1970s Styles: Disco Makeup, Retro Hair & Bell Bottom Fashions

The Sixties left the coming decade with an taste for the natural, and the Seventies era particularized the “Natural Look” to makeup and hair. Hair was long, smooth, often very straight, but ideally with a flip on the ends. Think the Mary Tyler Moore show, and you've got the early to middle '70s in a nutshell.

The longer hairstyles still required the large curlers (which could really damage your hairwith daily use) used in the '60s to create big waves, but electric curling irons were added to the mix when Farrah Fawcett Majors became on of the decade's "It" girls. The flicked up hair cuts worn to some extent by all of Charlie's Angels was applied to bangs or wings on the sides of the head. Farrah combined flicks on both sides with a high lofted center and amazing, wavy curls in streaky golden hair. Never mind that the fabulous Angel had stylists galore to keep her look fresh and "natural"; everybody wanted to look like that. And 'that' entailed more than a superb and constantly-renewed layered haircut: it meant hours with the curling iron, plenty of hair spray or mousse and strict avoidance of anything athletic, outdoorsy or the least bit—well, you know—natural.

1970's make-up styles had a natural, surfer appeal

Along with the "natural" hair of the '70s came a natural look in skin and cosmetics. Earlier decades had made fashionable the dead white complexion, the flawless matte of a movie star skin, and the rosy blush of innocence through the magic of foundation. In the Seventies, it was cool to resemble to surfers at Venice Beach: an all over tan, a golden glow around the face, and minimal looking make up were the things to strive for. Bronzers made an appearance, fake tanning fluids turned thousands of young women bright orange, and women who today look with alarm at the spots appearing on middle aged skin laid out all summer covered all too lightly in a bikini and a slick coat of baby oil.

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Vintage Accessories Never Go Out of Style

Some of today’s hottest looks and fashions can claim influences from several past decades and trends. The long, flowing hairstyles and natural makeup looks of the 1970s have returned with an updated flair. You’ll frequently see retro-styled clothing, with either hippie or disco flair, constantly popping up on the biggest celebrities in Hollywood. Keep in mind that there are, however, certain retro looks that have seen better days and make a better costume than outfit. So, whether you’re in need of some unique vintage accessories, like hats, glasses, or jewelry, or you’ve got a costume party and need a killer disguise, there are tons of choices from the 60s and 70s to get you the exact look you’re hoping for. Don’t believe everything you hear: disco is not dead—you’ll see when you check out the many costume selections and extras available!

Removing Unwanted Female Facial Hair: How to Remove Hair on the Jaw, Chin & Upper Lip

What causes facial hair in women? The same hormones that cause it in men. Let's face it: we're a hairy breed. And in the all too human world of beauty, we value smooth, hairless skin. Our hormones create hair, even in the female of the species, and as women we spend a lot of time fighting Nature to please Fashion. Removing facial hair is an issue for women all over the world: even in ancient times, women used hot honey and tree saps to remove unwanted hair from the jaw line, upper lip, eyebrows and chin.

Waxing Unwanted Facial Hair

Today, waxing is still a popular hair removal option: it's relatively inexpensive, more thorough than plucking individual hairs with tweezers and can be done any time. Hot wax kits consist of a "wax" made of sugar or honey, (this is called "sugaring"), beeswax or resin. The easiest way to do waxing at home is to buy a microwavable wax, apply with a wooden spatula, then spread with a strip of cotton muslin and pull off the wax along with the offending hair. But, if you don't have the patience to melt the wax slowly at the recommended power setting, stir it thoroughly, test a tiny bit on the tip of your finger and ascertain whether it's too hot, you shouldn't do that kind of waxing because you run the risk of getting badly burned. Microwaves work hot and fast, and the wax must be carefully watched, timed, stirred, and tested before applying. It takes patience.

