Balls-out colour

I’m a big believer in colour refreshing products. Used judiciously, they can keep coloured hair, especially difficult colours like my coppery red, looking fresh and non-naff for longer, and can even help stretch out salon visits. Refreshing my colour is a Sunday ritual for me. I shower, brush my trusty Goldwell Soft Colour in 8K through any regrowth, then pull it through the ends, clip everything gooily up, then clean the house. By the time I’m done cleaning the colour is well and truly processed, so I shower, work through a deep treatment (at the moment Redken’s divinely buttery Real Control masque, review pending), and emerge ready to face the week.

But I’m a nerd, and I’m always on the hunt for something new. Revlon’s colour balls, erm, Nutricolor Creme is a fixture in salons around Melbourne. It seems you can’t go anywhere to get your hair did without facing a display of these brightly coloured balls, and I’ve got to say two thumbs up for packaging design. The single dose trial packets are truly ingenious, and the big pump packs are truly covetable. My colourist uses Revlon, so last time I went in for a cut I decided to pick up a single dose pack to give it a whirl.

The single dose pack opens up to two halves, separated by a peel off foil. The instructions ask you to wear gloves and spread the entire ‘ball’ through your hair. It also says you need only process for three minutes, which is a bonus if you’re in a rush. Revlon bills this as a colour refreshing, deep conditioning double threat, and it is… kind of.

Here is my break down of the good and the bad.

The Good

• It’s very creamy, like a thick, unctuous gel, and easier to apply than a mousse.
• True to Revlon’s word, it is very conditioning. My ends felt really soft and lovely.
• It’s a nice, quick solution if you need to refresh your colour without mooching around the house for too long.

The Bad

• It does nothing to virgin hair, which means when you rinse it out your roots will be intact. My old Goldwell standby certainly doesn’t colour regrowth the way a proper colour would, but the copper still ‘grabs’ virgin hair and blends regrowth away nicely, making it a great solution for the last couple of weeks before a salon visit.
• It’s very conditioning, which also makes it kind of unsuitable to leave on your roots, anyway. Like a lot of people, especially those with longer hair, my roots tend towards oiliness and my ends tend towards dryness. The easiest solution for this is to keep shampoo to the roots and scalp, and spread conditioners and treatments from the ears down. Problem solved. Again, the Goldwell doesn’t really condition at all. While this means you need to condition afterwards, it also means you can apply the product right to the roots without getting any greasiness afterwards. My roots greased up like nobody’s business after using Nutricolour, just because it was so conditioning.
• The copper I used wasn’t really copper. This is a major embuggerance with red hair products. The thing about a believable red is it’s not really red; it’s coppery. True reds tend to look fake, and I’m really shooting for a copper version of my natural dark ash blonde.  The colour I used, 734, promised an orangey copper but came out a deeper red. Goldwell Soft Colour in 8K is reliably copper, so it wins on that front.
• Price! Nutricolour is $10 for a single dose, $40 for a pump pack. Soft Colour is $20-$21 per can.

It’s disappointing, I really wanted to like Nutricolour, but it just didn’t do anything for me. I guess my Sunday ritual remains unchanged.

A new fixation

Is anyone else watching True Blood? It’s my new favourite thing. I’m a total sucker for vampire TV, especially vampire TV with bad southern accents and plenty of nudity and sex. And I am seriously obsessed with Jessica, played by the stunning, amazingly beautiful Deborah Ann Woll. I always love a redhead, and as a fellow pale girl I especially love a redhead who stays away from all the spray tans and the bronzers and what have you. May I suggest a Mad Men/True Blood crossover where Joan and Jessica hit the town and literally eat some men?

The below clip demonstrates why I love Jessica. Beware – it is a little spoilery.

It was like they were reading my mind

TRUE CONFESSION: I have a GHD. I went through a phase of using it after before work at the kind of place where people would see me. I really didn’t like it.

