The holiday season is officially here and you probably have several parties and gatherings to attend.
When it comes to preparing for them I don’t have an issue deciding what to wear or how to do my makeup, but I always struggle with my hair.
Thank goodness for YouTube because it holds a bevy of video tutorials for gorgeous and easy-to-do hairstyles that are just perfect for the holidays. Here are a few of my favorite holiday hair tutorials.
What’s your favorite season?
I like fall and spring because it’s not too hot or too cold. My hair likes fall and spring as well, it can tolerate the summer but it doesn’t like the winter.
Honestly, I’ve yet to have someone tell me their hair likes winter. This is probably because the cold, dry air can have a negative effect on your hair causing damage that will haunt you when spring rolls around.
Oh...my...goodness. Sinkholes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, fires. There’s been a lot of media coverage lately about these types of natural disasters.
When I see images on the news and online showing the aftermath I can’t imagine what those homeowners are feeling or going through. Those images have also made me question and revisit my insurance coverage as a homeowner.
Our homes are our biggest assets and possibly also carry our largest amount of debt. So it’s important that we’re properly covered.
I have a confession to make. I was on the no sulfates train for a long time.
Sulfate shampoos were only used on my hair when I was clarifying or at the hair salon. And for most of that time, it worked for me. My hair looked good and felt good staying away from sulfates.
If you’re blogging about things like money, blogging, business, or food it’s pretty easy to find images. But for those of us who blog about beauty - makeup and skincare - it’s a lot harder to find good images to use.
Starting a blog can be daunting. There is a lot of different information and advice out there which can be hard to sift through.
Believe me, I know. I see a lot of that advice in the blogging Facebook groups that I frequent and fellow bloggers I follow.
More and more I’ve been having conversations with people about personal finances, budgeting, saving money, and making large purchases. Many of those conversations seem to start when they find out I bought a house by myself and I have no debt outside of my house. When people find out those facts about me their curiosity is piqued and they tend to have a lot of questions.
The two most frequent questions I get are
- How did you save enough money for a down payment?
- How do you not have any debt besides your mortgage?
If you’ve ever talked to other bloggers or read posts or tips about gaining new readers, you’ve probably also heard about Pinterest.
This may have conjured up several questions and perhaps a little doubt about why all of these people are singing the praises of Pinterest and how can one social media site bring them so many readers.
Have you ever found yourself staring at a blank document on your computer because you had no idea about what to write?
Or maybe you started to freak out because the upcoming weeks in your editorial calendar were blank.
I like to travel to see new places and have new and memorable experiences. One of the things I don’t like about traveling is packing. Especially the packing of my beauty products.
There are some products that I feel are essential to
my skincare regimen, especially when I travel. So I tend to stress about how I’m going to pack certain products that don’t come in travel sizes.
I also worry about making sure I bring the beauty products I can’t live without because it’s not always easy to get my hands on them when traveling. Either I won’t have the time, the products will be too expensive or I’m vacationing where those products aren’t available.
In an effort to try and lessen that worry and stress I stick to 12 beauty products that I always take with me when I travel.
When students start college it can be an exciting and nerve-wracking experience. It can also be an expensive one. For me college I didn't realize how expensive being a college student could be. Who knew that the cost of college is more than just the typical ones we all think about - classes, books, room, and board.
Once it hits that the costs for college go beyond that, it becomes clear that going to college is like getting your first takes of adulting.
Summer is the travel season. The kids are out of school and the weather tends to be nice. So many people will take a vacation or multiple vacations. This could be a long weekend or even two weeks.
To kick off my summer I went on a seven-day Mediterranean cruise. While the cruise would be seven days I would be gone for about 10 days. To prepare for the trip I studied the weather for the ports we’d be visiting, gathered everything I would need based on the excursions we’d be taking, and made a list of everything I would need at home before leaving.
August has rolled around and with August comes back to school, back to school sales, and state Sales Tax Holiday.
This weekend is Florida's sales tax holiday and a big back-to-school shopping weekend and there are a few items I’m planning to buy.
Now you're probably wondering why I’m shopping during a back-to-school shopping weekend and sharing this when I have no kids and I'm not in school. The reason is this. Sales Tax Holidays are a great way to save money on items you need or were planning to buy anyway.
