OMG. I randomly emailed hairstyling megastar Ken Paves asking if he'd answer a few Qs for Bossy Thing. No idea why he said yes but it meant I had to pop on my Sir David Frost head and quickly dream up a few things to ask. As I've never done an actual interview before, this wasn't exactly easy.
Paves is the guy Jennifer Lopez, Victoria Beckham and Eva Longoria refer to as their BFF and he practically invented clip-in hair extensions with his HairDo range, which he launched with Jessica Simpson in 2006. He's a Hollywood hair legend with tons of other stuff on the side - he's a TV regular, has penned a few beauty books and is now creative consultant for haircare range Color Wow.
Here's Ken's tips on how to take your hair into the A-List - in his own words...
Which essential tools are in your styling kit?
I always carry a bone comb - it's completelt seamless and doesn't snag, which makes it a great substitute for finger styling. Hooked elastic bands (bungees) are essential to avoid leaving ponytail creases - I'd never reach for a scrunchie. And I always have an array of extensions - I actually style most of my clients' hair nowhere near their heads!
What are your top tips for keeping hair healthy?
Don't overload it! Wash it two or three times a week, maximum, and only lather the roots to cleanse your scalp. Between washes, just rinse with tepid water to remove debris. Also, everyday styling should only take 15-20 minutes. If it takes any longer, you've got the wrong cut.
What do you recommend to rehabillitate over-styled hair?
Olive oil is an amazing overnight mask. Mix a small amount with water and spray onto your hair before bed. You can't beat it!
Ken on J-Lo's cascading Hollywood curls...
"One of my most memorable jobs was in Milan with Jennifer Lopez. All my hair extensions were confiscated at customs. I had to ask J-Lo's make-up artist , Mary Phillips, if I could cut off some of her hair to sew some pieces... She said yes! But don't worry, no drastic action is needed for this chic side-sweep. Curl your hair towards your face with a 1in tong. Pin the curls to your head while they're still warm - once cool, brush them out. For a modern look, brush some highlights into your roots using Color Wow Root Cover Up in Platinum."
I only just learned that Max Factor was binned off in America a few years ago in favour of Proctor and Gamble's more popular CoverGirl brand. Who knew? Rude! Anyhow, it's still going pretty strong on these shores and after seeing Gwynnie Paltrow looking quite simply radiant in the centenary advert for MF's Creme Puff, I felt utterly commanded to try it out for myself. This is an absolute classic with a near mythical status. However, online reviews runneth over with people complaining about its strong and "sickening" fragrance. "It smells like my nan." But is that really such a bad thing? My own grandmother was a very groomed lady, a veritable dame, so if emulating her is wrong, I don't want to be right. In fact, I find the smell pleasant, fresh and far from overwhelming - it barely registered, unlike that of many popular face creams. I declined to apply the powder with the eponymous puff; rather I used my own regular (massive) face brush. This, I feel, is generally better, and lessens the cake factor of any powder. The shade I decided on was the ultimate cop out of all powders: translucent. Opening the compact for the first time, its hue seemed a worryingly brown but having been assured of its sheer quality, I took the plunge and gave myself a good dusting. It's actually a good colour on my stupidly pale maw - it certainly gives me a glow, whereas the Rimmel Clear Complexion translucent I usually use leaves me peaky, albeit matte. Actually that comparison brings me to my next point. Mega finely milled modern powders aren't in the least bit chalky, but the Creme Puff, true to its old-fashioned formula, is quite heavy and when you have just applied it, the ultra-matte effect isn't the most flattering. I find it looks better after a few minutes' wear and, while the shine-free finish doesn't last, the old oil spillage certainly didn't arrive quicker than with any other powder. It's simply a case of having to use an oil-blotting paper like most people take a 4pm tea break. To sum up, then: good coverage; nice glow; no oilier than with other powders; wholesome retro feelings. Winner!
