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Even in full company class where talent lurks everywhere. San Francisco Ballet principal Muriel Maffre draws your attention and locks in your gaze. She is the five-foot-ten dancer who is not looking into the mirror while she adjusts her epaulement. She’s the one who is working at the barre shrouded in an aura of introspection. She talks to nobody. She corrects her balances, fixes her placement, measures her tendus, and gauges her extension, which seems to taper into infinity.

French-born Maffre has subscribed to this work Ethic for all of her 17 years at SFB. Her influence in the company has been profound. She has proved that unconventional bodies can flourish in the American ballet system. She has inspired more than one promising ballerina who did not fit into the standard mold. She has instilled in her consorts a refinement in partnering they never dreamed possible. She has animated exceptional new dances from renowned choreographers like Christopher Wheeldon and Mark Morris. And she has gathered a host of admirers for whom she represents everything that makes SFB distinctive and forward-looking.

“It’s very comforting.” Maffre says without false modesty, “that people appreciate your differences. I used to think I would never fit in.” She will also tell you that, “I have always been less interested in the finished product than in how I got there.”

In Maffre’s obsession with process may lie the secret to her popularity. At their best, her performances in 19th-century classics, Balanchine staples, and contemporary fare fuse an analytic intelligence with an arresting physicality. You know what she is thinking as well as feeling.

Onstage, Maffre summons metaphors. Her fearsomely long extremities, hip joints that almost always do their owner’s bidding, and the sheer elation of her pointe work suggest a winged creature from ancient mythology. Her Myrtha’s condemnation of Hilarion chills the marrow in its implacability. Her Siren wraps lethal tentacles around the poor prodigal who enters her lair. Her Lilac Fairy is all reassuring warmth. Her performance in Ashton’s Monotones II exemplifies liquid architecture. Her deconstructed Dying Swan deceives you into believing you’ve never seen this chestnut before. Yet Maffre’s sendup of that droopy fowl in Alexei Ratmansky’s Carnaval des Animaux brings down the house. She brandishes a teasing wit in the Tanaquil Le Clereq solo in Western Symphony and evokes a world of high romance in Liebeslieder Walzer. For many in the SFB audience, William Forsythe’s ballets would be unthinkable without her.

It seems impertinent to ask Maffre if she ever wanted to do anything else but dance, a passion that has suffused her limbs since she pestered her mother to take ballet class like her sister.

“No, if you want to go for that sort of achievement, you don’t have a lot of options,” she declares during our interview in the SFB Association Building. “Dance takes all your time.” So the die was cast. “My first public performance,” Maffre recalls, “was on an outdoor tennis court. I was 4.”

Born in a suburb of Paris, Maffre was accepted into the Paris Opera Ballet School at 9. The training, she says, instilled in her “elegance, refinement, and a very fine aesthetic.” But as her body matured, the reality of her situation hit home. In those bygone (pre-Nureyev) days, POB imposed a strict height limit on women, and Maffre had exceeded it. It bothered her that POB “was its own enclosed world.” She would go elsewhere, but she would go with an artistic goal, which she has never recanted.

“Because of my physique and height, I knew I would not have access to all the roles that interested me,” Maffre says. “I made a pact with myself that no matter how small the part, I would make it my own and explore it totally. This pact has fulfilled me.”

Maffre collected a gold medal at the first Paris International Dance Competition in 1984 and took first prize at the Paris National Conservatory for Advanced Studies in 1985. Her career was launched. Then, after a year at the Hamburg Ballet and five years at Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, Maffre was ready for a change. For one thing, French regional companies tour more than they dance in their own cities and their performance schedules are relatively skimpy. Maffre also realized that modern dance works were beginning to pervade ballet in France more often than she liked. She yearned for a company she could call home, where she could establish a relationship with the community.

“I needed to expose myself to something different, a different way of approaching work, a different mentality.” Inquiries to American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet did not yield responses. By then, Paris buzzed with rumors about Helgi Tomasson’s major overhaul of the San Francisco Ballet. Endorsements came from Maffre’s French colleagues, Karin Averty and Jean-Charles Gil, who had danced in San Francisco in the late 1980s. When Maffre saw the troupe during its 1989 Paris tour and took a couple of company classes, she made up her mind. Tomasson hired her after looking at her videos.

Geri Duncan Jones of the American Health and Beauty Aids Institute and Germaine Gibbs of Eckerd present a $60,000 check to the United Negro College Fund. AHBAI member products purchased at Eckerd stores funded the check.

“Beauty is the balance of light and shadow,” wrote Sr. Anita de Luna in her book, Faith Formation and Popular Religion: Lessons from the Tejano Experience. “To live in expectation of the predictable is to set oneself up for disappointment because neither the Provident God, nor nature, nor even humanity–who are the agents for beauty–are predictable.”

