How to Get Tea-Riffic Skin With a DIY Tea Face-Mask

Almost everyday I have a cup of tea. So when a friend told me about this DIY tea face-mask I was definitely intrigued. Tea’s are great for your inner body, so why not for the skins surface too. Aside from the fact that it has lots of antioxidants to shoot down damaging free radicals, depending on what kind of tea it is, it can perk you up when your energy starts to flag at the end of a tiring work-day, or it can help you reach that zen place after a particularly trying morning with the kids. What a lot of people don’t know though, is that it  can soften skin and tighten pores, and a cool infusion can soothe sunburn and inflammation too.

It’s really easy to make an exfoliating face-mask using tea; all you need is a little hot water, and the tea of your choice.

Black or green tea will do nicely; just make sure that you get kinds that don’t have any additional flavorings, to avoid any negative reactions. You can also try using herbal teas, but just be careful about possible allergies. Most of the time, if you don’t have an allergic reaction when you drink it, it’s unlikely that you’ll suffer any ill effects when you use it on your skin. But just to be sure, do a skin patch test before you slather it on.

This recipe is generally just enough for a face-mask but if you have some left over, you can use it on your décolletage, your elbows, or even your hair. Wherever you may end up using this tea mask treatment, it’ll feel fresh, clean, and rejuvenated, so go wild!

If you’re using tea that comes in teabags, around two bags should suffice for a nice, thick face mask. If you’re using loose leaf tea, a teaspoon and a half should do nicely. Take a medium-sized bowl, and just dump that tea in. If you’re using teabags, tear those bags open and pour all the contents out into the bowl. Afterwards, add about a quarter teacup of hot water (you can vary the amount of water, depending on how thick you might prefer it), mix it thoroughly, and let it sit until it’s lukewarm. The mixture won’t be completely smooth, but the water should be nice and saturated, and the dried tea leaves good and soaked. It’s likely that the mixture will look a little like gritty mud and if it’s evenly mixed, that’s how it’s supposed to be.

This is going to get a little messy, so make sure you have a bit of free time to clean up afterwards. In the washroom, just spread the tea mixture on your face, massaging gently to polish your skin and slough off dead cells. Leave it on for fifteen minutes or so. It’ll be a bit itchy as the tea mixture dries, and it’ll flake off if you move around a lot.

When you’re done, wash the mixture off with some soap and water, and voila! Fresh, clean, and soft skin! Enjoy!

How to Stop Fixating on Your Appearance

Easy tips on how to stop obsessing about things you don’t like about your appearance. Stop worrying about your flaws and start celebrating those parts of you that you love.

How to spend time alone and enjoy It!

Your life can sometimes feel like a constant rush: Work commitments, going out with girlfriends or visiting family members can fill your schedule rapidly. It’s all very exciting, not to mention, exhausting. When you do find the opportunity to catch your breath, what then? Do you, like a number of women, find it hard to relax and enjoy your own company for a while? Here are some tips on how to truly cherish your time alone without feeling lonely.

Don’t worry about what others are doing

It’s easy to imagine that all of your friends are having a fabulous time on a Saturday night whilst you’re home alone. If you’re not careful, you can easily find yourself experiencing jealously and loneliness. It doesn’t matter whether your friends are having the time of their lives or a miserable evening. If they’ve had a terrible night, you can cheer them up by planning your own night together. If they’ve had a great night out, share their stories and know that you’ll share similar evenings together in the future. Let go of the fear of missing out. When you do, you will find that spending an evening on your own can be just as much of an enjoyable experience as spending time with friends.

You don’t have to pretend

Life isn’t a competition to be the most popular person around. Spending time on your own is nothing to feel guilty or down about. Don’t feel the compulsion to lie to people if you haven’t received any invitations from friends for the weekend. If a colleague asks what you’re up to on Saturday, be honest. There’s no shame in being alone because you are going to enjoy the opportunity to slow down and enjoy your own company.

You don’t have to keep busy

Being alone doesn’t have to mean preoccupying yourself with tasks. You don’t have to distract yourself from the fact that you are your only company. Filing your bills into chronological order or alphabetizing your DVD collection can wait. You should be taking this opportunity to do the things that you love, not chores that you’ve been putting off for months. If you seek out tasks for the sole reason of keeping busy and forgetting that you’re alone, you will only find it harder to spend time on your own when the chores are done.