I realized that it’s been over a year since I shared the details about
my skincare routine. Quite a few things have changed since then. The biggest changes are to my skin. I started seeing more pimple breakouts and a bit more shine pop-up at the end of the day. Because of that, I introduced some new products and steps into my morning and nighttime routines.
It is amazing how stepping away for a few days can give you a new perspective on things.
I recently took a seven-day Mediterranean cruise. During the trip, I had no connection to the Internet. So I couldn’t work on A Relaxed Gal or spend any time on social media.
Because I was completely disconnected I had time to relax and fully enjoy my trip. This made me realize this was the first trip that had happened. In the past when I’d go on vacation I’d have Internet access and would feel like I needed to work on A Relaxed Gal.
I also came to the realization that overall my life had gotten very busy. Between prepping for my vacation, my full-time job getting busier, homeowner responsibilities, and spending more time working on A Relaxed Gal I’ve been spending less time living and sleeping.
Ah. Summer is in full swing. Especially here in Florida. And with summer comes heat and humidity. All of which makes my hair misbehave more than it does in the winter making it harder to style. I’m talking can’t even put it in a pretty, simple ponytail hard.
So it’s helpful for me to have specific hairstyles that are easy to do and can stand up to the summer weather. Here are 10 summer hairstyles that can do just that.
One of the things I liked best about my new home was the clean, white walls. That was also something I didn’t like because it made my rooms look bare. It also created a lack of style and personality in the rooms despite them being full of furniture.
It doesn’t help that I’ve yet to do any painting because I’m still trying to really finalize my decorating style and don’t want to spend a lot of money on paint and painters only to find out it doesn’t work with my decor.
As a happy, cost-efficient compromise I started to add art to the walls. Once I started doing that I was amazed at how different every room looked and much more like a home it feels.
Toners are an essential part of a healthy skincare routine. Sadly they aren’t something that I use on a daily basis. Mostly because the store-bought toners I’ve tried in the past would dry out my skin, cause me to break out, and cost a lot of money. But I may be changing my tune.
Recently I was suffering from several unexpected pimple breakouts on my face. I couldn’t figure out why. My routine hadn’t changed and I was using the same products I had before, but the pimples kept coming.
After having this go on for several weeks I thought “Maybe these breakouts are because my pores aren’t as clean as I think they are.” Outside of washing my face multiple times or trying to find a new cleanser, I wasn’t sure what to do.
When I started on a journey for healthier relaxed hair it was because I started to notice things about my relaxed hair I didn’t like. I naturally have really thick hair, but over time I started to notice my relaxed hair was thinning. It wasn't retaining any length. I also started to notice that my relaxed hair was shedding more than usual and it felt dry most of the time.
I naively thought that I could search online and find a product that would fix all of those issues. What I didn’t realize was many of my hair habits were the main contributors to these issues. So even if I could find a product that existed to fix all of my issues they would continue coming back until I broke those bad hair care habits.
SEO is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell, it is the process of getting your site or blog ranked on the unpaid list of results of a search engine.
To create these lists, search engines 1. Crawl pages to build an index and 2. Determine which websites are most relevant and provide a ranked list to searchers.
SEO is the best free way to drive traffic to your site or blog. According to
internetlivestats.com, Google can have an average of over 40,000 search queries worldwide every second. This equals to more than 3.5 billion searches each day. Can you imagine capturing just a little bit of that traffic for your blog?
One Friday afternoon my department at work went on a team-building outing to get pedicures. We went to a nice nail salon about a block from our office and got our feet pampered. This was perfect to help get our feet ready for summer.
There are so many mistakes I made when I started my site. One of them was not starting to build my subscriber base. My site had been live a little over two years before I started one! Yes, two years! So I’m essentially two years behind on building my subscriber list and have been missing out on several of the benefits of having one.
The main reason I didn’t start a subscriber list was I didn’t know how beneficial it would be for my site. The ultimate benefit of a subscriber list is you have a group of people who have raised their hands to say they want to be contacted by you. They are open to receiving offers for products and services from you. Additionally, a subscriber list allows you to
- Directly communicate with your audience
- Drive more engaged traffic to your site
- Have control over what messages and content you share and to whom
- Keep subscribers up-to-date
For those of us who like to wear makeup and style our hair, it can sometimes feel like the summer weather is working against us. The dry air and hot sunshine tend to dry out my hair and skin quicker than normal. And the humidity can ruin a good makeup look with no effort at all.
