Girl, before you jump into the rat race today — before you listen to your voicemail at work, check the calendar on your phone, read your new e-mail and all your tweets — relax those shoulders, take a slow, deep breath, and just chill in silence for two minutes with today’s latest list of skin care tips.

Why?

Because stress is bad for your skin (that’s from tip #9).

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like…

• 21 MORE Skin Care Tips
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1. How to Exfoliate With Organic Products: Starting with compresses and pure essential oils, this video covers how to use natural products to exfoliate your way to healthier, happier skin.



2. Flax Seeds for Healthy Skin: Ford Models’ Gelila has a secret beauty tip. She incorporates flax seeds into her diet for healthier skin.



3. Exercise Your Way to Acne Free Skin: Here’s an angle on the benefits of exercise that I hadn’t heard before. I wonder if Costco still sells those mini-trampolines…



4. Sunscreen Tips from a Melanoma Survivor: Worth it for the statistics, if nothing else, but I found this article to be a great resource. One in five Americans will contract skin cancer over the course of their lifetime? That’s more than I thought.



5. 5 Delicious Tips for Beautiful Skin: In this post, former supermodel Carol Alt shares some of her diet beauty secrets. I’ve listed a few of these nutritional beauty posts before, but this one has some new info that makes it worth a quick glance.



6. Can Vitamins Really Help Treat Acne? The picture is kinda disturbing, isn’t it? This brief post discusses which vitamins do and which vitamins don’t help treat acne.



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Heya, ladies! How’s your Saturday coming along? This comes out of left field, but last night I saw and absolutely loved Pixar’s Up, their latest animated flick. OMG! It’s effing delightful — poignant, breathtaking to see — and it restored some of my faith in humanity. If there are people out there thoughtful and capable enough to make a film like Up… well, anyway, I can’t recommend it enough.

As for today’s video post, it’s just a quick summertime makeup look (click here to see the video) using a few of my favorite products.

Hope you’re enjoying the weekend!

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

No matter how hard I try, I’m awful when it comes to controlling how much product I use with my loose powder jars.

It’s not like I’m devoid of muscle control, or like I’m shakin’ the jars like a Polaroid picture.

I don’t know, but every time I gently shake a jar to load the sifter tray, mayhem ensues; powder gets everywhere, and I’m sent down the same product-wastin’ path…

The wastefulness starts with the excess of powder in the tray. It’s why my brush gets overloaded with powder, which I end up blowing off or tapping away when I go to dilute the brush before application.

A lot product gets wasted in the process, and that makes me kind of cranky.

Makeup McGyver!

I finally found a way to doctor those jars of loose powder to cut back on waste.

It’s a cheap and easy trick that takes less than three minutes to do, and it makes it easier to control the amount of powder that feeds through those built-in sifters, consequently reducing the amount of product that gets lost to the wind.

What you’ll need

• A jar of loose powder (the kind that comes with a sifter)
• Scotch Tape
• Q-Tips

Step by step, oh baby…

First, create a clean surface for the tape by removing the powder from the holes in the sifter area with a Q-tip.

Next, grab a small piece of tape from the dispenser; place it on top of a few of the holes in the sifter.

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Locals in Hawaii wear flip-flops everywhere, even to work! It may be written into the State Constitution — that all citizens of Hawaii are legally required to wear flip-flops.

But wearing them comfortably can take some getting used to…

After a few days hauling my cookies around the island in flip-flops, my dogs started to bark. The pair of striped blue and green Roxy slippers I’d brought along for the trip may have been cute, but they weren’t substitutes for a comfy pair of walking shoes.

I started developing blisters and raw skin wherever the flip-flop straps rubbed against my toes and feet.

With shoes and sandals, I usually apply a Band-Aid or Moleskin to cover the sore spots, but I wanted a less obvious alternative to use with flip-flops. Who wants to see a ratty Band-Aid hanging on by a thread, ya know?

Enter Band-Aid Friction Block Stick ($8), aka a minor miracle for tow-up feet.

