RSS3 Workouts To Love
July 18, 2010
If you’re looking for more emotional strength in your life, grab yourself a weight. I am not fond of moving more than 8lbs of weight. With these exercises and 3lbs., right away I feel like “well, I can do this, it’s only 3lbs!”. Remember that every ounce of fat that you replace with muscle sucks up more calories every minute of the day. You get to reap the reward of exercise even while you’re not working out.
Read moreNo Secrets in My House
July 8, 2010
Rather hard to force secrets into the open. Keeping problems quiet and dark makes them safe. They get stronger because they look bigger, just like everything does in the dark. The problem grows inside your lonely imagination. And then you get this crazy idea that you’re the only one fighting and that you’re fighting alone.
Read moreSites To Know : Inside Out Style Blog by Imogen Lamport
January 20, 2010
I don’t buy into North America’s adulation with the winners of the fame and fortune lottery, so I particularly enjoy sites and blogs written by non-North-Americans. We hero worship celebrities and in trying to look like them, we don’t like our own looks. But it’s THEM that look crazy. We’re the ones who look normal.
Read moreProduct Review : Paula’s Choice Resist Barrier Repair Moisturizer
October 19, 2009
This article may be better titled “The Language That Sells To Women”. It is not a review in the traditional sense. I apologize if I offend, that is not my intention.
Read moreSqueeze by Tracy Effinger
August 18, 2009
She’s gorgeous, she’s powerful, and obviously doesn’t buy into the Barbie body mentality that fitness people are probably pressured with, especially if they work with celebrities.
How fascinating would it be to have lunch with this woman. Her mind thinks way beyond the surface of things. Finding the connections between seemingly separate elements is one of the great talents of female brains. It always sends a spark in me when I see it.
Growth Occurs In Recovery
August 14, 2009
No one can go from 0 to 100 instantly, nor should they. You’d miss out on the real appreciation of what 100 is all about. The fastest way to move forward may be to create some aerodynamic drag to slow ourselves down. Let success find you.
Read moreFitness Magazine July/August 2009: A Keeper
August 6, 2009
The best thing about this magazine is that it feels like it’s for the real world. It doesn’t harp on the weight loss, I-got-to-a-size-6, thing as much as the health and strength benefits. This is not an anatomy lesson or a journey beyond your outer limits. It is intended to be practical and motivating.
Read moreSites To Know : Pretty Your World
January 9, 2009
I’ve been waiting a year and a half to find Pretty Your World. I read the entire thing in 3 hours. There are other color sites out there but few hold a candle to this one because it is so much more a teaching site than a marketing site. In most cases, the marketing is only thinly veiled by an attempt to teach, but PYW is about teaching and it does so outstandingly well.
The most important image tool
You may know how much importance I place on getting your colors right to look good. The terribly overdone choice of black for evening. The ubiquitous blonde highlights. The supposedly safe charcoal gray or navy suit. They just don’t work on everyone. Ellen DeGeneres in black, Nicole Kidman in washed out blonde hair, even celebs get it wrong.
We all notice it, not just people who like color. The dress you complimented someone on but really thought didn’t look special at all. The friend who spent a fortune on a new coat and she really looks pale and washed out, but you felt you had to say something nice. The warm brown hair on women with no warmth in their skin, so the hair takes over the face.
I really like Color Me Beautiful‘s first book because it was my introduction the 4 color season way to analyze people’s colors. It made the whole thing simple enough to understand. It is unbeatable as a place to begin but there were still people I couldn’t fit into the scheme. I get most confused by celebs with hair dyed the color of corn or Springs with brown hair (like Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music, who seems most often thought of as Spring). Or why some women that I’m certain are Autumns look so good in black. I’m hopeless with women of color. Ask and it shall be answered. Along came Pretty Your World.
Lora Alexander
Lora Alexander is an esthetician, a makeup artist, and a Certified Image Consultant. Color and Art are her primary interests, with close second loves of makeup, color analysis, and beauty psychology.
The 12 Season System
The system is based on a more complete 12 Season color analysis, which Lora believes to be the ONLY accurate system there is, and I absolutely agree. The 4 seasons we know are broken down to each have 3 sub-categories. You don’t begin by finding your season. Rather, you find yourself in the 6 descriptions of Deep, Clear, Light, Soft, Cool, and Warm. Secondly, you identify yourself among the 2 choices of Warm or Cool. Combining the first 6 and the last 2 gives you the 12 combinations. So you could be Deep Winter, Cool Winter, or Clear Winter. The breakdown is found on the Analyze Yourself page.
There are plenty of examples, using celebrities. There are excellent but not overly detailed explanations. The system is broken down in various ways, in a stepwise process, to help you find your place. There are links using Eye Color and Hair Color to help guide your choice. It is unbelievable to me that Lora began this site only 2 months ago. She’s already created THE best teaching site about personal color analysis on the internet.