Discover something that you really enjoy

Being on your own is a perfect time to look into new activities. Just because you’re not socializing, doesn’t mean that you have to spend all day slumped on your sofa watching TV. If you’ve had thoughts about giving a new hobby a try, research it online, read books and do something totally new. It could be sports and fitness, arts and crafts, cookery or DIY around the home. When you find the hobby or activity that fits the bill, you will find spending time alone a prospect to look forward to.

Get out and about

Getting out of the house can do wonders for the mind. It’s invigorating and inspiring. You can spend time alone in your favorite coffee shop or bookstore, or you can expand your horizons and try something new. Even if you make a trip to a local museum you’ve never been to before, the experience is an accomplishment and one you enjoyed and did all on your own. Once you have confidence in your own ability to spend time alone, seek out adventures further afield. Spend the day in a neighboring city or book a short break away. Thousands of women enjoying travelling alone and you could be one of them.

Spending time with family and friends is very important, but having time out to spend some time alone is also essential. Forget what’s going on in other people’s lives and concentrate on your own happiness. When you enjoy your own company, you will always be content, whether you are alone or with others.

Cute Kissable Lip Balm

Temperatures are rising in New York City, spring seems to have skipped us this year with temperatures getting up in the 80′s this weekend. With all this sun I thought it would be a good idea to remind everyone to protect your lips from the damaging rays of the sun. Over the winter holiday I received Eos lip balm and finally cracked it open this past week and needless to say I love it…for all the following reasons:

• Shea butter and Vitamin E
• Cute egg shaped container
• Paraben Free
• Gluten Free
• Petrolatum Free
• Phthalate Free
• Minty taste

You can pick them up in a variety of different colors and flavors at your local drugstore. 

Do You Have The Courage To Listen To Your Intuition?

Everyone has intuition, but not everyone allows it to be their guide in life. The truth is following our intuition can be a bit scary. Fear can many times trump intuitive feelings because the logical thought can seem saner, or safer, than the intuitive one.

You may intuitively know that if you head in one direction it will result in happiness for you, but because you are not exactly sure about the steps that you need to take, or what will exactly happen on that journey, you become fearful. That fear results in you choosing the safer and more rational option.  

Unfortunately, when we ignore our intuitive thoughts and listen to our logical thoughts, we barely ever change anything in our lives unless something starts to go wrong. When that happens we then start to wonder if we are doing the right things and going in the right direction, and we let our intuitive side speak up a little louder. But even then we are more likely to listen to our rational side rather than our intuition because of fear.

We Ultimately Make Decisions Based On Our Emotions

Decision making cannot be done completely by rationality. It is human nature to make decisions based on emotions. If we were to try to choose an option just from our rational thoughts, we would constantly bounce back and forth reasons for, and reasons against, making one choice over another. Our emotions about the choices are the deciding factor on which option we choose.

When we are making a choice we tend to take the less scary option, and the option that has a clearer vision of what will happen as an outcome. This is why intuition usually gets ignored.

Your intuition does not always have a clear outcome. It can cause you to feel that heading in one direction is the right way to go, but because it can’t show you where you will end up you may retreat and choose the rational option instead.

Having Courage To Listen To Your Intuition

Courage is an important part of listening to your inner guidance system and becoming intuitive. Courage means moving past the fear you feel, because you understand that your intuitive side knows what it is talking about.

Having the courage to listen to your intuition involves:

Ÿ  - Wanting more out of your life and your happiness.

Ÿ  - Accepting that life is not all roses and lollipops.

Ÿ  - Knowing that life is meant to live and not just something to get through.

Ÿ  - Taking the option that feels right to you and not the easy option.

Ÿ  - Taking chances and risks in life because you know the reward could be great.

Life starts to happen when you move past fear and start trusting your intuition. When you accept that it has your best interest at heart, and that it does not want to lead you down a path of unhappiness or suffering, then you can start to gain the courage that you need to follow your intuition.

