Lemon face toner

Okay so first off I would like to apologize for not posting anything in a while. Things have been super crazy around here. I had my SAT, traveling to the states, a wedding, and a new addition to our family in the last few weeks that has kept me pretty busy. My middle brother and his lovely new wife had asked me to be a bridesmaid for the wedding so that kept me pretty busy the days before the wedding on the 18th and my oldest brother's precious little Coralynn came 10 days early at 3:43 AM on the 18th as well so that kept us on our toes with a lot of reshuffling of plans. But everything has calmed down for the most part now and I finally have time to sort of catch my breath as I will be in America for the month.

So with all that said, let's move on to the actual post. As someone with severely sensitive skin (to the point that any little thing can set off an allergic reaction on my face) I am constantly looking for natural effective ways of tending to my skin. And I found a rather surprising one after doing some research. Apparently lemon/lime juice is a natural facial toner and if left on over night it can even out your skin tone and even get rid of freckles/dark spots.

At first I was a tad but skeptical as I mentioned that I have very sensitive skin. So the first time I put on just a bit and left it on for an hour. Noing bad seemed to happen so I went to sleep with it. Sure enough in the morning I had actually seen a bit of a change and no side effect. So I started trying it out at night and after a few days it really was working!

But there are some minor drawbacks. I have found that if you don't use it fairly consistently the effects go away and your face goes back to how it was. And also if you happen to leave it on when you go out in the sun (an d for me just going out in the sun is dangerous by itself as I am extremely pale and burn very easily) it causes even more damage from what I found from research appears to be a chemical reaction. But if you use it at night and wash it off in the morning before leaving the house it is fine. I do suggest if you are just going to be around the house, wash your face and put on another layer of it.

Okay so now how to use it. It's so easy it's ridiculous. All you need is a small squeeze bottle, a lemon, and water (if you have sensitive skin you will need more water). Squeeze the lemon juice into the bottle (depending on how much you want) and then dilute it a bit with water (more for sensitive skin). After washing your face, shake the bottle to stir up everything, squeeze the juice onto a cotton pad and apply to your face (I use it all over, but you can put it where you feel you need it). It's just that easy!

How to keep jewelry from turning your skin green

Sorry about no post yesterday! I honestly meant to try to get one up, but unfortunately yesterday our volunteer Andrea left after three months of being with us, so I went to the airport with her to see her off and then I had school all afternoon once we finally got back. And since I am finishing school sometime next week (hopefully) things are going to be a little hectic around here, and therefor probably won't go too according to schedule. But I will try get up as many posts as I can. I already have a few planned out ahead of time, so hopefully that all works out.

Anyways, the one that I'm about to show you today is probably the easiest and for a lot of you probably the most useful if you are a budget fashion-chic kind of girl like me. Now my jewelry selection is kind of a crazy mix of a lot of different styles and materials. I don't really care if it is designer or expensive (in fact I usually shy away from dropping a lot of money on a piece of jewelry seeing as how little I really wear it) so most of my stuff is that cheap stuff that the top layer wears off after a while and starts leaving a lovely green mark on your skin that takes forever to get off or ruins a pair of really cute earrings. This has been driving me crazy for a while, because a lot of my favorite stuff is cheap that is now ugly looking because it all wore off. Well no more!

A lot of you might already know this really nifty trick, but for anyone who doesn't, here's the secret to keeping your cheap jewelry looking nice: clear nail polish. Seriously, that's it. You just put that dollar store clear nail polish on your jewelry and bam! No more worrying about those ugly green marks or your jewelry ruining! I paint it on both the inside and outside of my hoops and bracelets because a lot of the time my bracelets tend to turn copper all over. But seriously, for a fashion-savvy girl on a budget this is a huge saver.

Four strand braid

Well, this post was going to be put up a lot earlier today, but my internet has been down most of the day and then went down yet again just as I was about to start focusing on this.

