Permanently Beautiful

Good news for women of all skin types and skin tones, makeup is going matte! No-shine matte makeup is replacing sheen and gleam for a fresh, natural look this spring. Glimmery makeup was fun during the holidays, but shine emphasizes every tiny facial imperfection. The new matte look minimizes little flaws, allowing them to fade from sight. Matte doesn’t mean dull and flat, though. The new matte look is sheer and satiny, very pretty and natural. Always use moisturizer to prevent a caky look.

The almost air-brushed appearance of matte skin tones lets you focus attention on eyes and lips. Watch for eye shadows in soft earth tones and barely there evening sky colors mixed with pale skin-tone pinks, browns and beiges. Minimal black-brown eyeliner highlights the new downplayed look. And those spiky black stiletto lashes that were such fun during the holidays? Gone; replaced by a soft, natural look. Lashes go au naturel or with just a swipe of soft black-brown mascara. This spring, lips provide the wow! Go retro with bright red, innocent with pale pink or vamp it up with purple. 

If you have permanent makeup, you already have the perfect base for spring’s new natural look. Permanent cosmetics treat you to a salon makeup finish all day long. To change it up, apply cosmetics directly over permanent makeup. Otherwise, just moisturize and you’re out the door!

Imagine two Christmas mornings. In one, your kids or nieces and nephews or grandchildren rush you out of bed. No time to even wash your face, much less moisturize, and forget about makeup. The kids simply can’t wait another second to start ripping and tearing into their loot to see what Santa brought. You gamely toss on your robe and troop downstairs only to be confronted by flashing cameras dutifully capturing the big moment. There you are: hair a bit disheveled, glassy eyes fading into your sallow face, lips dry and lifeless. Ugh! This is the moment your family is capturing for all eternity? Where can I hide?

Now imagine yourself after permanent makeup. You wake up smiling, knowing you look fabulous. Run a brush quickly through your hair. With perfectly lined eyes from permanent eyeliner and soft red lips from permanent lips you know you’ll look smashing in the family photos to come. That mildly disheveled look has turned sexy and alluring. Bring on the cameras. You’re ready to shine — and it’s only 5 A.M.!

Who wouldn’t prefer to star in scene #2? Sure, it’s too late for this year; but it’s not too late to treat yourself — or someone you love — to a permanent makeup gift certificate from the Whitney Center for Permanent Cosmetics. Make a holiday vow that this is the last year you’ll find yourself hiding from Christmas morning cameras. Next year — after permanent makeup — will be your Christmas to shine. Smile!

This morning as I descended into the third level of hell, otherwise known as the 59th Street subway platform, I wondered how Carrie and the Sex in the City gals always managed to look so fresh, polished and put together. Sure, I understand the fantasy of television; and Carrie et al. did seem to take a lot of cabs; but practical New Yorkers know that the only way to get somewhere in Manhattan’s perpetually snarled traffic is to take the subway. Unfortunately, an uncomfortable lack of air conditioning — are you listening, Mayor Bloomberg? — turns the NYC subway system into a giant Panini press during August heat waves.

You emerge from the depths of the subway hot and steamy, sweat making unattractive rivulets down your once perfect makeup. You can feel your eyeliner starting to run and your foundation slowly sloughing off your face like a Chinese mudslide in free fall. OMG, all that careful work this morning and it lasted less than an hour! Where is Mr. Big and his sleek, black, air-conditioned car? This would be the perfect time for it to glide to the curb and rescue you.

There’s no need to cue Mr. Big. Permanent makeup guarantees you’ll look fresh and polished all day long, whether you’re fighting subway crowds or leading a board room presentation. Stop worrying about August heat waves and eliminate daily makeup application with a permanent makeup full face beauty enhancement.

The new summer movie, “My Sister’s Keeper,” puts out there on the big screen what people look like when they undergo chemotherapy.  In the film, the older of two girls in a family has leukemia and the younger sues to stop having to donate her body parts to keep her sister alive. The sister with the illness is realistically shown with no hair, eyelashes or eyebrows.

As often supportive friends and family do, the mother in the movie, played by Cameron Diaz, shaves her own hair so she will be bald like her cancer-stricken daughter. But she still is Cameron Diaz and still looks beautiful. She still has her striking eyebrows and eyelashes. People undergoing chemotherapy don’t. And it can make the ordeal even more devastating. Especially for women who in our culture continue to have a premium placed on their looks.

