Kimberly Jarman Photography

Oh my goodness, have you ever had one of those weeks/months/years where you feel like you’re working and working, just to watch money drain out of your bank account?   I know that in 2010 we ALL felt that way, and let me tell you, this week is killing me, people.

 To make a long story short, (and less boring), my beloved little Beetle, David Beckham (he’s foreign and gorgeous, just like my car, thus the name), is costing me every dime I have right now, and it’s happening the week that I’m flying to New York City for a huge birthday bash for my cousin, who just so happens to be a fashion designer. Um, I can’t go buy a fabulous outfit!  I can’t buy a stick of gum for this trip! My boyfriend bought my ticket (love that man), but I can’t hit him up for wardrobe too….so let’s talk about how you can look fab, without spending a fortune.

Cheap Secret #1:  Renttherunway.com

This site is phenomenal!!!! For around $50-$100 you can rent a designer gown, outfit, etc. for a couple of days and return it! It has everything from bags, to jewelry, to dresses, to shoes and more, and it’s all on their site to rent.  How amazing is that?!  You could show up to an event in a Calvin Klein runway outift, for $75. 

 Here’s my favorite example on the site today:

Badgley Mischka Dress:  Retail :$440

Renttherunway: $75

$75 got Badgley Mishcka?!?!?!  This is one example of the awesome deals you can find on this site. Totally worth a look, and my friend Cathy has now used the site, and it worked out really well for her, easy to receive and easy to ship back. What a wonderful idea someone had!

Cheap Secret #2:  Trade Your Closet Party

Ok, this is an event I’ve attended a couple of times, that honestly worked amazingly if you have enough people. What you do is: go through your closet and bag up everything you never wear anymore/doesn’t fit/you hate/etc and tell every single friend you know to do the same thing, and ask them to tell all of their friends to do the same.

These smarties got the whole church to participate!

Once you have everyone’s contact info, you invite them to a Trade Your Closet Party at your house, get some snacks and cocktails, and have everyone bring their discarded clothing items to your house. Set up a cheap clothing wrack, or just drape things over your couch and chairs, and it’s an open free trade! Shoes, purses, clothes, jewelry, clothing ,whatever people aren’t using anymore gets them admission to come see if there’s something they’d like to have! 

I did this for the first time in college and walked away with a pair of heels I still have to this day, and a pair of jeans I wore until they had to be retired. FOR FREE!  Just because that top looks weird on me, or I don’t fit in those pants anymore, doesn’t mean my best friend won’t look amazing in them! It’s a straight up trading party, and it’s beneficial for everyone!

It’s a big movement!  Check out swapstyle.com!

Cheap Secret #3: Have a Friend Go Through Your Closet

About three months ago my little sister was wailing to me about having no outift, and no money, for an event.  She came to my house, but it made her more upset because she is so much shorter than I am, my clothes just don’t fit her well. We then went back to her closet and I really dug into it.  I was pulling out stuff she never wears, things she thinks she hates, and so on, and pretty soon I had made some outfit combinations she had never thought up.

Stacy and Clinton make a living out of this on What Not to Wear!

Get your most fashion-minded friend to come do this, and you might be really surprised at what they turn out. My sister thought she had NO clothing, but when I left, she was wearing things she hadn’t worn in a long time, with a renewed appreciation for them! They might pair things up together that you never thought of, they might belt something in a way that makes it look totally different, they might add boots and tights that you hadn’t thought of, you just never know. You look at your clothes every single day, but your friends don’t.  Let someone come help you, and you might really be surprised.

Cheap Secret #4: Make Do

In the end, what can you do?  You can either go get yourself into debt by buying new clothes, or you can suck it up and make what you have work.  Or…if you’re me….you can bring the bare bones pieces that you can’t borrow due to size (boots, tights, undergarments) and count on the fact that your fashion designer cousin will have something you can put on. If not, oh well, I’m pretty sure the last thing we’ll all remember from this NYC weekend, is what we wore.

