Over the years of Beauty Bible, we’ve done a fair bit of travelling: Jo has countless relations in the States and Oz and now even Sarah (who once upon a time only went as far as a horse, car or train could take her) has been to Australia twice! (Her about-to-be-husband has a home in Fremantle.)
Our mission, however – whether it’s a short train hop from Hastings to Charing Cross or a major trans-Continental flight across multiple time zones – is to travel happily, so that we can arrive gorgeously. So as the holiday season looms, here’s what we shared on the subject in our last-but-one book, The Green Beauty Bible – which happens to feature many travel beauty-boosters that you’ll find on VH…
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Really, it’s a wonder that we all manage Good Hair Days at all when you think of the number of factors that can affect hair health – from eating poorly, sleeping badly, and not drinking enough water (Beauty Bible’s eternal look-good mantra!), to hormonal imbalances. At this end of winter, too, hair can be parched and dried-out simply from having had the heating whacked up for what feels like way too many months now…
But the only option is not a paper bag: there’s an enormous amount that we can all do to boost hair health, year-round – and we’re not talking about wonder products you can apply: lifestyle and diet can have a much bigger impact than you’d imagine.
Of course by the time it becomes visible, hair’s actually ‘dead’. Which is why it’s so important to keep the scalp – where the hair is still alive and kicking, within the follicle – in good nick. So: what can we do to keep hair and scalp in peak condition? First of all, feed your follicles. Hair is made of a protein called keratin (the same as nails and skin), and protein – not surprisingly – needs to be nourished by a protein-rich diet, plus plenty of vitamins and minerals. That doesn’t mean a diet of huge steaks every day (though a little lean red meat, twice a week, is good for iron levels – which also help hair). But it does mean eating a good helping of protein daily.
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OK, so we’re beauty editors. But it’s always been a bit of a mystery to us that our hair and skin can be strong and lustrous while our fingers – which are made of the same protein as hair (keratin) – still tend to be weak, flaky and dry. However, over our years of research, we have just about managed to find a (multi-pronged) solution – and this month, we’re sharing it with you.
We long ago decided that the reason our nails are ‘challenged’ is the tough life our hands endure – because despite our tendency-to-raggedness fingernails, our toenails are just fine, thanks. Just reflect on a day in the life of your fingernails: constantly exposed to water and paper (wetting them makes nails swell, while paper is drying, so they shrink) – a cycle that repeated enough makes them brittle and fragile. Add to that pollutants of all kinds, plus the harsh chemicals in polish and remover. Well, no wonder they show the strain…
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On 14th February, most women will be fantasising about roses. Red ones. Pink ones. Fragrant ones. Giant bunches of them, so that the delivery person looks like a walking rose bush, with luck. (We can dream, can’t we…?)
But actually, at Beauty Bible, we’ve become pretty interested in a different aspect of rose-power. Because over the past 16 years we’ve been trialling products for our series of books, we’ve discovered something extraordinary: they push our testers’ buttons in a way that few other ingredients do. Consistently, we hear absolute raptures about rose-scented, rose-based, rose-infused products – to the point where we can put a small private bet on a rosy body cream, or eye treatment, or face mask, scoring well. (NB Despite every product going to 10 women, scores are almost invariably astonishingly consistent.)
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All year round, you need to keep your immune system in the best possible condition so it can work at its very best to keep you well. But at this time of year – when bugs seem to be flying around and our immune system can be challenged by getting chilled at a freezing bus stop, or simply running on empty after Christmas – it’s very easy for the immune system to take a dip, and for us to wind up in bed. So this month, we’d like to share some tips from our book The Green Beauty Bible, to help you stay well through the year’s early, health-challenging months.
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Women eat, chew and lick our way through the equivalent of as many as four lipsticks, in a lifetime. (Or two tubes a year – depending on which expert we’re talking to.) So not surprisingly, at Beauty Bible we’ve always been rather keen that lip products should be good enough to eat.
Because of course while the debate rages about exactly how much of a body moisturiser or a skin toner is absorbed into the skin, there is no debate about where your lip products are ending up. The same place as your breakfast, lunch and dinner, basically. ‘Conventional’ lipsticks may contain paraffin, saccharine, mineral oil and synthetic colours, as well as fragrance – think: that nostalgic ‘mummy’s lipstick’ smell – which can be very drying to the lips.
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To paraphrase Nora Ephron, don’t feel bad about your neck.
We love Nora Ephron (screenwriter for Heartburn, Julie & Julia etc.), and author of the hilarious (and wise) collection of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck, in which she writes: ‘One of my biggest regrets – bigger even than not buying the apartment on East Seventh-fifth Street, bigger even than my worst romantic catastrophe – is that I didn’t spend my youth staring lovingly at my neck. It never crossed my mind to be grateful for it…. Of course now I am older, I’m wise and sage and mellow. And it’s also true that I honestly do understand just what matters in life. But guess what? It’s my neck.’
We agree with Nora that necks can be angst-inducing. But we say: any neck – even ‘turkey neck’ (a horrible term for a sagging neck) – can be improved, with targeted and diligent TLC. So here’s some wisdom from The Anti-Ageing Beauty Bible (NB Victoria Health is the only place where you can buy copies that have been signed by us…)
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There are a couple of upsides as we approach the end of summer. (Honestly, there are.) First of all, for anyone who has children, the bliss of not having to be a sort of Butlin’s Redcoat, day in, day out, dreaming up excitements to keep everyone from vegging out on the sofa – and secondly, we’re entering the Spa Season.
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We used to think that a friend of ours – then editor of Tatler – was being so grand when she refused to be photographed before lunchtime. Now we absolutely understand what she meant. One of the commonest causes of those ‘oh, s**t’ moments – when we really feel like we’ve fast-forwarded a decade or two – is seeing ourselves in a hideous snap. ‘Do I really look like that…?’ Well, the answer is not really: in real life, people take in all of you (voice, smile, twinkling eyes) – whereas in a snapshot, it’s so easy to see only your flaws.
So: we believe in positive reinforcement. Remember: it’s possible to take a hideous picture of anyone (think of all those ‘drunken’ celebrity shots which actually caught them mid-blink). But it makes all of us feel better about ourselves if we can glimpse at a photo and go, ‘Actually, not looking so bad…’
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The hay fever season, this year, seems to be going on forever – which is just one reason why we get many, many e-mails to www.beautybible.com about the problem of eye bags.
We know they really, really bother women. More so, in some cases, than lines and wrinkles. (We all develop lines and wrinkls, over time, but not everyone is prey to eye bags.)
So, as a little ‘taster’ of what’s in our book The Anti-Ageing Beauty Bible, for this month’s VH editorial we thought we’d share with you some of the secrets we’ve learned over – oooh, too many years to count, in the beauty business. Because they really work!
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