I've always been one of those people who likes to experiment with their hair. While it can yield pretty results, there is usually heat or chemicals involved. While I have sworn off color treatments for the last couple of years (that might change soon though. Stay tuned...) I have also not taken as much care of my hair as I should. Mostly due to the fact that haircuts and treatment in nyc are very expensive. While I have been able to find a couple of good drug store hair products, they are for the most part, unimpressive. I have even tried pretty high end products to find that some just dont justify their price. My hair stil has a mind of it's own and doesn't like to do what it's told.

A few weeks back I started using the Damage Remedy line from Aveda after receiving a treatment at their soho location. I've been using it ever since then and I must say I really enjoy the products. The shampoo is gentle but does a good job of striping out the old funk and gunk out. After all, I only wash but 2 times a week, 3 if I get sweaty or if it's summer. Out of the entire line I really like the Intensive Restructuring Treatment. It has a way of just releasing any tangles with very little effort. I usually have to use a wide-toothed comb and a little elbow grease to get tangles out. This stuff just releases them. It's pretty amazing. I like to use a big squirt of the Restructuring Conditioner with a small squirt of the Intensive Restructuring Treatment mixed in.

One of the greatest things about Aveda products are the amazing scents. They're very herbal and natural smelling not like other products that are purfumey or sweet smelling. I just can't stop sniffing my hair!

Overall I really like the Damage Remedy line and I'm going to use every last drop of it!. If the beast known as winter is taking its wrath out on your hair or you use a lot of heat on your hair this stuff will help nourish and pamper it to restore moisture.

GIVEAWAY TIME!

To win a set of Aveda Damage Remedy Shampoo, Conditioner and 2 treatments (retail value $101) LIKE Aveda on facebook and leave a comment below telling me about your hair and why you could uses some Damage Remedy.

For an additional entry Follow me on twitter and tweet: "RT to win! @lesleykat I want to win @Aveda #DamageRemedy"

RULES: Contest ends Friday January 13, midnight EST. Open to US Residents only. One winner will be chosen at random and notified via email, or direct message on twitter. If winner does not respond within 48 hours, a new winner will be chosen. Maximum 2 entries per person, any additional entries will be disqualified. Any twitter entries that are not following @lesleykat will be disqualified. Good luck!

Info from Aveda on the family of products:

Damage Remedy™ Restructuring Shampoo, $24: Our gentle daily shampoo helps repair damage with quinoa protein, while nurturing with rich coconut and babassu-lending new life to hair.

• part of a three-step restructuring system
• helps hair weakened by chemical processes, heat styling and environmental exposure
• babassu and coconut-based cleansing formula is kind to damaged hair
• with quinoa protein-to help strengthen and repair hair from the inside out

Damage Remedy™ Restructuring Conditioner, $24: Our daily conditioning formula with quinoa protein helps repair and re-moisturize damaged hair—infusing it anew with healthy movement, silkiness and shine.

• part of a three-step restructuring system
• helps hair weakened by chemical processes, heat styling and environmental exposure
• formula blends phellodendron, sandalwood and barley to smooth the hair cuticle
• with quinoa protein—to help strengthen and repair hair from the inside out

Damage Remedy™ Intensive Restructuring Treatment, $29: Our intensive weekly treatment deeply penetrates to help repair, seal and smooth even the most damaged hair. Using the power of pure plant oils and quinoa protein, it restores health, silkiness and shine.

• part of a three-step restructuring system
• helps strengthen hair weakened by chemical processes, heat styling and environmental exposure
• quinoa protein penetrates the hair shaft, working from inside to help strengthen and repair
• phellodendron and barley seal in moisture
• castor, jojoba and meadowfoam seed oils smooth hair's surface

Damage Remedy™ Daily Hair Repair, $24: Our daily leave-in treatment instantly repairs damaged hair by 26%*, helps protect from heat styling and detangles to help prevent further damage.

• Certified organically-derived quinoa protein penetrates hair to instantly repair damage and strengthen from the inside out.
• Wheat protein helps protect from heat styling—such as blow-drying and ironing.
• Soy-derived oil detangles to help prevent further damage and breakage.
• Certified organic essential oils including bergamot, mandarin and ylang ylang provide an uplifting aroma.

FTC Disclosure: I recieved the deep conditioning treatment and set of products from Aveda. Giveaway price will be furnished by Aveda. Image provided by Aveda.

The other day I read an article about scented nail polish and it got me thinking. What if instead of the nail polish coming in ridiculous scents like grape and cotton candy (um, hello! we're adults) it could smell like your favorite designer fragrance? I let my creative (and photoshop) juices flow and came up with a few examples of what I would like.