On our last trip together, my cousin Reagan (left) and I on the way to the Grand Canyon

xoxoxoxo

 

It is better to want what you have than to have what you want.–Proverb quote

Oh man, have you ever just gotten a big dose of humility dropped in your lap with a reminder that you need to be thankful and appreciative for the things in your life?  Well, hello everyone, I am on the receiving end of that today!

It all started with Valentine’s Day and what I’m calling “The Gift Incident”.  Have you ever worked so hard on a gift that you just KNOW you’ve nailed it?  Well, for the BF’s gift I nailed it, people. It was funny and sweet and loving and thoughtful and all packaged up and shipped to his doorstep right on February 14th.  I was very proud.

My BF on the other hand, thought Valentine’s Day was a week away, is far away in training, and frantically tried to send me something, knowing it would be a bit late, and trying very hard to do something good for the holiday in a short time frame. So when I received a huge Tiffany’s box on my doorstep, oh my goodness, imagine my excitement!  A huge blue box?! How much jewelry could be in it?  How beautiful were these jewels going to BE?!?!?!?!?  I opened, with excited trepidation, and held my breath…

People, it wasn’t jewels.

It was a beautiful, ridiculously expensive….travel makeup bag.  Oh my.  My heart kind of sunk and I just stood there thinking, “For Valentine’s Day…I got a makeup bag.”  I was pretty confused, then kind of sad, then just….really sad.  This is what our relationship is?  THIS is what the most romantic holiday of the year brought me? Oh, the comedown was hard and fast, my friends.  Hard and fast.  I spent the night pretty upset (after, of course repeatedly telling him how much I loved it) and feeling really unloved and unlucky and unhappy.

The next day the BF sent me a message saying he was feeling awful that my gift to him was so much effort and so much more romantic, and he just knew that he’d missed the mark.  I assured him no gift is bad, and that I was so happy.  But…I was lying. I pouted all morning and cracked jokes with my friends when really, I was upset.

And then, my cousin yelled at me.  She said that travel accessories, for someone who travels all the time, are amazingly thoughtful.  She pointed out that I love Tiffany’s, and she reminded me he had to scramble to get something shipped in one day.  I started thinking about this….

The my good friend Heidi told me I need to be grateful that a man, who cares about me, is sending me boxes at all.  Period.  That I received a Valentine’s Day gift, from 3,000 miles away, and it was from my favorite store.  This got me feeling slightly bad…

Then my wonderful friend David said that for a man, who is not very experienced in women’s gifts and romantic holidays, to send something that is useful for me, from Tiffany’s, will make my travel easier, and did it all in one day, is a pretty fantastic guy.  This got me eating that huge piece of humility.

What kind of brat am I?!  Just who do I think I am?  My boyfriend does many things for me, and he sent me a lovely gift that millions of girls would probably jump for joy over–as I should have been doing!  I was not raised to be ungrateful or unappreciative of other people’s efforts, and he was generous and thoughtful in his gift.  And even if he wasn’t, a gift is a gift, and always something to be thankful for!

So, today, I’ve decided that I will swallow my brattiness, behave like the grateful person I should always be, and carry my new bag everywhere.  Grateful looks good on everyone.  I need to put mine back on and get it’s shape back.

xoxoxo

So, when I frown, or squint, or think too hard, I tend to scrunch my eyebrows together and this little line has formed there, right in my furrow, and it’s making me a little nuts lately.  I know it’s just one line, I know I’m only 30, and I know it’s probably only visible to me….but it’s there and I hate it! I have used Retin-A for almost 15 years now, I haven’t left the house without a gallon of sunscreen on in over a decade, and I just feel like I’ve done all I can to fight time hitting my face, and for the most part it’s worked…but that line is THERE.

