If you’re looking for a little pick-me-up, how about an at-home blow-dry and some gorgeous, voluminous hair? Even if you don’t fancy giving it a go, the video I have to show you this week is well worth a watch, because it was made by two of my dear friends and two of the most talented hair stylists in the fashion world, Neil Moodie and Earl Simms. Oh, and you might recognise the model in the video, too…
How to Get Voluminous Hair at Home
In Neil’s ‘The Alphabet of Hair’ episode, he covers ‘V for Volume’, covering how to get voluminous hair, fullness and root-lift throughout the locks. You can watch the video below for all the techniques (and some pro wind-machine action at the end) and then read the tips to give it a go at home.
Image Credit @ Kent Baker for Wonderland Magazine
Root-lift
When people say their hair is flat, it’s usually because they don’t lift the roots. First, add a thickening spray or cream to the roots to prep the hair. Use a large round brush right in at the roots and follow the brush with a hair dryer. Once it’s dry, switch to cold and set the root lift in place.
Use a curling iron
Add a heat protecting hairspray to hair and then take the curling iron and wrap the hair around at the root, gently moving the hair over the iron to keep it in place. Once it’s cooled, brush it out.
Clip-in Extensions
Clip-in extensions are also a great way to add volume to your hair, but just make sure you get the positioning right. Section the hair where you’re going to add the clip-ins, add some spray and lightly backcomb right at the root. Add the middle clip in first as close to the scalp as possible then follow the line around clipping in.
S-Shaped Waves
With the curling iron behind the hair wrap the hair around the barrel away from the face creating the first wave. The take the iron out and place it in front of the hair, curling the hair in the opposite direction just below the first curl. Repeat until the end. Alternatively, curl all the way around the iron until the end, directing alternate sections of hair different ways (toward or away from the face).
Pretty major, no?
Stay safe everyone
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There are always new wellness therapies coming to the spa scene, and when you find one that works for you, it’s always good to share the news! I recently visited the Recharge Rooms in Notting Hill and checked out their wellness package, which consisted of two complementary therapies that are well worth checking out. If you haven’t heard about the benefits of an Ozone sauna, I thought I’d fill you in on the details, and also tell you about Mesojet facials, which utilise radio frequency technology to tackle skin ageing.
Image Credit @ Camilla Akrans for Vogue China
Ozone Sauna
A 30-minute visit to the Ozone Sauna acts as a holistic health and wellbeing procedure to introduce ozone to the body through the skin. This is a strategic wellness therapy, and promises to strengthen the immune system, boost energy and detoxify the body down to a cellular level. It does this by combining ozone, oxygen, far-infrared, steam, carbonic acid, electrotherapy, phonton light and aromatherapies. This might all sound a bit confusing but as well as delivering a host of benefits, the treatment itself is super relaxing, so you’ll emerge feeling calm, energised, and glowing. The lights in the unit change colour throughout the treatment which really adds to the relaxing experience, I absolutely loved it.
Mesojet Facial
Mesojet skin uses non-invasive, touch-free jet and radio frequency technology to deliver active skin enhancement including deep wrinkle reduction, making it an ideal anti-ageing facial. As well as reducing the impact of premature ageing, it also aims to achieve skin rejuvenation on a cellular level. The treatment uses a cutting-edge MesoJet machine (the very first in the UK) that combines two technologies to achieve results: MesoJet radio frequency (radio waves) technology and MesoJet needle-free infusion technology. Skin is left glowy and gorgeous, and it’s a great treatment to combine with the Ozone Sauna.
HOW?
Find out more at http://rechargerooms.co.uk/
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Beautiful, healthy, clear, and glowing skin is what every person desires, irrespective of gender, age or complexion. In today’s world when everyone wants to look presentable, having a good skin always helps. It not only makes you feel good about yourself, it also boosts your confidence. Most importantly, there’s no need to splurge money on expensive creams, serums, and facials when you can use simple ingredients and homemade treatments to get clear skin. In fact, Divyanka Tripathi who never fails to look gorgeous, even without makeup, has a basic skincare secret to share – she uses gram flour mixed with turmeric as a face pack on a regular basis, and that’s probably the reason behind her clear complexion. In this post, we have listed down 10 Ways to get clear complexion, do check them out.
1. The basic cleansing, toning, moisturizing and exfoliating routine is mandatory to get clear skin.
2. Cucumber juice is also very effective in getting rid of blemishes. Grate a cucumber and squeeze out the juice. Apply it on your face and leave it for few minutes. Wash your face as usual.
3. Mix honey with equal amount of lemon juice and apply it on face. Leave it for 10 minutes then wash your face with cool water.
4. Mixing honey with equal amount of almond oil is another very good option to have a clear complexion.
5. Make a face pack by soaking in a few strands of saffron along with a pinch of turmeric and 1 tbsp of besan in raw milk overnight. Make a paste out of two or three almonds and add it to the milk pack. Keep it in the fridge overnight and apply it on clean face in the morning. Rinse off after 20 minutes. Repeat this twice or thrice a week.
