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Saturday, September 29, 2018

No-Bake Protein Bites

1 Heaping Tbsp Ground Cinnamon

5 Scoops of Spoonfuls Vegan Chocolate Coconut Protein (Solgar's)

1/3 c Maple Syrup

1/2 c Almond Meal or Peanut Flour

1/4 c Nut Butter (creamy no-stir)

3/4 c Gluten-free quick oats or cereal of choice

1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

1. Grind oats or cereal in a food processor and transfer into a mixing bowl. This is optional. You can keep them whole as well and adjust the addition of maple syrup. 

2. Add almond meal, Solgar's spoonfuls protein, cinnamon, and nut butter. Stir ingredients all together. Add maple syrup and vanilla then mix with hands.

3. If the batter gets too dry, you might need to add additional maple syrup or nut butter.

4. Roll into 1-1.5 inch balls and place on cookie tray or plastic ware with parchment paper underneath.

5. Let protein balls freeze for 20-30 minutes then transfer into a freezer bag.

6. Dust with additional cinnamon if desired.

7. Keep in the fridge or freezer for up to 6 weeks. 

6 Natural Remedies for Sunburn

By Jessica Remitz
With Dr. Jeremy Wolf N.D.
from Lucky Vitamin's Happy Wellness Guide

1. The right moisturiser
Dr Jeremy Wolf, LuckyVitamin's lead health advisor, recommends using calendula lotion to treat sunburns or even urticaria urens, a plant-based cream that can be used to treat first-degree burns.

Wolf cautions against using moisturisers with petroleum, benzocaine or lidocaine. Moisturisers with petroleum trap heat in your skin, he says, and benzocaine and lidocaine can also be irritating.

Stacey Rex, who makes small-batch botanical skin-care products in her North Carolina home, recommends using aloe vera to soothe and hydrate sunburned skin.

2. Black tea
"The tannic acid in the tea will instantly restore the acidic nature of your skin, take out the stinging and help to prevent peeling," says Florida-based beauty chemist David Pollock. He suggests using a compress to dab the tea across your burn, or run a bath and pour the pitcher of tea into the tub to soak in.

3. Baking Soda
Baking soda can have a similar soothing effect on sunburns by balancing the pH of your skin to promote healing.

Add a cup of baking soda to a cool or lukewarm bath and soak for 20 to 30 minutes, Rex says, or apply a paste of baking soda and water to clean skin with a cotton ball. Let it sit for up to 10 minutes before rinsing with cool water.

4. Vinegar
Like tea, white wine vinegar is acidic and can be used to soothe sunburn naturally.

Rex recommends using apple cider vinegar as a sunburn-treating solution.
"Mix equal portions of water and apple cider in a spray bottle and spray on skin," she says.
"I also recommend adding lavender essential oil; not only will it mask the vinegar smell, but lavender is also great for soothing burns and speeding up the healing process. You can also add a cup of vinegar to a warm bath and soak."

5. Yogurt
The acidic nature of yoghurt is close to that of our skin and can help promote natural healing, pollock says.
Rex says that the probiotics in yoghurt help moisturise and reduce pain. Find a plain, full-fat version. Apply to the skin, w art ten minutes and rinse off in the shower.

6. Hydrating Foods and Beverages
Stay hydrated. Drink plenty of water, and even consider adding a scoop of electrolyte powder to your water bottle.


Friday, July 29, 2016

oooh...perfume

I'm a huge fan of perfume. I've always had obsessions with pads (yes, sanitary pads), but ever since I entered this industry, I developed a new (un)healthy obsession with scents. Ooh the amazing array of perfumes I have lined up in my room. An expensive but immensely gratifying hobby to upkeep. Oh well, I shall not tarry any further. There's an article I would like to share so badly that I'm retyping everything from Cosmopolitan UK's August 2016 issue (pp 51-54). Okay, does this count for sufficient crediting? And not forgetting Ingeborg van Lotringen, who so eloquently composed the following piece. Please pardon my reproduction of your article without your consent. Your article made me laugh at parts and very frankly, it's really made my day.

How to smell interesting

Caramel or moist crotch--which would you rather smell of? The answer, as Ingeborg van Lotringen discovers, is not as laughably weird as you'd think.

