Beauty Tips from Mom

Since I'm not a mom yet, and everyone who is in my same position has been posting about how great their moms are, I thought I would jump on the bandwagon.

And I thought I would take it one step further and tell you WHY she is so absolutely awesome!

When I was thinking about what my mom has taught me in my oh-so-long 22 years of life, one thing kept popping into my head: beauty. This woman has taught me SO many beauty tips, it's kind of excessive, but I thought I would take this opportunity to pass on a few tips from my mom.

For starters and to give you a little background, my mom is a very simple person. She grew up in an age of "natural beauty" (ie, she was a hippie in the 70's). Free love, no bras, and all natural everything.

For these reasons, her approach to beauty is very simple, very practical, and very natural.

Here are a few of her beauty tips, all involving the wonderful world of makeup:

(1) Always apply your foundation and other makeup around sensitive areas of your face (under your eyes, on your eyelids) with your ring finger. It is a very weak digit and therefore won't pull this sensitive skin as badly as another finger or a sponge.

(2) As you get older and start developing "vein-lines" on your eyelids, make sure that you put foundation on your eyelids to cover it up. This will not only help keep your eye makeup intact and prevent smudging, but will make you look younger!

(3) With fair skin such as my mother's and mine, you tend to get a gray tinge under your eyes just from the way your skin is colored, and if you put a lighter colored foundation than you normally use below your eyes, it helps eliminate that "grayness", covers the bags, and give you an upbeat look!

(4) For those of us that are oh-so-blessed with very fair skin, which results in eyebrows that go from our natural color on the inside of the brow and transitioning to blonde about halfway through the brow, we need to draw our eyebrows on with a pencil. Personally, I use the same brown eyeliner that I use for my eye makeup as for my eyebrows and it works for me. But that isn't the beauty tip. The tip is this: when you finish off a bottle of mascara, keep the brush, wash it off, and use it as the brush that you smooth out your eyebrow makeup with. This is what mine looks like. I usually buy the cheaper mascara so it's nothing fancy.

You can buy fancy eyebrow brushes at the store, but this tip seems to work just great and I've been doing it for years. However, be careful to switch it out as often as you change your mascara because excess brow pencil will build up on the bristles and start to smear your brows after a long time. You should be okay though if you change it out every three months or whenever you change out to a new mascara bottle. Or wash it off again. Either will work.

(5) Don't wash your hair everyday, if you can avoid it. If you have oily hair, it's a bit harder to do this one, but I've been blessed that my hair doesn't normally get greasy until the end of the second day or so. It helps your hair SO much by avoiding breakage and dryness. This tip is also a little bit harder to do when you have short hair like mine and you get what my husband likes to call "crazy hair" in the morning because of it, that only a re-style will fix.

(6) And here is a last little tip from me that I've picked up along the way. I am not a huge fan of curling my hair under into a cute little bob like some women do. Instead, I like it stick straight and sort of "funky spunky" on the ends, as I like to call it. To do this, rub a little bit of bar soap and water in your hands and smooth it into the ends of your hair, being careful to avoid the roots. If you hit the roots, it might make your hair greasy faster. Also, if your hair is naturally oily and you tend to be oily by the end of one day, you should try it out on a day that you don't have anywhere to go to see what happens. Or be prepared with a pony tail holder for the evening. Also, you could try getting a bar soap that doesn't have as many moisturizers in it (avoid Olay, Dove, etc. basically the more expensive ones). This is a trick I've learned to help save some money on hair product and it's already in my house!

So these are the things my mom has taught me. Hope you liked them, and have a great Mother's Day!