this article of mine will tell you why you simply HAVE to give it a chance…

http://alligator.org/articles/2008/07/17/the_avenue/fashion/080717_beauty.txt 

check out my article on great summer choices for girls and guys:

http://alligator.org/articles/2008/06/19/the_avenue/features/080619_scents.txt 

Lorac’s Blush/Bronzer Duo (Sephora, $28.50) is my new favorite summer makeup treasure. It’s a two in one product with both blush and bronzer. It will give you that perfect sun-goddess look you desire. Tip for my ladies: Toss the brush that comes with it and use a regular bronzer/powder brush. Those flat brushes make the powder look streaky when it goes on.

Image: Sephora.com

It seems we often forget how harmful the sun’s rays can really be – both to our health and our good looks. According to the National Cancer Institute, there are expected to be over 1 million new cases of skin cancer in 2008 alone. With so many products on the shelves containing SPF, there is no need for you to be one of those million. If the threat of cancer doesn’t make you want to wear sunscreen, then just realize that every moment you spend outside without sunscreen is bringing you closer to wrinkles and age spots, which are equally as unappealing on men as they are on women.

Most people don’t wear sunscreen because they see it as a hassle. In reality, adding a dose of sunscreen to your daily routine is as easy as switching to products containing SPF. What’s great is that nowadays, more and more beauty companies are trying to raise awareness of proper sun protection and are adding SPF into many of their products. This means that finding a product with the right amount of protection is a lot easier than it was in the past.

For guys, the best way to protect their skin is by using a moisturizer with built-in SPF such as Clinique Superdefense Triple Action Moisturizer SPF 25 (Clinique.com, $39.50). Girls who don’t usually wear makeup can do the same and stick with an SPF-infused moisturizer. Those who wear makeup daily can use a regular moisturizer and find a foundation that contains SPF instead. Tinted moisturizer has become extremely popular for this reason – it’s a two-in-one product. A great one to try is Laura Mercier Tinted Moisturizer SPF 20 (Sephora, $42). Most companies also make SPF-injected versions of their powders and bronzers. There is no excuse for not being safe when it comes to the sun – taking a few extra moments in the beauty section to find a product with SPF can prove invaluable to your health and beauty in the long run.

Check out my first officially published article with some great summer tips!

So, I’m always looking for new ways to improve the texture of my hair. I mean, who isn’t, right? But seriously, my family has a history of extremely dry, unmanageable hair. You know when they show the model’s hair all tangled and frizzy before, then all beautiful and shiny after on those Garnier hair commercials? Yeah. That’s me. The before. And we all know that the “after” — the perfect shiny hair — is very difficult and time-consuming to obtain for many of us. Though some products help, there’s only so much they can do and most are hardly the miracle products they claim to be in their advertisements.

But, there’s hope. I found one. A miracle product, that is. Well, a miracle treatment, rather. One you will never believe until you try it. This is big news! Like you-just-won-a-shopping-spree-at-Sephora big! Like the-day-man-invented-lipstick big! I found a semi-new and very under the radar treatment that will literally — in only three hours — make your hair as soft as a baby’s.

It’s called a Brazilian Keratin Treatment. And, let me tell you. It is literally like a rebirth for your hair. It will take even the most helpless and unmanageable hair and turn it into perfect silky, shiny locks so easily it’s magic. And even better, according to BrazilianKeratin.com, it doesn’t contain all the heavy chemicals found in the more common Japanese Hair Straightening and causes minimal damage to the hair. Basically it just infuses your hair with the proteins (largely Keratin) it had when you were born and helps your hair regain that youthful feel. It’s that simple.

Before having the treatment, it would take me close to an hour of wrangling with several different tools and products to achieve the look I wanted. And once I finally got it right, I would walk outside and the humidity would undo all my hard work. Now, it takes me literally five minutes to blow-dry my hair perfectly straight and I don’t even need a flat iron! Even the Florida humidity is not a factor since the Keratin acts like a protective shield against frizz. Best of all - this treatment is also totally convenient since you only have to do it every three to six months! Trust me – once you try the treatment, you will never want to stop. So find the salon nearest you that does Brazilian Keratin Straightening and give it a try. We’ll see if you still think miracles don’t exist once your treatment is over.

Image: Beauty and the Bath . com

Marc Anthony Pro Root Touch-Up, featured in Allure this month, is AWESOME for those of us who color our hair on a regular basis. It has a special formula that colors your hair quickly with no mess. It can give your color an extra few weeks of life before you need to get a salon touchup! How awesome is that?! And it only costs….wait for it….TEN bucks! Check it out! You will thank me later!

