A variety of brushes and other makeup applicators can help us apply makeup with more precision and subtlety. They can have a considerable impact on the way we look and investing in a set of superior quality brushes is a wonderful idea. It’s also economical in the long run.

Brushes for Makeup After 50

It makes good sense to buy high-quality make-up tools. They will do a much better job than cheap and nasty tools and will save your face and ultimately your pocketbook. The brushes sold inside compacts are really pretty useless, especially the blush brushes.

Buy brushes with firm, soft bristles that won’t shed easily. Good brushes and better application create a more youthful look. There is a variety of brushes you can use.

A foundation brush has long bristles and is used to blend the foundation well into your skin to create the flawless look.

Concealer brushes are used to cover blemishes by blending the concealer into the skin.

There are a lot of eyeshadow brushes! Use them on the eyelid to add highlights under the brow and to blend the eyeshadow upwards at the outer corner of the eyes.

A blush brush has soft bristles, is very “full” and is used to add color to the cheeks in soft circular movements. Always add the color to the top of the apples of the cheeks and not along the cheekbone.

Use a lip pencil to outline the lips and then use a lip brush to apply the lipstick. The lip pencil should be the same color as the lipstick (not darker).

A lip brush provides a longer lasting application as it pushes the lipstick deep into the creases on the lips. You can use a layer of powder on the lipstick and then apply a second coat. Then, blot the lips with a tissue. The lipstick “stays” longer and is unlikely to run into the creases around your lips.

The bristles on a blender brush are usually cut at an angle, a shape that only works for blending. You cannot live without brushes that blend; buy several for different blending jobs!

Sponges and Pads

There are also many different types of sponges and pads which can be used for makeup application.

Silk sponges are excellent for applying a cream foundation. A flat, circular sea sponge (like a very small pancake) is good for removing makeup. You can also buy pads that are eye make-up or face makeup removers that contain a skin disinfectant or even moisturizer.

And instead of using reusable pads and sponges, you may choose to use disposable cotton balls or cotton pads and cotton buds.

Remember to Protect Your Brushes after Every Use

Clean your brushes at least once a month because they collect bacteria, dead cells and the like. If you don’t clean them properly, you may acquire some skin problems. Just wash the brushes in warm soapy water and let them dry naturally on a towel, or between two towels if you dry them outside.

And to finish, here are some of the most common mistakes that will make you look as though you’re wearing a mask.

The first mistake is not taking the foundation up to the hairline. Another is not blending foundation around the ears, neck, etc., as well as applying blush in a stripe along the bone.

Other mistakes include wearing too much foundation and blush or trying to conceal every freckle and line and imagined mark.

You also want to avoid removing all shine. Finally, avoid too much eyeliner and/or mascara, especially under the eyes or failing to apply concealer to dark shadows under the eyes.

How many different makeup brushes do you use? Do you wash them regularly? Which ones are your favorites? Do you have any special tips and tricks you would like to share with us? What makeup after 50 tips can you share? Please join the conversation.

For many of us, winter can feel like a season that just drags on and on and on. Shorter days, colder temperatures, and more precipitation are perfect for putting us in a constant state of misery. Mix that in with the post-holiday blues, and it’s no wonder this time of year can be tough.

Perhaps the power of science can give us the extra motivation we need to elevate our spirits and keep ourselves focused on our new year’s resolutions for our wellbeing.

The Effects of Seasonal Change on Our Minds (and Brains)

You might feel lazier and gloomier this time of year. Well, there’s a reason for that. The consensus among health scientists is that a lack of sunlight affects our brains.

Photosensitive receptors in our eyes detect changes in the light levels in our environment. These receptors contain a photopigment called melanopsin, which responds to blue light and signals to our brain that it is daytime.

The specialized melanopsin neurons in our eye are poorly stimulated in the winter due to a lack of sunlight, and this impacts our internal clock, or circadian rhythm. As we age, our circadian rhythm also becomes less consistent, making it harder for us to adjust to the winter.

The low melanopsin responses and altered circadian rhythm that we experience in the winter can make us prone, among other unhealthy things, to sleep disorders, carb cravings, depression, and anxiety. The good news is that there are ways to actively combat the winter doldrums.

Have a Consistent Sleep Schedule

Light is the most important driver in our circadian system because our natural sleep schedule relies on our exposure to daylight. Once it’s dark outside, specialized cells in our brain prepare us for sleep, making us tired.

The decrease in the number of daylight hours tells our body that we should be sleeping. While we could simply indulge in more rest, too much shuteye, just like too little, can negatively impact our health.

