In Honor of Fashion Week...

... I am going to share a few beauty tips.   I will keep it short and simple.

FROWNIES:  They are an excellent and a very old Hollywood way of keeping frown lines at bay without resorting to Botox.   If you do use Bo for those two little lines between your brows or if you have a lot of lines on your forehead, Frownies help to keep your use of Bo to a minimum or a once a year thing.

I learned about Frownies from the lovely Rene Russo, who named them as one of her beauty essentials and to my surprise, the bloody things work.    They are small, thin pieces of skin tone cardboard with adhesive that you simply dampen and apply to certain areas of your face that reminds it not to "squint."  In other words, it trains the muscles.

As always, I tweak things around to suit myself.  My personal tweak of the "frownies" is that I cut them down and round off the edges and instead of using water to dampen them, I use two drops of CELLEX C Advanced C Serum (I love the stuff).    It works magic to minimize those lines.

My daughter D now uses them and I have given them as gifts to female friends and family.  They work as well on men who are man enough and vain enough to want to stay youthful or look good for their partners or for their careers.   D's new boyfriend is a rugged, nice looking 45 year old, who swims with sharks, surfs, dives, etc....and is also concerned with looking good, so I expect at some point to find him wearing a little frownie...along with all the other things she is teaching him about staying healthy and looking good through diet and other natural modalities.  She learned at her mother's knee and it is a private joke between us now that he told her (upon meeting me this fall) that I was "really well preserved" for my age.   I laughed like a loon and told her to tell him that he made me sound like I was "pickled in formaldahyde."  Trust me, I really don't look "preserved."

Frownies?  They really work.  I wouldn't steer you wrong.   I get mine through drugstore.com, but I am sure any big, good beauty supply store may carry them, though both products will be cheaper online than through a beauty supply.  And if you want to pack a bigger punch to this beauty regimen, plunk down the $$ for a bottle of Cellex C or any other vitamin C serum to wet them down with.   If you do use Botox you may be able to kiss it goodbye after a while.  There are two topical things that help build collagen, one is vitamin C and the other is retinol.

Frownies:  Around $13 to $14 online

Cellex C - Advance C Serum:  Between $80 and $125 (the lower range is obtainable on-line-shop around) and at two drops a night it will last quite a while.   This is one thing I do splurge on and I also use it under my moisturizer (to protect my skin from sun damage) and also fortify my night creams with it.

I am a frustrated chemist, so I concoct my own creams using a simple base and adding my own ingredients.  You would be surprised how much and how cheap you can get the basics like Hyaluronic acid, liquid zinc, niacin, green tea extract (for caffeine), DMAE, Ester C and glycolic and lactic acids at high concentrations, etc.... and just about anything else that are the ingredients in some of the most expensive creams on the market.  It is especially good when you want to treat the skin on your body as well as you do your face and it would be too expensive to do so.

If you have sun damage, ask your dermatologist to give you a 0.1% retin A cream.  They usually prescribe .05% but  0.1% is stronger and better.  You can use this to fortify other creams too!

As for the Frownies... Thanks Rene Russo!   Good things are meant to be shared and passed on to others.

Songs out of tune, the words always a little wrong...Canzoni Stonate