beauty

“When you’re smiling,” Louis Armstrong (and dozens since) sang, “when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.” More than 80 years later, scientists are getting around to proving that Larry Shay, Mark Fisher, and Joe Goodwin’s lyrics were more than just a pleasant homily. All thanks to an ancient evolutionary development called “mirror neurons.”

Italian researchers in the 1990s first found...

“When I was a child growing up in Morocco, we had so many orange trees,” Paule Attar recounts in her gorgeous, husky French accent. “As a kid, I would eat oranges fresh from the tree.. . .Any time you rub the peel over your hand, smell it and it is pure heaven!”

Since 1988, she has been the president and the technical and creative director of the European-style Paule Attar Salon and Spa in Bellevue, Washington. Ms. Attar has also...