Spun sugar is the bane of my life. As a beauty journalist, you get to open a lot of bottles of fragrance, and nine times out of ten these days, out comes that blasted note of funfair.
I find it offensive, but in the Cosmopolitan office, I am in the minority. Our intern put it best when she described yet another syrupy concoction as "nice...like Britney spears' fantasy [true]. It smells like...perfume."
Exactly. Like the ubiquitous 'aquatic' note that dominated half the perfumes in the '90s (think L'Eau D'Issey...you goy it), 'gourmand' candyfloss (or ethyl maltol, its scent-molecule equivalent) has become the fragrance of our times. That may sound somewhat incongruous when 'out times' are mostly punctuated by terrorism, debt, loss and environmental doom, but it's not an accident. Perfume houses will tell you the public positively demands fragrances of joy, smiles and freedom (as Lancome put it upon launching the cupcakey La Vie Est Belle in 2012) to offset the gloom in real life. And judging by the way any eau de praline, vanilla or caramel sells by the bucketload, our happy place for a good decade has been pudding.
In itself, that's not a bad thing. Research has shown that edible scents make men think sexy thoughts (something to do with a similarity between vanilla and mother's milk -- make of that what you will) and give us all a sense of comfort. But as with anything, you can only churn out so many variations on the same theme before senses get numbed and familiarity starts breeding contempt. And if most recent contents of my office fragrance crate are anything to go by, that's what's beginning to happen in perfume. we may have reached peak candyfloss, my friends. and in its place comes something rather more unsettling...

Something rotten, something blue

Any perfumer will tell you that the sexiest and most intoxicating scents all have something distinctly rotten at their core. "Anything 'off' or even faecal [yep, smells like poo] heightens the sexual aspects of perfume," says perfumer Roja Dove. We're talking notes like civet, musk and castoreum: glandular (including, er, anal) secretions of animals that -- don't fret -- are used in synthetic form today. "It's not like you can actually smell these in a perfume," says Dove, "but a tiny quantity triggers your brain's synapses and ignites your animal instincts." Judging by the appalled reaction to Dove's televised nuggets of wisdom from Gogglebox's armchair critics recently, this isn't a great selling point -- but you'd be wrong. Enduring classics such as Guerlain Shalimar, Dior Diorissimo and Bottega Veneta EDT all owe their "mmm, sexy" popularity to subliminal stink. It's just that you didn't know it. Enduring classics such as Guerlain Shalimar, Dior Diorissimo and Botega Veneta EDT all owe their "mmm, sexy" popularity to subliminal stink. It's just that you didn't know it.

And it's not just animal notes that can stir something within. White flowers like jasmine and tuberose are packed with the molecule indole, which, in high quantities, "smells of a recently used toilet," says Nick Gilbert of Youtube channel Love to Smell. (This may explain why Laura on the Cosmopolitan beauty team deems pure tuberose 'disgusting'.) "Tropical fruit notews rely on sulphuric compounds that, alone, smell like rotten eggs. Oud (a resinous wood note) smells of a barn or blue cheese at intense levels." Good lord -- why would you go there?! Because, says perfume archivist James Craven of scent emporium Les Senteurs, "your subconscious detection of something 'nasty' alerts and heightens your senses, making your response more powerful and emotional. It can make a perfume truly addictive, adding intrigue that will make you want to smell it over and over." Think of it as the olfactory equivalent of Benedict Cumberbatch: unsettling to behold at first, but forcing you to do a double take and eventually to deeply appreciate its skewed beauty.

I want to be special!

This instinctive approach to finding the perfume of your dreams, as opposed to one led by marketing, is just right for a social-media generation intent on self-display, says Dove. "Perfume has become a way to express individuality,. Young consumers put far more care into their choice of scent to stand apart from the crowd." He adds that despite the fact that you cannot (yet?) smell scent through a phone screen, the internet has transformed the way we shop for fragrance. "Blogs and websites talk in detail about ingredients ang the story behind a fragrance composition, making us all connoisseurs of sorts. The more educated you are, the more open you become to different kinds of scents and the more refined your tastes become." So an 'odd' fragrance, apart from having the ability to make you love it with a passion, puts it out there that you're clever and unique. And that, apparently, is priceless: sales of niche fragrances costing more than 110 pounds were up 28% in 2015.

That's all well, but faced with an ever-swelling tsunami of scents, it's hard for most of us not to seek refuge in the familiar. If you want to cheat on your trusty perfume in favour of a lusty affair with a dangerous new one, where do you start? "By letting your head shut up and your nose take over," says Craven. That means browsing a perfumery at leisure, picking up bottles you might not even like the look of, and enlisting the help of the in-house expert. "Ask for scents they enjoy or find unusual," says Gilbert. "Try not to think of what they remind you of or what might be in it, but how you would describe it. Think of the texture, colour, density, pitch and tone. Use words you have for your other senses. Truly, trust your nose. Do you like it? Yes? Then it's fantastic."

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Non-incisional blepharoplasty + ptosis correction day 1

I see so many pretty Koreans with natural monolids and I had small double lids so I'm filled with deep regret. Especially when I look in the mirror now and a monster greets me back. People stared at me even though I only went to the hospital, which is a few steps away from the guesthouse. So I just smiled. Really. Yes. Haha. And then I made the fisting action and pretended to punch my eye and the strangers laughed. Well might as well make lemonade since I was given lemons. I after all once again brought this upon myself. For those who know me they know I like to do stupid things which I later regret so badly but are irreversible. I hope this will not turn out to be one of those things cos I'm starting to regret already.

