

Focus
The methodology behind focusing is similar to the technique used to project a movie. A stream of light passes through the lens of the projector. The lens changes to focus that light on a screen to show an image. When you are in a movie theater, the light passes through film into the lens. The lens moves forward or backward to focus the beam onto a white screen. The image of the film transfers with the light onto the screen.

The human eye works the same way, just in reverse. Light passes through the cornea into the pupil. Once it enters the globe, it moves through the lens and an image projects onto the retina.

Changing the shape, or curvature, of the lens requires a powerful muscle – the ciliary muscle – plus a fibrous ring of tissue, the zonule of Zinn, which suspends the lens in place. It is a combined effort of both the ciliary muscle and the zonule fibers that shape the lens.

What Happens When You Focus?
When you are looking at something that sits close, the ciliary muscle contracts, the zonule fibers relax and the lens thickens. Accommodation for greater focal distances works in reverse. The ciliary muscle relaxes causing the zonule fibers to tense to pull the lens flat and thin it out.

Transparency
In order for light to pass through the lens, it must remain transparent. When the lens thickens, it must maintain proper index of refraction while still retaining clarity. This is done via crystallins, water-soluble proteins that are packed into the lens fibers. Crystallins are what keep the lens clear regardless of the density.

Cornea
The other component that is critical to focusing vision is the cornea. When light hits the cornea, it bends to enter the pupil and then bends further as it passes through the lens to focus the image onto the retina. The cornea must have perfect spherical shape in order to refract the light properly. If it is misshapen, light bends wrong and the image ends up fuzzy.

The eyes ability to properly refract light and focus an image onto the retina is the basis for vision. When something is off even slightly in the process, people wear corrective lenses or get LASIK surgery to fix the error.

20/20 Institute is the leader in vision correction in the Denver-Metro area. Call for a free consultation if you want to know if you qualify for the best Denver LASIK.

Beauty Tips while Travelling

When you're travelling, there are often more pressing things on your mind, such as: how much money is the bus? Do I have money? Where does the bus go? Is that man going to mug me?

Unfortunately, there are always things to worry about when you're travelling abroad, so you'll always be occupied with them. Don't worry, though, because we have made a guide for you to look great while you stress overseas, with these easy beauty tips that will guarantee that you look great every day, even when you're backpacking and sleeping in tents most of your trip.

Pack light

Keeping your skin hydrated is something that will be of the highest priority, especially when you're travelling in the air. Use a light cream rather than a heavy moisturiser, as the latter will make you look oily. A light cream is one that applies and dries quickly – but if you're even more of a rush, just use a bit of concealer and lotion and apply to your face.

Hide any smudges quickly

Made a bit of a mistake rushing from Wallert to the airport? Don't fret, you don't have to go back to your Eucalypt home and wash it all out and start from scratch. Instead, what you could you is use a creamy concealer to break down the existing makeup, which will then blend out.

Hide your bags

That couple in the hostel keeping you up all night? Hide those unsightly eye bags easily by applying an apricot coloured concealer to the offending locations on your face to neutralise the colour. If it's puffiness that is the problem, however, then you may have to work a little more: simply applying concealer will make the light reflect off of it, emphasising its puffiness. Instead, you should work and apply mascara to your top eyelashes to take away from this.

Shine

Exhaustion taking away from your normally healthily radiant complexion? No worries. If you're feeling tired or queasy, all you have to do is apply a simple shimmer powder to your nose, cheeks, and lips so that you can look completely alive. Alternatively, if you have problems with dry skin, try instead a blend of lip balm and a cream gloss to keep yourself looking even more fabulous.

Moisturise your lips

Always keep your lips moisturised. You'll often encounter dry and cracked lips, which are unsightly and feel terrible, when you're travelling. The best way to remedy this? Not surprisingly, it involves bringing lip treatment. Try something medicated so that your lipstick doesn't smudge.

Sarah Paige wants to work part time at the community of Wallert.

Four Important Vitamins and Minerals that Fight Aging

As your body ages, good nutrition becomes even more important for living a healthy, long, and pain-free life. Certain vitamins and minerals in particular are especially important for older people. Here are four that will help aging and info on how you can get them in your diet.