--Editors Tip ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Tired of Tweezing or Plucking? Try Natural Hair Removal Gel

Many women have unwanted facial hair on their jaw, chin, or lip. Women have hair-producing hormones, just like men, some have it worse than others! Especially as women get older, unwanted facial hair can become more of an annoying beauty problem. Checking every day in the mirror and plucking or tweezing as necessary gets old. Home waxing is painful and very messy. Using a natural hair removal gel can not only avoid the mess and the pain of waxing, but the natural ingredients remove hair directly from the root and give you professional results. Natural hair removal gels will leave your skin moisturized and smooth—as well as hairless! Natural hair removal can leave your skin hair free for up to six weeks, and it’s perfect to use on not only your face, but your underarms or bikini line, too.

Get that summer body smooth and hair-free and ready for the beach!
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Bleaching Upper Lip Hair to Reduce its Appearance

Another popular at-home hair removal method is bleach. You can buy cream bleaching creams that are mixed with an activator and then applied to the facial hair. You cannot use cream bleaches on eyebrows or anywhere near your eyes—if they get in your eyes, you can go blind. Some people may experience facial redness or sensitivity from bleaching, so it's a good idea to do a 24 hour test patch first. But if the bleach doesn't bother your skin, and if you use it weekly, you'll not only be rendering facial hair more invisible, after awhile it will become fragile and start to break off, lessening its appearance even more.

Shaving is not a best practice for removing facial hair

Some people wonder how to remove facial hair by shaving, and this is a good place to say that shaving is a bad idea. It will leave stubble, and the only thing worse than facial hair is facial stubble. Forget shaving anything on your face.

Electrolysis is permanent removal, but become an old technique

Electrolysis has long been considered a good way to remove hair permanently, but it's pretty much a bygone era at this point. Electrolysis is permanent, but it may cause pinpoint scarring; it's expensive and it hurts like blue blazes. Treatments can also cause redness and swelling or breakouts, and you risk infection (all of which are temporary). Scrap electrolysis: if you want permanent hair removal and can afford it, the thing to do is laser hair removal. Unlike electrolysis, there are no needles involved; pain is practically non-existent, any redness disappears in an hour or so, and it really works. Laser hair removal is the best remover on the planet: thousands of Brazilian bikini lines can't be wrong! Just keep in mind that laser hair removal works better on darker brunette hair than it does blonde. You will need multiple laser hair removal treatments over many months in order to be hair free.

Business Professional Dress Code: What Women Should Wear in the Office

Your work wardrobe depends largely on what you do for a living, and if you aren't a natural-born fashion hound, it can be difficult to put together work ensembles that are practical, comfortable and affordable. Besides the obligatory chinos and polo shirt-uniforms of many retail establishments, there are three types of working wardrobes: professional, business casual and casual. In this column, we're going to cover the basics of dressing for the professional office.

What is a Business Professional Dress Code?

Probably the easiest wardrobe to assemble is the professional one that most large corporate firms expect from women. Most corporations and firms whose employees affect professional dress have strict if unwritten dress codes: observing what other people wear is the best way to decide on your own wardrobe basics.

Even now, many firms expect women to dress in skirts rather than pants to work, which raises complications in terms of choosing comfortable shoes that look good. If you are applying for a position with a company where professional dress is the norm, do as much reconnaissance work as you can to determine what designers are favored, whether suit blouses are strictly white and tailored or more feminine and colorful, and what makeup styles are in fashion. Wear the best shoes you can afford to your interview, spend more money on hose that won't snag and run before you even get to the interview, and wear a skirt, even if women also wear pants in that culture..

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First Date Tips: Advice on What to Wear and Ideas on How to Act

There are three extremely trying times to choose the right clothes for the occasion: job interviews, first dates and meeting the parents nights. First date dressing is tough because you usually don't know the other person well enough to predict what will be attractive to him. You want to look fabulous but not unattainable, chic but not cheap. Add to the problem that you may or may not be familiar with where you are going, and you have the perfect explanation for women who choose to stay home in a chenille robe with a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck and a box of microwave kettle cornLet's go over some first date dress basics. Maybe you'll get lucky and I'll have an idea you haven't already considered.

