With so much of your skin showing in great summer fashions, it makes sense to pretty it up. One way to do that is to apply a bit of sparkle and glow to your eyes, lips, cheeks, shoulders and collarbone. With MAC multi-purpose glitter ($16.50 for 0.26 oz.) you can transform the make-up you already own — just add a bit of this product to it — or apply the glitter directly to your skin. The effects will be dazzling. Bloom’s shimmer body cream ($24) isn’t designed to blend with other makeup, but it does promise to add a subtle sheen to your skin. Plus, it’s scented with lavender oil to make you smell fantastic. Make Up For Ever was one of the first companies to make skin powder that captures and reflects light like a gem. A little bit of their pearly, iridescent Star powder ($18 for 0.09  oz., pictured), available in a complete painter’s palette of colors for mixing and shading, goes a long way. If maximum glitter is what you want, get the Diamond powder ($24 for 0.07 oz.). It’s composed almost entirely of pure synthetic mother-of-pearl and will “radiate extreme brilliance” upon application. For the eyes, be the first to own a Sparkle eye pencil ($17.50), which is available as a limited edition sneak preview item from Prescriptives. (Full product line to be launched in the fall.) Offered in plum and midnight blue, this eye pencil boasts intense color with dramatic sparkle. Over at Urban Decay, there’s Heavy Metal glitter eye gel ($18), eyeliner ($18) and, for the lips, a sparkler pen ($10). Turn heads with this make-up, but be careful not to blind anyone

The Handy Magnet is an idea so simple it might not even be immediately apparent how neat it is, much less why somebody would need to claim having “invented” it: A strip of plastic with nine small magnets in it. So what, you ask? Well, once you have a strap of them in your hands you start thinking of all kinds of ways to use them. Doing a project in your driveway? Slap some magnets on the garage door to keep nuts and screws from rolling into the street. Need to keep a toddler from digging around in the fridge? The magnets’ combined strength is more than enough for an impromptu temporary lock. The product’s promotional site offers ideas both clever and — magnetized water, anyone? — totally kooky, but it emphasizes their versatility and (given the useful way the magnets are integrated into a watertight plastic enclosure, with hangers on either end for attaching to non-magnetized surfaces) might convince you they’re worth the 19 bucks each set costs. Don’t think this company has the corner on magnets as tools. You can find quite a selection from the Joe Tool Company , The Magnet Source (both primarily an assortment of telescoping magnet tools) and Ace Hardware, which offers pages of handy magnets for lots of uses.

Mayo, ketchup, mustard, salsa. There is so much more you can do to give your food some extra zing. The taste buds come alive with pleasure when the right flavors collide on your tongue, and we’ve gathered some truly exotic jams, jellies and chutneys to make your eating more adventurous and enjoyable. First, get an 11 ounce jar of Branston Pickle ($3.75 each; case of 12 for $36), a favorite condiment in the United Kingdom, where more than 28 million jars are sold each year. The sweet and tangy stuff is made from “vegetables in variable proportions” (carrots, rutabaga, onions, cauliflower, marrows, gherkins), sugar, vinegar, chopped dates, apples, tomato paste and more. It absolutely enhances a fish and rice or meat and potatoes meal. Just put a spoonful on your plate and take a little with each bite. Another UK delight is Piccalilli ($4.25 for 10 oz.), a yellow relish of chopped pickled cucumbers, green peppers and onion with tumeric and mustard. In the jams and jellies department, we wanted to know what lay beyond strawberry preserves and orange marmalade. Thus it was exciting to find Mrs. Miller’s Noodles, a Web site featuring the low-priced, beyond-the-ordinary products of a Ohio-based Amish family, the Millers. The family makes dandelion jelly, pineapple jam, mint jelly, hot pepper jelly, red pepper jam, tomato jam and sassafras jelly. All are $2.25 for 8 oz., except the hot pepper jelly, which is $3.50 for 18 ounces. At the Exotic Jam Factory, each season supplies its own selection of jams and jellies. Right now the pickings are great. Get some strawberry and cracked pepper jam ($9) to go with your cheese and crackers or cold meats. Or try the Jaboticaba jam ($9), which is made from a luscious Queensland fruit similar to the cranberry. Other offerings include nectarine and ginger jam, and a berry blend from their orchard which mixes Queensland Mulberry, Brazilian cherry, cherry guava and Jaboticaba. In the marmalade department, there’s orange and lemongrass and orange and whiskey.