Soon your intuition will not be as scary. It will be a guide that allows you to live the life you desire. You may not always know where you are going when you listen to your intuition, but you will always know that you are living your life the way you want to live it instead of just getting through your life. That is the amazing gift that comes from gaining the courage to listen to your intuition. 

My Aztec Beauty Secret

This one of my best kept secrets to flawless skin Ladies….I’ve probably only shared my facial secret with a hand full of people and now I’m about to share it with you. I’m not one for spending a lot of money on fancy facials, but every once in a while I will. Between my visits to the esthetician I give myself an Indian Healing Clay mask. This clay mask can also be used on acne, bodywraps, clay baths, foot soaks, chilled clay for knee packs and insect bites. The best part is you can find this clay mask at most health food stores.

Basically, you stir equal parts of mixture with water or raw apple cider vinegar in a non-metal bowl (I only use Raw Apple Cider Vinegar.) The Apple Cider Vinegar acts as an antibacterial which is great for killing any bacteria that may be on the face. Apply 1/4 or 1/2 inch of the mask to the face and let it dry for 5 -10 minutes for delicate skin and 15 – 20 minutes for normal skin. Remove clay with warm water. You may notice a little redness to the face, but they even tell you on the container that this is normal and will disappear in about 30 minutes or so.

Now that my secret’s out of the bag….go on try it out. Let me know how it works for you and by all means spread the good word.

Are you Afraid of Failure? 4 Ways to Combat the Fear of Failure

Are you afraid of failing? When you fail at something, do you put yourself down harshly for it?  Does failing at something make you feel like a failure as a human being? Have you considered how much your physical appearance is affected by how you handle failure? Whether you admit it or not how you feel about your looks is directly impacted by how you manage your self-esteem. If you fear failing, you are adversely lowering your self-esteem and missing out on some very important life lessons that failure can teach you.

Let’s face it, there’s no doubt that success feels better than failure. When we succeed, we feel good; we even feel great.  We get lots of praise from other people when we succeed. Success tells us we’re on the right track. Success means we’re good. We’re great. When we succeed, we approve of ourselves.

On the other hand, failure often feels terrible. Failure means we made a mistake.  For many of us, failing means we’re not good enough. It means we are inferior. We don’t deserve anybody’s respect, not even our own.  We often feel so humiliated when we fail, that we never try again. We lose our courage and we lose our self respect.

But is this really the right way to look at failure? Failure actually has a lot to teach us. In fact, we can learn more lessons from failure than we can learn from success.  All of us fail at times and all of us succeed at times. Those of us who never learn how to handle failure will be less likely to achieve success in the long run.

Instead of looking at failure as a judgment upon your worth as a human being, you need to start looking for the important lessons in failure:

• Sometimes the lesson of failure is that a particular path is a dead end.
• Sometimes the lesson is that we need to try harder on that path.
• Sometimes the lesson is that we need to take a different approach.
• Sometimes the only lesson we learn from failure is that we need to stand tall and keep trying.

Learning how to respond to failure with our own pride and dignity intact will in the long run help us to feel better about our self-image. Prevent us from spending lots of money and time fixing our appearance in an attempt to feel good about our life and help us to build skills necessary to handle failure. Getting back up after being knocked down is triumphant, feels good and is quite sexy.

Be sure to download my free 30-Minutes Guided Meditation it too will help you get centered and focus on the good and beauty within you despite your external circumstances.

Coo Coo for Coconut Oil…My New Favorite Moisturizer

I use to use coconut oil all the time for cooking, but once the last jar I bought ran out I completely forgot about it. Last week I rediscovered it again while working on set for the television show The Revolution. After finishing Dr. Jen’s makeup she grab a jar of coconut oil and spread the oil on her legs for moisture. Immediately after the taping of the show I walked into Wholefoods Market to purchase a jar of coconut oil and have been using it for about 4 days now and have completely gone coo coo for it all over again.

My skin has never felt softer. There are also numerous other benefits coconut oil has on the skin like it delays wrinkles, and sagging of skin which normally become prominent with age. Coconut oil also helps in treating various skin problems including psoriasis, dermatitis, eczema and other skin infections. Unless you are allergic to coconut oil in someway then I would stay away, but if you aren’t by all means run out immediately and buy yourself a jar. Try it out and see if you like it. If you find you don’t like it for your skin you can also use it for your hair or for cooking click here for some free coconut oil recipes.

