Cosmetics Galore

I just LOVE using natural methods to keep my facial skin toned, my muscles lifted underneath, my cheekbones high, and to keep my chin and neck from drooping. Admittedly, these are all due to the inescapable forces of gravity, which is something we all have to contend with the longer we are here on this earth.

However, we can somewhat defy these cruel laws of gravity by doing daily facial exercises which help to tone and lift the underlying muscles and fascia that lay beneath the skin on the face. This helps us not only fight wrinkles, sagging and aging, but it can fight the inevitable muscle erosion that occurs, making things fall down and generally look more slack.

One of the problems that I’m noticing on my own face has really started to bother me. These are the nasolabial folds as they are termed. These folds are those lines that run up from the edges of your mouth to the edges of your nose.

As we age, they tend to get deeper and the crease becomes more noticeable. Everyone notices this as they age, but some notice it a little earlier than others depending on their facial structure. I started to notice it several years ago on myself. They say you’re always your own harshest critic, and boy was I!

I’m 38 years old now, so I started to notice them when I was about 33. It was mostly in pictures that I could really see them, especially if my skin was really dehydrated since this exaggerates any folds or wrinkles present in the skin.

Nasolabial folds can really make you look older. The good news is, there are ways to puff them back out. I’ve just started trying a new yoga-inspired exercise I learned to hopefully get a natural (and totally free) result and will definitely report back to you with my results. However, there are also options that do not involve cutting (but do involve injections) that can address these creases.

Hyaluronic acid or filler injections can fill these folds out quickly. It takes a lot of the solution to fill them out though, so you could be looking at quite a costly bill when all said and done. Without further ado, I’d like to share with you the new exercise I learned to help address these folds naturally.

Even if this only helps a little, it will take only about thirty seconds out of your day. Oh, and you can do it anywhere. You’d just probably want to do it in private since it looks a little silly ?

Start by filling your mouth with air, so that it looks like you have jawbreakers in both sides of your mouth and the sides of your cheeks are both taut with pressure from the air.

First, roll the air all over to the right side of your mouth. Hold for five seconds. Then, roll the air over the left side of your mouth so your left cheek is puffing out a lot with the air pressure. Hold for five seconds.

Now, roll the air up to the top lip, so that the upper lip area is puffed out with the air. Hold for five seconds. Lastly, do that same thing with the area below your mouth and hold for five seconds.

That’s it! Literally less than a minute. Like I said I plan on doing these daily and reporting back with my results in a few weeks.

Everyone wants a flawless complexion but with a little effort and a few essential skincare products, the skin you have always wanted is within reach. Here are six tips to help you whip your skin in to shape in time for summer.

Cleanse Tone and Moisturise

Great skin starts with a good skin regime and therefore the first step to improving your complexion is to invest in some high quality skincare products. Our skin tends to pick up dirt and grease throughout the day and therefore it is essential that you remove every trace of this at night. Using a cleanser followed by a toner ensures that every trace of dirt, grime and makeup is removed. Finish with a high quality moisturiser to leave your skin feeling silky smooth. You can find a range of high quality skincare products including la prairie at Beautique.

Hit the Steam Room

If you attend a gym that has a steam room, there is a skin clearing secret that has been sitting under your nose the whole time. Regular trips to the steam room offer a number of benefits to your skin as it opens your pores and eliminates toxins from the body.

Up your Water Intake

Do you drink the recommended the eight glasses of water a day? Water helps to flush toxins out of our bodies and ensure our skin is hydrated. Drinking your recommended daily allowance of water can leave your skin looking healthy and clear.

Eat Well

Cleaning up your diet and replacing sugary foods with plenty of fruit and vegetables can have a wonderful effect on your skin. The food that you eat can affect your complexion for better or worse but including healthy foods in your diet can help you achieve a clear complexion.

De-Stress

When you are stressed, it shows on your skin and stressing about your skin can make things even worse. If you want clear skin, it is essential to relax. Indulge in a spot of yoga or visit a spa to take a break from your hectic schedule.

Try Green Tea

Green tea is packed full of antioxidants that are great for your skin. It is no surprise that what you put in to your body has an effect on how your skin looks on the outside and these herbal teas are a great alternative to black tea.

i-Lipo (also known as Laser Lipo) is one of the most recent developments in the so-called “noninvasive” fat removal techniques that promises to rid your problem areas of fatty deposits without cutting, lasering or otherwise breaking your skin.  So it purports to remove fat just as liposuction or Smart Lipo does, but only without actually removing the fat with a suction device.

When I see new techniques like this, I’m often skeptical. This is because any treatment that is supposed to remove fat from the body without actually physically removing it with a cannula or suction tube, has very mixed reviews from clients who have had the treatment done.

