Last month on Babble, Sarah James posted the Blogger Beauty Secrets and tips of 33 of her blog friends, and when I was lying in bed last night thinking about what this week’s Friday Fives topic should be, I decided that I would post five of my own beauty tips. I’m pretty low-maintenance when it comes to beauty, I’m not going to make any “most beautiful bloggers on the internet” lists, but that’s okay – my husband thinks I’m beautiful and that’s all that matters   Scroll all the way down to see a photo of me taken yesterday, and here is my Friday Fives!

Five Beauty Tips:

1. If your hair is prone to frizz, handle it as little as possible when it’s wet. I had straight hair until after I gave birth to Kaitlyn, when suddenly I had wavy hair, so it’s been 6.5 years of trial and error figuring out how to care for it. I mean, imagine if after 30+ years, you suddenly had completely different hair!  The hair I used to be able to blow dry, curl with a curling iron, and still have it be smooth was suddenly a big frizzy mess.  I tried different kinds of shampoos and conditioners,  anti-frizz serums, silicone smoothers, but it turned out that what I really needed to do was just let my hair be natural whenever possible.  Blow-drying is the worst possible thing I can do to it, so I wash and condition, run a comb through to get out tangles, put in a headband to push back my growing-out bangs, and then leave it alone.  If I have to sleep with wet hair, I pull it up to the top of my head and wrap a scrunchie around it. In the morning I let it down and finger-comb it into place.  That plus a wash-and-wear hairstyle means I no longer hate my hair

2. Vaseline is your all-purpose beauty friend!  Keep a jar of Vaseline in the bathroom and another one on your bedside table. You can use it on your face, hands, legs, body, even your hair!  I use Vaseline as lip balm, to smooth down unruly eyebrows, under my eyes, on the little wrinkles next to my eyes,  on my rough heels, and on any dry patches of skin.  Although I haven’t tried it myself, I’ve read that you can also melt down those last little bits of lipstick in a tube and mix it with Vaseline for custom lip gloss!

3. Invest in good tweezers. I’ve been using cheap drugstore tweezers forever, until Tweezerman contacted me last month about doing a  Slant Tweezer review on MomReviews. I could not believe the difference!  I pluck my eyebrows because I’m a big baby about pain and don’t want to find out if waxing hurts or not.  I also pluck around my chin, yes, at 45 I’m getting whiskers like some old fairytale crone, and the Tweezerman tweezers are so much better at grabbing the fine hairs than the cheap ones.  The retail price for the Slant Tweezer is $22,  I recommend grabbing the weekly $5.00 off Bed Bath & Beyond coupon that comes in the Sunday paper. Trust me, $17 is a great deal, and I’m a diehard cheapskate.

4, Shave your legs with hair conditioner.  A couple of years ago, I was at the hair salon getting my hair colored, and two of the stylists and I were chatting about this and that when the topic of shaving versus waxing came up.  One of the stylists told me her “secret” for super-smooth shaved legs was using hair conditioner instead of shaving cream! Think about it, she said. Hair conditioner is for softening hair, which is exactly what you want to do for coarse leg hair so that it’s easier to shave.  The next time I shaved I used a squirt of conditioner on my legs first and sure enough, I got a close shave and my legs felt less dry when I was done.  Genius!

5. If you must spend time in the sun, use a ton of sunscreen. Except for some very faint lines next to my eyes and across my forehead, I think my skin still looks pretty good for being 45 years old, and I think one of the reasons is that I’m not a big fan of being out in the sun. Never have been. Growing up in the late 70′s and 80′s, my sister would spend every Saturday “laying out” on a towel in our backyard.  Tanning outside was so popular back then that a local radio station had 30 minute “time to turn over” announcements, and I am so not making that up.   I remember baby oil being advertised as the way to get a deep, dark tan!   Fortunately for me now, I preferred to be inside reading or playing the piano, although the times we did spend in the sun, there was sunscreen, but we only put it on our arms and legs. I guess people thought faces didn’t need it?   I have daily moisturizer with sunscreen but mostly, I just stay indoors.

Here’s a photo taken yesterday of me and Nathan. Notice my frizz free wash-and-go hair and my pale, spends-her-time-inside complexion? Oh, and that’s Vaseline on top of the Covergirl Outlast Lipstain on my lips

Happy Friday everybody and thanks for stopping by Friday Fives! Do be a love and leave a comment, won’t you?