Permanent makeup can help give anyone facing chemotherapy – a child, man or woman – the chance to feel better about themselves when they look in the mirror. And they deserve every bit of feeling better that they can get. Applied by a professional, permanent makeup can give them eyebrows and eyes that help them look like their former selves.

It may be better for someone who has cancer to have permanent makeup applied before chemotherapy or in the early stages of treatment to reduce stress and promote healing. A doctor’s release should be provided. Alternatively, with approval of the physician, permanent makeup can be applied in the midst of a course of chemotherapy during an off-week when no chemo drugs are administered. Advance approval of the doctor is recommended for all attendees before enrolling in the clinic.

When you’re traveling, it doesn’t make sense to pack your whole makeup bag. Here’s how the experts travel light.

When it comes to packing up a beauty bag for a few days or a week away, no one does it better than a makeup artist. These experts are always on the go and can be found on desert islands with just a tube of gloss and still manage to make someone look gorgeous. How do they do it?  Basics, say the experts at MAC. You’ll need a few basics such as mascara, lip gloss and a base for the skin, then everything else should be dual-purpose.

A good moisturizer is essential, so choose one that you can wear a little or a lot of depending on what your skin needs at any given time. You can also mix moisturizer with your usual foundation or concealer to create a lightweight base that’s more comfortable and beats the parched, dry air of an airplane. For lips, mix lip balm with lip color to create a variety of textures from ultra sheer for day to more intense for the evening.

Waterproof mascara is another favorite. It’s perfect in all climates. Also creamy blushers to give skin a beautiful radiance.

Also make sure to schedule an appointment with an experienced permanent makeup professional several weeks before your departure date.  That’s the best way to lighten your travel makeup bag and still look fabulous 24/7 on your vacation getaway.

Here’s a list of people I never want to see in a wedding flick again: Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez, Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, Cameron Diaz – and Anne Hathaway’s getting close.

But we’re halfway through June, so we can safely assume Hollywood has no more wedding movies up its digital sleeve. However, out here in the real world there are still plenty of June weddings to go.

If one of them is yours, congratulations. Now do yourself a favor and get some permanent makeup. You’ll be stressed out enough. Do you really need to worry about eye makeup and lipstick? With permanent makeup, that’s all taken care of.

Here are several more reasons why it’s a great idea to face your wedding day with a face made gorgeous with permanent makeup:

No makeup to drip black rivulets onto your white gown if you get teary-eyed at the altar.

Wedding photos

Wedding night. I repeat, wedding night.

Honeymoon – especially if the honeymoon involves snorkeling or otherwise plunging into large quantities of water, salty or chlorinated.

On that special wedding day, every bride wants to look her very best and be at her most beautiful, but presenting your best face can be a little daunting.  How do you make sure your wedding makeup stays on all day, looking flawless in your wedding photos, and manage to make you feel like a model, but still look like you?

Easy. Permanent makeup. Trust me, later when you’re putting together your wedding and honeymoon scrapbook and pleased with how terrific you look in all the photos, you’ll be very glad you did.<-->

What do Ann Kournikova, Mia Hamm, Steffi Graff, Amanda Beard and Sasha Cohen have in common?  They’re all celebrity athletes – and they’re all gorgeous.

How do they look so good when they’re swinging a tennis racket, kicking a soccer ball, swimming laps or doing figure eights?

For one thing, their sports keep their shapes in good shape. But they’re making other smart choices, too.

Consider athletic hairstyles. Athletic hairstyles are typically hairstyles that allow the hair to be kept out of the face of the athlete, while still maintaining some style. Athletic hairstyles can be long, medium, or short to extremely short.

The most common athletic hairstyles worn by female athletes are typically ponytails and other pulled back styles. These styles are easy to maintain and can be dressed up almost instantly for going from the gym to the dinner table with a quick shower between.

Another common athletic hairstyle is the bob, since it is easy to pull back in a hair band or other restraint. This style is quick and easy to change and care for. The bob, a classic, is considered one of the most versatile hairstyles ever. It can be dressed down by leaving it plain, made athletic with a headband or dressed up by adding a jeweled bobby-pin.

Hair that is too short to swing into the face is also popular with female athletes. These hairstyles allow for some hair, but not so much that it gets in the way. Often, when off the field, the hair is spiked or slicked back to provide a more hip look.

Permanent makeup can also be part of a female athlete’s bag of tricks. They can always look gorgeous when the cameras close in. And with permanent makeup they have no worries about makeup running from sweat and chlorine which not only looks icky, but can interfere with their vision and cost them a win.