Argan oil is definitely one of the nicest oils to use as a beauty product: it's light, silky and non-greasy, not to mention full of fatty acids, vitamins and antioxidants. A bottle of organic Argan oil can be picked up for just a few pounds and it's definitely worth getting one so you can try out your own concoctions. Here's some ideas!
- Deep cleanse your skin. Take a few drops of the oil and apply all over the face. Lightly roll your fingers to gently press the oil into the skin for several minutes. Remove with a hot cloth and pat dry.
- If you use castor oil to grow your lashes and brows, try swithing to argan oil. The lighter texture means it's much easier to apply and, knowing how conditioning it is for the hair on our heads, just imagine what it can do for lashes! I have had great results using it this way and I think it makes my brows grow even better than castor oil. And without the heavy, sticky feeling - joy!
- You probably already know about the highly overpriced Morrocanoil products - which barely contain any actual Argan oil, FYI - but how about adding a drop of pure Argan to your regular conditioner? Supercharged conditioner for a fraction of the cost!
- Use it as a hand soak. Take a bowl of warm - not hot -water and add five drops of Argan oil. Then leave your hands to rest in there for 5-10 minutes. Pat dry and apply a rich hand cream - to which you can also add a few drops of the oil.
- Make a softening face mask. Take 2-3 teaspoons of honey and add a few drops of Argan oil. Apply to the face and relax for ten minutes, before removing with a hot cloth.
- Add a drop to your face and body moisturisers. Argan oil is high in vitamin E which will help the skin to repair and plump up.
- Add it to your regular hair serum. As Argan oil is too heavy for most European hair, diluting a drop in your serum will leave you silky but not weighed down.
- Use under your night cream as a serum. It makes skin feel silky smooth and cared for.
- Add a few drops to the bath. I hate greasy bath oils so this is light, hydrating and lovely!
The ways you can use Argan oil are really unlimited so don't be afraid to use your imagination and go for it - you'll be amazed how far a small bottle can go!
What's the deal with primers? They are always being recommended on blogs, YouTube beauty videos and in magazines, and might seem like yet another step to add to our ever-growing list of application rules. But if you regularly find your make-up slipping off or your skin feeling a bit oily, a primer could be your new hero product.
What is a primer?
It helps to smooth the skin in prepration for foundation, enabling it to stay on for longer. Some primers have a polyfiller-like texture that fills in all the fine lines, little holes and enlarged pores on the skin, creating a truly uniform base for you to apply your other make-up to. They can also reduce oil, tone down the appearance of redness and brighten your skin.
Do I need one?
If your foundation doesn't absorb into your skin properly, if you have excessive oil or your finished look doesn't appear "clean", try using a primer. Even if you have problem-free skin, it will give a velvety finish.
How should I fit it into my skincare regime?
Moisturisers hydrate, serums repair and primers prepare the skin for make-up. Make sure your moisturiser and primer don't contadict each other: for example, avoid using a moisturiser for dry skin with an oil-free primer or your skin will get mixed messages and it could cause a problem!
Where do I apply it?
Use a pea-sized amount after moisturising. Apply it over the areas that get most oily. Some primers mattify the skin on top of make-up, which is a nice alternative to powder - try patting it on instead of rubbing.
Pick your primer
The anti-ager SkinPerfect Primer SPF30 £37.30 Dermalogica
The skin smoother 5 Sec Perfect Blur £12.99 Garnier
The pore minimiser Tea Flower Deep Clean Anti-Shine Pore Minimiser £12.99 Super Facialist by Una Brennan
The sun protector DayWear Advanced Multi-Protection Anti-Oxidant & UV Defense SPF50 £30 Estee Lauder
Regular readers know I love trashing, well, anything, but this is actually a bit of a rave. I picked up Revlon's matte lipstick in Pink Pout a little while ago and I utterly love it. It is a cute baby pink colour with a neutral-cool undertone. Not one of those ghastly neons or purples that some gals bizarrely insist on rocking. This is much more subtle than that. It's kind of a muted look, one that goes best with a strong eye. It's that Kardashian nude kind of look, one that can be dressed up or down. Its matte texture might feel drying but I find it fine with a good swipe of lip balm underneath. I had never worn a matte lippy before but this has converted me. It is much more pigmented than its shiny couisns so you get more of a colour hit that lasts longer, and as someone who looks ridiculous with shiny lips, this is now my favourite product ever. Apparently it also serves as a close dupe to Mac's Snob, if you like a little switcheroo.