Born to a family of migrant farm workers, she went on to join the San Antonio-based Missionary Catechists of Divine Providence, the only Mexican-American congregation of women in the United States. She later earned multiple master’s degrees, and a doctorate in spirituality from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She lectured around the world on Latinos and the church; she was the fast woman of color to be named president of the National Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

But for all her acclaim–she received an honorary doctorate from Notre Dame University–she stayed true to her roots. “She was always asking, ‘What can we do for the people, la gente?’ “said Sr. Jeanette Hernandez.

Sr. Hernandez, a member of Sr. de Luna’s congregation, teaches in religious studies at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. Sr. de Luna taught there until about a month before her death; it was one of many teaching posts that she had held during her life.

It was my privilege to be on a retreat at St. Andrew’s Convent, where Sr. de Luna’s order is based, when she passed away. I drove with the sisters to Sr. Anita’s little house, which overflowed with books, family and the sisters and friends who had cared for her. We gathered around her body. We sang songs in Spanish and shared stories.

Sr. Gabriel Tamayo, the. order’s archivist, blessed Sr. de Luna’s feet: feet once planted in the fields where she picked crops as a child. It was in those fields, in a barrack, where the Missionary sisters first taught her the catechism of the church.

She recounts these and other experiences of her faith formation in her book on Tejano (Texans of Mexican descent) popular religion. Each chapter opens with a recuerdo, or memory; if you take the word apart it means to bring back to the heart or corazon.

We see her mother’s home altar filled with santos blessed by friends, and a traveling altar for use when following the crops. And we recall the death of her brother from pneumonia; worn down by years of harsh working conditions and a poor diet; he went to a hospital where he was diagnosed, but could not get medicine because the pharmacy was closed.

Each recuerdo opens up into an exploration of the links between popular religious practices in the New World and the evolution of church catechisms of the 16th through the 20th centuries.

Sr. Jeanette said that Sr. Anita, who wrote music and poetry, had plans for more books. “She had a great passion for life. She just didn’t have time to do all she wanted to accomplish.”

Now it falls to us to complete Sr. Anita’s work. Her mandate is clear. We live in a society that “models violence as the answer to our problems, tolerates extreme permissiveness, keeps the ‘other’ at arm’s length, makes spirituality a private affair, and reserves God and prayer for emergencies.”

When you are the “American Idol,” looking glamorous is part of the job. Busy promoting her new CD Free Yourself, FANTASIA wears her newfound stardom well. However, she prefers to keep her makeup light when she’s off stage. “I love gold tones the best. I feel like gold tones keep my makeup on the natural side.” Being an entertainer on the go can take its toll on the skin, and Fantasia has one surefire beauty secret to keep the damage to a minimum. “I don’t pick at my face. If I have a bump, I just leave it]”

Keep your complexion pimple-free by cleansing thoroughly and removing all makeup before bedtime. Try Fashion Fair Gentle Facial Polisher and Olay Daily Facials.

It’s the classic nature-versus-nurture debate: Is it your genes or your lifestyle that determines how you look as you age? “The rule of thumb in terms of wrinkles is that it’s 10 percent genetics and 90 percent environment and lifestyle,” says Tina Alster, M.D., of the Washington Institute of Dermalogic Laser Surgery, in Washington, D.C. What is genetic: skin thickness (which accounts for how much it sags) and wrinkle patterns.

The good news: The remaining 90 percent gives you a lot of control. To prove it, Darrick Antell, M.D., a plastic surgeon in New York City, studied identical twins and found that if their lifestyles were the same, their faces aged similarly. But if their habits were different, the contrasts were dramatic. Antell found one sister, who was a sun worshipper (and had premature aging) and the other who wasn’t. “Seeing their photos side by side was like looking at plastic surgery before-and-after pictures,” Antell says. So while your DNA may be immutable, what you do with its blueprint is up to you. Here, the lifestyle changes that will help you save face.

Protect yourself from the sun. The experts agree: The sun is, hands down, your skin’s worst enemy. Exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation causes the skin’s support structures (collagen and elastin) to break down, accelerating the aging process. “There are many habits that can age the skin, but the sun really trumps everything else,” says Nancy Silverberg, M.D., a dermatologist in Newport Beach, Calif. “And even if you’ve already done a lot of damage, it’s never too late to start wearing sunscreen. Daily use has been shown to actually reverse a significant portion of sun damage.” And, it’s not enough just to wear it; you need to wear the right one.

