Artifacts caused by cosmetics in MR imaging of the head.

Cosmetics can produce severe distortion of the orbital contents in MR imaging. This distortion, typical of compounds that exhibit a permanent magnetic moment, results from iron oxide in the pigments used to produce dark shades of makeup. In general, the artifact created by cosmetics does not interfere with interpreting routine head scans. However, if the orbital contents are the subject of clinical concern, the images may then be rendered nondiagnostic. The artifact created by the makeup is propagated along the frequency-encoding axis of the images.