This happened with the Zerona procedure, which was supposed to freeze the fat cells by placing a topical freezing device on top of the skin. It was supposed to freeze and therefore destroy the fat cells, making them essentially explode and disintegrate so that they can then be flushed from the body by the body’s own natural mechanisms for getting rid of “toxins” and other debris that doesn’t belong.

i-Lipo says it does something very similar, except it uses deep red infrared lasers to destroy the fat cells beneath the surface by placing several paddles on the affected areas for a period of time. The place around me that offers the treatment locally then actually makes their patients do about a half hour or more of cardio so that the body can work the destroyed fat cells out on its own.

The importance of physical activity afterwards is definitely stressed even on the website of the manufacturer that makes the fat blasting technology, so the cardio must play a vital role in getting the body to remove the fat cells via its natural lymphatic drainage processes.

I did watch quite a few videos showing the procedure and the outcome and I must say they were pretty convincing.  The Doctors even had the procedure on, but then again they rave about a lot of procedures and that doesn’t necessarily mean they endorse them or say they work really well.

I actually got a Groupon offer for this procedure at a place near by where I live, which is what prompted me to start researching it. I have been a little out of the loop on the latest and greatest in cosmetic surgery technology, and I love to read about the new offerings.

The only thing that concerns me about this process is that I wonder how permanent the results are. The treatments end up being a lot cheaper than Smart Lipo or normal liposuction, but because the procedure only makes the fat cells dump the fat out of the cells, and doesn’t actually remove whole fat cells, I do have to wonder if the results are permanent.

Even though I’d be paying almost half of what I would for more expensive (and invasive) surgeries, it’s still a significant sum of money to be wasting if it’s not going to last a long time.  If anyone has any experiences with this Laser Lipo, I’d love if they could share it here!

So I’ve been hinting that I was looking for a good at-home solution for the cellulite that’s built up over the years on my thighs and butt (as well as a little on my stomach, which I never thought possible).  Well, I found the one I wanted, at the right price and with pretty good reviews as well.

I wanted something that seemed to have a high caliber of quality, and I wanted something from a brand that I’d actually heard of.  The Bliss Lean Machine is their cellulite treatment vacuum machine that they’ve recently come up with as an accompaniment to their already uber popular cellulite cream Fat Girl Slim.

I had used a similar device years ago and had some pretty good results with it, but it wasn’t very well made and didn’t last long.  I’m hoping this one lasts a little longer and gives the same great results. In the coming weeks I am going to provide my review and let all my readers know what kind of results I got from using the Bliss Lean Machine.

I plan on using it religiously as they advise, which is 3 minutes on each body part every day until you start to see results, then you can pare it back to a few times a week.  Not sure I’m going to use a cellulite cream with it or not, I’m thinking probably not.

Review will be forthcoming soon!

I just bought a home fat cavitation device for me and my husband to try out on some stubborn areas of fat on our bodies that we want to minimize. I also want to try it to help with the cellulite on my butt and thighs, as well as to help tighten my belly and possibly tighten the neck area, which seems to have accumulated fat under the chin.

Cavitation is a method to help the fat cells “dump” their contents and shrink. It does not eliminate the fat cells, just the contents of them, so in effect it has the same outcome as weight loss since our fat cells shrink with weight loss.

As with anything else non-invasive, there are plenty of naysayers and skeptics on this method. However, I’ve done more than my due diligence in researching ultrasonic fat cavitation, and firmly believe that if you follow the regimen and do it yourself at home at the right frequencies, you can get real results.

Plus I’m cheap and don’t want to pay for someone else to do it when I can do it myself and have more faith in myself doing it at the right intensity. When I want something I can be very disciplined at getting it done, so I’m definitely the right sort of personality for trying it out at home.

I’ll have more to come on my results and my husband’s results as well in the next few months. I believe it is being shipped from overseas because it won’t get here until the middle or end of May. I also purchased a suction device, the Bliss Lean Machine, so that I can do that as well and help to shape and tone the area after cavitation.

All in all, both devices cost me about $500, so if this works, even if it takes time and patience and dedication it will be well worth it!

More to come!

I highlight my hair at least once every summer. I have been doing this for the past several years. It’s a refreshing change from the solid colors of the fall and winter that I have for way too many months in the frigid days or Northeast Ohio.

There is another huge benefit to highlighting – especially with lighter, more blonde colors when you’re a brunette. The advantage is that you don’t see the grays that start sprouting up as readily. The blonde highlights are really a great camouflage for gray hairs coming up.  I find that I don’t catch myself looking in the mirror, trying to snatch those gray hairs between my fingers in an effort to get them out at all when it’s highlighted.