Moreover, as we age, sleep becomes more necessary, because it helps reduce our risk for age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia. So, how can we cope with the seasonal change and prevent common sleep problems?

Create a regular sleep schedule and a light-exposure schedule. Train your body to sleep well by going to bed and getting up around the same time each day, even on weekends. Expose yourself to sunlight or bright light when you wake up and throughout the morning.

Bright light can help to regulate your circadian rhythm, decrease the time you need to fall asleep at night, and help you to stay asleep longer. Avoid spending time in front of a screen at least two hours before bed: the blue light from screens will keep you up at night, throwing off your sleep schedule.

A solid sleep schedule yields benefits beyond a good night’s rest. It will also make it easier to regulate your exercise and diet and manage your stressors during the winter.

Set a Goal to Exercise

It might be hard to get exercise in the winter. The external chill isn’t exactly motivating, and it can be tempting to just stay cozied up at home. Yet, just like sleep, exercise is important when it comes to regulating our circadian rhythm. So, it’s also important to set times for moving around and being active throughout the day.

If possible, exercise outdoors. Not only will the sunlight and physical activity boost your mood, they will also help to regulate your sleep. If you’re stuck indoors, try yoga or Tai chi. Both have been shown to reduce stress and promote a greater sense of ease by reducing physical stress responses to triggers in the environment.

Drink Green Tea

Winter is a season that dehydrates us, because the systems we use to heat our homes and workplaces dry the air around us. Dehydration can significantly impact our ability to concentrate. Adjusting your total fluid intake to your lifestyle and environment is an obvious solution to this problem.

If, in addition to drinking plenty of water, you make drinking herbal tea part of your daily routine, you’ll be treating your body to various mood-boosting substances. Green tea, in particular, can reduce anxiety, relieve tension and help you feel more relaxed, all thanks to a compound called L-theanine. So why not cozy up this season with a hot cup of green tea?

Avoid Loneliness

The chill and darkness of winter make it especially tempting to hunker down and avoid social interaction. However, don’t allow yourself to become lonely through isolation. Loneliness is one of the biggest risk factors for dementia.

Make an effort to contact friends and family, invest in a hobby or play some of your favourite tunes during the daytime!

Stay on Track This Winter

The winter season can be hard on all of us. Making an effort to get light exposure and shifting our routine to fit the season can improve our overall brain health.

Scheduling our light exposure, getting some exercise, drinking green tea, and engaging in fun activities are easy ways to avoid seasonal affective disorder, decrease our risk of cognitive decline, and feel relaxed. They’ll also keep us on track to achieve our new year’s resolutions.

It can be hard to stay motivated during this season. Sometimes, having someone holding you accountable can help you get through the winter doldrums.

The Synaptitude Brain Fitness Program can help you develop personalized strategies for optimizing your sleep, diet, exercise, stress, and memory and for tracking your progress. To learn more about the program, check out our Brain Health Assessment.

How is winter affecting your mood? Do you feel gloomy most of the time? How often do you catch yourself craving more light? What strategy are you using to keep yourself motivated and out of the doldrums? Please share in the comments below.

This month, as the New Year started, the temperatures dropped and we had the first sign of snow. I had a call from an old school friend whose mother is affected by dementia. Agnes doesn’t live with her mother Diana, but she worries about her all the time.

Right now Agnes’s chief worry is the weather. We talked about the dangers of walking on icy pavements. Diana has recently developed a tendency to venture out without the right clothing or footwear and Agnes is terrified of what might happen to her if she falls.

Recently Agnes visited and found Diana in the house where the temperature inside was below 6 degrees (about 42 degrees Fahrenheit). The boiler wasn’t broken; Diana had turned it off to “save money.”

Older people don’t adjust well to heat or cold. Because of her dementia, Diana may not notice that her temperature is falling. The danger of hypothermia is acute in those circumstances and needs medical attention.

After our chat, I sketched out five hints that might help anyone who is worried about a person with dementia in winter.

Get the Temperature Right

Start by understanding how warm anyone needs to be. My husband goes about in a T-shirt and shorts when I’m swathed in jumpers, so we demonstrate perfectly that not everyone has the same comfort zone. That’s partly because he is always rushing about being physically active and I’m often sitting at my desk writing reports.

Older people are sometimes less active and more sensitive to low temperatures. When people talk about “room temperature” that is technically between 20 and 23 degrees centigrade (68 to 74 Fahrenheit) but for older people that is likely to be higher. If it drops below 18 (64) in your living room, and you are old and frail, you may be getting too cold.