This feels like sacrilege, because surely the GHD is the greatest thing that ever happened to hair. And perhaps it could be a great thing for my hair, and maybe I just don’t have the skills to use it, but I am but a lowly beauty nerd, not Dario Cotroneo. While I’m more than willing to put in an effort, I don’t want fixing my hair to feel like homework, or an exam I’m continually failing. I can straighten with a GHD, but it always feels a little crisp, a little flat, a little flat-ironed looking. GHD curls completely fail me.You know what doesn’t fail me? A hairdrier, a round brush, and a curling iron.

The hairdrier-round-brush combo is a difficult one, and it sounds like it would be much harder than a GHD. However, this winter I’ve found myself drying my hair after I wash it more often, as it’s just too cold to air dry, and when I do air dry my hair has the limp, stringy appearance of a puli dog.  So I started blow-drying, and found (a) that my fine hair will blow straight with next to no effort, so long as I keep the air flow moving from roots to ends, down the hair shaft, and (b) it’s possible to master the hairdressery round brush blow dry, complete with flipping the hair over the barrel of the drier when you reach the ends, if you look away from the mirror and stop thinking about it. Seriously. Try it next time you’re in the mood to play with your hair. Just let your hands do what they need to and the blowdry will follow.

Forgive the Image Searched picture - finding my camera was beyond me today

The curling iron, however – and here we get to the point of the post (BURYING THE LEDE, YOU GUYS!) – is a lifesaver. Life. Saver. I use it to quickly Whoorl Curl a day-old blow dry, I pin up tighter curls, let them cool, then unpin for a more structured look, I wind broad sections around it, then quickly wrap those sections around Kevin.Murphy rollers to cool for very set, 1940s waves. You’ll see it has no clamp. I never use the clamp, and find no need to. It’s also a nice, smooth, versatile, if suspicious looking, cone. It heats up very quickly and has a wide range of heat settings. Babyliss Conical Styler. Get into it.

GOOD GRAVY, SPORTSGIRL

See these polishes? This perfect, turtledove grey polish and the absolutely flawless nude, the first flecked with barely perceptible silver shimmer, the second fine, fine silver? These polishes that are the epitome of every colour I’m feeling this winter? These polishes that are only $8 a pop?

Swoon. SWOON. Swoon so hard I even swatched them.

This is Nude, and Nude it is, the perfect Belle du Jour nude I’ve been waiting for.  Forgive the lumpen appearance. This is my first time doing swatches for the purpose of blogging and I applied the second coat immediately after the first. The formula was a little watery with this one, and it was difficult to judge how much polish I needed on the brush. Still. PERFECT.

See the fine shimmer in this? The barely perceptible shimmer giving this beautiful, blue-grey turtledove shade depth? I am a total sucker for bare-shimmer cremes like these. This colour is unbelievable. It was my manicure this week and I couldn’t stop staring at my hands.

Sportsgirl shades seem to come and go, so get into your local store before they fly off the shelves. I predict Stormy will go before Nude, as others might not be feeling the same soft shade vibe as me. Either way, they are perfect, flawless, one of a kind. GET THEM.

Wanna see me disco?

So I bought these pants, and made plans to go out and tear it up, and did my hair real pretty and vowed to use the word ‘disco’ as a verb…. and then we went home before 11 because it was cold and I was sleepy. Nevertheless, my nails were hot.

OPI My Private Jet. Smokey, holographic goodness. I layered this over black to get the full sparkley disco effect. My nails are super long here and badly need to be filed down. That’s a task for a more energetic night.

You know, I rather like Megan Fox

I know what Zoe said about her (‘glamitus prime,’ lub), and what the Go Fug Yourself girls said about her, and I know that she made a collection of painstakingly rendered fighting robots look like Elliot Gould next to her glassy-eyed acting, but I like her. I like that she’s all pneumatic and tanned and made up and bandaged and literal because we need that. I love that we live in a world where Megan Fox can sit next to Cate Blanchett, reminding the world that for every grade-A Film Actor we need a Movie Star, one with boobs and unfortunate tattoos and a total lack of subtlety. Keep it up, Ms Fox, you make me happy.

