Beauty Tips for Ministers

Almay Bright Eyes Base + Concealer: A PeaceBang Review

Darlings,

We were just discussing the problem of eyeshadow making our lids itchy, and PB wants to share her success with a cheapie little drugstore product called Almay Bright Eyes Base + Concealer.

This doesn’t come in a wide variety of colors and it doesn’t work well as an actual brightener or concealer for the undereye area (if you have real circles to conceal), but I found that it totally solved the problem of itchy eyelids, so I’m happy. I used it for two days and wore lots of shadow to see if it would help it stay through the day and keep my lids from irritating. It succeeded on both counts.

If you buy it, be VERY light with your squeezing; the product comes out very quickly and you only need a little dab per eyelid. The brush it comes with is useless, so just use the finger God gave you to blend the product on the lid.

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Vegan Shoes and Accessories

Alert Reader Tera from L.A. sent me this great link for vegan shoes and bags, AlternativeOutfitters.com.

Look at these fab boots (now under $60):

And these vegan Oxfords for dudes!

My favorite source for vegan bags is, as ever, Matt and Nat. LOVE their stuff. Can’t afford them in general (I have one briefcase/messenger bag from them that I love), but I get pleasure just looking at their designs. And they do have good sales where they discount their products way down.

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Eye Cream With SPF & Glowy Face

Hooray, hooray!! ROC, which makes a very affordable and effective eye cream with retinol, has released a new day cream with SPF!! Some of you may recall PeaceBang’s dismay when Kiehl’s discontinued their gel-based SPF eye cream and her subsequent difficulties in finding a replacement product. Well, this is it! At around $18 for 1 oz., it’s a major bargain compared to the fancy brands, and ROC has an excellent reputation for actually working to decrease fine lines. A 1 oz. tube can last you at least six months even if you use it daily. You only use the tiniest grain of rice dab for each eye and pat it on. I use Philosophy Hope In A Tube eye cream at night without retinol, and I would recommend that you limit retinol to either day or night eye cream, not both.

It’s called ROC Extra Magical PeaceBang Special Eye-Line Reducing Anti-Aging SPF Supercalafragalisticexpealidocious Cream Just For Clergy and I found it at Target. Ha ha! Just kidding! It’s just that, as time goes by, my brain cells get used up with actual information and I have less of an ability to remember these products’ ridiculously long names, especially when they spell perfectly ordinary words like “correction” as “correxion.” Is that British, or what?

Both men and women, if there’s one skin-care product, aside from SPF moisturizer, that you should be using EVERY day, it’s eye cream. Some people age beautifully and continue to look vibrant even as their skin wrinkles and dries out. Honestly, is that you? The people I know who do manage it exercise daily, are in fantastic shape, and/or just happen to have an internal radiant beauty or plain good genes. Looking around at clergy gatherings, I must say that they are a rarity, while most of us just look wan or even haggard. I continue to despair that clergy of all ages go forth in public leadership without any attention to their photographability or visual “stage” presence in the pulpit. Young ones with bare, too-casual faces and whispy fly-away hair and older ones with sagging bags around their eyes and blotchy, oily or dried-out skin (and no, a suntan does NOT count as “make-up” — in fact, it often makes matters worse by highlighting sun damage and further drying things out) when just some simple attention would help so much. Augh! It pains me, it really does. All that money and fuss about vestments and pretty clothes, when the face is drab, drab, drab. And believe me, a “done” face can help so much when you’re having a Bad Hair Day.

You communicate so much with your face. ESPECIALLY if you eschew cosmetic enhancement, you should at least devote yourself to some skin care regimen.

Benefit High Beam is a wonderful product that PeaceBang calls her “glowy-rested face in a bottle.” I sweep a line of it across each upper cheekbone, blend up into the hairline, dot a tiny amount on the upper eyelid and it catches the light and makes me look dewy and rested even if I’ve had three hours of sleep (which I do very infrequently, since I think that being a Sleep Martyr is a very bad idea for any clergyperson, but maybe that deserves its own column). It costs $24 but lasts and lasts – I’ve had my little bottle for over a year and it still has plenty left.

A LITTLE BLUSH WOULDN’T KILL YOU, EITHER.

Kiss of peace, PB

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Dragon Breath And Liquid Chlorophyll

Darlings, how to say this gently?

If we brush our teeth in the morning (and I hope you’re flossing, too — did you know that dental plaque can wind up going straight to your arteries? Flossing is actually a matter of good heart health as well as oral hygiene!), and then we spend the day talking, drinking coffee, eating food and never doing anything else to clean our mouths of bacteria (say, chewing gum), by evening we will have developed a coating on our tongue and mouth that creates the dreaded Dragon Breath.

Do the people you meet with of an evening a favor. Brush your tooth (as my late father used to say). Brush the tongue, spend a good minute or two at the job, and rinse well. If you can’t get home to brush, pack a toothbrush in your bag and at least brush with water.

Alternating coffee with water throughout the day will not only help keep you hydrated (and your entire body needs that — but as a professional speaker, your vocal chords cannot do without it!) will also help the nasty bitter breath from developing.

Chewing parsley is great, too. The chlorophyll is an added bonus. Speaking of which, I have been taking straight chlorophyll in liquid form (an alfalfa base) just to add a straight shot of plant-based nutrients to my winter diet, a product which also claims to act as an internal deodorizer. It makes me feel great in general, but if I get fresher breath from it, double bonus! Remember the “I’ll have a shot of wheat grass” craze of the 90’s? It’s like that, except for I’m allergic to wheat grass. Same sense of natural high, though.

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Clergy Dress By WomanSpirit: PeaceBang Review

And what, pray tell, is this?

It’s a shirtwaist dress with a clergy collar attached. Is this for the office? For services? What?
Weird.
As a day dress, it’s ugly as sin and skimpy-looking. I mean, belted shirtwaist dresses can be very cute with the proper accessories and in a fun color on the right figure (not mine, kids, not mine), but black with 3/4 length sleeves?? No.

As a vestment, I’m just baffled by what this communicates. It’s sort of Donna Reed-Meets-Father Frank. All she needs is a crinoline and she could be like, “OH! I was just baking cookies at home when I realized I was late for church! Good thing I happned to be wearing my cross-dressing Priest/Mommy Clergy Dress at the time so I could run from the kitchen to the chancel!”

This reads like clergy drag to me.
We are women. We wear dresses sometimes. Shirtwaist dresses are fine (although decidedly frumpy on wide-hipped gals, I’m sorry to say); we wear those, too. When we are wearing vestments, we wear vestments. They do not attempt to resemble day dresses, for they have a different function. Finally, one does NOT wear clericals with a shirtwaist dress. It’s frumpy and awkward and not professional.

So, WomanSpirit, thanks for trying to give us another option but I’m calling this one a fail. With some adjustments it would make a nifty contemporary habit for an order of nuns.

Thanks to Caroline Divine for the link.

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Discount Cosmetics Site

Wow! Awesome prices!!

Cosmetics hounds, you can thank me later. Look at that selection!!!!

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