How to Boost Your Health Through Forgiveness

Spring is here and while the earth is warming and flowers are blooming, wouldn’t you also like to feel the radiance of spring in your life? If so, try forgiving someone and replacing those hurt feelings with something more positive.

When was the last time you forgave someone? I mean really truly in your heart, mind and body released all of the emotional charge around an event or person whom you felt caused you pain? If you are at a crossroads with yourself about whether or not you should let go of your attachment to the past and the hurt associated with it, my hope is that your vanity for your looks and good health will outweigh the burden that carrying around resentment has on you.

When we are angry with someone, the person who suffers most is us. Anger feels dangerous because it is dangerous to our bodies and our minds. Conversely, forgiveness feels like freedom because it is a relief for our bodies and our minds. Scientists have studied the effects of forgiveness, and you may be pleasantly surprised at how much something that takes so little effort can benefit you.

Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Hope College, has been researching anger and forgiveness. In 2001, she conducted a study of the physiological responses 71 college students. One group of participants dwelt on injustices which were perpetrated against them, and the other group pictured themselves forgiving those who had offended them. The professor notes that, “When focused on unforgiving responses, their blood pressure surged, their heart rates increased, brow muscles tensed, and negative feelings escalated. By contrast, forgiving responses induced calmer feelings and physical responses. It appears that harboring unforgiveness comes at an emotional and a physiological cost. Cultivating forgiveness cut these costs.”

Fred Luskin, Ph.D., author of Forgive for Good also believes in the power of forgiveness to heal the body. He says, “When you’re stuck in a grudge, you’re isolated in your own suffering. The long term damage to the cardiovascular system from bitterness and resentment is clearly established. The power of forgiveness also boosts immunity in the short run, helping the body fend off colds and flu.”

Everett Worthington, Jr., Ph.D.  is a clinical psychologist, professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and author of several books on forgiveness. He has found that unforgiving people tend to have more negative indicators of health than forgiving people. They have higher stress levels, lower immune system function, and increased rates of heart disease. They also divorce more often than the general population. In contrast, forgiving people suffer fewer episodes of clinical depression, enjoy longer marriages and larger social networks, indicating that they get along better with others than their unforgiving counterparts.

According to an article in Harvard Women’s Health Watch, people who forgive also feel less pain than unforgiving people. They note that “A small study on people with chronic back pain found that those who practiced meditation focusing on converting anger to compassion felt less pain and anxiety than those who received regular care.” The previously mentioned Dr. Luskin also echoed this finding, noting that his subjects who were trained in forgiveness “reported fewer headaches, backaches, and upset stomachs.”

There are numerous ways that forgiveness can benefit you. Collectively research suggests that people who make the effort to forgive sleep better, are happier, have more long lasting relationships, less stress, and less incidence of disease. Conversely, anger, bitterness, and unforgiveness have been linked to cancer and other undesirable health conditions. So if you value your health, forgiveness is an extraordinarily inexpensive way to care for your body and your mind. It may not benefit you, but you have nothing to lose by trying it, so why not forgive someone today?

If you are have trouble taking the steps necessary to forgive download my Radiant Beauty Guided meditation CD and receive access to Kenetia’s Makeover Matters where I provide you with tip and techniques to liberate the beauty in you.

Glowing Reviews…My New Favorite Makeup

Just last week I was out shopping with friends and couldn’t help but stop by the makeup counters in Sak’s Fifth Avenue. Burberry cosmetics caught my eye with their sleek displays. I must admit I wasn’t expecting much when I tried on their foundation, but to my surprise their liquid foundation matched my skin perfectly. However, if you are needing full coverage foundation this is not the makeup line for you and to be really straight if you are more than two shades darker than I am you won’t find what you need.

Aside from the foundation they sell this outrageously beautiful ”Fresh Glow” Luminous Fluid Base. It retails for $48 and I believe only sold at Sak’s, Nordstrom’s and online. It works for all skin tones and brings a nice fresh glow to the face without looking oily or wet. A must have ladies for the summer.