Dior J'adore Nail Lacquer would be my beauty dream come true. They'd be super multi-dimensional with crystallized pigments that look like crushed jewels. When they dried they would have the scent of my signature fragrance, Dior J'adore. They'd probably retail for $30 and I would buy every single one of them! Of course they'd be shaped like the fragrance bottle because they're super limited edition and highly coveted.

"Tricolore"
Named after the French flag. A royal blue jelly base with flecks of red and white glitter.

"Roquefort" 
Named after one of France's most notoriously stinky cheeses. A champagne colored sheer base with 3 sizes of hex glitter in antique gold, champagne and light gold.

"Ciel Nocturne"
Named after the night sky as seen from the French countryside. A Black base with hyper-reflective multi-chrome glass-fleck finish.

"Rosas Salvajes"
Named after wild roses. A deep red-pink jelly base with glass-fleck shimmers of gold and baby pink.

If you could create your own dream product what would it be?

I work at an advertising/marketing agency that specializes in fashion retail, and I have a few thoughts on Photoshop and the industry that I'd like to share. I spend a lot of hours out of my day cleaning up photographs of super beautiful models both male and female. We enhance our images by booking photographers that specialize in fashion. We bring out certain features, mood, and emotions using makeup, lighting, composition and styling. Photoshop is just another one of those of tools used to make a photo more appealing to the eye. Photoshop is not the enemy folks, it's the abuse of photoshop that is.

Banning Photoshop in ads will NOT make much difference because the beauty world will still find a way around it. Whether it's lash extensions or just finding models who are naturally blessed with long, lush lashes they will book THOSE girls for mascara ads. I can't imagine what will be done for foundation ads.

We are used to looking at idealized representations of human form. Before the days of photoshop, images were literally airbrushed, recolored, cut apart and put back together to do some of the same things I do in photohop every day. It took a lot longer, but the results were still pretty good. In the world before photography, artists and illustrators often idealized human forms. If you were to open up an old Sears catalog you'd see a lot of long-legged women with tiny waists and perfect-looking hair and features. Human beings like to look at beautiful things. Our eyes/brains are naturally attracted to them.  Do you think Mona Lisa never had a zit on her face? I betcha she did but it certainly wasn't added into her famous portrait.

My point is that advertising is a fantasy. Its about making you feel that if you buy product X then you will look/feel/be like the people in the ads. I guess what's making people so upset is when product X doesn't live up to the expectations.

We start with a RAW image. On set a style is applied that enhances the photo right away. These can range from color correction, brightness, contrast, even pushing colors into blacks and whites. This stylizes the photo right away. Many photographers have certain "curves" that they apply that define their style. A few specific examples are photographers who have very specific styles include Guy Aroch and Mary Ellen Mathews. Then the images are marked up for retouching. The usual stuff includes cleaning up skin, delete dark circles, enhance clothes and makeup (on women) and even cleaning up hair. Further color shifts are made to enhance style and product.

For beauty retouching the general process goes a little something like this: general cleanup followed by more detail work like deleting wrinkles, enhancing color of skin and even tweaking facial features. As you can see in the above GIF I have arched the brows more, slimmed the nose and enhanced the chin by pushing it out slightly. The skin has been stripped of all freckles and pores/natural texture. Additional "light" has been added by darkening shadows and lightening high planes of the face where the light is naturally reflecting. If the model is wearing lipstick the lips are cleaned up and often reshaped. (Not the case in this photo) The backgrounds was finessed to POP the face. The hairline was filled and cleaned up. Oh, did I mention the eyelashes? You see the makeup was enhanced dramatically by cleaning up the edges and darkening the rims of the eyes. Also lightening of the eyes and reducing the redness of the inner tear duct pops the eyes.

This type of retouching happens to just about every ad you see. Sometimes less and sometimes WAY more.

PS. Just so you all know, I do not do this extent of retouching to my own photos for this site. I will clean a spot or two if necessary but NOTHING to the degree demonstrated in the above GIF.

I know NYE is a little ways away still but don't tell me you haven't considered a few nail options yet? Right? Yeah, that's what I thought. For this glittering glory I started with 3 coats of Maybelline Express Finish, 650 Sunlight. You can get away with 2 but I like 3 since this polish is on the sheer side. I then topped it with a couple of coats of Sally Girl, Chunky Gold Glitter. This glitter is a little tricky to apply because instead of swiping like a normal polish you have to dab it to place the glitter where you want. I love the 2 different sizes of glitter so I don't mind applying it this way at all.

What do you think? Is this nail look perfect for NYE or what? 
PS. Click through to see what it looks like with a coat of Essie, Matte About You on top. Spoiler alert... it's really awesome.