Hollywood stars just love to strut their stuff live onstage on Broadway. We’re always dazzled by the sheer star power lighting up the Great White Way these days. And that’s part of what makes watching the Tony Awards show so much fun.

Of course, Ann Hathaway, who’s doing Shakespeare in the Park this summer, looked darling at this year’s Tonys. But we were impressed by the glam of the more mature divas. Susan Sarandon looked fabulous. Edie Falco, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis, Liza Minelli, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Jessica Lange also all looked terrific.

How do they do it?  And can we do it, too?  Yes, we can. Here’s how:

We may be tempted to grab the tweezers and start plucking every time we spot a gray hair!  But there’s a quicker, healthier option. Gently blend grays and prevent that telltale line of demarcation by applying hair color just on trouble spots and blending gently. Insider trick: Grays can be stubborn, so apply with a fresh toothbrush to thoroughly coat grays around the roots.

If diminished vision and a less steady hand make it hard to apply eyeliner and pencil in brows, permanent makeup can save the day – or night. Especially with brows turning patchy and eyelashes thinning with age.
Permanent eyeliner gives the appearance of thicker fuller lashes. Beautifully shaped, colored and arched brows can take years off an aging face.

A more youthful appearance can help women over 50 feel confident, look fit and polished and keep a competitive edge in both the dating and job markets. Remember, each of us deserves a Tony Award because, as Shakespeare said, all the world’s a stage.

Kristen Stewart took a break from the Italian set of New Moon to attend the MTV Movie Awards, according to InStyle, but she didn’t leave her character’s casual style far behind. While she looked stunning in a red Yigal Azrouel dress, she made a statement by pairing it with a pair of Converse sneakers. It was a last minute replacement for heels after she twisted her ankle, a trick she must have picked up from her Twilight character, Bella. In the film Bella injures her leg before prom and accessorizes her dress with a walking cast and Converse sneaks.

But how do stars like Twilight‘s Stewart and her co-star Ashley Greene go from airport casual to red carpet glamour in a matter of hours? Preparation. “We fitted Ashley way in advance because of her hectic New Moon schedule,” said Greene’s stylist Ilaria Urbinati, who styled her for the MTV Movie Awards. “We had to alter the dress,” she said of the originally straight-cut Dolce & Gabbana dress. After accessorizing with a neon clutch and a dash of vintage beauty, Greene was red-carpet ready just 24 hours after arriving from Italy. “The dress felt very old school, that’s where the idea for the hair and jewelry came from,” Urbanati told InStyle’s Lisa Tilson. “A neon clutch gave it a little edge.”

We think that Bella and her buddies get a jumpstart on perfecting their game face for the red carpet with permanent eyeliner. That’s our expert opinion. We know that when you live life on a tight schedule, permanent makeup offers a fabulous beauty shortcut.

In the 1950s and 1960s, tattoos signified rebellion against middle-class conformity, according to historian Jonathan Zimmerman. They were associated them with street gangs, motorcycle clubs, ex-cons and drunks. In 1959, the National Education Association advised schools that “potential juvenile delinquents” could be identified as “those with male kin who are tattooed.”

And it was mostly males who got inked, not females. In a culture of straight-laced Organization Men, tattoos came to embody a kind of rough-hewn, frontier-style masculinity. That’s why Philip Morris USA Inc. decided to adorn its Marlboro Man – the epitome of 1950s machismo – with a small piece of body art on his hand. “We wished to show a man who, during some moment – some loose moment – got himself tattooed,” an advertising executive explained.

Fast-forward to earlier this year, when toymaker Mattel Inc. released its Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie doll. It comes with a set of tattoo stickers that can be placed anywhere on her body, plus a tattoo gun that allows children to ink the doll – or themselves.

That tells you all you need to know about the changed cultural meaning of the American tattoo. It has become just as common among women as among men. Most of all, it has gone 100 percent mainstream. If even Barbie is getting inked, and it’s totally stylin’, we can be sure that there’s nothing remotely rebellious about it.

That could be the best news of all, if you’re still debating about yourself and tattoos. If you get inked, you won’t be defying social propriety. As tattoos become more accepted, indeed, it will be unusual to find someone who doesn’t have one.

That’s why the heavily tattooed ex-rocker and reality-show star Ozzy Osbourne warned his own daughter against body ink. “To be unique, don’t get a tattoo,” Osbourne urged. “Because everybody else has got tattoos.” Of course, his daughter got one anyway.

A subtle and gorgeous way to get inked is with permanent make-up. You can flaunt it or keep it hushed as your beauty secret.