Recently, as I perused a trashy magazine, I became intrigued - then won over - by an ad for a new BB cream being hawked by Simple. I know we've all been bored to tears by blah-blah creams in the last few years; in fact, the next beauty editor to commission a feature-length Q&A on them is going to get happy-slapped by yours truly.
But honestly, this was an ad that screamed: "I'm trustworthy! Buy me!" So I did and: oh dear. I was having an awful day anyway - a loved one is seriously ill, for example - and I thought it would be a treat to try my new BB cream. My first glimpse of what lay inside the tube is where this anecdote begins its downhill trajectory. I could see instantly that its lurid orange tone - billed as a "universal shade" - wasn't really going to fit the bill as I am of course coloured like a Geisha - only whiter.
Still, I plugged away, forging ahead fearlessly with a good application. First up, it doesn't cover anything. Ok, I admit: I do have factor 4 acne. But even when I put it in places where no P. acnes resides, like my forehead, it still looked like a smeary, greasy, disgusting mess. Don't bother asking yourself, Will it blend? It doesn't.
All of this is elevated by what the beauty industry lulzily calls "illuminating particles", but what any 3-year-old can tell you is glitter. Oh that old joke, still as unfunny as ever! I don't know what sort of reasonably-minded individual they think would want to have glittery foundation all over their face, but they won't give up on the idea that easily. Glitter is a particularly heinous addition to this BB cream because as the day wore on and oxidisation occurred, turning me ever more orange and sticky, the sparkly stuff made me look not just ill, but mentally ill. At best people were asking me if all was well, at worst they looked on with pity in their eyes.
If that's what you crave, this is the one for you. Me, I've never been so happy to wash something off.
Like Xtina Ag, my brows took an absolute battering back in the late 90s when, aged 14 or so, I first discovered tweezing and everyone sported the thinnest brows imaginable. The Ag looks utterly ridiculous now yet seemed perfectly normal at the time. My former BFF - slated here - went from having natural, rather bushy brows one day, to a single row of hairs the next - so straight and thin they could have been drawn on with a fine line pen and a ruler. Others went for that ghastly tadpole shape - anything so long as actual hairs did not appear to be present, I suppose. I myself took heed and plucked my lovely full brows into the most hideous shape ever conceivable. They became a very strange shape on the inner part and disappeared altogether at the ends - each one totally different to the other. Yeah, I know: eyebrows aren't twins, they're sisters. Well, mine weren't even step cousins. What was going through my head as I carried out this murderous attack? Not much, I would guess, though presumably the destruction of anything that looked like a hair - and was therefore hairy in society's eyes - was pretty high on the agenda. Thank God, I don't think anyone ever commented on the devastation I had so obviously wreaked on my brows - I have noticed that sometimes when something is really, really bad on another person, people don't dare to make any remark about, such is the pity you have inspired.
Anyway, once I had realised what a terrible job I had done on my brows - for one thing I had one of those awful school photos taken when the full extent of the damage became very painfully apparent - I laid off the tweezies for the most part, though I still couldn't leave the end bits alone. That was until a couple of years ago when I finally accepted how hideous these evil metal pincers had been making me look, and resigned myself to forsake them for the rest of my days.
"Grow back, my pretties!" I told my - frankly - clapped-out brows. "I'll never torture you again!"
But sadly, despite much coaxing, the poor things had been plucked half to death and resolutely lay dormant, unlike my patience. Fashions change and suddenly big brows were in - really in - and there I was feeling bereft. Then, a few weeks ago I was dicking/fannying around on the www when I googled "how to regrow overplucked eyebrows" and found this blog post. Like a lot of others it recommends using castor oil, claiming miraculous results on bare brow bones.