A walk through PYW
I was completely amazed to see how much Lora and I have in common – like our love of Kevyn Aucoin, our belief in Paula Begoun’s work, our over-40 vintage, our season (Autumn), the fact that we colorcast people within a few minutes of meeting them (though I’m not nearly as good at it as she is), our thriftyness (but we are not cheap!) and our passion for finding beauty advice that works in the REAL world.
She doesn’t pull any punches. We are in perfect agreement when she states, in The Truth About Beauty , that the cosmetics industry lies to us day in and day out and we still can’t give them money fast enough.
Though it may be not be fair, she is also right that we are judged immediately by others and most of it is on appearance. We are not judged on whether or not we’re Gwyneth Paltrow look-alikes. We are judged on the use we’ve made of what we have. Following the “Even someone naturally beautiful…” link on that page will take you to the famous Dove billboard ad and how much artifice the beauty industry is based on. Empower yourself. Learn which products work. Learn your colors.
I love Celebrity Style because it shows celebs in their various hair color tryouts.
Just for fun, but fun it is, there are 4 pages of celebs without makeup. Would we look twice at any of those faces in the mall or pushing a grocery cart? We would not. Their 5’10”, 110 lb bodies, maybe.
How to most improve your looks
I totally get that not everyone wants the bother of makeup. Most women probably don’t. But, listen. Makeup is EASY once you know your season. Your makeup colors ARE your clothing colors. It’s all right there. Even your hair colors are in your palettes!
What I don’t understand is why a woman would not take the time to know her colors just to make good clothing choices. It totally transforms how you look. Why spend $200 or $100 or $10 on something that not only doesn’t flatter your looks, but actually detracts?
You might prefer a certain style of dress or cut of jacket and nobody could argue with your taste. But only 1 of the 3 Springs will ever look gorgeous in black. A Summer never will. You might as well paint a drab grayish foundation color on your face, darken the shadows under your eyes, and get it over with.
I know Autumn women reading this will be saying “I like ballet pink and I’m g.d. well going to wear it.” Do what you gotta do. Hopefully the pink thing doesn’t cost a lot. You will never look rich, vibrant, and powerful in pink. Wear it but not to a meeting. Or an argument. Or a 10 year reunion.
Experiment with success
Many women have some sense of what colors suit them but there’s still a lot of confusion out there. The whole topic seems intimidating. They might have a sense of their general category or some good safe basics. To find a collection of 50!! colors that would be great on YOU – now that’s a gift. You could be more adventuresome, get away from safe, and look amazing.
Where do you start? How do you find your colors when you go shopping? Well, you start here. Like everything else, you get help when you need it, even if it costs money. You send in your picture. You buy the swatch book. You take it shopping. The swatch kit on Lora’s site, and all the extras that come with it, looks fantastic.
Remember the articles on Gift Ideas 1 – 5, back in December? Well, no gift, and I mean NO gift, NONE, could come close to buying a woman her color swatches. Gift certificates are available but the surprise and gratitude of giving a woman her own colors would be worth it.
The palettes themselves aren’t at PYW – or anywhere on the internet. Lora recommends looking at the book Color Me Beautiful’s Looking Your Best for good explanations and 28-color layouts of each of the 12 Seasons, with verbal descriptions of the full 48colors for each season at the end. (The Click to LOOK doesn’t work, it’s just coming from Amazon.)
I bought this book and it’s pretty good. The best thing about it is that it explains the 12 Season system quite well, particularly how a season can crossover and borrow colors from another season. This expands your palette but in a controlled way that is understandable. There is still the hair/clothing/style advice but it’s outdated (the first version was published in 1991). Most disappointing to me was that the 28 colors are hard to see. They look like they’re painted on concrete, grainy and rough. The swatches in the original book were better. Still worth it for the explanation of the 12 Seasons if you’re into it, though.
Have your colors done!
Still don’t believe your color analysis can be done on the internet? In a future post (once I know the date, I’ll post it in the Upcoming link on the front page of this site), Lora will do an in depth color analysis using pictures of me with makeup, without makeup, close-ups of my eyes, and pictures of my hair color when I was young. I’m off to her site to fill out the questionnaire.
Take a serious look at what you get for $89.95 on that same page.
-->I’ve been waiting a year and a half to find Pretty Your World. I read the entire thing in 3 hours. There are other color sites out there but few hold a candle to this one because it is so much more a teaching site than a marketing site. In most cases, the marketing is only thinly veiled by an attempt to teach, but PYW is about teaching and it does so outstandingly well.
Read moreThis Month In O Dec 2008 : Feed Your Right Brain
November 29, 2008
I love Oprah. Well, everyone loves Oprah.