Anyways, for today's post I decided to do another braid I figured out how to do last night and dragged my poor guinea pig into it. This is another one of those braids that looks harder to do than it is, which is coming from someone who can barely do a normal braid without disastrous results. Today's braid is a four-strand or a four-piece braid, whatever you know it as. I, yet again, learned from a video which I'll put at the bottom in case anyone wants to see that way as well.

Step 1: Brush out your hair and separate into four equal(-ish) sections.

To make things easier, I'm going to number the sections 

Step 2: Take strand 1 and place it over strand 2

Step 3: Take this strand under strand 3

Step 4: Now take strand 4 and go under strand 3 and just repeat what you did the first time: Go over strand 2, bring strand 1 under 2, over 3. Bring strand 4 under 3, over 2. Repeat this until it is at the desired length.

Step 5: Tie off with a clear elastic or hair tie.

Step 6: (optional) For a looser, somewhat messy look tug on the strands gently. 

And now for the video I watched. For this I did the first version, but sometime I might try out the second one as well. 

Fishtail braid

So here is my make up post for being so lame last week. Recently I've been looking at different braids for when I actually get hair (hopefully not too far in the future) and a friend of mine showed me how to do one on her daughter. Well, naturally I was intrigued, so while I was browsing Pinterest, I happened to find the same braid! Turns out it was a fishtail braid. Though hers, unlike the kind I do, was very tight and controlled.

So I managed to nab my poor hair guinea pig (Andrea) and use her in my braiding experiment tonight. As she has such nice, long, thick hair, I asked if I could try some out on her and the poor sap agreed without realizing what she was getting into. By the end of Disney's Brave and two episodes of Supernatural we were both pretty sore and tired of trying to get several different styles down. The first, and probably easiest for me, was the fishtail!

One thing that is fabulous about this braid is that it looks so much more complicated than it is, giving you the look of someone who spent a long time on it when really you could probably do it with some practice in about 5 minutes more or less (depending on your hair length and thickness). I watched a video (which I'll post) on how to do it to yourself, so that will be a nice reference if you get confused.

Step 1: Brush out your hair. It's easier to get a nice smooth finish if it's brushed out, but if you like it messy then leave it unbrushed.

Step 2: Put it up in a loose ponytail with a rubber hair band (I have heard you can buy them at a dollar store or a general store very cheaply) or a regular hair tie. 

Step 3: Separate your ponytail into 2 sections 

Step 4: Begin by taking a section from the outer part of your left side and going over the left side and under your right.

Step 5: Do the same from the right side. Take a section and go over the right, under the left. 

Step 6: Continue going back and forth like so.

Here are some photos to give you a general idea of how it should be looking:

Step 7: Once you are getting towards the end (with about less than an inch or so, depending on the style you are going for) tie it off like you would any other braid. I saw with either one of the clear rubber hair bands or with a regular ponytail. 

Step 8: Carefully remove the top ponytail or cut the rubber hair band if you used one. 

Step 9: (optional) If you would like, fluff it out and tug it some to get a loose somewhat messy look. 

And you're done! Yay! Now, seeing as this is my first successful braid ever if I can do it, I know plenty of you can out there. So give it a shot, and with some practice you'll get it down, I'm sure. 

And here's the video I watched to learn in case you would like to see a video instead or want to know how to do it on yourself easier: 

Glow in the dark nail polish

First off I'd like to apologize for the lack of posts this week! I'm moving the posts to Tuesday instead of Monday because of issues with school, but this week I was so swamped with papers that I couldn't even get in that one and yesterday we were traveling out to El Sembrador which is near Catacamas, Honduras. This is actually the place where I grew up originally so I have been a bit busy around here reacquainting myself with it and showing around our volunteer. But I just got inspired (since the internet came back up) to write a new post to make up for yesterday and Monday I will do a  post to make up for my lack of post on Tuesday.