A tale of two soft shades

After my experiment with Sportsgirl’s Cupcake I’ve been on the hunt for just the right soft shade. I’m really going for a 1960s, slightly saucy, Catherine Deneuve in Belle De Jour style soft shade, the kind of nail polish that can take you from urbane salon to bordello in a single day. So I scoured Scrangie and The Polish Addict for swatches, then put in an order for polishes from Misa and OPI and, well…

The first one I tried, OPI’s Who Needs a Prince, wasn’t quite the sleek, elegant nude I was hoping for. It’s a white jelly with superfine red shimmer, making it look pink from a distance, and… eh. It’s pearlescent but a touch too girly for my tastes.

The second one, Misa’s High Waist Hue, is a strange one. It’s a pinkish-beige, bandaidy creme, potentially the most Belle du Jour of the two, but it just looks… odd. I’m a huge fan of the Stickey sandwich to keep my polish in place, and I usually never see the green of Stickey through my polish, but Stickey did weird things with this colour.

I’m still on the look out for the right quietly sexy soft shade. Any suggestions?

Oh the boob-manity

Kush Support – A Natural Rest For The Breasts – The funniest videos clips are here

Zoe’s recent post on mysterious boob lines is a timely reminder that, even in the current wintery climate, One’s Face Ends at One’s Boobs (actually, I believe it was Zoe who reminded me of that back in the days of Fruity Beauty). I was lucky, because when I was a mere 12 my grandmother who, bless her, had more wrinkles than a shar pei fresh from the drier, seized me and said ‘WHATEVER YOU DO always take your moisturiser down to your boobs OR YOU’LL END UP LIKE ME,’ thus triggering a lifetime of feverish boob-moisturising.

And remember: just because it’s winter doesn’t mean there’s a sun up in that sky waiting to destroy your lady treasures.  My favouritest thing in the whole entire world is the Cancer Council sunscreen roll-on, because you can carry it in your bag and it won’t explode. Roll it all over boobs, neck and arms whenever you see it. I’m also a huge advocate of extending your exfoliating products down to your boobs, but that is the subject of tomorrow’s post.

Either way, as with the One True Ring, you’ve got to keep ‘em secret, keep ‘em safe.

MAC VIDEO TUTORIALS, YOU GUYS!!

I am in superficial lady heaven. Via Specktra.

A winter lifesaver

I love winter. While the chill and wind does dry my skin out a little, it’s much easier to add moisture to your skin than matte out overheated, oily slickness. I love coats, and thick tights, and boots, and scarves, and everything. I don’t, however, love the usual frizzed-out, tormented hair, so for the first time this year I bought a cheap knitted beret from Target to hide my shame.

I’m not usually a big hat wearer, as they seem to scream you don’t have to be crazy to wear a hat, but it helps, but keeping your head covered truly does help. For a while I was letting my hair outside the hat, but then I watched the epic French slasher Inside and, as usual, got a new hair idea from the least likely of sources. Right in the beginning the doomed protagonist peevishly twists her loose hair up and pulls a beret over the top, and my life was changed. The only problem is it can be hard to keep all the hair tucked up inside, so I began keeping a couple of bobby pins in my back pocket. Now, when I want to head out on a cold day, I just twist my hair into the loosest of buns, secure with a pin or two, cover with a hat and head out. The hat stops the cold from wrecking my hair, and when I unpin the bun I get loose, soft, frizz-free waves. Perfect.

This might prompt the question, why don’t you just use a hair elastic? Well, I have the world’s most dentable, pliable hair, and I find that hair elastics crease my hair into big, unappealing folds. Pins make better waves, and I reckon you should totes try it.