For the matte look...

KEEP READING...

Well I missed mani monday but I am making up for it with this awesome combo for you all! I have been sitting on these Forever21 Love & Beauty glitter polishes for a couple of months now. I finally pulled them out monday night and I am so happy I did!

I started with 2 coats of Zoya, Verushka which is one of Zoya's matte velvet colors. Its a rich warm forest green and when topped with clear it comes alive with beautiful shimmer. I then added 1 coat of Forever21 Love & Beauty, Turquoise. It has tiny holographic circle glitter and large hex glitter. With an almost tone-on-tone color combo it adds a richness and depth to make this combo look awesome! I was so pleased with the results. I think it's perfect for the holiday season. I hope you all enjoy.

Have any of you out there tried the Forever21 Love & Beauty polishes? thoughts?

This weeks's manicure is a snow globe inspired look. I used 2 coats of Color Club, Sheer Disguise as my base color. It closely resembles the grey-blue color that the sky becomes when it's snowy. I then used LASplash, Great White and a dotting tool to carefully  place my snow flakes, which are more like snow balls, but whatever. I made them more dense at the bottom to resemble accumulation. I then topped it all off with Sally Girl, So Disco to give it a bit of winter magic.

Now if only that snow would just get here already! Enjoy kittens.

YO! Happy thursday dear kittens! I hope your weeks are all going well. I've got a little photo spam for you rounding up my favorite looks from the #2011MUC (2011 make challenge) from the past couple of weeks. Sorry for the inconsistent lighting/color. I've been messing with my camera's manual modes trying to push its limits a little more.

We're planning on going to the end of the month with this challenge. If you want to join just upload your images to twitter and use the hashtag #2011MUC. Check out all the other contributer's posts at the offish tumblr blog.

Here we go! Hint: Click the pictiures to view them full size and hit the link underneath for product lists.

11.15.11 Green Screen

11.17.11 Vintage french

11.29.11 Teal cat eye

look from 11.30.11, A lesson in bright liner

12.1.11 Smokey duochrome red-green

Roy G Biv is a good friend of mine. We go way back. I have never been afraid of him, nor him of me. If you don't know what I am talking about then let me explain. Roy G Biv is a the rainbow. Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet. In high school I had just about every color you can imagine. For a little while I had this amazing blonde to pink ombre hair. I was obsessed with changing my hair color. I used everything from Punky Colour to cake icing coloring. All of my methods were messy, unpredictable and a bit ridiculous at times. Oh, high school!

From Lauren Conrad's rainbow streaks to famously-pink hued hair model Charolette Free to countless numbers of runway shows, brightly colored hair has taken the fashion and beauty world by storm. My office lets me wear all the crazy makeup and hair colors I want. For those out there that cannot but still want in on the brightly colored fun let me introduce the Color Bug by Kevin Murphy.

Its a radical new concept to temporary hair color that works a lot like and eyeshadow. It comes in a little half globe shape and is applied by rubbing it directly on to your hair. Lets explore further, shall we?

More pictures, directions, swatches and continued review...

KEEP READING...

There's a new flakey in town! Esse just released a collection that includes Luxeffects top coats. For this week's mani monday I used 2 coats of Illamasqua, Rampage; a rich, deep, dark semi-jelly cream emerald green. What's great about this particular green is it doesn't live in the forest! It's a dark warm-toned green which is kind of hard to find. It looks great with my neutral-warm-toned skin. I then topped the edges with Esse, Shine of the Times Luxeffects top coat; a multi-dimentional flakey glitter.

The shape of this flake is much smaller than the INGLOT flakies or Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure. It's also a bit more condensed. You really don't need more than 1 coat. I used a tiny bit a the tips of my nails and then spread it down with a cleaned off brush. The effect is gorgeous! I completely obsessed with the Esse Luxeffects!

Top picture taken in indirect sunlight, bottom in direct sunlight. You can see the different colors at the different angles.

Bonus shots of Esse Luxeffects, Shine of the Times:

(direct sunlight)

(indirect sunlight)

Green is one of those colors that looks good on just about every eye and skin color. It pops on brown eyes and looks rich on deep dark eyes. It compliments blue eyes and looks amazing on violet eyes. It even looks nice on green eyes.

Urban Decay 24/7 Glide-on Eye Pencil in Covet is a blue-toned medium-dark green with hints of silver glitter. The glitter isn't super apparent but it's there. In no way would I consider this liner a glitter liner. It has a semi-metallic finish with catches light and has a great effect. Since it is on the cool side it would be easier for someone with cool tones to wear but I think all will be able to make it work.

Available at Sephora $18

For more photos and swatches...

KEEP READING