I don’t watch the show, but then I watch no TV. I just like who she is and who she’s trying to be. I like the magazine more and more.
Those books in her book club… The fiction plots are suicidally dark. The spiritual guides seem completely without grounding, just floating around in the ether, holding on to nothing. I’ve tried wearing my tin foil hat, the one with the receivers at the ends of the antennae, but I still can’t get these Buddha-Lite books. Still, any woman with such awareness of her journey will find answers. She’s just following another of the many paths.
Right Brain matters
In this issue, Oprah is interviewing the author of the book I’m presently reading. It’s a book everyone should read if they want to be future-adapted. The book is Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind : Why Right Brainers Will Rule The Future.
Do many of us still belong to a generation that encourages our kids to be accountants, engineers, computer experts instead of cooks and bedsheet designers? I’d have to count myself in. I’m wrong and doing them harm with my 50 year old advice. Why encourage them to do jobs that machines and Asians already do faster and cheaper and that might not even exist on this continent in 15 years?
What cannot be done by anyone else, here or in Mumbai, is to add the particular stamp of creativity that is uniquely ours. It might be found in the design of the lipstick case, in the emotionally beautiful story that goes with the coat giving it meaning beyond all others, or in the story behind the computer game that gives it value beyond all others.
Right Brain practice
For those of us who are primarily Left Brainers, hope isn’t lost. To succeed in every sense of the word, we first will have to redefine “succeed”. Second, we’re going to have to learn to add some R Brain inputs to our usual L Brain output. In the book, Pink gives us six senses we can develop to get our R Brain cooking.
Every skillset is partially in the gene but can be learned and developed. If you’re not sure where opening up your R brain begins, have a look at Betty Edwards’ most fantastic books, Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and Drawing On The Artist Within. See what you can learn to see in a week. These are not books about changing how you draw, they’re about changing how you see, in a very literal sense. Begin with Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, the first book. Give yourself 7 days and nothing in your world will ever look the same to you unless you’re already an artist.
The basis of it all is that we’ve reached a point of guaranteed physical comfort. We now have the freedom to think more about what it all means. A candle isn’t light and heat anymore, it’s tranquility and uplifting fragrance. Our homes can’t hold our harvest of stuff. The pendulum is swinging away from accumulation for its own sake to owning less but having it symbolize more.
This has great implications all round. At last, we’re getting beyond what things look like. Hopefully, we’ll make the same progress where bodies and faces are concerned. Pink says that he predicts baby boomers are going to do something astonishing. There are so many of them, together with we stragglers, that our combined mental energies will find a way to give our lives reason and worth.
The new News
Every issue brings stories of how women are being empowered to look after themselves and their families, this time with making bracelets. The article on how women brought peace to Liberia, and the movie of the excellent name (Pray The Devil Back To Hell), also raises my head a little higher for all women.
I feel good reading Oprah when I see how humans are helping humans. A surgeon and his all-woman team travel to politically dangerous Zimbabwe to correct cleft lip/palate facial deformity in children. THIS is what should be on CNN every night. It makes you feel good for the right reasons. O is becoming the magazine for the News I want to know, not the horrors they force-feed us.
Does accepting stress help control it?
What I try to come away with and hold on to is the sense of not resisting everything all the time. So the tire was flat, the bank machine ate the card, you weigh 5 lbs more than you want, the window broke, you missed lunch. Why storm and rage? Why not accept and cope? I strive to be one of those people who is inwardly very calm, as Oprah seems to be. The outside may be busy but the center is still. (Those of you who know me can stop laughing. It’s mean and I really am trying.)
In the article on dealing with holiday pressure, and as we know already, it discusses powerlessness as the most destructive type of stress. I don’t know if it’s better to fight and resist all the time or accept. Is accepting a type of resignation and a sign that hope has been lost? The nurses on the surgical team in Zimbabwe notice that the Africans are more accepting of what life brings. Is resisting vs. accepting just a cultural difference or a symbol of our indefatigable belief that things CAN be made better? There were many connected ideas in this issue.
Music and family
With Oprah, Sissy Spacek, and Suze Orman wearing metallic gold, I was glad to see that they didn’t dress Dan Pink that way. Or Dr. Phil for that matter though a Yuletide tie might have been a festive touch.
Fascinating piece by neurologist Oliver Sacks on music’s ability to break through many forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. The comprehension of music penetrates and outlives what the disease has done to the brain tissue. Sometimes, this ability that music has to shine through the darkness even persists for long periods after the music was heard. Why is this not in commonplace use, I wonder? A short article but I found it rather amazing.
The best, best line in the whole magazine is where Oprah says “ I don’t know what I love more, my bathtub or my bed”. Why, I think we might be long-lost sisters (or it just proves that all women are long-lost sisters).