6. Drink at least 2 liters or 8 glasses of water daily to hydrate, nourish the body and to flush harmful toxins away.
7. Wash your face with gram flour mixed with water or milk. Massage this mixture on your face for a minute and then leave it for 5 minutes. Wash it away with normal water.
8.White radish juice mixed with honey can also be applied on face to achieve clear complexion.
9. Take 1 tsp oatmeal and 1/4 tsp sandalwood powder. Mix them with water and apply it on face for few minutes. Wash off with cool water.
10. Protect yourself from sun always, never forget to apply sunscreen, irrespective of the weather, whenever you step out. Exposure to sun is the root cause of a lot of skin issue – hyperpigmentation, premature ageing, wrinkles, age spots are only some of them.
Bonus Tips: Try to be happy and reduce the stress from your life. Also, do exercise daily to improve blood circulation and get that perfect glow.
The post 10 Ways To Get Clear Complexion appeared first on Makeupandbeauty.com.
Indian women love their hair and needless to mention, they love to keep it long. Generally, women like their tresses long, shiny, and soft, and to help you all with that, here are 9 amazing hair care tips for Indian women.e
1. Always follow up shampooing with a good conditioner because most shampoos leave hair dry and brittle, and without a conditioner, your hair would be at a high risk of splitting and breakage.
2. Almonds are high in vitamin E and it can help hair grow long and healthy. Here’s how you can use almond oil to grow hair long and strong. Here are “10 Amazing Skin and Hair Packs with Almonds” that you can try.
3. Castor oil and brahmi and amla oil are widely used in Indian hair oils. Mustard oil too is widely used for its good hair enhancing characters. So, grab herbal hair oils with these ingredients and oil your hair regularly or at least twice in a week.
4. Biotin is a nutrient that boosts hair growth and helps it grow long and strong, and here’s a list of biotin-rich food that can help your hair too.
5. It’s not just biotin which is great to grow long hair, here’s a list of “Biotin and 10 Other Hair Supplements For Long and Shiny Hair.”
6. Avoid excessive use of blow dryer, straightener, and curling tongs and never ever use such hairstyling tools without a thermal hair protectant to minimize damage to the hair.
7. Coconut oil mixed with hibiscus and curry leaves makes hair real healthy and strong and black. They take care of pre-mature greying as well.
8. Mix amla powder, ritha, shikakai powder together in curd and yogurt and apply it as hair mask, keep it for 20 minutes, and rinse off. Do this once a week.
9. Make your own herbal shampoo and replace it with regular shampoos that can damage and dry out the hair with harsh chemicals in them. Full recipe of a completely herbal shampoo that you can make at home here.
10 Amazing Skin and Hair Packs with Almonds
Biotin and 10 Other Hair Supplements For Long and Shiny Hair
The post 9 Hair Care Tips For Indian Women appeared first on Makeupandbeauty.com.
So this is a little strange. I haven’t written a blog post in years – to take a guess, I am going to say around 7. This domain, which once meant so much to me, which once had thousands of visitors a day and represented years and years of hard work, was about to lapse and I felt nothing. I was ready to just let it go.
Then a friend said to me, why don’t you just renew it for old times sake? I tried to open up this website and I couldn’t. Abandoned and unloved, bots and hacks had managed to completely bring the site down as well flooding my long forsaken Cosmetic Candy email (full of spam for V*agra which I can’t seem to stop). Like a derelict house covered in cobwebs and dust, I had let it fall apart.
This was once my baby before I had babies, and I didn’t even have the courtesy to replace it with a holding page, a picture of a cute kitten perhaps or a rickroll. I was a very bad caretaker.
Whether you used to read this blog or have just stumbled here because you were looking for sweets, here is some background.
This is not my bed because there are no crumbs.
What is this site?
Cosmetic Candy was a fairly bustling beauty blog which I started around 2003, then for 10 years ran with equal parts of excitement and boredom, joy and sadness. Long before everyone, from your nurse to your hairdresser was an influencer, I innocently opened up an ugly blogspot website to talk about my passion for make-up. It was fun and easy, no pressure, no commitments. It took years before us mere bloggers suddenly got sent free products to review, then came sponsorships and ads, and the rest is history.
Look at this gem I found – yes that is a piece of torn paper with my domain name on.
There were absolutely no guidelines back then, you made it up as you went along whilst filling up your sidebars with as many widget as humanly possible. Our sites were ugly, but our hearts were sincere.
Another gem. Make up pic taken with flash on some bedding with the date in the corner too.
When blogging was fun and successful, I adored trying new things, swatching, staying up till 3am to write blog posts whilst going to my 9-5 job. Sometimes I went to fun events and met interesting people, occasionally I was treated like something special, giving my ego a temporary boost. This period was probably the longest part of my blogging journey; there’s other stuff that used to go down alongside the fun stuff, like plagiarism, bitching, good old fashion back stabbing and so on. That may sound terrible, but it really was generally fun because it wasn’t ‘real life‘. Later on, it started to take up a lot of time, and did become like…well, a job.