Calcium
Calcium is the most important mineral for bone health; it helps maintain bone density and prevent brittle bones. As people age, especially women, their bodies lose bone density, and they’re prone to osteoporosis, broken bones, and other issues. The recommended daily intake of calcium is 1,000mg for women ages 19-50, and 1,200mg for women ages 50 and up.
Where to Get It
You can get calcium from dairy products. Fat-free yogurt and milk are especially good sources of calcium. Salmon, calcium-fortified orange juice and cereals, cheese, and tofu are other potential sources of calcium. One serving of milk has about 300mg of calcium. You can also take a 500mg supplement of calcium citrate, or a 600mg supplement of calcium carbonate daily.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Omega-3 fatty acids are incredibly important for brain health. The fatty acids help maintain the structure of your brain, and not enough can lead to memory loss and decreased brain function. Omega-6 fatty acids aren’t good for our bodies, and they’re found in notoriously fatty foods, like processed foods. We often get too much of omega-6, and not enough omega-3, which is essential for counteracting the effects of bad fats.
Where to Get Them
You can get omega-3 fatty acids from foods like walnuts, ground flaxseed, salmon, herring, sardines, or halibut. For fish, wild-caught is better. You can also consider taking a supplement of 2,000mg of fish oil every day, and a 1,000mg supplement of combination DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosaentaenoic acid).
Potassium
Potassium is essential for fighting high blood pressure. Too much salt in your diet can raise your blood pressure and lead to damaged blood vessels. Potassium helps to stop too much salt from wreaking havoc in your body. When your kidneys try to remove salt from your system, you also lose potassium, making more potassium even more important on a high-salt diet.
Where to Get It
Potassium comes from bananas and many other fruits and vegetables. Eat about seven to nine servings of fruits and vegetables per day, and you should get enough potassium. At the same time, however, you must consume no more than 1,500mg of salt every day. There are potassium supplements, but they are not generally recommended because they can lead to heart arrhythmia or other issues.
Manganese
Manganese can help your body maintain joint cartilage, and a lack of it can lead to joint deterioration and pain. By increasing manganese in your diet, your body can repair damaged joints and prevent more damage.
Where to Get It
Manganese can come from foods like nuts, spinach, and beef. It’s unlikely that your diet will include enough manganese to really help your joints, however, so take a supplement of 5mg of manganese every day.

Jennifer Hawkins is a professional chef and health fanatic who specializes in recipes with nuts. She loves to write and blog about diet and nutrition and how it can help you live a longer, healthier life.

How Your Face Ages Over Time

It's a fact of life that everyone gets older. As we age, our body changes, and many of the changes we see take place in our faces. Everyone knows that the way they look changes over time; wrinkles form, facial features change and alter; but not everyone knows why and how this happens.

Three Zones
Looking at the human face, we can divide it into three separate areas or "zones." These zones are useful classifications when discussing the way the human face changes through the years. When discussing aging, these three areas are referred, so it is important to know exactly what portions of the face they encompass.

The upper face includes the area around your forehead, eyebrows and eyes. The mid-face includes the area under the eyes, the nose and the cheek regions of the face. The lower face includes everything below the nose such as the lips, chin and jawline.

Four Layers
Just as the face is divided into three regions, it is also made up of four basic layers. As a person ages, these layers change, giving the characteristic features of an aging human face. These four features, from deepest to most superficial are bone, muscle, the subcutaneous layer and skin.

Different decades see different changes take place in these layers and these combined changes are what case the various facial changes over time such as wrinkles and loss of face volume.

Bone
Although bones are generally thought of as unchanging once we reach adulthood, nothing could be father from the truth. As we age, our bones continue to change and alter, shifting subtly and taking on slightly different shapes.

Because bone is the foundation on which the shape of the other three layers are built, changes in bone structure, volume and shape can cause changes in the other layers. For example, your cheekbones may become less prominent as you age, causing a change in the shape and volume of your cheeks and affecting the three layers above.

Muscle
As we grow older, the strength and firmness of our muscles weakens. As a result, the muscles don't tend to spring back into shape as easily as they did when we were younger. 

As the face is the most expressive portion of our bodies, we are always using the muscles when making facial expressions. As these muscles become weaker over time, they don't snap back into their original shapes as they did earlier in life. Combined with the loss of elasticity in the skin, this causes the creases in the skin caused by repeated facial expressions to become permanent, creating wrinkles.

Subcutaneous Layer
The subcutaneous layer is the layer that lies just beneath the skin. It is also known as the fatty layer or the volume layer. This layer contains collagen, fat and a substance called hyaluronic acid.

While you might be familiar with collagen and fat, most people aren't as familiar with what hyaluronic acid is and what its function is. Essentially, this is an acid that is used in repairing skin tissue. When you become sunburned, the UV rays slow the body's production of this acid. As a result, the degradation of the skin increases significantly, thus causing the skin to peel. This is one reason why the use of sunscreen is important to reduce the effects of the sun's rays.

As we age, the volume of collagen, fat and hyaluronic acid decreases. This loss of volume can cause not only changes in how the face looks, often causing it to seem to droop, but the skin no longer snaps back as well as it once did.