I always do it myself since I’ve been watching our budget like a hawk. I actually find that I like the outcome better when I do it myself. The last few times I had gone to a salon to get my hair highlighted, $80 to $100 later, I found that I often times couldn’t even tell my hair had been highlighted when I left the salon!

It was almost as if just because I told the stylist I wanted tasteful and natural, they were afraid to let the color develop at all.  I left with a slightly different shade of hair, and it wasn’t noticeable enough to even justify the money spent!  So I resolved to learn to do it myself.

I sometimes would go to a beauty supply store and buy all the components myself, but truthfully I find that most of the highlighting kits give me the same outcome. It’s all in the technique you use and watching the color develop closely to get the desired outcome.

I bought the Revlon Frost & Glow highlighting kit this time in the “Honey” color.  The model on the front had way too many highlights for my taste, but I knew that the honey colors were the ones I was looking for that would perfectly compliment my skin tone and the brunette shade I sport naturally.

It came with your typical developer and powder that you mix together in the little tray they provide you. You end up with a purple colored paste that you need to apply to your hair chunks as you want them.

The one thing I did not utilize in the kit was the provided highlighting cap and the little pick that you use to poke through the cap and pull through the selected small sections of hair to color.  I find these totally useless. Not to mention, the pick was so small that it would literally only pull through a few strands at a time.

I don’t like the cap method anyway, so I always just do my own foil method. I cut up little squares of foil, about 3 by 3 inches, and use these to separate the chunks of hair I want highlighted after I’ve brushed on the highlighting paste.

I bought small mascara-like brushes a while ago to do my own brush on highlighting, and I just re-use them every year. All you do is rinse them off when you’re done.  So I basically did my own brush-on highlights with the Revlon Frost & Glow highlighting kit instead of using their cap method.

The colors turned out great. I left it on a little too long on some areas in the front, so I”m going to have to wait for those to mellow out a bit, but overall the color is true to the picture. You really have to just be diligent in keeping an eye on the color every five to ten minutes so you can rinse it out when the desired color is achieved.

I’d buy this kit again for sure. It did what it said. It was cheap and it worked.  I liked the provided gentle shampoo and conditioner that came with it too, although to be fair I did mix some of my own conditioner with the tiny amount of conditioner they provided.

We’ve had a long winter and the thought of showing some skin when summer finally arrives can be a little daunting. There are many ways to boost your body image from beauty treatments to cosmetic surgery. However, these top tips will have you feeling fabulous come rain or shine.

Go Shopping

If you want to feel fabulous, looking good can help. If you want to boost your self confidence for the summer, make the shops your first stop. There are two main rules when shopping for a new look. The first is to always wear the right size. Squeezing into a smaller size can make you look bigger. The second rule is to dress for your shape. Identify your body shape and go online to research the types of clothes that will complement this.

Pamper Yourself

Sometimes a long soak in the tub or a relaxing body massage is all it takes to have us feeling a little more positive about our bodies. Looking after your skin can reduce cellulite and improve the way we look and feel. Detoxifying body wraps, manicures, pedicures and other beautifying treatments will make shedding some layers come summertime that little bit easier.

Be Positive

If you are always focusing on the things you dislike about your body it is easy to forget about the good things. Changing your mindset and the way you see yourself in the mirror can have a positive effect on your self confidence.

Improve your Posture

Losing weight isn’t the only way to look and feel good about your body. The way you hold yourself can affect the way you look and improving your posture can make you appear taller and leaner. There are many ways to improve your posture but Pilates and Yoga are one of the most popular methods. These exercises have many advantages including increased flexibility, muscle toning and detoxification as well as improved posture.

Get Moving

Regular exercise will boost your body confidence as not only does it encourage endorphins to flow around your body but it tones your muscles over time and helps you shape up in time for summer. Schedule in some gym time and watch your body confidence soar. If you can’t afford a gym membership, put on your trainers and go for a walk or a jog. Body confidence is easy to achieve but you have to be willing to work to achieve your health and fitness goals.

Thought I’d take a moment to solicit feedback from any readers who may have had good or bad experiences with various cellulite massaging devices. I remember years ago (the product is since discontinued) I purchased an IGIA massager.

It was a simple hand held vacuum type of massager that pulled and rolled the fatty areas of the body so that they could help to smooth out the collagen bands underlying the skin that pucker the skin and add to the appearance of cellulite when the fat gets bunched up within them.

This is the typical “dimpled” look that we all see on our butts and thighs mostly that we really would love to do away with.

Although IGIA didn’t have the best reputation for quality, this little device was pretty effective when I used it regularly. I don’t remember why I got rid of it to be honest. I think I just got tired of doing it, but if I had it now, I’d definitely still be using it.