Then like any “job” it got repetitive and the love for it definitely die.
Sure, receiving new beauty stuff through the door is very exciting, there are events with free food, but there really is only so much you can use and only so much you can store unless you’re a makeup artist or an esthetician. You feel obliged to go through piles and piles of products, the majority you are lukewarm about, and back then, most of us didn’t get paid for it. Please don’t get me wrong – what a lovely treat to be able to try beautiful products and have people read about it, and support you.
But it’s natural, I think, to get bored of the same thing over and over, and more importantly, I began to wonder if blogging, or rather, influencing, supported the kind of person you want to be. Did it up hold my values, my true self? For me, it most definitely got to the point where it did not.
The fact is, the competitive side of blogging was something I had to grow out of. I can’t imagine at this point of my life, with a young family and other commitments, being tied to blogging and getting outraged when someone got paid more for an instagram post, or when someone got something that you didn’t, people following and unfollowing. Stats and followers matter if you want to be paid, and whilst some earn theirs, many have to beg or buy subscribers to feel worthy. It just wasn’t something I wanted to be part of.
Another thing that I thought about was how more and more experts were joining the scene having seen how incredibly successful bloggers were. Dermatologists, cosmetic scientists, make up artists. In contrast, I was just an ordinary person talking about products I liked and didn’t like. I couldn’t tell you the benefits or weaknesses the way a dermatologist or cosmetic scientist can,’..because this ingredient is X and does X’, I couldn’t show you how a beauty product blended like a makeup artist either.
Nurse kitty is ready to do your fillers.
Does that mean my opinion didn’t matter? Of course not. But the point of being a non beauty professional, a normal Sally (sorry Sallies) was that I could give my genuine, normal-person-view of things. But once PR and sponsorship got involved, that began to change. I also didn’t have the desire to study beauty further, although I still do love all things makeup and skincare, the limits of what I had to say definitely reached its natural end after 10 years.
I did always do my best to tell the truth about a product and if you remember my blog, you’ll know that I did, but I found it was difficult at times. Can you honestly say, this product is a pile of poo, if you’ve been sent it for free (and you don’t want to miss out on more freebies) or if you’re being paid (certainly not). I don’t mean middle of the road opinions, but I mean really rip in to something you hate. It’s rare. This is not exclusive to bloggers/influencers by the way, celebrities do this too – it’s just business and (nearly) everyone has to make a living.
Some people who I started with have gone on to make a lot of money, some are now “famous” and some really deserve their success. This post isn’t really about that though – and I say, good for those who have made blogging into a viable job and those who are still going after 10 years – well done on having the stamina to keep up with the whippersnappers!
Undoubtedly, the best thing that came out of blogging is the friendships I’ve made with people I still talk to regularly. There are some seriously good eggs out there, and it’s taken the passage of time, with most of us retiring our blogs, to highlight how good those friendships are because it’s outlasted our hobby.
Where are the old posts?
Oh the issue of the old blog posts. I think I must’ve had close to 1000 posts (I used to blog A LOT). Due to the fact I didn’t update WordPress for such a long time, it’s all locked away in some kind of database which I can’t open or access. I should be sad, but I am sort of grateful. It represents a decade of my life which has gone, I’m sure I said some mindless things so I am happy for it to be vaulted. I do wish I could remember what my last blog post was though.
And….you were gone for 7 years???
Something like that. In the last 7 or so years, I have had three babies and I think I’ve done (so far) a pretty good job of making them in to kind, fun and happy little folk. Life still has its peaks and troughs, but hey, that’s life.
I am heading to a milestone and I am working on rediscovering who I am, and what I would like to do with my life before I die. (Sorry, I am a double Scorpio, I have a preoccupation with death).
Dr Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-Canadian doctor and writer with an interest in Childhood development, says that,
“The greatest gift a parent can give a child is his or her own happiness.”
So that will be my mission and focus, alongside the day to day, to make myself fulfilled and happy to be the best mother I can be, because they are my purpose now. It’s like a win-win situation.
Iron man approves.
As for this blog, I’d like to occasionally post on here, possibly about beauty or something else, but it will just totally depend on how I’m feeling. I hope to open up more and tell you what I am up to – maybe. Double Scorpio you see, it’s hard to not keep everything a secret.
I am on Twitter and Instagram if you want to follow my musings, and I have a new outlet for crafting passions (@2amcraftclub). My plan is to add my blog sale page on here as I am also currently decluttering area by area. I suppose you could say this blog clear up is also a form of decluttering too!
The lost year of 2020 has been a really good time for us as a family to stop and reevaluate things, and I am grateful for this time even though it has been unpredictable. I hope you have all been able to find something precious amid the mess caused by the Covid-19 virus and if you used to read here frequently, I thank you for your support in the past and hopefully in the future, and most of all, I wish you all purpose, luck and of course love.
Rowena.
9-7-2021 (that’s the 9th of July, my American friends).