Reader, everything they say is right: castor oil is bloody brill! I sourced (ooh, get me) a small bottle of it on ebay for around £4 - you can get it for even less in Asda and chemists, but I went for some cold-pressed, organic good stuff. I have only been it for around a week and I am already so pleased with the results. New hairs are coming through and existing ones are looking much stronger and darker. One of my eyebrows has been falling out for the last year or so - God knows why - and I'm really hopeful that castor oil is going to save it. People bitched about the smell and it's true that it does stink a bit, but it doesn't bother me because luckily my eyebrows aren't under my nose LOL. All you have to do is dab a bit over your brows once or twice a day, although nightly might be preferable because it's not the most attrcative of daytime looks. Give it a couple of weeks and see what happens. I'm going for the full Delavigne.
This is a typical conversation I go through on a frequent basis when meeting new people:
Them: Aren't you grown up! So, got some GCSEs coming up soon, have we?
Me: Um... actually I already did those - a while ago.
Them: A-levels, then? Ooh, aren't they tough...
Me: Well, you know, those were a while ago too.
Them: Oh, are you at Uni then?
Not even.
It's not easy to be continually mistaken for a teenager when you're decidedly the wrong side of 25, but it seems to happen to me with worrying regularity. It wasn't so annoying when I was late teens/early 20s but now it really pisses me off. And no, it's not down to my acne, cheeky. My softly-spoken voice probably adds to the ditzy, young overall impression and hey presto, it's patronise o'clock.
So what can be done to look a bit more sophisticated and pull a smoke and mirrors job on their asses? I try to keep my wardrobe on trend but classic, so I like to wear skinny jeans and neutral coloured flats, because trainers only reinforce my youthful air. I never wear round neck jumpers or tops because that takes me into the tween zone which is horrendous. A little bit of chest really does the trick. Make-up can help too, and I like to use a bit of dark eyeshadow applied with a slanted eyeliner brush to add some much needed definition to one's eyes. Filling in yo' brows is an easy way to prettify without having to worry about a complicated eyeshadow design. The excellent Maybelline Master Shape brow pencil comes in at a mere £2.99 and apparently it's a brilliant dupe for the much more costly Mac Spiked pencil. Profitez, my friends. I like to wear my hair in a sleek up do because having it down has always looked awful on me, God knows why. I'm going to be big-headed and say that, yes, I do turn the odd young man's head, even with my chronic skin condition(s) and all the other flaws I am unafraid to chronicle indepth here. It feels weird that I do sometimes attract teenage boys' attention - eww, groty - but I'll take what I can get, thanks. If only they knew my real age, they'd be so freaked out! But luckily being IDed for such things isn't mandatory. It's quite funny that I am so young for my age still when certain other people I have slandered mentioned before are looking distinctly "mature" nowadays. Can't win 'em all, I suppose. ROFLMAO.
When I heard that Salisbury District Hospital had launched their own moisturiser, the first thing I noticed with the name - and not in a good way. My Trusty Little Sunflower Cream (MTLSC) must be the most appallingly-chosen name for a beauty product, ever. If they want to be taken seriously, a swift renaming ceremony is vital - one of those made-up generic names along the lines of Cetaphil and Dermalogica would see it right. Like my Mum said, even Heal Gel is a better name than this. What's funny is that they obviously wanted it to sound friendly and cute which sits oddly with the rather officious tone of the website. It smacks of a brainstorming sesh that must have taken all of 30 seconds (tea included) - probably in a Masonic lodge if I know anything about Salisbury.
The big selling point is that this is the first NHS venture of its
kind, where a product developed by a hospital has been commercialised,
with the profits going back to support patient care at Salisbury
Hospital. Apparently MTLSC was developed 20 years ago in the celebrated specialist burns and plastics unit for burns' victims and post-operative care, and proved so popular people kept requesting more long after their discharge (lol).
