Living

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SECTION L FRIDAY JUNE 24, 2011 thestar.com

BOLLYWOOD NORTH
Dazzling accessories, L3 Fusion fashion: East meets West, L3 Flawless faces by MAC, L4

JEWELLERY

Beyond silver and gold

Couples forgo tradition for rings made of plastic, titanium, even wood
EMILY SENGER
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

FASHION

Bollywood gives a new twist to an old tradition, wooing western women, South Asian girls

The simple

Anesthesiologist Jonathan Kong might find titanium in the Sunnybrook Hospital operating room, where it is used in joint replacements or in pins to mend broken bones. He can also find it encircling the ring finger on his left hand. When Kong and his wife, Gina Lam, married last August they wanted their wedding bands to have a personal touch, so they went against tradition, forgoing gold bands and choosing, instead, to go with custom-made titanium rings. A wedding is a very personal thing and we wanted to have a ring that not everyone has, Kong said. We wanted a uniqueness that we could associate with the wedding. Kong and Lam are among a growing number of Toronto couples who forgo traditional gold for wedding rings made out of alternative materials.
RINGS continued on L2

SARI
SUSAN PIGG
LIVING REPORTER

Ready saris are really more skirt than sari. They require no hand pleating or tucking.

Anju Saini doesnt have to venture back to her native India to get inspiration for the exotic and sensual saris that fill her sprawling basement. Instead she watches Bollywood movies from the comfort of her Richmond Hill home. The colourful costumes, the dancing, the music all of which will be centre stage in Toronto during this weekends International Indian Film Academy Awards help the former travel agent weave her own magic. Sainis Kaveri Kollection, one-of-a-kind IndoWestern designs she creates and then has crafted by a handful of young suppliers in India, are as unique as the Bollywood actors who have taken Toronto by storm. Some are inlaid with Swarovski crystals, others are covered in stunning embroidery. All are fashioned out of colourful chiffons, silks and lightweight fabrics that feel as soft as butter. People want all that Bollywood glitter to make that Bollywood entrance, says Saini, 57. Just as the Bollywood blockbusters have captured the imagination of western audiences, so have Sainis creations: Shes seeing more demand from North American women who are looking to stand out from the evening-dress crowd. Most of the time when you go to parties, everyone is wearing black dresses. Even weddings are very black, said Saini. Indian outfits are so vibrant, so colourful, so sexy they cheer you up. And you know that no one else will be wearing the same outfit.
SARI continued on L4

Zsolt Szekely has been using wood in his silver and gold rings.

EVERLASTING IMPRESSIONS PHOTOGRAPHY

SOCIAL STUDIES

Women have better gaydar while ovulating, study says

Andditional dash of romance makes women more intuitive
AMY DEMPSEY
STAFF REPORTER

They buy sexier clothing, are more likely to stare at attractive men and if they are strippers they get better tips. And now science has identified yet another characteristic of the elusive ovulating woman: she is better at picking out straight men from the gays.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Toronto suggests that ovulation significantly improves a womans ability to judge a mans sexual orientation. What it really sort of hints at is, there are evolutionary reasons why women would pay attention to cues relevant for mating, says Nicholas Rule, assistant professor of psychology at U of T and lead researcher on the study. When women have a higher chance of getting pregnant, theyre going to pay more attention to cues in the environment that would attend to that.

A slew of strange ovulation phenomena have been uncovered in recent years as scientists track how the female cycle affects mating practices. Other research has suggested that ovulating women emit a scentthat is more attractive to men, get better tips as lap dancers and buy sexier clothing in an unconscious attempt to outdo rivals. For the gaydar study, scientists tracked the fertility cycles of 40 heterosexual female undergraduate students and asked them to judge photos of 80 mens faces. Half of the men self-identified as gay and the other half were straight.

The men were all equally attractive and wore the same facial expression, researchers said. Women were encouraged to use their intuition. Ladies closest to peak ovulation were found to have the best gaydar. Its interesting because it suggests that there are factors that influence the way we perceive and evaluate people without our knowing it, Rule says. Gaydar, by the way, is a portmanteau of the words gay and radar, defined as the ability to detect sexual orientation. When scientists added a little ro-

mance to the equation, women became even better at determining whether men were gay or straight. Researchers made up a story about a walk on a beach with an attractive male during a tropical island vacation and had women read it before they looked at the photos. Women who were primed to think about romance and mating were better at spotting straight men than those who were not. The study also found that ovulation did not make women any better at judging whether other women are gay or straight.
adempsey@thestar.ca

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