I’ve been shopping around for something similar and had little luck until I came across a few on Amazon that looked promising. I’m not really looking for one that just vibrates or sends heat, I’m looking for one that has the same motion as the expensive in-office treatment called endermology since this treatment regimen has a great track record with getting rid of cellulite problem areas.

I found one that is made by Bliss, which is the cosmetics company that makes the Fat Girl Slim topical cellulite treatment products. These products are pretty popular and are known for their encapsulated caffeine ingredient. The suction cellulite device is called the Lean Machine.

The little device looks a lot like my IGIA massager did, almost identical in fact, and it provides the same rolling suction motion that my old massager did. The device is $145 and has gotten good reviews (although very few reviews) for having a good quality construction and effective and powerful suction.

While this may be a little more than I wanted to pay, it certainly pales in comparison to what I would pay in an aesthetician’s office for comparable types of treatments. If I end up buying this device, I’ll definitely be sure to report back to you on what my experience and ultimately what my results are after using it regularly for a few weeks.

Have you ever read a really great book about beauty or health or well being? One of my favorite genres to read about is actually self improvement, whether it be improving yourself on the inside or out, and I’ve always loved to read various versions of this.

I also love to read fiction and autobiographies and biographies as well. Pretty much any genre besides romance is ok in my book. I also always had a very strong conviction that I would never get one of those e-reading devices because I loved the feel and smell of paper so much.

I remember reading an article by a woman who was of the same mind I am on the subject a few years ago when e-readers like the Nook and Kindle really began to gain some popularity and handheld tablets like iPads were becoming more popular as well, which can double as an e-reader.

I totally agreed with this woman’s point of view and I thought wow, I’m glad someone else is in the “dark ages” on the subject because I was starting to feel like I was the only one that still enjoyed lugging around a paperback or hardback with me.

My husband used to ask me if I’d ever like to get one as a gift and I would adamantly refuse saying I just didn’t get it nor want one so that he wouldn’t dare try to get me one as a gift.

Well, this was the year that he had no idea what to get me for Christmas. We put a cap on our limit of what to buy one another. Let’s face it when you’ve been together for as long as we have, gifts just don’t matter, paying the bills on time matters more – and you can usually just get things you want for yourself if you want them that badly.

So when I opened a Nook from under the tree I was actually stunned that he had gone that route. I was unsure at first how to react because I just really didn’t expect it. I said oh well that’s cool and thought oh boy now I have to actually try this thing out to be honest.

Well, I can honestly say that after using my Nook now for a few weeks, I’m truly converted. Now don’t get me wrong, I would not put my nose up at a normal book now. I just see the merits of using an e-reader.

It’s light and portable first of all. You can put several books on it. You can fit it in your purse. The batter life is awesome and it goes into sleep mode quickly to conserve on battery when you’re not using it.

You can prop it up in front of you and easily turn the “pages” with a flick of your finger, unlike a book which you’d have to have a holder for to do something similar when lying in bed or sprawled out on the couch.

It’s just really, really convenient and easy to use. And the cost isn’t that bad either. Plus the books are usually cheaper in electronic format which is great.

I had bought a microneedle facial roller about one year ago. I used it every couple of days for the first few weeks I had it, and I must say I did notice a difference in the areas I had done with the needle roller. However as with so many other beauty ideas, I let it fall by the wayside for a while.

I also have to admit that it is kind of uncomfortable bordering on painful so it’s not something I totally look forward to doing.  After all, you are plunging little tiny stainless steel “needles” into your skin time and time again and how can that feel good?

So I did put my little needle roller (it only cost me a little more than twenty bucks) aside for a while, let it collect a little dust, and would go back to it here and there for some problem areas that were bothering me.

On of the things I try to do with the roller is to lighten age spots. I have a few age spots on the side of my face that gets a lot of sun and has had two stubborn little blobs of darkened skin for a while.

I am now trying to roller them away by rollering over them in every which direction with the microneedle, then applying a concentrated vitamin C serum (which I made myself and will be introducing to my line of natural skin and body care hopefully in the months to come).

It would sting a bit since the skin is a bit raw after you roll over it, but I began to see a difference after I had done it for about the tenth day in a row.I only was doing a spot treatment, so the time commitment was basically one minute of rolling – no big deal at all.

And when you’re dealing with such a tiny surface area, a minute can even be overkill because you can roll over one tiny are a while lot in a minute.

I like the results and am still playing with this and the concentrated vitamin C applications. I will keep you updated on my microneedling progress. What I can tell you is that the age spots I’m targeting have gotten larger but much lighter, like they are being spread out and broken up.

Hopefully they will completely disappear by my next update