Think you're the DIY beauty queen because your Pinterest page is stacked with pins for lemon and honey masks, apple cider vinegar toner and exfoliating coffee bean foot scrub? Before you get started on your papier mâché crown, give one of these DIY beauty gadgets a spin. When used correctly, our readers say these beauty devices saved them tons of time and money -- we're talking thousands of dollars. That's enough to bankroll your own DIY skin care line made from your personal lemon orchard and beehive, ladies. Here's the lowdown on spending a little (these high tech beauty gadgets aren't cheap) to save a lot.
In a perfect world, winter would turn us into totally adorable, fairy-like beings. Pink cheeks, flawless skin and long, dark eyelashes dusted with snowflakes should make up for winter storms and sky-high heating bills. In reality, a long winter takes its toll in other, less desirable ways, leaving us raw, red and sniffle-y.
February may be a short month, but there's a lot going on: Fashion Week, the Olympics and Valentines Day -- just to name a few. For this month's roundup of the best new beauty products, I'm ignoring all of those things and focusing on the products you'll want to buy for yourself. No street style inspiration. No roses. No gold medals. There's enough of that floating around already, don't you think?
How much time do you spend thinking about the way you wash your face? It's the most basic, essential step in your skin care routine, but I'm guessing you spend far more time obsessing over hiding pimples and wrinkles or sopping up the oil slick around your T-zone. Hate to break it to you, but the way you wash your face may be the source of those problems.
Would you rather be four feet tall or eight feet tall? Deaf or blind? Poor and beautiful or rich and ugly? If you've ever played the game "Would You Rather," you've probably contemplated similar hypothetical dilemmas.
If you have breakouts, covering your face in black soot probably seems like a really terrible idea. But if that black soot happens to be active charcoal, it may be just the acne cure you've been looking for.
We're all well-versed in time-related clichés: The right place at the right time, better late than never, time heals all wounds, timing is everything ... as tired as these platitudes are, when it comes to your beauty and health routines, timing really is everything. Did you know that the time of day you rub salicylic acid on your face could be the difference between "meh" and a miracle? And when you decide to go in for your wax can be the difference between a trauma or ... well, waxing is always kinda traumatic, but less so?
My showers usually fall on either end of a spectrum: they're either super short (like hop in, do one turn under the running water and hop out) or ridiculously drawn out blocks of contemplation -- drawn out to the point that I start getting lightheaded and I risk ending up unconscious, passed out on the shower floor. Turns out, both of these are doing a number on my hair and beauty routine.
When the weather turns from sunny and mild to cold and blustery, our skin often turns too -- from supple and hydrated to cracked, flaky and ashy. We know that adding moisture-infused products to our skin will help hydrate it. We also know (and have heard a thousand times) that in the winter we usually need to switch from lighter moisturizers to more intensely hydrating ones, right? Right.
Ever since I was a little girl, I've been fascinated by the glamour that seems to come from simply being French. I always went straight for my mom's Chanel lipstick when playing dress up -- sorry, mom. And I never got tired of watching "Sabrina" where one trip to Paris (and a jaw dropping collection of Givenchy gowns) transforms Audrey Hepburn from the less-than-glamorous chauffeur's daughter into a knockout.
Let's be honest: after a typical, jam-packed busy day, how many times have you run a wet washcloth over your face before bedtime and thought, "Too. Tired. To wash." ? Or maybe you spend a good 15 minutes washing, scrubbing and cleansing the last stubborn bits of makeup off ... only to wake up with raccoon eyes anyway.
When shopping for beauty products, we tend to look for a few key words on a bottle's label -- namely ones that assure us the product we're about to use has been tested on humans, not animals. But beauty treatments involving live animals? That's a whole different story.
Really, who doesn't have "combination" skin? I'm not talking about T-zones or the amount of oil one's skin produces. I'm talking about the battalion of products the average woman needs to combat her myriad of skin problems. When you've got wrinkles, breakouts, age spots and chapped lips at the same time, it's hard not to pile on a slew of products aimed at fighting different skin issues. But according to New York City dermatologist Jeannette Graf, M.D., assistant clinical professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai Medical Center, the concoction of products we layer on our face may not be the best recipe for great skin -- in fact, it could be a recipe for disaster (kind of like the time you blew up the living room with your chemistry set).
When it comes to skin care, most of us fall into one of two camps. There are those of us who never change our routine, using the same ill-suited face wash and moisturizer from our high school days. Then there's the other group, who embrace treatments like Botox and acid peels before there's a wrinkle in sight.
If you're anything like me, you love your eight hours a night (okay, seven … on a good day), but you wish you could function with less. All that time spent horizontal just seems so, well, unproductive. If sleep came in capsule form, I'd take it.
It's one thing when a celebrity endorses a brand. They sign on for a year or two, and their eerily airbrushed photos appear in magazine ads. They tell us in the beauty press about their favorite lotion or whatever the product line might be, but when the contract ends, POOF. They move on to the next big deal and I'm left thinking, "Maybe she didn't like that lotion after all …"