Our first outing together after our reunion really should be to go shopping. We’d go to Target and Mark’s Work Wearhouse. We’d discuss the fact that if someone spends $50 on me, I’d really rather not get a bookmark no matter how pretty and functional it is (from the gift suggestion articles). And the ball of 100 hair elastics for my kids… into the vacuum and the cat, one by one, after they’d thrown it at each other a few times.
-->In this issue, Oprah is interviewing the author of the book I’m presently reading. It’s a book everyone should read if they want to be future-adapted. The book is Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind : Why Right Brainers Will Rule The Future.
Do many of us still belong to a generation that encourages our kids to be accountants, engineers, computer experts instead of cooks and bedsheet designers? I’d have to count myself in. I’m wrong and doing them harm with my 50 year old advice.
Sites To Know : stillGorgeous
November 1, 2008
Here is the website of two British women, Kathryn Hamlin and Laura Barker. Kathryn and Laura might holiday in Greece and think nothing of shopping and seeing plays in London. They use different products than we do. We’d have trouble driving each other’s cars.
The thing I love about this website is the reminder that beyond the superficial differences, women everywhere are the same. It’s especially so as we get older and develop a stronger sense of what really matters in life. We’ve coped with losses, raised children, seen our bodies change, all constants regardless of the language you speak or currency you use. They have a great balancing effect.
Kathryn (in front) and Laura, being cool on a Harley.
We’re all trying to keep our children happy, healthy, and entertained so they become happy, healthy, and successful. We’re trying to preserve our sanity and the last dollar in our wallets. We’re growing and finding ourselves as human beings and exploring the many facets of relationships. Many of us have finally seen how vital our contribution is within our families and to this planet’s wellbeing.
Kathryn and Laura’s site, like AGT, is dedicated to making the most of the mature years. They reject any notion that it’s all downhill, as do I. There is celebration here, not defeat. Hope and love for themselves and their families prevail, not resignation to superficial concerns like, oh heavens, wrinkles!
Kathryn Hamlin.
Laura Barker.
Kathryn’s About Page is sobering. Having lost her sister to accident when she was 14 and her mother to illness at 17, effectively the entire female side of her family, she somehow survived to become a happily married mother of 4. Today, she is 45. Perhaps because she has proven herself such a survivor, life seems to be sending her for a tumble once again with her own health difficulties.
Now this woman could have given in to depression, or simply self-pity. Instead she chose to provide an understanding ear and heartfelt support to those coping with adversity. In strengthening and supporting other women, she is also empowering herself in her own life. Her website provides “an oasis of tranquility”, a place to moan a little, and to receive a virtual hug from someone who’s been there.
stillGorgeous was created in May 2007 when Kathryn and Laura decided to find a new challenge once their youngest children had started school. With no previous computer or business knowledge and after a lot of late night foraging on the internet for information, they built the website themselves. The steep learning curve has continued but it’s a journey they are still enjoying and it fits in well with their family commitments, despite a few grumbles that the home baked goods are in scarcer supply than they used to be!
At the London Premiere of Pirates, Dead Man's Chest (LB on left, friend Carrie, KH on right)
When you browse at stillGorgeous, you’ll find features on fashion, beauty, health, and travel. There are articles on homemade skin treatments, ways to save money and pass a rainy day, and recommendations for great reading or movies. They take on family issues and the working woman’s balancing feat.
Carrie's publicity board, signed by Johnny and Orlando!
The Glam Gals from Fabulous After 40 visit now and again. Deborah and JoJami are Image and Style Experts, and write one of the best sites out there showing women over 40 how to look vibrant, fashion-savvy, and age appropriate. Their latest article at stillGorgeous is all about how to look fabulous in under 10 minutes this fall.
Style Experts Deborah Boland and JoJami Tyler.
Of course, I headed straight to the articles on makeup and looked at some of the Best Cosmetics as voted by the CEW (Cosmetic Executive Women Awards). Since this is a hot button for me, I had to wonder where European women go for independent reviews of products before they buy them. They have access to the same information we do, but what do they actually use?
Most impressive is the ability to create join the sG community by creating your own social network page. It’s a lovely site where you can upload videos and photos, and find women of our age group without having to filter millions of facebook and MySpace pages.
My thoughts are very much with Kathryn right now as she copes with her health concerns. I was very happy to hear that she found so much relief from acupuncture, and this was her first treatment! Hang in there, Kathryn. You have more strength than you know. We all do.
-->Here is the website of two British women, Kathryn Hamlin and Laura Barker.The thing I love about this website is the reminder that beyond the superficial differences, women everywhere are the same. It’s especially so as we get older and develop a stronger sense of what really matters in life. We’ve coped with losses, raised children, seen our bodies change, all constants regardless of the language you speak or currency you use.
Read moreGet daily makeup and colour updates. Join the 12 Blueprints Fan Club on Facebook! A Click on the box will take you there.
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