222 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS of the bench that mattered. Nevertheless, wide benches can still be seen in America and in other countries but except, perhaps, in Switzerland, they always end up by being cluttered with bottles and apparatus and what- not. Too often with the deep bench, the research worker reaches over to pick up some bottle and in so doing knocks a piece of apparatus and the breakage can be high. On the whole, the use of a centre shelf or.. the bench leads to a similar state of affairs. The plain narrow bench tends to make the research worker put things away in their proper place because if this is not done he has no bench to work on. This leads to mental tidiness and, indeed, more precise work. One feature, and perhaps the most important, of laboratory designing is arranging proper services, i.e. gas, water, electricity, vacuum, etc., etc. This can, of course, be done simply by having the pipes hung on the walls and leading down to the benches, but such arrangements create dust recep- tacles which, in a laboratory, one is best without. One can now go on to describe precisely the building which was erected for the Research Laboratories of my Company. In the first place, it is 230 ft. long and 40 ft. wide. It is the annexe of a maior headquarters building facing on to a main road and, because of this, certain restrictions had to be taken care of (Fig. 1). For example, it was forbidden that drain pipes or i• .... ..-i- -' '• r .: ½• . ...• •r ....•:. • ß .' • ß ½•-.• ß • •,': .... • . • •.'.•.' ::.' ... .t • . : ::•- ,• ----• %:.: ....'.•'? •..% •.•:-:. (-•:-'-'."'•..'•":-:--:• ..•.•&•'•.• •,' ...... •'.•••• .................. 4.m ........... :•.=,•½ 4 ß . • •- . .• •g•.•., •.•,• •,,• ....... •. ........... .•.•_ • ... .. .i:-• ......... ,. .............. •..•%...• ... Fig. I. The Research Laboratory occupies the top floor.

PLANNING AND EQUIPPING OF A COSMETIC LABORATORY 223