“Look for sunscreens that contain ingredients such as zinc oxide, titanium dioxide and Parsol 1789 [also called avobenzone], which all partially block aging ultraviolet-A [UVA] rays,” recommends Cherie Ditre, M.D., director of the Cosmetic Dermatology & Skin Enhancement Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in Radnor. Best bet: Clinique Superdefense Triple Action Moisturizer SPF 25 ($40; clinique.com), which uses avobenzone to protect against UVA rays, and the ingredients octinoxate and oxybenzone to fend off burning UVB rays. It’s available for oily, regular and dry skin.

Put out that cigarette. Smokers often end up with telltale lines around their lips (created by repeated lip puckering while inhaling), but the damage doesn’t stop there. Silverberg points to a study of smokers that found they also were more likely than their nonsmoking counterparts to have significant lines around their eyes. Like sun exposure, smoking breaks down collagen and elastin, speeding up the rate at which skin sags and wrinkles. To help reduce the damage, try Estee Lauder Perfectionist Correcting Concentrate for Lip Lines ($35; esteelauder.com), which helps fill in wrinkles and keep lipstick in place.

Stop making faces. Think of your skin as being like the soft, fine leather of an expensive shoe. Just as the creases in the leather get deeper as you walk in the shoe, your skin reacts in a similar fashion to repeated facial expressions. “Years of constantly using those muscles causes the skin to get a crack, or wrinkle, in it,” Antell explains. Botox is often used to soften expression lines (since it paralyzes the guilty muscle, you can no longer make the expression that’s causing the wrinkle). A less expensive option: Break the habit. “You can learn not to make certain facial expressions, such as squinting or scowling,” says New York City dermatologist Dennis Gross, M.D., author of Your Future Face (Viking, 2005). “Those are behavioral.” Make a conscious effort to relax your face when you find yourself drawing your brows together or grimacing. Or apply a topical product to help relax the wrinkles; try Avon Anew Clinical Deep Crease Concentrate ($32; avon.com), which uses a patentpending relaxant called portulaca, or Nuxe Creme Nirvanesque ($41; sephora.com), which uses the botanicals blue lotus, poppy and althea to help relax the contraction of facial muscles.

Control stress. The effect of stress on the body has been well documented: It can compromise the immune system and weaken your ability to fight off illness. Your skin suffers too. When your stress level goes up, your body goes into fight-or-flight mode. More specifically: “Capillaries shrink, and blood flow to the skin decreases as the body redirects blood to the internal organs,” your body’s way of preparing to defend itself, Antell explains. In addition, chronic stress can increase tension lines on the face and, if it impairs your sleep, you risk a further speeding up of the aging process (see below). In addition to learning how to reduce the anxiety in your life, you can also apply skin-care products to help reinvigorate your complexion. Try Caudalie Vinosource Riche Anti-Wrinkle Cream ($50; caudalie.com) with grapeseed extract to moisturize and protect against age-accelerating free radicals (highly reactive oxygen molecules created by smoking, pollution and sunlight that speed up the aging process); 3Lab Hydrating-Vita Cream with the powerful antioxidant coenzyme Q10 ($120; 3lab.com) and Biotherm Line Peel ($40; biotherm-usa.com), which increases the skin’s natural cell turnover process.

NATICK, Mass. — BJ’s Wholesale Club has announced the debut of Altaire, a technologically advanced French skin care line developed by Kelemata Group–an exclusive for the retailer.

The six-item line includes Cream Cleanser, Firming Facial Toner, Youth Vitamin Day Cream, Repairing Night Cream, Ageless Firming Serum and time Fighting Eye Cream. The suggested retail prices range from $12.99 to $24.99.

You may already have the right gear for your favorite sport, but do you have the right beauty essentials to keep you looking great too? “Probably not,” says Gretchen Monahan, owner of the Grettacole Salon and Spas in the Boston area. “I see a lot of clients with exercise-related beauty problems who haven’t taken the time to stock their gym bag or medicine cabinet with the right products. You have to choose your beauty regimen in the same way you would your workout clothes.” So whether you’re a skier or a yogini, here are the essentials you need to prevent or relieve sport-induced skin and hair problems.