Today a few things happened to me and for that I'm thankful. 
Firstly and most importantly, I was able to open my eyes. My vision is still blurred and I woke up with a lot of yellow conjunctival pus (baksai in singlish) that rendered opening my eyes impossible but at least my left eye is bigger than a slit today. So I happily peeled the plaster from each eye. And this is how I looked like:



And then I'll write the rest later cos my eyes tire easily at this stage.

{Warning to those who are tempted to do it. No matter how natural you make it, people like me will forever be able to sniff out a difference. And not like what they see because they know its FAKE. We cannot play God. Remember that. It's so easy to tell who has done their eyes and who hasn't. Even easier to tell who did their nose and who didn't. So. Pick another treatment, choose another feature. I did this on a whim. Now I'll be the one who will face scathing judgment and barely concealed side glances and uninvited stares of not envy but disgust. }

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Non-incisional double eyelid surgery + ptosis correction

Hello everybody, I'm typing from my guesthouse bed with eyes are struggling to open cos they're so swollen. It's day 0 now, meaning it's surgery day. I had thought they started counting from the surgery day but I guess not. So before u plan your trip, do take a longer leave cos you may very well end up bleeding and swelling more than usual. Like me.
I just did my surgery with dr ___ at bano____, and since it's not sponsored at all and in fact the surgery is really expensive, I'm wondering if I should drop names even. I went with a medical tourism agency, and my agent is fantastic. It'll probably be super easy to google them but if you want to know who he is, contact me via the comments below and leave your email address. 
Well, I wasn't really unhappy about my double eyelids in the first place. 
So my dear readers don't jump to doing this unless you really hate your eyes cos it's torturous. You may end up like me cos you never know how your body responds to the surgery. My agent told me the doctor said I bled more than usual which is why my swelling is going to be even worse in the next few days. Currently I'm having such difficulty seeing and even opening my eyes. I just can't. It's painful, ready and super swollen on the left and looks nothing like the other bloggers' pictures. (Do you know why? I believe it's because these people are sponsored and can't tell the truth or bad stuff.) but I'm honest and will show you exactly what I mean:

This was just taken a few seconds ago.
Ground zero, I mean day zero.
I simply can't open my left eye but my right eye is slightly better but also swollen. And to think they all assured me on day zero I would look fine with minimal swelling while on days two three and four the swelling would be horrendous. Looks like in the days ahead I would be temporarily blind.

Ok and my original look was this. 

Doctor said my eyes were pretty. The translator pulled me aside yesterday said he thinks I shouldn't do anything. I also was on the fence but thought that I shouldn't disappoint my agent and perhaps it would be a walk in the park and my eyes would be even more beautiful effortlessly. Oh well what was I thinking. I always end up regretting. I fundamentally believe in natural beauty you know that? Which is why though my nose is bulbous I'm not going to do anything to my nose. Walking into the clinic, the nurses were gorgeous but I could distinctly tell: ah she did her eyes she did her nose, her chin, her zygoma, her jaw, her v line, her forehead. Everything was so freaking obvious that I came to appreciate those particular features that haven't been operated on, and finding them so much prettier. Like the nurse who attended to me on the first day. She had such a pretty natural nose yet she told me she had wanted it done. But the doctor, thankfully, intervened and refused to have it operated. 

Ugh! At least it's symmetrical!! 

A few things that I wasn't happy with:
1) The nurses at banobagi kind of just ditched me after the surgery without illustrating a post-surgical schedule despite having promised me that yesterday. 
2) The nurses who attended to me kept changing. Chl** wasn't here today and another nurse took over.
3) I didn't get to see the doctor much. After the surgery he didn't check on me. During the surgery I don't know if he was there frankly cos I couldn't see. And no, he did not ask me to open and close my eyes after the surgery. Maybe because he knows I cannot open my eyes. I'm hoping he didn't think he botched it. 
4) After coming down all drowsy and sedated and with eyes no bigger than a tiny slit due to my excessive bleeding, a stupid ajuma pushed me aside. She actually pushed me aside! Just so she could see the tv more clearly! So I was baffled and told my agent that she pushed me. And my agent told her off and she started to quarrel with him. Though I speak zero Korean I can tell it was a very heated argument. Really. She has no manners at all. No social graces. I don't want to stereotype but I find many of the people in this country like that. And look. Having known this I still came here. I should have done this in my own country or in Japan. 
5) I'm still waiting for a post-surgical schedule. Their aftercare sucks really. Thankfully I have an agent. Can you imagine if I didn't have one and had questions?
And there are so many questions I have! Like, when can I wash my hair? 