So I just recently got some nail polish from a volunteer team that was down here for a week working. They are these really nifty ones that are double sided (purple on one side and hot pink on the other and another that is bright blue and lime green) and I decided I was going to use them on my nails sometime this week while I was here. Well last night our lights went out for a bit and while we were talking in the dark, our volunteer Andrea, who is rooming with me while we're here, noticed that something was glowing on the counter. Upon closer inspection we realized that it was the blue and green nail polish that was glowing! We both promptly began freaking out and laughing excitedly . Once the lights came back on, we tested the nail polish out on the tips of my nails to see if they really glowed, and sure enough they did! So now our nails are all wonderfully glowy, and whenever we get in the dark we both wave them around excitedly like a bunch of five year olds.

                     

Example of one of the tutorials I saw for it

Well, this got me thinking. How can I make my own glow in the dark nail polish? So this evening when I finally got internet back, I looked around to find some good ways of doing it. Basically all the ones that I've seen say around the same thing: take a glow stick and cut it and mix with your clear nail polish. Well, all except one. The title of the blog got me curious. Liesthatpinteresttoldme.wordpress.com talks about the dangers of doing something so incredibly reckless as dumping something that is possibly toxic and not meant to touch your skin, all over your nails. Which, she really does make some good points, and coupled with the fact that most of the blogs/tutorials I saw from my search are people that have never actually tried and are just blindly recommending it for other people to try and tell their results, I kind of think that there really must be a better option. And there are! She links to a very cheap one that you can buy at partycity.com and I'm sure in stores, or at Walmart.com they also have one that's a bit pricier. Either way, it's a lot safer looking and much easier than trying to do it yourself. When I go up this summer to the states I'm so trying this! Let me know if anyone does this as well.

Vanilla Sugar Body Scrub

I love making body scrubs (as anyone living in this household can attest for). It's super fun and easy to make, plus the feeling of your skin afterwards is like rubbing a baby's fat tummy. Yes, a baby's chunky tummy is like the best part of big babies. Or any babies in general, but that's beside the point. The point is is that body scrubs are freaking awesome and feel like tiny babies dancing on you. Which is pretty dang awesome. Anyways so I was messing around in the kitchen one night and decided to do a a recipe from The Idea Room for a brown sugar scrub that I like. Well, I had seen some various sugar scrub recipes and decided why not try making one of my own? So I did just that! As per usual I lay it out with nice big pictures just in case (mainly because I get bored and love playing with the camera). I used an old salsa jar that we seem to be getting a lot of lately and simply used my label removing technique to get that pesky label off for a perfectly good jar.

Recipe:
1 cup white/brown sugar (whichever you want really. I have used both before and I find white is a bit more aggressive than brown is, but both feel great).
1/3 cup olive oil
2 tsp honey
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla

I threw in the cinnamon and vanilla because (1 I have heard that cinnamon is great for your skin and (2 because they smell great and (3 Why not?

Alright let's get started!

Our supplies

 Step 1: pour in the one cup of sugar into your jar, making sure that you have a jar large enough

 Step 2: Pour in the 1/3 cup of oil and kind of move the jar side to side a bit to get the oil to sink in easier

Step 3: Pour in 2 tsps of honey. This part tends to get kind of messy and sticky, but you have to kind of scoop out the excess honey from your teaspoon. So as long as you don't mind having a little fun while you're making this, it should go fine!

Step 4: Pour in the 2 tsps of cinnamon. This may vary, depending on how much you like the smell of cinnamon. I personally love it so I wanted an extra good dosing of it. 

Step 5: Add in your 1 tsp of vanilla. Again this can really vary on your preference. I love the smell so I wanted to cover up the smell of oil with it. But you can add until you feel comfortable. 

Step 6: Mix all of your ingredients together with a spoon, making sure to get all of your sugar mixed with 

Step 6: Go forth and enjoy your new baby dancing awesome feeling skin! Or if you love giving homemade nifty gifts like I do, throw a bow on it and give it to someone you want to experience the amazingness.