And you need to know their preference. Some people prefer to wrap up warm in a cooler room and others find it easier to move about if they are not too bundled up in clothing, especially if they are already slow moving.

Be Prepared

Without stating the obvious, I talked to Agnes about watching out for weather forecasts. She didn’t realize that you can get cold weather alerts on a smart phone. Not only that, but she can also control her mother’s heating system from the same phone.

On cold days she can set the heating to go on earlier and switch off later. That might work better than turning up the thermostat and might be less expensive in the long run.

Deal with Fuel Poverty Anxiety

“I found Diana weeping over an electricity bill. It looked reasonable to me, but to her it looked like six months’ salary – now that her memory is playing tricks she doesn’t realize how much things cost, or how much money she has in the bank. She’s really very well off and doesn’t need to worry.”

This is a common problem, and one that is difficult to fix because even if you explain it all away today, the person with dementia will get the same shock the next time a bill comes. Agnes has power of attorney for her mother so she is getting all that sort of correspondence diverted away from Diana’s mail into her own.

Agnes has set up standing orders and direct debits for fuel bills and when Diana asks about them, she diverts her attention somehow. There are lots of good practical reasons for getting a power of attorney sorted as early as possible and this is one.

However, if Diana were short of money there are schemes to help older people with fuel costs, and it would be really important to make sure that she is getting all the allowances that she is entitled to.

Helping a Dementia Patient to Stay Safe

Some dementia patients worry about economizing on the water heating bills. Home safety is a nightmare if people use hot water bottles and electric blankets in the same bed and drape their washing too close to the fire to save using the electric dryer. Winter is definitely home safety territory.

Step one is to try to get rid of the fuel poverty anxiety. Then remove the offending items. My friend who is a fire fighter will not let an electric blanket in the door of his house. He has carried one too many charred people out of bedrooms.

Take the benefit of alarms and if the householder doesn’t really understand what it means when the carbon monoxide alarm sounds, get the alarms centrally linked so that someone else can respond the right way. You don’t want an old person to suffocate because they blocked up all the ventilation vents to reduce drafts.

Common Sense PLUS

Simple things like eating nourishing warm meals and wearing the right shoes and clothes are dead obvious ways of dealing with cold weather, but the problem in dementia is that your loved one will not always do what is obvious.

Short of locking the person up for his or her own safety, there is not much you can do to completely avoid risk. The most powerful thing is to know them well and to learn from each incident. The first time they return after getting lost outside in the cold, hire or purchase a GPS system. When they wear the wrong coat, hide it in your own house and leave them with only their warm one.

There is more advice about how to care for a person with dementia in Dementia: The One Stop Guide. You can also find out more by visiting my website at www.juneandrews.net

Are you a caregiver helping a dementia patient through the winter months? What issues are you facing and what tips would you suggest to someone facing similar issues? Have you found useful tech tools and smartphone apps? Please share in the comments.

Kyle Richards’ Woven Mule Sandals on Instastories

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Instagram Fashion 2021

There’s no questioning the fact that Kyle Richards’ woven mule sandals on Instastories are the it-shoe of the moment. There’s also no questioning the fact that we can’t wait to get ourselves a pair (or more likely, a more affordable Style Stealer) in advance to wear come summer…or possibly even winter while curled up against a warm and cozy fire like Kyle. ‎‍

Fashionably,

Faryn

Click Here to Shop Her Bottega Veneta Sandals in 6 Colours

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Photo: @KyleRichards18

Originally posted at: Kyle Richards’ Woven Mule Sandals

Don’t let anyone tell you TikTok can’t get you places. Just look at Addison Rae, a one-time teenage competitive dancer who parlayed TikTok dancing into nearly 75 million followers, a leading role in the upcoming film He’s All That, a podcast, and the beauty brand Item Beauty—all in just over a year’s time.

Just as quick has been the Lafayette, Louisiana native’s transformation into a quintessential L.A. girl. (See: matcha-filled mornings; a newfound battle with desert-dry skin; and a tendency toward essential oils and meditation, of course.) But no matter how deep her love of avocados, the 20 year-old’s approach to self-care includes bedrock values instilled in her long before she became the second most followed account on TikTok.

Chief among them? Prioritizing connections with family and friends and forging personal growth through self-love. Ahead, see how she weaves long-standing California wellness trends with her Southern roots for a life lead in happiness and health. Plus, the new makeup boss gives us her picks for that L.A. glow—all in her own words.