Image: Walgreens.com

To shave or not to shave down there? It seems this really is one of the ongoing questions in every culture. Below the belt grooming has always been somewhat of a taboo in our society since, unlike most beauty practices, it is not spoken of openly. There has been an unmistakable revolution in the past few decades towards the idea that “less is more” when we’re talking about hair down there. All cultures have their own practices when it comes to its removal, but for the most part, getting rid of pubic hair is not only an accepted practice in almost every culture, but, more often than not, it is expected.

Sometimes, it’s even mandated by religious ideology. Let me explain. In the religion of Islam the removal of genital hair is actually required by the “fitrah” (a part of the Qur’an that can be loosely translated to mean “natural disposition”). According to this religious text, all Muslim women are expected to remove their pubic hair in order to purify their body. This sacred text also mandates that Muslims are circumcised (if they’re male, obviously!), clip their nails, cut their mustache short (also only if they’re male, I would hope!) and remove their armpit hair. In this religion, the cleansing of the body and soul is of extreme importance and thus, the removal of hair down there is considered to be imperative for cleanliness.

As for those of us who don’t remove our bush for religious reasons, I wonder what caused us to start, and why we were created with this seemingly useless accessory in the first place? Granted, I could ask the same of leg hair, but that’s a whole other column!

There are a lot of theories about why we have pubic hair. Many people claim that it supposedly protects bacteria from getting into a woman’s vagina. But I’m not sure I buy it. If that were really true, then the hundreds of women I know who shave everything off on a daily basis would constantly have bacterial infections – which is definitely not the case. Other people claim that it allegedly keeps our natural pheromones trapped in order to sexually attract a potential mate. Now this theory seems even more bewildering seeing as most women feel more comfortable when they shower right before sex and make sure there’s no odor down there at all. Both of these theories seem slightly unfounded and neither of them really has any concrete proof.

When it comes down to it though, it has become the cultural norm for women to remove at least part of their bush if not all of it. It makes me wonder, how did we, as people, mentally evolve into preferring less hair down there and will we ever go back to liking more?

Looking back, pubic hair maintenance was a lot simpler in the past than it is today. Nowadays, most men expect a clean shave from their women, and most ladies want to be as hair-free as they can in order to feel womanly. Of course, you have those men who don’t like it when girls shave because it makes them feel like they’re having sexual relations with a child, but for the most part, our cultural view of genital hair has become a negative one. In America, as a society, it seems that we just don’t like it. Any hair, that is. Unless its on our head, it’s not really accepted. As Americans, we like women to be clean-shaven and hair-free pretty much everywhere below their eyes.

But seriously, how did we get here? Even just decades ago, it was considered natural for women to have pubic hair. Bathing suits were shaped to cover the entire region so as to completely conceal the genital area (and any hairs that came with it!). “Down there” grooming was less expected than it is today. In the 70’s and 80’s, as fashions changed and bikinis became ever-more teeny, women became more conscious of the importance of maintaining a clean below-the-belt region. Waxing and shaving became more popular in this part of the body and it became generally unacceptable to have any hairs sticking out of your tiny bathing suit.

Today, it seems that developments in pornography have actually been the main cause of our changing mentality towards genital grooming. At the end of the last century and the beginning of the 21st, adult films featured more and more completely bare women, and as a result, the current generation of men grew up with, you could say, a fear of the bush. When these young boys went through puberty, bought their first Playboys and watched their first dirty movies, their expectations of a clean-shave were first instilled. So, naturally, these boys grew up and had standards for their girlfriend’s below-the-belt maintenance to which many modern women slowly but surely obliged. And, voilà, nowadays it seems that the vast majority of college-aged and young adult women have taken the clean-shaven fad to a new level and made it into a cultural norm. Today, it feels like pubic hair removal is no longer the taboo, but not removing the bush is the greatest taboo of all.

Sources: islam-watch.org, dearsugar.com
Images: netscape.com, minimicrobikinis.com, iofferophoto.com, flashgames.com

Angelina Jolie. Jessica Alba. Rachel McAdams. Nicole Scherzinger. Scarlett Johanssen. Eva Longoria. The names we have all come to know as one word. Sexy. The women any girl would die to look like. The women men fantasize about every night. A girl can’t help but wonder what makes them so damn sexy and how you can get to be that sexy too?!

Yes, all these women have great bodies that make them physically appealing to the human eye, but I would argue that their sexiness really comes from within. All of these women are physically very different. They have different body types and facial features, but they are still all considered gorgeous.