With the first official day of summer a few weeks away I’ve started looking for great tips that can help me summer-proof my makeup and hair. Here are the best of the best - here's my list of 10 summer beauty tips.
When I vacation, whether stateside or abroad, I like to visit historical sites. They can be straight-up museums or my all-time favorite, old homes. This could be because learning about history is something I like to do. Or because museums can help you learn more about the city, state, or country you’re visiting.
While I like visiting museums many of them charge an admission fee which can eat into your vacation or travel budget. So sometimes adding a free local attraction or two to your vacation itinerary can be helpful.
If you’re planning a vacation and want to save a little money while taking in the sites, here’s a list of 10 free museums you can visit.
Have you ever opened your bathroom vanity, looked at all the hair products stored in it, and wondered “How did I get here?” I have.
Once I started my healthy relaxed hair journey I had to sit down to really figure out what products and tools I needed to care for my hair. I admit, that when I first created the list, it was really long. There were so many products and tools that I used when I started my hair journey. There were multiple shampoos, conditioners, and oils.
Over the years I’ve shortened that list to 15 key hair products and tools that I couldn’t live without.
It really seems like the older I get the more people I know who are graduating high school or college. Sometimes it’s a relative, other times it’s someone who attends my church or a co-worker's child. Have you noticed that too?
Well, if you have you’ve probably also noticed that with graduations come graduation gifts. I admit when I was graduating I really liked the gift part! Now that I’m the gift giver I still enjoy the gifts, but sometimes there's not a lot of room in my budget to buy expensive gifts for every graduate.
I have gone to several hairstylists over the years to get a relaxer touchup, get just a hair wash and trim, and even get a consultation to see if I even would let them touch my hair. Some of the hair stylists I could tell were good ones, others weren't so good and so I only let them touch my hair once or not all.
From the hairstylists that were good and I liked I would talk to them to get some advice on taking care of my relaxed hair. Some of them were more forthcoming than others with their tips. Here are 5 tips that were shared with me. There were several more but these were the common tips among all of the stylists.
I follow many, many blogs via Pinterest, Facebook, and Bloglovin. Lifestyle blogs, hair blogs, DIY decor blogs, and also beauty blogs. I have to admit that reading beauty blogs is my guilty pleasure. I like reading about product reviews from beauty bloggers and learning new beauty tips I may want to try.
The great this is there are thousands of beauty blogs out there. Don’t just take my word for it. Google beauty blog and you’ll be scrolling for quite a while.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a post about my hair. I’ve been somewhat on autopilot with my relaxed hair care so I haven’t felt like I had anything new to share. Also, I’ve had many other topics I wanted to share with you that sharing about my personal hair care kept falling to the bottom of the list.
That is going to change today with this quarterly hair goal check-in. At the beginning of the year,
I set three hair goals for myself.
- Follow my new wash day plan all year
- Finalize my roster of hair products by the end of March
- Try eight or fewer new products all year
Pretty simple goals right? When I set them I figured the simpler they are, the easier they will be to achieve. I also tried to make them more measurable and actionable than the goals I had the previous year.
One of my 2017 site goals is to retain readers. While this is a broad goal, I anticipated that retained readership would also help me decrease my bounce rate which has been in the high 80s since probably my site launch. Well, I’m happy to announce that I’m starting to see significant decreases in my bounce rate.
When I first started wearing makeup I bought all my products at either the big box store or drugstore. Several of the products I tried ended up being a disappointment and I thought it was because they weren’t expensive. So I started wearing more expensive brands that I either had to buy online or from Ulta or Sephora.
With so many blogs out there it can be hard to make your blog stand out from the crowd. Especially if you're just starting out and don't have a lot of money to initially invest in your blog. If that's the case you may be using a free service like Blogger.
If you're self-hosted you may be using a design theme that's free or cheap so many other bloggers are using it. Or you may be using free stock images that seem to be really popular on Pinterest. If this is you don't despair, you can still make your blog look unique without spending a lot of money.