Our mission at STYLECASTER is to bring style to the people, and we only feature products we think you’ll love as much as we do. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission of the sale.

Source: Instagram

What Self-Care Really Means to Her

“Self-care is to me is accomplishing things that I really want to do and spending my time really wisely, so setting monthly and everyday intentions or goals for myself is a big thing. The other big part of self-care is about connections; Being very open and vulnerable with people is a great way to teach yourself how to love. Because the only way you can love yourself is if you give love to other people and the only way to receive it is to love yourself, too.

I just recently started writing down affirmations in the morning. It’s a great way to give myself a confidence boost because if I don’t love myself and believe something positive about myself, then how will anyone else? Recently, even just being in quarantine, there have been days where I was like, I wish I was doing more to care about my body and eating better. What’s one thing I can do to make myself feel better? So I take steps to make myself feel better and that can include telling myself, ‘You’re healthy. You’re alive. You’re great.’”

Source: Instagram

Her Major Moves

“A lot has changed in my life in the last year. I moved across the country from Louisiana to Los Angeles and that’s done a lot of different things to my body and skin. That move has made me focus on skincare and making my body feel well.

Lately, I’ll wake up in the morning and have matcha—it’s my favorite thing in the world right now. I’m sure I’ll grow tired of it because of how much I’m drinking, but I love an iced matcha latte with lavender in it. So I drink a lot of matcha, then I’ll take a shower. Obviously, I want to clean myself, but it’s more than that. It’s almost my ‘me’ time and it’s become a big part of my routine as my self-care moment.”

Source: Instagram

Her Must-Have Shower Products

“Once I’m in the shower, I’ll shampoo with something like Inphenom Shampoo ($26.49 at Amazon) and really lather it in. Then, I’ll do a hair mask, like the Ouai Treatment Mask ($38 at Sephora) once a week. I’ll let that sit in my hair while I shave my legs. After I get out of the shower, I’ll use a lotion that’s really hydrating all over my body. Right now, I’m using Ouai Body Crème ($38 at Ulta). Then I’ll let my hair air dry while I do my skincare. Air drying my hair has been a big part of my self-care in quarantine, just kind of letting my hair do its own thing until I’m ready to style it.”

Source: Instagram

The Skincare Tools Swiped from Zoey Deutch

After I wash my face, I spray it with my Item Beauty One Hit Prime, Set & Refresh Dewy-Finish Face Mist. ($18 at Item Beauty). When I moved to L.A., I had to adjust how often I was washing my face or how often I needed to use moisturizer. I also had to drink more water to stay hydrated. In the south, it’s very humid, so it’s very wet already and my skin kind of likes that wetness.

But in L.A., I need something that’s refreshing for my face that’s giving me extra lift and bounce. My One Hit Mist is perfect for that, but alongside that, I’ve had to adapt to being better about really cleaning my face and making sure there’s no dirt staying on there because it’s so dry. My skin is always looking for moisture; If I keep my makeup on for too long, I’ll notice a breakout the next day.

I also love using these cool Georgia Louise Cryo Freeze Tools ($125 at Violet Grey). I saw Zoey Deutch used them before putting on her makeup in her Vogue Beauty Secrets video. These freeze tools are really good to get blood flow to my face.”

Source: Instagram

Her Item Beauty Faves

“Keeping my face hydrated is a big thing for me and using products in the makeup world that will keep my skin nice and hydrated as well. So I’m really excited about a concealer that’s coming out soon from Item Beauty called Air Hug Concealer. It’s not too thick and it’s very much a hydrating formula, so it’s not going to dry you out.

I think so many of Item Beauty products are so good for that very natural feel and like your skin isn’t suffocating underneath the makeup. We also have a new shade coming out of our Item Beauty Lip Quip Moisturizing Lip Oil ($12 at Item Beauty.) It’s not just a lipstick color; It’s actually hydrating your lips and giving you that chance to not feel so dry.”

Source: Instagram

Her Pleasure Pursuits

“I’ve always been very aware of putting my time into things that I only really enjoy and love. The past year has given me a chance to look back and reflect on the things that matter the most to me and what things I should be focused on in the day.

I do a lot of Pilates and yoga for self-care. I feel like meditation it’s really nice to refresh myself every day. I got into that because I was a dancer. YouTube is a great resource for finding yoga, pilates, and other workouts. Even TikTok has fitness workouts. You can watch a 60-second breakdown of a HIIT workout, so I feel like anything I come across that I feel like could be good for me, I’ll do.”