Anyway, despite having ruled themselves out of the international market with such a cringe-making name, what is the product really like? First impressions were that it has quite a noticable and not entirely pleasant smell. We're not talking Carolina Herrara here, trust me. That's the trouble with using an ingredient like sunflower oil and not adding a fragrance. As I suffer with dry hands, that's where I have been using MTLSC for the last week. I find it a very difficult product to rub in, it goes all white and it takes several minutes of really working in it to make it adsorb. I feel like the way the cream is formulated is sort of crude and it just doesn't have the silky consistancy other widely available creams have. This really reminds me of a cream I made in my kitchen last year from a recipe I got from a book - no, really! It has the same smell and the same texture. And similar to that, it makes me feel hydrated in a greasy way for five minutes, then things start to feel a bit rough. But, looking on the plus side, my hands are starting to look really nice, the nails look as pink and shiny as newly washed shells on a tropical beach. w00.
The ingredients are as follows: Aqua (water), Cetearyl Alcohol, Helianthus Annus (Sunflower) Seed Oil,
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Phenoxyethanol, Benzoic Acid, Dehydroacetic Acid,
Ethylhexylglycerin, Polyaminopropyl Biguanide. As you can see, it contains Sodium Lauryl Sulphate - uh-oh. Here's what a cosmetic ingredient dictionary had to say about it: "Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) is one of the most irritating cleansing
agents used in skin-care products. In fact, it’s considered a standard
comparison substance for measuring skin irritancy of other ingredients.
Thus in scientific studies, when they want to establish whether or not
an ingredient is problematic for skin, they compare its effect to the
results of SLS. In amounts of 2% to 5% it can cause allergic or
sensitizing reactions in lots of people." So the fact that a division of the NHS is putting out a cream with this nasty goop in it and selling it as perfect for irritated skin - read: eczema? Oh hell no. That's incredibly bad practice in my view.
They seem to believe this is an innovative product but that just isn't the case. It is a basic, kinda greasy cream - there is nothing sophisticated about it. I suppose I am pretty shocked that a product as old-fashioned as this is still being used to treat burns patients in what is a renowned unit. It was developed in the 90s and maybe it should have stayed there. I don't mean to be mean, but honestly - should a product developed in the lab of a highly respected derm ressemble something I whipped in my kitchen? That doesn't seem right. Surely people with awful scars should get the very latest of cutting-edge technology, a state of the art cocktail of peptides and silicones and other doodads. They boast that the formula was "developed with clinical scientists". Well, maybe they should look at how L'Oreal and other big names go about doing things - after all, NHS doctors are the highest paid in the world. All the billions ladled on them and this is the best they could do? More effort next time, chaps.
MTLSC comes in at nearly £10, with p+p, putting it in the mid range of the market. I simply don't feel that it justifies this price and, while I will use up the rest of the tube, I don't think I'll be repurchasing it.
Find the product here.
I have read/watched quite a few reviews of the Clinique All About Eyes Concealer that are less that flattering. People saying it's cakey, settles into lines, blah blah blah. Well I got news for you, buddy. You're using too much. Promise. I did this the first time I got it, I wrenched it open, squeezed out a huge blob, smeared it all over my [Louis Vuitton] bags and within minutes felt annoyed because it had formed into little rivulets of make-uppy mess. Yes, you heard correct - rivulets. Since that day, however, I have found that if I use the tiniest amount imaginable - literally the teeniest dot shared between both eyes and blended in with a ring finger - it gives a lovely, smooth result that lasts. It feels light and comfortable, even on my under eyes - which, can I state, might just be the most allergic on this entire planet. I can't use anything without a red, angry reaction. So hallelujah, Clinique! I'm converted. People also bitch that the Light Neutral shade is too yellow for pale skin tones but it looks just fine on me. So remember: you only need a full-stop sized dot to get the job done :)