6) after I came out looking like that, only did the nurse tell me that ptosis correction will cause more severe swelling and it may take even longer than a week. That non-incision itself wouldn't cause much swelling. Thanks. I had time and again told them I only have seven days max to recover and go back to work. Thanks. What am I going to do?! 

I was prescribed antibiotics, a hydrogen peroxide solution and an antibiotic cream. I also bought with my agent's help medicine that would supposedly help swelling and bruising. May the higher beings help me. I need to go back to work in a week, and my parents don't know about this. The only person who knows about this is my agent the nurses and the doctors and the new friend I made who stays next door. A beautiful mono-lidded Miss Korea contestant who wants to have her prominent cheekbones shaved. She's untouched but beautiful, and I'm sorry she wants to have her cheekbones shaved. She however doesn't want to touch her beautiful monolids and nose so I applaud her for that. Cheers to natural beauty! 

So worried, had a bad feeling about his and I know I shouldn't have wasted my leave on doing superfluous things. Now I possibly have to leave with shitty eyes for many months and possibly a scar for life. 
Cheers to natural beauty again and I hate myself for having itchy fingers and rocking the boat when it was actually sailing fine. I liked my eyes. They weren't huge but also weren't small and at least they were natural. I am a natural double lidder, though they were hooded and hidden and whatever. Yes oriental eyes but they beat having to go through this.
Girls, learn to love your eyes and work whatever natural beauty you have! 
I like to scrutinize those people who have had certain features altered and now I'll be the one who'll be suffering under the scathing gaze of many an observant person. 
Don't believe them when they say they see girls all wrapped up in bandages walking along Gangnam-ku. I only saw one or two and these girls were scuttling in and out of the guesthouse and clinic with their heads bowed and their eyes averted.
Surgery in Korea, you are not what other bloggers make you out to be. Or maybe it's because I'm just a normal civilian. These celebrity bloggers must be getting better treatment by dint of their status. Oh wells. I'll blog again tomorrow if I can open my eyes. 
I have not started to apply any topical cream and peroxide on my eyes because they told me to wait till tomorrow when I remove these plasters. I wonder if that increases my risk of infection. 


Monday, November 9, 2015

Comparing collagen supplements

3 facts about collagen 

1. It makes up 75 per cent of our skin. But our body's ability to produce it starts to dip from our twenties, dropping at a rate of 1.5 per cent a year.

2. Loss of collagen in the dermis, combined with loss of moisture, causes early signs of ageing. This is made worse by UV rays, pollution, prolonged exposure to air-conditioned environment, stress, lack of sleep, smoking and other unhealthy habits.

3. Eating more chicken skin, fish skin and pig trotters will not help to "load up" on collagen as the molecules are too big to be properly absorbed by the body.

Like sun protection, replenishing your collagen should be done on a daily basis.

Or so says Brand's. This is an excerpt from their promotional pamphlet from their marine collagen essence strip series. 

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Skin Food

Taken from New Idea Magazine, have no idea which issue this is cause it's a torn-off page.
 
I wonder if the image is clear enough. Due to time constraints, I'll type only the headers and subheadings and little bits of pertinent info:
 
Every second beauty product on the market claims to be natural -- but is it? They may have natural extracts, but it is likely that synthetic substances are making them smell better and last longer. If you have sensitive skin or are concerned about chemicals, with a little time and energy your greengrocer could be your skin savior.
  • Moisturisers:
    Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Cocoa Butter (rich in fatty acids)

  • Masks:
    Avocado (vit b,c,e. mash and leave for 15 min, rinse off with warm water and flannel), cherries and strawberries (mash and smear on face, 10 mins. rich in vit A and C, brightens. remove berry stains with olive oil), potato (puree raw potato and apply as a mask, 15 min. tightening effect.)

  • Toners:
    Lemon (dilute with water before spraying over the face to tone pores. leave on.), Cloves (allowed to steep in mineral water and applied via an atomiser. antiseptic ability)

  • Eye treatments:
    Cucumber (cooled cucumber has a mild astringent effect)

  • Exfoliators:
    Pineapple (smooth it flesh side down over body then rinse off), Salt (mixed with olive oil. eliminates toxins)

  • Body Treatments:
    Milk (smooth a face washer soaked in milk over your body while standing in the bath)

  • Acne Treatments:
    Honey (antiseptic. dab an amount no larger than a five-cent piece, leave overnight), Watercress (cleansing. chop up, wrap in muslin. place in bowl of cool water, apply, let sit for 15 min)

  • Eczema Treatments:
    Oat (calms inflammation. pour into muslin washer and tie corners. immerse in bath then smooth over skin while bathing. avoid hot water.)