Summer is the favorite season of many campers and hikers. They opt to take time off from work and backpack on mountain trails, spending the night away from city lights and noise. One of the pleasures of camping is enjoying a fresh cup of coffee or espresso at your camp site. At Everestgear, you’ll find the Thunderpress ($16) , a handy combination coffee press and travel mug, where you brew one cup at a time. For a larger group of campers, try the Lexan Javapress ($20), which looks like a clear pitcher with a coffeepot top. Place medium ground coffee inside, add boiling water, and allow to steep for 4 minutes. Press down the built-in plunger and you’re ready to serve your java. If you are more of an espresso person, GSI Outdoors carries a four-cup stainless mini expresso machine ($50). You place ground espresso beans inside it, set it on your camp stove to heat (this does not work in microwaves, or over campfires), and soon you have four double-shot (2.5-ounce) servings. To really impress your fellow campers, you can also purchase the milk frother kit ($20) to make lattes. Pour hot or cold milk inside the frother and move the plunger up and down until the milk foams. To look like a real outdoorsman, you can drink your coffee or espresso out of a Snow Peak Titanium Trek Mug from REI. This metal mug with a flip-top lid works as a cooking pot for pasta, a serving bowl for soup, and as a coffee mug too. It only weighs 4.25 ounces, so it’s easy to carry as well.

The techheads at Wired recently declared we’re in the “Petabyte Age,” in which massive quantities of computer storage can fundamentally change scientific research. Astoundingly, for just a couple hundred dollars, you yourself can own a terabyte of storage — just one notch below (a thousandth, in other words) the earth-shattering petabyte. (Just in case you aren’t good with the numbers, the terabyte holds 1 trillion bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes.) For a mere $220, for instance, Maxtor’s OneTouch 4 Plus can be yours, resplendent in brushed metal case and boasting a quiet operation that belies the muscular operations within. Just for your edification regarding the heft of a terabyte, entries on Wikipedia say that all of Walmart’s data is stored on 500 terabytes of data, and YouTube holds more than 600 terabytes of video. The Maxtor is compatible with both Mac and PC, the OneTouch naturally comes with backup software that stores duplicate copies of everything on your computer without your having to worry about it; it also can encrypt all that data for you, lest prying eyes want to snoop through personal records. Less common is its ability to sync data between multiple computers, eliminating the frustration that sometimes arrives when you’re in the middle of a project and realize you left an important phone number on your laptop at home. But backups and data-syncs are like laundry and dishwashing: Happily, having a terabyte at your disposal means all the chores can be done by one little corner of the hard drive while vast swaths of disk space are available for the good stuff: 1 TB, after all, is enough room to store a thousand hours of digital video (depending how it’s compressed) or nearly two years of continuous music. By the time you’re tired of all those songs, you’ll probably be able to afford a petabyte, which would hold enough music for the next two millennia.

A home filled with books — especially when you look at the titles — makes a statement about the readers who live there. But the things holding those books up make another statement - about your home decor taste.  JustBookends is an intriguing site which carries more than 250 types of bookends, far more than you’d find at your local bookshop. One of their best-sellers are the triangle black marble bookends, two thick triangles of dark swirled marble, perfect for holding up large or heavy books (a set is $50, and the shipping, which is on special now, is $7). Another popular choice at Just Bookends is the splashing dolphin set, bronze sculptures of dolphins leaping joyfully out of the water ($84). Another nautically themed choice is the brass ocean wave lighthouse pair of bookends; each one depicts a lighthouse with water lapping at its base. If you’re looking for a gift for a music teacher, consider a set of piano bookends($38, pictured). Made from cast resin, they’ll look nice on a shelf near the real piano. For little girls, radiantly colored butterfly bookends are a standout choice ($35); little boys might prefer the wooden train set , with the engine on one side and the train cars on the other ($35). Barnes & Noble has a classy selection of bookends, including these gleaming red heart-shaped bookends from Alabastri Duchessi Italy ($63), which could be given along with a book of love poems for a romantic gift. Alabastri Duchessi also makes fantastic green malachite alabaster eggs ($63 for the set), which would look perfect in a contemporary design setting. An amusing choice for children or adults are these playful brass polar bear bookends ($45). If you have two photos you’d like to display on your bookcase, order a set of these Pottery Barn photo bookends ($34), which come in black, espresso (brown) or white; each one holds a 3- by 4-inch photo.