Any ideas on where you going on your first date?

If you can, have a conversation with your date to find out where you're going. But be simple with your questions to make sure you dont' sound to controlling. This will help immeasurably, even if you can just get a sense of the formality of the occasion. A good tip is it's always better to be a little overdressed. We've all at some time or another ended up at the baseball game in a frilly, walk-in-the-park sundress, which beats hell out of going to see Itzhak Perlman wearing skateboarding pants (which happened to me once).

--Editors Tip ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Good Date Movies For At Home Dates

If you are still on your first few dates with a guy or girl, stay away from the serious dramas, bloody action flicks, and overly sad romantic (mushy-gushy) movies. Try sticking with up-beat, light hearted movies that are in the romantic comedy genre. He'll enjoy the comedy and you can enjoy the little bit of romance.

Exfoliating Homemade Body Scrubs with Simple Sugar & Salt Recipes for the Home Kitchen

Body scrubs have always been a beauty must. Cleopatra's slaves rubbed her down with granulated honey and myrrh, an upscale version of the scrubs of pumice, barley hulls and goat's milk used by lesser Egyptians of the day. Body scrubs have proliferated lately, with recipes including grains, nut shells, sea shells, salts and other minerals scrape-scrape-scraping away the layers and leaving fresh, new skin behind.

It's Easy to Make Body Scrubs at Home

You may have noticed that you're paying a lot of dough for a handful of scrub. Read the ingredients: you're paying for sexy packaging! Most scrubs contain salt, sugar or nut shells and you can buy any of those things for well under fifty cents a pound. But the seven ounce coconut scrub from The Body Shop sells for $17. How long does it take to use up less than one cup of body scrub? Not long!

Universal Body Scrub Recipe To Follow

2 Parts Salt or Sugar + 1 Part Beauty Oil + Essential Oil
= Basic Body Scrub

You Choose the Natural Exfoliate Ingredients

Make your own body polish! Choose your favorite fragrances, control the granularity of the scrub, avoid ingredients that you may be allergic to, and create a big potful of body polish with about $10 worth of ingredients. Or you can make a cupful for under a dollar and decide if you like the recipe. It's a breeze: you'll need a spoon, a bowl, and a container for storage.

Step 1: Choose Your Salt or Sugar Exfoliate (amount = 2 parts)

Review the table below to see the types of sugar or salts that are readily available at any grocery or health food store.

Salts (listed finer to courser)
• Fine Salt
  
• Table Salt
  
• Sea Salt
  
• Kosher Salt
  
• Epsom Salt
  

Sugars (listed finer to courser)
• Fine Sugar
  
• Brown Sugar
  
• White Sugar
  
• Turbinado (raw sugar)
  

Step 2: Choose a Beauty Oil (amount = 1 part)

The beauty oil will turn the salt or sugar into a moisturizing slurry that can be rubbed into wet or dry skin. Review the table of beauty oils below to see their skin benefits. You can always use more than one oil. These can be found at most grocery or drugstores with a natural food department.

Suggested Beauty Oils for Body Scrubs
• Apricot oil - great for sensitive skin
• Avocado oil - great for dry skin
• Coconut oil - great for moisturizing
• Grape seed oil - great for oily skin, acne prone skin
• Jojoba oil - great for moisturizing for all skin types
• Olive oil - great for moisturizing (but strong smell)
• Sesame oil - great for its anti-oxidant properties
• Almond oil - great for moisturizing for all skin types
• Vitamin E oil - great for healing & moisturizing

Step 3: Choose Your Fragrance & Special Additives (several drops)

The sky is the limit when it comes to adding fragrance to your homemade body scrub. You can use any blend of essential oils that can be found at many natural food stores. You can also use fragrance sources from your own kitchen like vanilla extract or citrus fruits. This is a place to experiment and make it your own!

You may also want to add additional ingredients to your scrubs like aloe vera for its skin soothing properties, tea tree oil for its anti-inflammatory properties or honey to improve the texture or your scrub. If need more ideas on additives you can incorporate view the ingredient labels of premade natural body scrubs at your local beauty store or natural foods market.