How does it work?

Band-Aid Friction Block Stick is a solid stick shaped like a mini-deodorant. It’s pocket-sized, fitting into the palm of my hand, and reduces friction caused wherever footwear makes contact with your skin.

It dries to form a clear, smooth barrier — kinda like an invisible Band-Aid.

I busted out the stick I’d brought along for the trip when my flip-flops rubbed my skin raw.

It dries quickly and works for hours, through miles of walking in hot, humid, sandy conditions, and even worked when my feet were sweatin’ like Whitney and Bobby Brown.

And it works in more ways than advertised, too. Before surfing, I applied it to my inner thighs and forearms — places that usually get rubbed raw by the board. It worked just as well as Vaseline but without the greasy mess.

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Today Aisha gives us a few tips on how to wear eye makeup with glasses.

Okay ladies, let’s start this post with a short quiz for those of you who wear glasses:

QUIZ: If you wear glasses…

1. Would ripping a contact lens before something like your best friend’s wedding trigger a minor panic attack due to the thought that you might have to wear your glasses to the wedding instead?
2. Do you secretly wish you could look as cool (and therefore be as cool) as Tina Fey in glasses?
3. Does your collection of eyeshadows look more colorful than a bag of Skittles?

If you answered yes to … well, ANY of the above questions, you’ve come to the right place. With some creativity, your awesome eyeshadow collection and a few rules of thumb, you, too, can look as spectacularly sexy in spectacles as Jennifer Garner did in Alias.

Before I show you some evening looks, here are 10 basic tips for wearing glasses with makeup.

10 beauty tips for girls who wear glasses

1. Your eyebrows frame your eyes when you wear glasses, so keep them well groomed.
2. Under-eye circles are more noticeable beneath glasses, so good concealer is a must.
3. Cream and waterproof eyeshadows are less likely to flake onto your glasses than loose powders or pressed eyeshadows. If one type creases, try another. The likelihood of creasing often varies from one person to another.
4. Shimmer CAN be worn under glasses.
5. Keep trying on your glasses during makeup application to see if the look needs adjusting.
6. Curling your eyelashes may prevent them from touching the inside of your lenses.
7. If you’re blind without your glasses, a pair of these Magnifier Specs may help with application.
8. Wear sunglasses to protect your eyes and to reduce squinting, which can cause fine lines to appear around the outer eye area.
9. When choosing a frame, spend the extra money for a quality anti-reflective coating and high index polycarbonate lenses.
10. Keep your lenses clean and fog-free with lens cleaner and a soft cloth.

Look One: Dramatic false lashes

Now that you have some basic guidelines, here are a few dramatic evening looks to spark your creativity!

My first model, Q, has a simple dark frame — nothing too overpowering. She’s wearing a light but vivid pearly color, strong black eyeliner and mascara, dark brows, and a dark, shimmery, glossy lip color. She also has dramatic false eyelashes on her lower eye line.

First, I applied Hourglass Oxygen Foundation Powder No. 3 and then used Shu Uemura Cover Crayon as concealer and eyeshadow base.

Next, I applied MAC Naked Lunch (a pearly light peach) all over the lid before applying Shu Uemura Cream Eye Shadow in P Light Green (a pearly lime green) to the lower part of the lid and inner corner of her eye.

I think a synthetic brush works best for blending this cream shadow.

The top semi-hardened layer of the eyeshadow in the pot should be wiped off prior to each use. Here, I used MAC Cloudbound (pearly ivory) to highlight.

Finally, I blended the upper area and curled the upper eyelashes, applying Fresh Supernova Mascara to the ones on top.

I used a nail clipper to trim the four end sections of a set of Darkness false eyelashes in style X-up6 in Black. Darkness can be found in some beauty supply stores and is available online, but the styles vary among sellers. Other inexpensive false eyelash brands will work just as well; that’s what experimentation is for.

Since I used an eyelash intended for an upper lid, I removed the sticky residue from the band with makeup remover.

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