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Rejuvenation: Beauty, Diet, Home, Spirit
By
Published: Jan 03, 2016
Category:
Beauty/Vanity
Rejuvenation. It’s what we do after long holidays. Because you watched all ten hours of Making A Murderer. Ate. Drank. And now you have resolutions. The gym. A neater home. Better diet. More kindness, more intelligence, more wit. Me too. As I stood with friends at the reservoir and watched the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, there was a fun run on the Central Park roadway. I thought: On 12/31/16, I might want to do that. The thought is rapidly fading. But stuff you can do indoors without breaking a sweat — I’m good with that. So….
T3 Professional Salon Hair Dryer
Head Butler reader reviews:
“It cuts the time it takes to dry my hair by 5 minutes — and in the morning, that 5 minutes is huge.”
“My T3 takes 4 minutes. (I’ve actually timed it.) I know it’s ‘just a hairdryer,’as my husband would say, but if you are anything like me in the morning, every second counts.”
“When I looked in the mirror, my hair was nice and smooth — no flyaways. I can usually only get this look when I use shine/smoothing serum on my hair. And when I do that, I’m looking in the mirror and constantly brushing/styling as I’m drying it.”
“If you are trying to justify the cost, look at it as saving money on extra conditioner for your hair.”
“It’s all that’s advertised. My frizzy hair is lying down, nice and calm. From towel-dried, it dried almost completely in 10 minutes. I have almost no patience with hair dryers, so to get it almost dry at the limit of my patience is saying something.”
Clarins Beauty Flash Balm
Someone noted on a message board, “It’s like eight hours of sleep in a tube.” My wife: “At the end of a long day at work or, later at night, when your makeup begins to settle, you rub a little of this cream in your hand, then press it on your face. Very quickly, your skin looks dewy — it’s almost an instant glow.”
Clarisonic Facial Sonic Cleansing System
Head Butler reader reviews:
“My skin looks and feels as it would after a micro-dermabrasion, but I get that feeling every day instead of a few times a month. I love that I can use any type of non-abrasive cleanser to address my facial needs.”
“Retin-A makes your skin peel like crazy for the first few weeks. But the Clarisonic brush was great with this because the gentle setting was easy enough on my skin but also hard enough to scrub the dead skin away nightly.”
“I did not at all expect the dark circles under my eyes to disappear, but they are totally gone. I haven’t used under-eye concealer for the past five days.”
Anthelios with Mexoryl
Once upon a time, Americans had to stock up on Anthelios with Mexoryl on tuips to Europe. In 2006, the FDA approved Mexoryl. No more smuggling. And the American price for Anthelios with Mexoryl is not dramatically higher than it is in France. What’s so great about Anthelios with Mexoryl? Listen to Dr. Vincent DeLeo, Chairman, Department of Dermatology, Founding Director, Skin of Color Center, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt and Beth Israel: “It produces a product which gives us almost perfect protection against sunshine.”
Kneipp Bath Oils
Kneipp isn’t a product flying off the shelves at the drug store on the next corner or the drug store on the corner after that, but it’s a venerable brand in Europe and a cherished friend in the Smart Set in America. Is it “bath therapy,” as is often claimed? In our home, although none of us is currently involved in actual therapy, three people again raise their hands.
Egyptian Magic
There’s really nothing “magic” about Egyptian Magic. The ingredients are olive oil, bees wax, honey, bee pollen, royal jelly and bee propolis. And — so it says — “divine love.” With the exception of the last “ingredient,” you could whip it up yourself. But you couldn’t improve on the original. If there’s a skin problem this stuff can’t deal with, I can’t find it. Burns, scrapes, skin irritations, diaper rash, sunburns, eczema, psoriasis — it’s the go-to cream.
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
What’s better for you — whole milk, 2% milk or skim?
Is a chicken labeled “free range” good enough to reassure you of its purity? How about “grass fed” beef?
What form of soy is best for you — soy milk or tofu?
In just 200 pages (and 22 pages of notes and sources), Michael Pollan gives you a guided tour of 20th century food science, a history of “nutritionism” in America and a snapshot of the marriage of government and the food industry. And then he steps up to the reason most readers will buy his book — and if you care for your health and the health of your loved ones, this is a no-brainer one-click — and presents a commonsense shopping-and-eating guide.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
Other books see decluttering as a constant battle. In those books, we’re doomed to spend our lives fighting against an ever-rising tide of stuff.
Marie Kondo sees decluttering as a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Other books are about deciding what to get rid of.
Marie Kondo’s is about deciding what to keep.
Glenn Gould: Bach: the Goldberg Variations
In 1741, a Russian count who lived in Leipzig had trouble sleeping. To calm his nerves, Count Kaiserling ordered Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, his personal pianist, to play in the next room. And the Count asked Johann Sebastian Bach to provide Goldberg with some clavier pieces — music that would be soothing but cheerful.
Bach, at the height of his genius, was not about to knock off some insignificant ditties. Instead, he produced what’s been described as “the most serious and ambitious composition ever written for harpsichord.”
In form, the piece consists of an aria, thirty variations, and a repeat of the aria. The jaw-dropping achievement? Instead of writing variations on the melody, Bach built the piece by embellishing the ground bass line.
The Count loved Bach’s music. “Dear Goldberg,” he would say, “do play me one of my variations.”
Or so the story goes.
The Count claimed ownership — he had, after all, paid Bach with a golden goblet filled with a hundred gold pieces — but this work has never been known as the Kaiserling Variations.
For more than two hundred years, it was the Goldberg Variations.
And then, in 1955, Glenn Gould made a recording that the cognoscenti dubbed the “Gouldberg” Variations.
