Doing Some Beautification (or Feeling Better From The Outside In)

This isn’t a recap of my current monthly challenge (I’m only a few days into it), but it is related to it. I’ve been working on finding myself again and getting back to me. And I really thought a lot of that was going to be stuff about my emotions and feelings and that I needed to reconnect to myself that way. But over the past few days I did a few things for my outside that really did help me feel so much better.

I’ve been getting better about doing self-care and taking care of myself, including things like skincare and beauty. I have noticed that I have looked better on the outside since I’ve been making more of an effort on those things. I don’t know if weekly sheet masks are really making my skin better or if doing those sheet masks is bringing down my stress which is helping my skin look better, but either way it’s working. I know that physical beauty isn’t everything, but when you don’t feel at your best it can be a hit on your self-esteem and how you feel about yourself.

Since I have been doing all these new self-care things, I really didn’t think that doing some more beauty stuff was going to make a difference. But there were some beauty things that I have been slacking on for a bit that I finally got a chance to do. A lot of this slacking has to do with not having the money to do it, but it also has to do with timing.

The first thing I did for myself was getting my eyebrows done. I know this is a luxury thing to do, but for me it almost feels like a necessity. My eyebrows are pretty crazy to begin with, but I cannot trust myself to do the work on my own. I don’t even try to use tweezers because I will overdo things and pluck way more than I should. I don’t want to do any damage to my eyebrows so I try to get them done professionally on a regular basis. When I went to cheap places, I would try to go once a month or every other month. But those cheap places were not worth it as I would get burns from wax and other issues from them. So I go to a slightly more expensive place (but still on the cheap end of things) and I can’t go as often.

My eyebrows weren’t the worst they have been, but they weren’t great. And I have something happening this week that I want to look my best for so I wanted to get them done. Even though this wasn’t the most dramatic eyebrow makeover I’ve had from getting them done, just having them look clean and professional really helped. Since I don’t wear a lot of makeup on a regular basis, having my eyebrows look good makes a big difference in my appearance.

The other beauty thing I did recently was getting my hair done. I used to be much better about getting my hair done on a regular schedule. Since I color my hair, when I don’t get it done it’s usually very noticeable. It used to be bad because I went lighter with my color, but since I’ve been going darker my roots don’t show as much. But since I’ve been getting more and more gray hair, now it’s really bad! When I was getting it done, my friend who does my hair said I’m about 30% gray now. I started going gray around 20, but it got drastically worse in the past 2 years. Now, my gray hair is all over and there’s no way to pretend it’s not there. I do have powder I can use to cover them, but it still needed to be done.

I was going to have my hair done around my birthday, but I put that off because I didn’t do a big birthday thing. Then I was thinking about doing it in September, but because I can’t afford to get it done as often as I like I didn’t want to do it then and have my hair look bad for Thanksgiving. I put it off longer than I would have liked to, but I finally got it done this week when it was looking really bad.

I like to take before and after photos of my hair, and the before ones are always much worse than I look on a normal basis. I always remember to take them right before my appointment, but that’s when I haven’t done anything to my hair. I just wash and condition it and let it air dry. Normally, I put product in my hair after it’s washed and I blow dry it. So my before picture has much more frizz and random curls than I do on normal days. But you can still tell a big difference between the before and after photo when you ignore the style of my hair.

The color is back to what I like it to be and you don’t see any gray or weird color changes from the top to the bottom of my hair. My hair was also super long and looking stringy so it was cut and shaped. It looks like a lot of length was taken off, but it’s actually not that much. In my after photo my hair is curled a bit so it looks shorter. I still had about 2 inches taken off to make it look healthier, but it’s still long. I have toyed with the idea of going short again, but I still love it long right now.

Before getting my eyebrows and hair done I didn’t think it was going to make that much of a difference, but it really did. I feel so much better about myself and just much calmer about things. It’s so weird how working on how I look on the outside made that much of a difference about the uneasy feeling I’ve been having. I still need to do more work on myself and I’ll recap that at the end of the month. But for now, I’m just so glad that doing something that seemed so frivolous really ended up being a big deal.

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Self-Care Is So Important (or At-Home Beauty) At Home Hair (or I Haven’t Done This Since I Was A Teenager) Time For A Bit Of A Change (or Getting Chopped) Continuing To Get Back To Me (I Needed My Hair Done!) Getting A New Look (or Two Attempts To Dye My Hair) Feeling Refreshed (or Looking Good While Babysitting)