Since then, he has learned that among many other requirements, the sand cannot contain more than five solid particle residues of any size on an extension of 100 linear meters of beach. Erick had become conscious of an important fact. Doing a quick calculation, in the last two minutes, his own family had thrown out a cigarette butt and a small wrapper. Those were two particles already! They may have been small, but they were there. He started understanding that if his wife smoked a pack a day, at least a third of her cigarette butts ended up on the beach, so just that activity had stopped that beach from getting certified. He changed his outlook one hundred percent. Nowadays, if he’s asked the same question, he’d say: “define clean; to know if it’s clean or not, I need to understand your concept of clean”. Four months later, the certification had been obtained thanks to the joint efforts of private enterprise and state and county governments. When Erick came back last November, he no longer smoked on the beach.

“It’s incredible. The beach had looked clean before, but now it looks like it’s gone through a Laundromat. The view is astounding. It used to be impressive, now it’s mind-blowing. Now I can be sure my kids won’t get sick by swimming in the sea”, he said.
Still, the Banderas Bay community can’t let down their guard. They’re maintaining very strict programs to ensure that their certifications are kept up and are working on four more beaches. They know you can’t isolate one beach from the others, so they’re working to keep up the standards so that every point on the coast is impeccable.

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1.) Choose a white according to your furniture style. Very bright pure whites (like Benjamin Moore’s Super White) tend to work best in minimal interiors with very modern furniture. Traditional furniture incorporating dark antique woods often looks out of place in bright white interiors but looks harmonious when pared with creamier whites (Linen White) with a hint of yellow, gold or taupe.
2.) Avoid white in rooms that are basic boxes. White looks fantastic in rooms with high ceilings, mouldings and large windows, but can seem very bland in new construction with no architectural details. If you use white in these circumstances, consider an accent wall of color or use colorful art to lend the room more interest.
3.) Choose a white with the color of your furniture in mind. White walls will reflect colorful furniture. A red couch will turn walls pinkish. A green couch will lend the walls a greenish cast. Choose a white keeping in mind how it will look when reflecting large colorful pieces. For example, if you’ve got a green couch, you might use a pinkish white to offset the color cast.
4.) Keep in mind where the light comes from. Where the windows face in a room can have a profound effect on the tone a white takes. Northfacing windows can make a white room appear grayish. Eastfacing light can lend a room a pink or lilac cast. Westfacing rooms may have an orange-gold cast, and southfacing rooms receive intense sunlight that can drain out color. Keep these color tones in mind by choosing a white that will help balance out color reflected by natural light. For example, you might use a white with a pink or yellow undertone for a northfacing room. You might choose a white with blue or green undertones for an eastfacing or southfacing room. If a room receives primarily artificial incandescent light, choose a warmer white, as a cool white with hints of blue can seem drab.
5.) Don’t paint high-traffic areas white. If you do choose white for areas that get a lot of use, be sure to choose a washable paint that can be wiped down often.
6.) Choose a warmer white to keep rooms from feeling sterile. Cool whites are much harder to pull off, and never feel cozy.
7.) Invest in a color wheel of white. Because there are so many shades of white, it makes sense to see the whole spectrum at once. Study the wheel, choose three or four to sample, and compare them by painting patches of your wall.
8.) Check out the favorites. Every designer seems to have a favorite white. These are some oft-cited favorites from Benjamin Moore: Decorator’s white, White Dove, Moonlight Night, Super White, Linen White, Cloud White, China White.

There are actually hundreds of  shades of white, each with a very specific feeling.  There’s Alpine White and Easter Lily. There’s Decorator’s White and China White. The list goes on and on. Some whites have hints of green or blue. Others hints of gray, red or yellow.  Some whites feel traditional, others feel hard-edged and modern. So how to choose?

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Carbon dating and infra-red analysis of the artist’s technique are consistent with such a conclusion, but the most compelling evidence is that fragment of a fingerprint.

Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, found it while examining images captured by the revolutionary multispectral camera from the Lumière Technology company, Antiques Trade Gazette reports today.

Mr Biro has pioneered the use of fingerprint technology to help to resolve art authentication disputes. Multispectral analysis reveals each layer of colour, and enables the pigment mixtures of each pixel to be identified without taking physical samples. The fingerprint corresponds to the tip of the index or middle finger, and is “highly comparable” to one on Leonardo’s St Jerome in the Vatican. Importantly, St Jerome is an early work from a time when Leonardo was not known to have employed assistants, making it likely that it is his fingerprint.

Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford, is convinced and recently completed a book about the find (as yet unpublished). He said that his first reaction was that “it sounded too good to be true — after 40 years in the business, I thought I’d seen it all”. But gradually, “all the bits fell into place.”

Professor Kemp has rechristened the picture, sold as Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress, as La Bella Principessa after identifying her, “by a process of elimination”, as Bianca Sforza, daughter of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (1452-1508), and his mistress Bernardina de Corradis. He described the profile as “subtle to an inexpressible degree”, as befits the artist best known for the Mona Lisa.

If it is by Leonardo, it would be the only known work by the artist on vellum although Professor Kemp points out that Leonardo asked the French court painter Jean Perréal about the technique of using coloured chalks on vellum in 1494.

The picture was bought in 1998 by Kate Ganz, a New York dealer, who sold it for about the same sum to the Canadian-born Europe-based connoisseur Peter Silverman in 2007. Ms Ganz had suggested that the portrait “may have been made by a German artist studying in Italy … based on paintings by Leonardo da Vinci”.

When Mr Silverman first saw it, in a drawer, “my heart started to beat a million times a minute,” he said. “I immediately thought this could be a Florentine artist. The idea of Leonardo came to me in a flash.”

Carbon-14 analysis of the vellum gave a date range of 1440-1650. Infra-red analysis revealed stylistic parallels to Leonardo’s other works, including a palm print in the chalk on the sitter’s neck “consistent … to Leonardo’s use of his hands in creating texture and shading”, according to Mr Biro.

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