Exercise essentials There’s no doubt that cold weather and harsh winds can rob the skin of essential moisture (see Beauty Rx, page 84), which is why daily hydration is so important. “Extremely dry, irritated skin can crop up quite fast, so keep a heavy-duty moisturizing cream on hand to handle those problematic areas whenever necessary,” says Tennessee Callie, R.N., a skin practitioner at New York City’s Skinklinic dermatology center. Best bet: B. Kamins Chemist Maple Treatment Cream SPF 15 ($95; bkamins.com), a superhydrating cream made from the sap of Canadian maple trees. Exercise essentials Logging a lot of miles can give your feet a beating, but daily care will keep them in fine form: Stash a tube of exfoliating moisturizer (one with skin-sloughing alpha- or beta-hydroxy acids) in your locker or gym bag and massage sore feet to help exfoliate dry skin. Editor’s picks: Babor Body Thermal Line Anti-Callous Cream with mineral oil and algae ($16; babor.com) and Propoline Pedi Care Cream with olive oil and alpha-hydroxy acids ($12; beautyhabit.com). Monthly professional pedicures are also recommended: “A lot of our clients are Boston Marathoners who come to us for a proper pedicure,” Monahan says. “That means we buff but don’t cut their calluses, which build up as a protective layer on areas where there is prolonged pressure.”

Any runner who has experienced runner’s rash or runner’s nipple, which occurs where skin rubs against fabric over long distances, never wants to repeat the misery. To prevent it, wear clothing made of moisture-wicking fabric like Dri-Fit or CoolMax. “A layer of Vaseline or zinc oxide paste (available at drugstores) will also provide a barrier between your clothes and sensitive spots like nipples and underarms,” Bodian explains. Also try Indigo Wild’s Zip’s Nip Stick ($9.50; zipsnaturalsport.com) with beeswax and shea butter. An antiperspirant with moisturizing ingredients, such as Secret Platinum & Olay Conditioners ($2.79; at drugstores), can help to keep your underarms dry–and therefore less likely to chafe.

“I am a gloss collector. I must have five different ones in my purse all the time,” says actress Merrin Dungey, who shines on the screen in the WB television series Summerland. The only problem is that her boyfriend hates lipstick and gloss. So when he’s around Dungey, who has worn makeup every day since she was a teen, plays up her beautiful eyes with funky pops of color.

Mandisa lives up to the American Idol promise by delivering a dynamic debut recording, True Beauty (Sparrow/EMI), on which she entertains while being true to herself. She wakes up listeners (their ears, hands, feet, heart) with her inspirational praise jam “Shackles,” on which she displays the faith that plays a “major role” in her life.

Then there’s “True Beauty,” a beautifully upbeat song that speaks to self-esteem and self-worth and the related issues that confront young women today. On the high-energy, feel-good first single “Only The World,” Mandisa continues to showcase her ebullient spirit. But she also takes us to a special quiet time with the calming, soothing, yet moving “God Speaking,” on which her expressive vocals are the star. The standout talent and Fisk alum captured hearts and attention with impressive vocals as an American Idol fifth-season finalist. With this collection of great gospel-influenced songs with funky rhythms, Mandisa establishes her place among the true winners.

* FRUIT PUNCH

It doesn’t get any juicier than Dior’s Addict UltraGloss ($23, Sephora stores nationwide), a colorful collection of iridescent sparklers that put your luscious lips in the spotlight. From top: Sparkling Green, Sparkling Orange, White With Light Blue Effect and Sparkling Yellow.

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* BUTTER UP

A good body butter soothes, scents and makes brown skin glow. Fruits & Passion’s Avocado Butter ($20, fruits-passion.com), which combines shea butter, oats and glycerin, makes for a wonderful ultramoisturizing treat.

Lancome’s Colour Focus Palette 4 Ombres ($38, fine department stores) brings it on with sensational shadows from vibrant green to golden corals and warm brown.

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* COOL-AID

A citrus bath on a steamy night is oh, so refreshing. My new fave, Davies Gate AllSpice Pink Grapefruit Powder Sugar Bath Soak ($21, daviesgate.com), is undeniably perfect.

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* POP FEVER

Got a pair of hot sandals to rock? Set them off with Sally Hansen’s Beyond Perfect Protein Nail Color ($5, drugstores nationwide), shown in Fresh Lavender, Hibiscus Harmony and Mandarin Mantra.

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* MULTI-FLASKER

Bond No. 9 New York Chinatown (3.4 ounces, $178, Saks Fifth Avenue stores) is a sexy blend of peony, gardenia and dark woods packaged in an ultrafab part contemporary, part vintage flask.

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* SUNSHINE SHIMMERS

Portable and ever so pretty, Bourjois eye shadows ($14, Sephora stores) come in 24 shades that can be worn wet or dry. From top left: Turquoise Ensoleille, Jaune IIluminateur, Orange Cocktail and Violet Divin.

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* CASE IN POINT

The Pucci-inspired compact alone made me an instant fan, but Flirt! Cosmetics Go Go Glamour Compact in La-La Land ($25, select Kohl’s stores) also nails the nude look with gilded and neutral eye shadows and a warm, sheer blush.