At this time of year, who has time for high-maintenance pampering?  We’d certainly rather be outdoors, enjoying the beach/barbecue/our begonias, or just watching the sun go down.  And at Beauty Bible we’ve a hunch what we all want – fixes that make us look fantastic – fast.

So this edition, we’re going to let you in on the secret of making your hair look fab, in a flash. So:  here are our best beauty cheats and short-cuts – so you can spend less time on getting gorgeous, more time on making the most of summer, while the sun shines.  (Trust us:  there’ll be plenty of time for long, languid beauty rituals in a locked bathroom, when the clocks go back again…)

And watch this space on VH for how to perform speedy miracles on face and body, next month…

HAIR

Slather on conditioner, in the sun. This does double-duty:  it protects your hair from the ravages of salt water and chlorine, and if you rinse your hair thoroughly when you get back from the beach, you shouldn’t need to shampoo and condition it from scratch.  Ideally, wet your hair first, then slather on a rich conditioner or a hair mask, and comb through.

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Following on from our Summer Hair Short-Cuts which featured here in July, some time-saving body cheats – and a few of Beauty Bible’s best make-up tricks, to give you an instant, glamorous glow, in the blink of a (waterproof mascara-ed) eye…

BODY

For silky skin, become a scrubber. We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: we are constantly impressed by the power of body scrubs to buff away even that stubborn chicken-y skin on the derrière, knees, heels and elbows;  a couple of sessions with an oil-based scrub packed with either salt or sugar can transform dull, sluggish skin faster than you’d imagine possible.

Discover skin tints. Unlike self-tanners, body tints are temporary (they shower off, and don’t have the characteristic biscuit-y smell of most fake tans).  We’re all converts at Beauty Bible Towers, because they work brilliantly to instantly deliver a can’t-tell-it-from-real bronze tint to bronze pasty limbs, and to even out strap/bikini marks. (A tip:  we find that no matter how moisturising the formula claims to be, truly seamless results are achieved by applying body lotion first.)

Feel like a lemon. Cut a lemon in half, squeeze out a little juice, and sit down to read a magazine with your elbows propped in the two halves.  The natural  fruit acids will bleach the skin (which tends to be darker), while leaving elbows silky-soft.

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You wouldn’t dream of eating food that’s gone past its ‘use-by’ date – but maybe you’re still trying to eke out a Jurassic Age mascara….  But at Beauty Bible we get many e-mails asking:  how can you tell if cosmetics have gone off…?

Helpfully, though you might not even realise it, cosmetics do now generally come with a ‘Use By’ date. Thanks to a European directive, manufacturers now have to offer guidelines about how long a product can be kept after opening, for safety reasons.  But you’d be forgiven for not knowing this, because the EU have made zero attempts to communicate this to the consumer!

And the trouble is, you probably need a magnifying glass (or at least some specs) to spot it on the packaging:  a little symbol (it’s called a ‘pot’ symbol because it looks like a jar with the lid open), with a number beside it.  ‘6’ means six months.  ‘24’ means two years.  And so on.  (3, 6, 12 or 24 are the numbers you’ll most commonly see.)  So if you open it in March, and it says ‘12’, technically it should still be good till the sun goes down on February 2009.  (Before opening, products aren’t exposed to light and air, so the clock really starts ticking the minute you unscrew the lid.)  And in reality, most of us hang onto make-up for longer than we should:  a recent study from the College of Optometrists found that despite recommendations to throw away mascara after three to six months, 92% admit to keeping it longer!

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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 14^th 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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