As part of my healthy relaxed hair journey, I decided I wanted to learn more about my hair type and why it would react or not react in various situations and to different types of products.
As I started paying more attention to my hair I started noticing things I hadn’t noticed before. Such as my hair takes forever to air dry, all of the strands don’t feel smooth to the touch, my hair will quickly absorb product but doesn’t hold moisture.
What I found is that a lot of why my hair reacts or doesn’t react to products is due to the porosity.
One of the things I was most looking forward to about owning my own home is being able to decorate it however I want. The downside to that is decorating a house costs money. And with 500+ more square feet than any place I ever rented, decorating would cost a whole lot of money.
More money than I wanted to spend right away. Because of that, I decided I wouldn’t buy anything new for rooms that were already furnished. Rooms like my master bedroom, living room, and dining room.
Well, that lasted for only a few weeks. Two weeks after I moved in my parents visited me for a few days to help with the last of the unpacking and to see my house. During the visit, my mother and I were in my master bedroom and she noticed the lamps I had beside my bed. My mother matter-of-factly told me that I needed to replace them because they were lamps for a child’s bedroom not for a master bedroom.
I’m not a hair product junkie, but if you looked in my bathroom cabinet you would see lots of different conditioners. No matter what type of conditioner it is, deep conditioner, leave-in conditioner, or rinse-out conditioner, I have several.
While shampoos are important for cleansing your hair, and deep conditioners are a must, rinse-out conditioners are also important especially when your hair tends to easily dry out like mine. This is why I’ve bought and tried several rinse-out conditioners on my relaxed hair over the years.
So it's no surprise that I have some thoughts on what rinse-out conditioners rise to the top. Below is my list of top ten hair conditioner picks for dry relaxed hair. You can find these conditioners in several different places such as Amazon, Walmart, Target, or the beauty supply store. Some of these are ones that I've actually tried and others are ones that I've seen several good reviews on.
Sometimes to better your finances you need to bring in more income. And to bring in more income you may need to look for a higher-paying job or take on a second job. With a competitive job market and employers looking for very specific skills and experiences, it can be hard to stand out and not have your resume rejected or filed away.
When I was job searching a few years ago through trial and error I uncovered five ways to make my resume look professional and have it stand out so I could get the coveted phone interview.
When the days start getting warmer and longer I know it’s time to start rotating to my spring and summer wardrobe. And just like clothing, there are some beauty products that work better for me in the winter than they do in the warmer months and need to be retired when winter ends.
So when the seasons change I switch up my beauty routine so it’s more appropriate for spring and summer. Here are the ways I’m updating my beauty products for spring.
Did you know your makeup has an expiration date? I didn’t realize that for many years. I would have a tube of mascara or lipstick and hold on to it for months. Even when I hadn’t used them in months. My mindset was that I was being frugal by not throwing them away so I could use them sometime in the future.
As with many things, food, and hair products, once your makeup is opened and exposed to the air the expiration clock starts ticking. When kept in a place like your bathroom where humidity is common creates a breeding ground for bacteria. You also contaminate your makeup whenever it comes into contact with your skin.
Have you ever had a situation where you’re multitasking multiple projects and as a result, none of those projects had good results? That's where I found myself with my social media channels this past February.
Since starting them my social channels have seen slow follower growth and engagement. And despite trying several different strategies and tactics I still haven't been able to move the needle much at all.
The first official day of Spring is only a few days away so this is a great time to share Spring related content. Spring is a time for renewal and fresh starts. Lots of people are looking for inspiration so you'll want to make sure you have lots of fresh content on your blog.
If you're experiencing writer's block or would just like some inspiration yourself, here are 20+ blog post ideas for beauty and lifestyle bloggers.
Did you know you don’t always have to use a hair conditioner as a hair conditioner? I didn’t until a few years ago when I overheard some co-workers talking about the multiple ways they use hair conditioners and how handy it was when they traveled.
Well, I decided to try these other uses out for myself and found out they were right! Now I get more bang for my buck when I buy conditioner. I also have other ways to use up hair conditioners my hair doesn’t like and save money at the same time.
My favorite makeup look of all time is the natural look. No matter where I am or the occasion I revert back to the natural makeup look.
