STYLING PRODUCTS

Nurture Anti-Ageing Conditioning Hair Treatment: When Good Things Come In Small Packages…

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… if the thing doesn’t sparkle, it better do something useful.

First: adorbz!
NURTURE package

Second: handy!
NURTURE capsule

Could this be any easier to pop into a going-away bag? It could not.

Third: any good?
NURTURE HAIR

Yes! The softness, the shine… The Hair feels good, and looks good, too.

A few things:
> You need to be patient with the twisty top. The capsule is made of particularly soft soft plastic, so it takes more than one twist to get the cap to snap. I think it took me abut six twists. Careful! Don’t want to spurt serum all over the joint!
> As tiny as the capsule is, it felt like there was almost too much in it. It’s like the wardrobe to Narnia, or something. Speaking as a long-haired person, it was ultimately the correct amount. Shorter-haired persons may even be able to get another go per capsule.
> It is oddly, and yet welcome-ly, scentless. I sniffed my locks a couple times, I was that surprised.
> The serum has UV and thermal protection qualities. I never think about my hair getting baked by the sun, which = duh, espesh as my highlights gets noticeably highlightier in the summer…
> 20 capsules suddenly doesn’t seem like enough…

You can buy them online here, on nurtureskincare.co.uk for only £7.45, which is a snip, frankly.

And there’s a whole world of product on the site designed for mature skins, and the company are located in Guernsey, which looks stunning!

Let the hording begin…

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UPDATE: You won’t get second day hair out of this unless you use dry shampoo the night before. < Which, when I was first investigating how to use dry shampoos properly, wrecked my head {ha, ha}.

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UPDATE, MARK II: I used two of my carefully hoarded capsules on a recent trip to France. The water in France is usually rather hard on The Hair*, and it gets all dry and frizzy and dull. This stuff was magique: softness, shine and manageability were the same as at home. So, maybe the headline should be: Travel-sized Product Travels Well!

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*Occasionally, my diamond shoes pinch just the tiniest bit, too.

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The Hair Meets Elnett Styling Spray; Happiness Ensues

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Three new products from Elnett are available for your follicular pleasure: Heat Protect Styling Sprays for three-day Volume, Curl or Straight coiffures.

I went for Volume on the roots and Curl on the ends:

L’Oréal Paris spokewoman/model/boldface name Cheryl Cole and I are like *that*.

This very impressive blow dry was done by Sinead from Foundation Hair Salon. No tongs were used in the creation of this hairdo. The sprays protect the hair from heating tools up to 230°, so no more fried tresses of a Saturday night.

This morning, with very little intervention. Combed out and spritzed the Volume on the roots!

Due to the fineness of my hair, I am not entirely convinced that I’ll get another day out of this, but we shall see.

Pictures of the very fancy spray bottles can be found here, as well as more pretty pictures of my pal Cheryl. Price point is in the area of €8, and I asked how many hairdos you might expect to get in a bottle, and I’ve forgotten the answer. Four months worth, I think? I bet that’s reasonable. {Updates to come on all that — couldn’t wait to post!}

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Elnett Heat Protecting Styling Sprays are available everywhere, basically.

Oh! And the lippy in the last photo is one of the new Clinique Chubbies in Mightiest Maraschino. It is a lightweight in texture only — I already adore it.

Magical Amazingness: Moroccanoil Luminous Hairspray

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Once upon a time, I used a non-aerosol hairspray that will not be named. I used it because it absolutely froze my hair into submission. Like, I could walk out on a day like today {rainy/blowy, for all my foreign readers} and my skin would wobble like on that Memorex advert, but The Hair would not move. Which was the point.

But then, should anyone want to run his fingers through said coif, there’d probably be blood, because the hair was so crispy, it would cut a bitch. {Bastard? Eh.}

This was so many years ago, I would prefer not to say.

I would still like my hairstyle to have some hold, but I’d rather not look like I’ve had my head shellacked. I’d also prefer that the product actually smell lovely, which I think we might agree that one of the more popular hairsprays on the market does not. Also! I’d like a bit of body, too, please.

Is this too much to ask?!? Not if you’re talkin’ to Moroccanoil’s Luminous Hairspray. During the hair fashion show — at the Westbury, BTW, very fancy — this can of miraculousness was employed rather relentlessly by the stylists as they crafted each new hairdo. Hmmm, I thought, I bet their hair is going to break right in half. I mean, that was a lotta hairspray to be sprayin’ on  the same head, over and over.

