It’s my birthday weekend and I’m having a well-earned rest. It has been a truly terrible week, with Dexter in and out of the vet hospital (he’s still not better) and various other stressful things going on. Today I’m taking a leaf out of Mr Bear’s book and just chilling out (above). Doesn’t he make relaxing look so easy?

And here’s my poor, shaggy boy Dexter before he was taken into hospital… Please send him get well vibes if you have a moment, I miss him terribly and can’t wait for him to come home.

Read more Sunday Tittle Tattles…

The post The Sunday Tittle Tattle: A Birthday Rest… appeared first on A Model Recommends.

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It’s spring—YAY! We can finally break out our sandals & light sweaters. Bye, winter coats! While we’re doing a little spring cleaning in our closet, it’s also super important to give your skincare routine a spring refresh. As beauty lovers, we all know that the skin is the most important ingredient to a flawless face. That being said, it’s über important to make sure you take care of your skin—morning & night!

Here are some very important steps to prepping for the summer months ahead:

Wash Your Makeup Brushes

We’re just as guilty as the next makeup junkie, but this really is a key step. Your brushes create a lot of bacteria over time, so washing them every 3 months is important. Think about it—other than your fingers, your makeup brushes are touching your face more than anything else (hopefully) during your day. Scrub-a-dub-dub!

Exfoliate

We recommend exfoliating the skin at least once per week, sometimes more (or less) depending on your skin type. Your skin creates natural oils to protect your pores, however you want to make sure you’re giving it a clean sweep at least once a week. Our refined finish facial polish creates the smoothest surface, while gently exfoliating and purifying the skin to reveal your skin’s natural radiance.

Tone Up!

Another vital piece of our skincare regimen is prepping the skin before moisturizing day & night. Best way to do this? Apply our moisture prep toning lotion all over your face and neck. Its specialized formula contains vitamin E acetate, natural oat & meadowsweet, as well as botanical extracts known to purify & smooth the skin and help reduce fine lines. And, let’s be real here, there’s no better way to start or end the day than with smooth skin!

Lock In That Moisture

We don’t want to sound like a broken record, but moisturizing your skin really is the most important step. Moisturizing provides your skin with immediate & long-term hydration. When using total moisture, our hydra-concentrated facial cream with tri-radiance complex, you’re instantly helping your skin develop reserves of water & reinforce its moisture barrier.

Protect

Protect, protect, protect. Okay, okay. Every step in this skincare routine refresh seems to be the most important step, but seriously. Don’t leave the house without sunscreen, ever. Dream team? More like dream screen. What a perfect time to introduce our NEW, invisible silky-matte broad spectrum SPF 45 sunscreen for your face! Pair this with big easy, our bigger than BB, multi-balancing complexion perfector, which also has SPF 35.

Practice these steps every day, and you’ll be walking out of the house like “I woke up like dis,” obviously.

Have any questions, gorgeous? Ask away in the comments below! xo

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I could have called this post “sappy-looking, stylish hair care that I thought would be rubbish but actually turned out to be really good”, but I didn’t. I thought that it might be a little rude of me. Because it all looks very smart, actually, doesn’t it? Smart and clean and the kind of hair care that won’t make your scalp fall apart or dye your bathtub blue when it leaks or make your hair smell of “candy floss” or “peach melba” or “strawberry bubbles”.

I have a love-hate relationship with these kinds of products – SLS-free, natural extracts of this-and-that, shampoos that don’t lather, conditioners that don’t detangle – because part of me thinks that the best my hair ever feels and behaves is after I’ve used the cheapest, most synthetic of products. A clear, SLS-based shampoo followed by a conditioner that’s so loaded with silicones and slippery agents I can hardly put the lid back on the bottle after I’ve got the stuff on my hands. But I say part of me because actually, though I get these effects temporarily with the cheaper stuff, if I use those products long-term my hair tends to suffer. For the first few tries I have the silkiest princess hair known to man, but after a week or so my flowing, golden locks become dull and rubbish, and my scalp feels crap and itchy, and I’m all the way back to square one.

So, to cut a long story short, I like to use a mixture of some cheapy stuff (occasionally and also – ironically – just before an event or important occasion!) and some posh/”no nasties” stuff, with a default core routine of Philip Kingsley’s Itchy Flaky shampoo (here) and No Scent No Colour Conditioner (here). I find that a lot of the posh/”no nasties” stuff is just useless – shampoos that don’t even touch the surface when it comes to cleaning, conditioners that leave the lengths of my hair knotted and dry – but all of the products in the picture at the top of the page performed really well. I was surprised, because they all looked too stylish to perform well – I thought they’d be the beauty equivalent of those really nice-looking Swedish chairs that are an absolute b*stard to sit on for longer than ten minutes.

The Sans(ceuticals) Balancing Hair Wash and Hydratant (find them at Brummels of London here) smelt far too wholesome to be effective, but the shampoo lathered well (yes I know that lather isn’t an indication of a good shampoo, but I want a lather because otherwise it’s just like rubbing your head with an egg white) and left my hair really clean. The Hydratant was a bit cat’s-wee smelling to my pregnancy nose (lots of the more “natural” products seem to smell like stale wee to me at the moment!) but, considering its light formula, it conditioned and detangled just as well as some of my heavy-duty silicon-laden cheapies.

The Grown Alchemist Damask Rose, Black Pepper and Sage Shampoo (£16 at FeelUnique) is a nice one; less lather than the Sans(ceuticals) but still a fine cleansing job, even if I do need to go in twice if I’ve got dirtier than usual hair. The Sachajuan Hair Repair, however, has to be the biggest surprise of them all; light, flimsy in texture and with no real “presence” when you apply it to your hair, after five or ten minutes of getting to work it leaves everything incredibly smooth and silky. Very impressive, and I will be buying a full-sized version. (The one pictured isn’t full-size, you can find it at SpaceNK.)

So there you go – don’t judge a book by its cover, lesson learned, etc etc. Stylish-looking hair care that does a great job. Of course there are cheaper brands who do SLS-free shampoos and so on, and I shall get to those because so many of you ask for ingredient-savvy hair care recommendations, but I’ve finished all of the above and the empties were taking up room on my desk, so that was round one. Ding ding.

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