Mostly this is because I don’t like to look like I’m wearing makeup. I feel like it draws too much attention. Also, I think I like to keep people guessing about whether I’m wearing makeup or not. So it’s no surprise that I also prefer my eye makeup to look natural. So If you looked
in my makeup bag all of my makeup, including my eye makeup reflects that.
Liquid leave-in conditioner vs. creamy leave-in conditioner is probably one of the great hair care debates. And it may be debated in the hair care world until the end of time. Personally, I’ve always been a proponent of creamy leave-in conditioners. From my experience, they’re easier to apply, not messy, and moisturize better. Until I realized they weren’t.
During one of my long relaxer stretches, I realized that the creamy leave-in I was using wasn’t really moisturizing my new growth. It was also harder to apply the cream leave-in on my new growth without spending a lot of time sectioning my hair each time and focusing on the hair closest to my scalp.
If you wear makeup every day like me, you also use your makeup brushes every day. But do you also wash your makeup brushes every day? Well, you don’t really need to wash them every day, but you should be washing them often.
Believe me, this is a surprise for me also. I confess, when I first started wearing makeup it never crossed my mind that I should be cleaning the brushes I use. I don't know why because I would clean the combs and brushes I used on my hair weekly. When I think back on that it makes me cringe and honestly gag a little bit.
Keep reading to see how you can make sure you have clean brushes to apply your makeup without having to buy brand new ones.
This year I decided to do my traffic reports a little differently. I decided to focus on one thing that I learned during the previous month and focus less on my overall stats.
Why the change? Well, one reason is it helps me to have a more compelling headline. It also helps me make the post more meaningful for you my readers. Hopefully going forward these posts will be more helpful and you’ll be able to learn something that you can apply to your site or blog.
Have you ever washed your hair expecting good results but your hair didn't turn out as you expected or even hoped?
That's happened to me several times. I have hair that tends to be on the dry side so it's important that I use a lot of moisturizing products - shampoo, deep conditioner, and leave-in conditioner - but sometimes that isn't enough. Sometimes my relaxed hair needs a little bit more to moisturize it and keep it moisturized. That's when I add another step to my wash day. That step is the pre-poo.
When it comes to my beauty routine I think I’m a pretty low maintenance gal. I don’t have a lot of skincare products or makeup. Partly because I don’t want to spend a lot of money when spending a lot of money isn’t needed. I also don’t spend a lot of time on my routine. I keep it quick, simple and cost-efficient.
That being said, there are five beauty products I have that are my favorite and I have to have whether I’m at home or traveling.
Like many other bloggers as 2016 was coming to a close, I sat down and reflected on the past year. Most of my reflections were pertaining to my site A Relaxed Gal - what went well, what didn’t go well; what I could have done better; things I learned; things I planned to do and never did; etc. What I found is while 2016 was a mix of highs and lows it overall was a good year for arelaxedgal.com.
During 2016 I saw exponential growth on my site, grew my social following, and implemented many other changes. Here are some of the highlights:
- My overall social following increased by 388% since the beginning of the year
- Unique Visitors to my site increased 661% year-over-year
- Site Pageviews increased a crazy 763% year-over-year
- I started an email newsletter. If you haven't signed up already you can do so here
- I converted to rich pins on Pinterest
- I launched a Facebook page
- Revised my site topics to be hair, beauty, blogging, and life (a mix of personal finance, travel, and home)
When I find a hair product that works I use it as often as I can. This applies to shampoo, conditioner, moisturizer, you name it. If it works after using it at least three times, that hair product becomes the hair product I use again and again until it doesn’t work anymore.
Before I started my healthy hair journey if a hair product stopped working I would try to power through and hope it would start working again. Or I would ditch the hair product and try to find another one that did work.
Now that I’m more knowledgeable about my hair and hair care, in general, I now know why I would experience this. It wasn’t necessarily the product that stopped working, it was the product build-up on my hair.
2016 is over, but I still have one last 2016 traffic report to share. I share my monthly traffic reports partly to hold myself accountable and help me keep a closer eye on my monthly stats. I’m also doing this in the hopes of helping and encouraging other bloggers who are looking to grow their online presence.