They all have one thing in common though. Well, actually, three things…

The first is their enormous passion for their lives and their careers. All of these women have attained very high levels of success in their jobs. They all do what they love to do day in and day out. All of them have worked their pretty butts off to get to where they are. The word laziness doesn’t exist in the vocabulary of this group. All of them have the career success every woman wants and the admiration every human being craves. They are the pinnacles of success and the benchmarks for all aspiring careerwomen, regardless of their chosen career path. You can see in their eyes that their lives are full of passion. They never backed down and never allowed anyone to tell them that they couldn’t succeed. They feel pride in their accomplishments, which gives them fulfillment and happiness. And happy people exude sexiness.

The second commonality between the three is the glamour and beauty they bring into their everyday lives with their makeup and clothing they wear. I read once that if you want to get anywhere in your career or your love life, you need to approach each day like it matters. Approach each day like YOU matter. Take the thirty minutes in the morning to do your makeup and hair. Spend some money on your wardrobe to make yourself feel sexy and beautiful everyday. Not only do you never know who you may run into, but even if you don’t run into anyone, it will make you feel good. Because when it comes down to it, if you don’t believe in how sexy and gorgeous you are, no one else will. Which brings me to the third idea…

All of these women send out an aura that they KNOW they are sexy and glamorous and fierce, and no one can take that away from them. They take that time every morning to make sure they feel beautiful and in turn everyone knows that they matter. They feel more beautiful inside because they take the time to make themselves beautiful on the out.

That’s where makeup and fashion can be life changing. It can make you find that inner confidence to move through each day with a sense of calm and the knowledge that you are gorgeous! Remember, when it comes down to it, you are the one who has to believe in your own beauty. If you wait for others to tell you how sexy and beautiful you are, you will always be disappointed and unfulfilled. Why do you need someone else to tell you anyways? You are beautiful and you should own it!

So next time you see these gorgeous women on the covers of magazines, don’t wish you were them. Instead, remember that they are only sexy and beautiful because they wake up every day and put the time into looking and feeling the part. They don’t wait for others to tell them what they are and aren’t. They know they’re hot and successful, and what other people think comes in second.

So, don’t spend your life wishing you looked different. Or thinking that if you could just be this or that celebrity your life would be different. A life spent thinking that way would be a life wasted. You are who you are. So tomorrow, take the time to make yourself feel as beautiful as you deserve to feel, because you are amazing and the only person who needs to tell you that is you.

Images: tv.com, kitmeout.com

So, on allure.com, there is an article talking about Botox and a recent study that discovered there may be potentially harmful side effects to the product. It got me to thinking about the whole concept of Botox. On the one hand, I very much believe that every woman should beautify herself in any way she can and if for her that means is Botox, then who I am to say that it is not a good idea. If it makes her days brighter, and if she is able to afford the treatment, why not indulge in a little confidence-boosting Botox session?

But then another part of me fears for the one million plus Botox users and I wonder whether, eventually, more reports like the one discovered by Allure will surface proving the dangers behind the product. In theory it seems miraculous that an injection can take years off your face. It makes me wonder, maybe it is just too miraculous to be true. It’s like that old saying, “What seems to good to be true usually is.” It just seems unrealistic that injecting a toxin into your body could cause no long term harm in the user. Maybe one-timers will not be affected, but I have a hard time believing that constant users of Botox would not be impacted by what is essentially an injection of poison.

When it comes down to it, Botox (also known as Botulinum Toxin A) is really a neurotoxin that results from the same bacterium (clostridium botulinum) that causes the paralyzing and often fatal food poisoning known as Botulism; Botulism can cause paralization and even death in extreme cases. So basically, by having Botox injections, a person is essentially putting into their body something that when consumed is potentially deadly. Now you tell me how that will not cause some sort of longterm damage?

It’s very essential that these cosmetics firms do more testing on the product to ensure its longterm safety, but realistically, the drug was FDA approved for cosmetic use in 2002, so the long term data will not exist for many more decades to come.

So it’s really up to you whether you want to take this risk. For me, beauty is not worth dying for. Plus with so many other cosmetics out there that can help with fine lines and wrinkles, you can achieve similar results without the toxin. And, if you are young, the BEST way to prevent premature aging is to use a sunscreen-infused facial cream every day so as to constantly be protected from the suns harmful rays. Remember: In the long run, prevention is always the best solution when it comes to aging.

Image: dbtechno.com