Storing Your Body Scrub

Scrubs stored in the refrigerator should last up to 4 weeks. Just keep a couple days worth in the shower for regular use. If your scrub starts to smell, look or feel "funny" throw it out and start a new batch.

Raw sugar (Turbinado) isn't as harsh as other natural exfoliates.

Using Sugar as the Exfoliating Ingredient

Try it sweet. Sugar isn't as harsh as ground nut shells: it melts fast when it hits moisture, so if your skin is delicate, you're probably not going to over-scrub it. The other benefit is the fact that sugar, unlike pumice, ground shells and other insoluble ingredients, will melt instead of sticking in your bathtub drains. Here's what you need to make a large batch:

Homemade Sugar Body Scrub Recipe

• 1 Cups turbinado (raw sugar) or light brown sugar

• ¼ Cups avocado, untoasted sesame oil or jojoba oil

• ¼ Cup apricot or peach kernel oil

• essential oil (we used ginger and vanilla)

• honey for smoothing the texture

4 Fixes for Damaged Hair: Home Remedies and Treatments to Repair Dry Hair

Dry, damaged hair is one of life's little horrors: it won't ruin you, but it won't do you any good. Maybe your hair was caught in a freak, hot roller accident; perhaps chemical straighteners or perms have tortured it into a permanent, frizzy fright wig. You may seek treatment from a local salon, but the stylist might recommend a crew cut. So, what can you do to repair extremely damaged hair that doesn't require a period of enforced baldness? Or what if you're darned close to bald already from chlorine, hair color, blow drying and other hair related emergencies?People most likely to have damaged hair include those with fine hair and African Americans who use straighteners or keep their hair in cornrows (this tightness can damage the hair follicles and cause hair loss) . African American's hair is very delicate –usually drier than Caucasian hair, and can be easily ruined by chemicals and heat.

Cutting off damaged hair into a medium-short style will improve your hairstyles overall health.

Remedy 1:
Cut Off Some or All Damaged Hair at a GOOD Salon

If your hair has been truly wrecked, sometimes the best thing to do is have professional advice and then cut off as muchdamaged hair and split ends as possible so you can start fresh. You know when to cut off your hair: it's when you'd rather be bald than look the way you do now! A super-short haircut can be appealing if you go to someone who will shape the cut to your face. Understanding face shape is the difference between a ten dollar, ten minute hair cut and an admittedly more expensive, hopefully much nicer one.

If you decide to treat your damaged hair instead, you will need to limit blow drying, flat ironing and other heat styling tools.

Remedy 2:
Keep the Damaged Hair, but Take Special Care to Protect Healthy Hair

Home remedies for "hair gone wrong" include restoration of moisture to hair not too severely damaged and making way for regrowth. In the case of hair ruined by hot rollers or straightening, you may have a few inches of relatively undamaged hair on the scalp. Get a medium-severe haircut to get rid of the frizzled hair tips, or leave the damage right where it is and concentrate on protecting the good hair. Leave off the chemicals, avoid the blow dryer and other heated hair appliances, and use gentle shampoo as infrequently as you dare. Shampoo strips oils from your hair, making it more brittle, so if you don't really need to shampoo, cut it down to once a week or so. And forget vitamins in shampoo: they don't work. You can try taking vitamins internally to keep your hair strong as a side effect of your increased health, but there aren't any vitamins that help when applied externally.

Argan oil and other natural oil deep conditioning masks and treatments can help treat and prevent dry, damaged hair.

Remedy 3:
Use an Over the Counter Deep Conditioning Treatment

Buy deep conditioner hot oil products at the drugstore, or go the homemade route for less money. Hot oil treatments (actually, the oil is warm, not hot), work by starting with dampened hair, softening the cuticle and locking in the water by sealing the outside of the hair with a coating of oil. You can make your hair drier by using hot oil if you then go and wash it all out with a harsh shampoo.