Well, I brought this up to the woman who does my eyebrows, the amazing Lana Pinski of Leidan Mitchell Salon (seriously, I’ve gone to her for my eyebrows for 10 years and I think she actually somehow reshapes my whole head each time to make me prettier, she’s a miracle worker with wax) and I was looking at her flawless skin and she said, “Oh I love Botox, but only for that spot and around my eyes.”  I was floored!  She doesn’t look frozen-faced!  She doesn’t have a weird, plastic surgery look to her skin!  She just looks….pretty.  I then tentatively asked the next question I was afraid to hear answered, “So…do you think I should get Botox?” She, very matter-of-factedly, said, “Well, if you start now, once a year, before there’s really a groove, you’ll never have to get it filled with something like Restalin when it’s formed into a real, deep crease in ten or fifteen years.” Hm.

This sounds pretty logical, if I start paralyzing that stupid little muscle now, it won’t ever become a deep crease.  But….I’m scared of Botox!  I’m scared of all things plastic surgery related to be honest, and I’m scared of what that leads to…..like…if I paralyze this muscle now, what stops me from finding a hundred spots to Botox and then I have a fully frozen face one morning that I’ve just gone overboard on!  I’ve done this before–with tweezers.  In the days before Lana, I tweezed my eyebrows once and kept finding a stray hair..and another..and another..until I virtually had no eyebrows. It was hideous and I just couldn’t stop plucking!  What if Botox is the same way?

So I’ve decided to ask around about alternatives to Botox, but beyond the usual face creams/sunscreen/sleep more advice, and here’s what I’ve found out:

Frownies

The beautiful actress Rene Russo swears by a product called Frownies, so I looked up this product and it looks pretty good! Basically, they are sticky, tape like patches you place on your face to hold your skin apart while you sleep (or drive, or whatever you want to do with tape on your face), and eventually train those muscles you repetitively use in facial motions to relax and lie differently.  It sounds simple enough, they’re not expensive, so I’m ordering some!  Can’t hurt, right?

Non-Intravenous Procedures

Ok, I already use Retin-A so I looked up what else there is and talked to some people about what other procedures you can do, before going under the needle.

Chemical Peels:  a lot of what happens with wrinkles is old skin cells sitting into grooves, and an overall dulling of your skin with age and less cell turnover, causing wrinkles to be more prominent on the surface. A chemical peel is designed to remove that dull uppper-most layer, and reveal the younger skin underneath. It’s less expensive, non-invasive, and definitely worth a try!

Microdermabrasion:  going with the same philosophy, by removing that top layer of duller, older skin, you are making the overall health of your facial skin in it’s top shape, leaving less to settle in those creases forming.  I’ve had microderm….but I was like 23, so I’m thinking I might revisit this and see if it makes that area (and all areas) less noticeable to me!

Laser Resurfacing:  Ok, this one scares me a little bit, but it’s apparently still a non-invasive therapy that isn’t injecting poison into my face, so I guess it’s less scary than Botox! Laser resurfacing is pretty self-explanatory, it’s the use of lasers on your skin to “gently vaporize and/or ablate skin tissue to improve wrinkles, scars and blemishes, seal blood vessels or cut skin tissue.  The laser has the unique ability to produce one specific color (wavelength) of light, which can be varied in its intensity and pulse duration” (according to http://www.asds.net/LaserResurfacingInformation.aspx) and it can erase fine lines and improve everything in terms of your facial tissue.  It isn’t cheap though: laser resurfacing runs around $500-$1500 a treatment, and most times you’re recommended to have more than one treatment.

Tacit Acceptance

And of course, there’s always the fact that, eventually there will be lines on my face, and I’m going to need to accept and embrace that. I don’t want to be a woman over a certain age with a freakishly pulled and smooth face….but I also don’t want to be 30 with this stupid frown line.  I suppose I could also look at the culprit, and stop frowning in general, maybe smile lines are much more fun to deal with 🙂

We’ll see……time marching on, right across my face….I swear I was 19 last week! Sigh, I guess I’ve earned this furrow line, and I’m going to have to deal. I will console myself with the fact that it’s no longer acne concerns!

xoxoxo