When I got home, the first thing I did was shake up my sample of the product and — if you’ll excuse for a moment, I’m just gonna give my hair a little blast — ahhhhh. Wow. The typically delicious Moroccanoil scent meets a spray that is light yet strong, and if you direct it at the roots, you get a nice bounce without any gunk at all. Which is all a girl can ask for, really.

Oh! I didn’t ask for this, but you get shine, too! Magic!

€21/£16.65

Haiku Review: Moroccanoil Hydrating Styling Cream

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Nope, no way in hell.
Putting cream on my dry hair!?
No way will it — oh.

Gotta love my open mind. Oh, yeah. Show me a product and my immediate reaction is, ‘Hey, that is great! I can’t wait to experiment with this thing that you are telling me is going to work a treat!’

Not so much — at least not where my hair is concerned. We all know by now that the hair {or, better, The Hair} is of primary importance, and a bad hair day is enough for me to hide under the bed, or even crazier, jump back in the shower and start over.

Last Sunday week, I attended a Moroccanoil fashion show. Again, as this fashion-y business is new business to me, so I was wondering how they do a hair fashion show? They do it like this:

Models model clothes and hair, and then stylists make changes to the hair using the sponsor’s products.

Now, Moroccanoil are the original creators of argan oil-based products, and continue to innovate. Their signature treatment can be perceived to be ‘the’ oil, the one that opened up the whole ‘let’s use oil on our hair’ market.

I love the way it smells, and using the oil as a pre-blow dry styling product is like weaving silk into the very core of each individual hair on your head.

But when the talk turned to the Hydrating Styling Cream, I was like to close my ears entirely.

That is a cream. And you’re telling me to put it on my dried hair? My hair that I have just put oil in, and let me tell you, how much risk was involved in that!

I even saw it in action, on the lovely tresses of representatives of the brand, and still I did not believe.

But I wanted to. Why? Who knows, except that anything that I can discover that gives me silky, lovely hair is to be sought. So I pumped out a dab, such a wee dab that it should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for Smallest Amount of Hair Product Ever Dispensed, and I smoothed it onto the ends.

Ooh. It was nice. It didn’t feel greasy, it didn’t weigh the hair down, and it smelled gorgeous.

Okay. Since I was just sitting around, and I wasn’t going anywhere that evening, I pumped up some more, and like a wild woman, applied it about halfway down the hair shaft and combed it through.

Oh, wow. Now, my hair on that day was second-day, unstyled, no dry shampoo — nothing special, not going-out-into-public hair, and I have to say, the cream gave it such a lift. I would never show you pictures of my hair in that state, so forget it. The thing is though, I felt like it revitalised the locks that had been going limp, and if pushed, I might have made a run to the corner shop for some buns, if I had to. I don’t think I can say any better than that.

You can of course use this on damp hair as well, and I’ll do that next. And see the can the model is holding, in the picture? That’s Moroccanoil Luminous Hairspray, and WAIT until I tell you about THAT.

€28.45/£22.85/$31; available in select salons.

Haiku Review: Carino Professional Miracle Oil from Aldi

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Shake, shake, shake — doo doo
Doo doo DOO doo! Shake, shake, shake!
Shake your bottle. Shake

YOUR BOTTTTLE! It’s official: this is the world’s worst haiku! And I don’t even care, because it is making me laugh.

This is a glass bottle. I am thrilled by its glassness. It feels like the kind of bottle into which an old-fashioned apothecary might have poured a distillation of some healthful tincture. Or a snake-oil salesmen would have filled it with water and a splash of peppermint, claiming the mixture to be a cure all for everything from persistent cough to impotency.

Excuse me, I seem to be having a past life flashback. Or two.

The oil in this bottle has nothing to do with snakes, of course. It’s another in an ever expanding category of ‘things with argan oil in them.’ And as argan oil is so ‘now’, it can get pricey. At €3.99 it would really be good if this was good.

It’s good. And the thing is, I believe much of its goodness is down to the bottle. It’s not so easy to shake out, which ensured that I didn’t use too much. I hate having bad hair days, down to not knowing what was the optimum amount of a new styling product. I’ve had to figure out how to pump a half-pump of product, or how to drizzle jussst the right amount out of a container. This one was perfect from the go, because after a few shakes, you think Ah, sure, this is enough, and it is. And as it was teeny, tiny amount, I expect this to last me long enough to carry over into my next lifetime. Talk about excellent value!