There are also various deep conditioning hair masks and leave in conditioners that can be used about once a week to repair and prevent damage to hair. Some of these products are left on about 10 minutes and others are overnight treatments depending on the brand. Ingredients like argon oil, macadamia oil, coconut oil and other natural oils are in many of these products. These oils can do wonder for hair as a repair treatment as well as a hair damage prevention treatment. A good beauty store (Ulta, Sephora, etc) or local hair salon should have a variety of hair repair conditioning treatments available.

If you don't have time to run to the beauty store, try a homemade peanut oil hair treatment.

Remedy 4:
Homemade Moisturizing Treatment for Damaged Hair

Deep conditioning home remedies and recipes for fried hair include mayonnaise, avocado and egg, but some of us prefer to eat our salads, not wear them. You can get the job done using any cooking oil (but peanut oil will make you smell peanutty!) Coconut suntan oil is a favorite, and it smells terrific, too. Rinse your hair with warm water, apply the oil from the palm of your hand, working it into your hair. Now comes the warm part: wrap your head in a towel or a plastic hair bag that comes with hair color kits, or in some cling wrap, and sit around in it as long as you can. Cover your pillow with a safety-pinned towel and sleep on it overnight. Next day, use a moisturizing or gentle baby shampoo to wash out the greasiness.

The Perfect Eyebrow Arch: Shaping Your Brows with Plucking & Tweezers

Eyebrows are tricky creatures. You know how they’re supposed to look, but sometimes they don’t want to cooperate, and because they’re growing out of your head, they have a semi permanent character that defies wishes and good intentionsOne of the many problems of eyebrows is the fact that if they aren’t the right color, they can either dominate your face or disappear entirely. Their unfortunate (but necessary) proximity to your eyeballs makes it a pretty major no-no to just sweep the haircolor across each brow and hope it doesn’t drip into your eyes. That’s why the goddess of practical beauty created the eyebrow pencil, an unsatisfactory solution, but sometimes better than nothing if your eyebrows happen to be very pale.

--Editor's Note --------------------------------------------------------------

Proper Beauty Tools Make Eyebrow Shaping a Breeze

Plucking the perfect eyebrow shape can be a stressful task because no one wants painful, over tweezed brows. Follow the lead of to make up artists and get the right tweezers and eyebrow care beauty tools. For very little money you can get the same eyebrow tweezers most professional salons use.

Learn from the professionals and see some eyebrow care kits that come with everything you need for perfect brows.

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Shaping Your Eyebrows: How to get the perfect arch shape

Shape is also crucial, and if your eyebrows are coarse, creating and maintaining the ideal shape is difficult because pulling out individual hairs can leave large gaps, or severely shorten the length of a brow if you happen to pull out the half-inch hair on the very end.

The perfect eyebrow starts above the inside corner of your eye (over the tear duct), and ends at the outside corner, above your eyelashes. Eyebrows should have an arch: in nature, it’s rarely where it should be, which is a frustrating commentary on standards of beauty. Ideally, the arch happens over the iris, the colored part of your eye. It should be gentle, so if you’re planning to reshape your arch, take it very, very slowly. Do a hair or two a day, and err on the side of caution. Hasty plucking can give you a surprised look that lasts for weeks.

How to Pluck Eyebrows with Tweezers: The Do's and Don'ts

Many women pluck their eyebrows with tweezers. Some wax them, but wax is tricky because it’s hard to get an accurate shape. And some go to a hair removal salon to try "threading." Although threading is newly popular in the United States, it is a centuries-old technique of hair removal practiced in India. The eyebrow experts say never, never to pluck your eyebrows from above, but always to pluck from the bottom of the brow. I say, if you have some wild or stray or bushy hairs growing above your brows, feel free to pluck them. I did it once, and nothing bad happened to me.

I read somewhere that it’s okay to trim your eyebrows. I think this is good if the single hairs are long and thick. You can pluck some hairs and trim the others, brushing them up, evening the ends (be careful not to trim too much!), then brushing them down checking again and again as you go along.