Skin
The skin, or epidermis, is the most visible part of the aging process. The skin is closely tied to the subcutaneous level, and the point at which one ends and the other begins can be quite difficult to discern. 

As time drags on, the skin loses its own elasticity, the replacement of the outer layer of skin slows and the function of the sebaceous glands becomes lessened. The skin itself no longer snaps back, and wrinkles form over time.

It's a Combination! 
Like so many things in life, the effects of aging are not caused by one single thing but rather a combination. As bone changes, muscle loses strength, the subcutaneous level loses volume and the skin just no longer bounces back, the effects of aging, such as wrinkles and sagging skin, begin showing.

Bella Labella founded Bella Labs in 2009 to become a leading edge skin care supplement manufacturer. To learn more, follow Bella Labs on Twitter.

Bad Habits That Harm Your Looks

Sleeping On Face Side:
When you sleep on your face side, or on your abdomen, the skin on your face encounter will get pushed into the pillow as well as experiences a lot of contortions. Over a period of time this particular pressure can cause lines and creases. Furthermore, utilizing a moisturizer just ahead of punching the sack assists. “Men are usually robust, guys don’t use virtually not any moisturizer,” you might say. But when you don’t want to get wrinkled, difficult skin color sooner, begin to use an excellent moisturizer today. 

Get Away From soaps:
Soap are usually your enemy, except few. Many cleansers produce your skin highly dried up and also susceptible to wrinkles and also ageing. Even though you utilize the face cream submit utilizing cleaning detergent, it's still not good as it completely fatigues your skin of most dampness. Switch to an excellent confront rinse and a entire physique rinse. 

Give up smoking:
It'll be excellent if you can entirely stop, but if an individual can’t, start reducing, besides causing most cancers and also impotency, cigarette smoking cigarettes may also result in wrinkles to form close to your mouth. In order to keep seeking young and also wrinkle-free, kick the butt.

Clean-up Nice hair:
Dry skin doesn’t simply cause a good itches crown. Each time a skip out drops on your own face, this brings about an contamination. Increase slimy pores and epidermis towards the formula, and you are in some genuine difficulty. You use the exact identical fingertips so that you can scuff your own head and touch that person with similar hand. We don’t even realize it because it many occurs quickly. More disease, extra skin difficulties. So work with a excellent dermatitis hair wash, an organic one as well as keep the hair itching free. This will make your hair grow faster.

Stay Away From Sun rays:
sun rays don’t only affect female skin; they will impact man pores and epidermis also. The more exposed you might be, the greater you’re at risk of getting in touch with skin cancer, and other side effects. Hence, use sun screen lotion product prior to 30 minutes regarding walking out there. It'll protect the skin and also keep facial lines from increasing.

Make Your Hair Grow Faster

Lengthy, healthy hair is really a signal associated with attractiveness, vigor, as well as children's. No matter if you’re stressed to obtain movie-star-caliber locks, fighting difficulties with hair regrowth, or just trying to set any tragic new hair-do behind an individual, there are a variety associated with natural and medicinal strategies you should use.

Protein:
Eat a nicely sensible amount of necessary health proteins every day. Proteins is important regarding healthful hair growth. Make absolutely certain you eat the correct quantity of. 

Vitamin C:
Make sure you fulfill your own suggested daily ingestion regarding Vitamin C. Creating a Vitamin C deficit may cause dried out, dull, and also fragile locks that's vulnerable to break. Your body uses Ascorbic acid also helps to build collagen, any dietary soluble fibers important to producing brand fresh head of curly tresses cells. Without Vitamin C, the body can also get difficulty ingesting straightener, therefore it is doubly vital that you make sure you get your daily serving, specifically in in conjunction with iron-rich meals. 

Maintain good general health and avoid stress:
Take in properly, exercise every day, and get sufficient sleep to lessen general physical anxiety levels. Intense actual or even psychological anxiety can cause hair growth in order to be able for you to help sluggish or perhaps turn off totally. In severe cases, anxiety could cause hair loss. 

Brush Your Hair Twice A Day:
Clean or even comb locks a maximum of two times each day. Extreme or even incorrect brushing and also discovering can pull hair away too soon, avoiding fast as well as organic benefits withinside hair size in which milder or much a smaller amount frequent brushing might permit.

Trim Your Hair: 

On a regular basis Trimming down on head of curly tresses to eliminate separated comes to an end (for the most part every Ten to 12 days) will help prevent separated hair coming via vacationing more in the string, deterioration the head of hair and which makes it susceptible to breakage. Cutting locks will not market more quickly development, however may help stop hair injury that can lead to the look regarding sluggish or even a lesser amount of healthy hair development.