Beauty Tips for Ministers

Coloring Thine Own Hair: L’Oreal Products Win PeaceBang’s Endorsement

Well let’s face it, kids, getting hair professionally colored is a luxury that many clergy could never afford, and is now becoming an unjustifiable luxury in the face of insanely expensive gas, food, and everything else for those who could/can afford it.

So PeaceBang has gone out and done a little research for you and would like to announce her endorsement of L’Oreal home hair coloring products, with Feria winning top honors in the all-over color category and L’Oreal Couleur Experte taking top honors in the color + highlights category.

Here are some tips for coloring at home:

1. Don’t be in a rush. Block out an hour or so and work carefully, getting a friend to help if possible. Clear the bathroom of rugs and towels so they don’t get splattered, and never, ever use metal bowls or appliances with the dye.

2. Every brand of hair color always recommend doing a patch test first, and waiting for 24 hours to see if you break out but I’ve never done it. Why? Because once you mix the color, it has to be used right away. So how is that supposed to work? Do, however, rub petroleum or heavy moisturizer around your hairline, ears and neck so you don’t stain, and keep those gloves on! If you start to feel itchy or allergic, rinse the color out immediately.

3. Go to a beauty supply store or a local salon and get yourself a handy-dandy little haircolor applicator brush for around a dollar — it will be of tremendous benefit in applying the color to roots and hairline. Do they really think we can get the color on accurately with just that applicator bottle tip? Lord knows I never could!

4. Semi-permanent colors may seem to be the best choice for the cautious, but in my experience they just don’t come out looking very well and they wash out so quickly (even if you use shampoo especially formulated for color-treated hair), it hardly seems worth your time investment to bother with them. They are also notoriously lousy at covering gray. Clairol Natural Instincts, I’m looking at you — and I’m not smiling.

5. Henna, while a supposedly “natural” product, is actually incredibly drying and damaging for hair. It can also produce some really frightening shades of color and simply coats the hair shaft, so re-growth is long and occasionally painful (if you wind up with one of the aforementioned frightening shades).

Good luck with your Adventures in Home Coloring, pigeons! I know… the results are usually less fabulous than you get at your salon, but doesn’t it feel good to save all that green stuff?

PB At UTS

Remember, New York-Area Pigeons,
PeaceBang will be visiting Union Theological Seminary next week!

Stila Smudge Pot

Have I mentioned how much I adore this product?

It’s a gel eyeliner that goes on with a little angled brush (sold separately) and STAYS ALL DAY. It stays on through Zumba class, it stays on through preaching, it stays on through meetings, it weathers tears and naps. If you fall asleep in it, you won’t look like an escapee from the Snake Pit the next morning. You can apply a sexy cat eye, a professional everyday line, or make a crazy smudged rock-and-roll eye. I’m a huge fan of liquid eyeliner because I find it easy to apply (after years of practice) and indestructibly long-wearing, but a bit harsh in pigment intensity. This product is much less harsh, and I swear it’s easy to apply. The bronze shade is dramatic but in a low-key way, the blue is stunning and brings out the grey circle around the iris of my dark brown eyes (it looks hideous in the pot, so don’t go by that), and I just ordered the black from www.drugstore.com.

It’s a huge amount of eyeliner, too, so you can guarantee at least a year of use out of it for $18. Just make sure to close the lid tight so it doesn’t dry out.

I still use smudgy pencils and I still love my Maybelline liquid liner for traveling (who wants to have to pack a separate pot of liner AND a brush?), but Stila Smudge Pot is first in my heart. I just feel so pretty in it, and what girl doesn’t want that? I mean that and world peace, of course.

The Cost Of Skin Care

It seems to little ole PeaceBang here that the price of cosmetics has just skyrocketed lately — especially skin care. I went to the Rite-Aid to purchase a little bottle of moisturizer that I could tuck into my overnight bag and was blown away by the difficulty of finding something simple and affordable, not to mention small in size.

Good Golly, Miss Molly! I have very sensitive skin and I don’t want to use something with a lot of fragrance or irritants (Oil of Olay, L’Oreal, Garnier Nutrisse, you’re all out). But after I’ve eliminated the smelly itchy products, shouldn’t there be some more options out there that don’t have a barrage of SPECIAL ACTIVE INGREDIENTS in them that raise the price of the goo way up past ten bucks? I mean, this is just my overnight bag we’re talking about, not my nightly regimen. Whatever happened to a simple little night cream, for the love of Joan Crawford?

PeaceBang loves to comb the aisles of drugstores as much as any other product junkie, but this was just Not. Fun. Aveeno, huge bottles of product and just too expensive. I love Neutrogena, but $21 for a little tube of sumthin-sumthin? I don’t think so. I know it’s stupid but I don’t like to use SPF on my face over night, so all of those options were out (I already have a little SPF day cream product for my overnight bag).

What gives? There was a time not so long ago when a person could purchase a skin cream that just helped stave off dehydration for the night and didn’t promise to balance your checkbook, sort your sock drawer, solve the energy crisis and write your dissertation for you at the same time. You could just, you know, moisturize your face for like six bucks, and it worked, and you didn’t smell like a slightly fruit-scented chemical cocktail, either.

Please, pigeons, recommendations!!

PEACEBANG TO VISIT UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN NYC

Conversations with the Reverend Victoria Weinstein: Ministerial Formation, Life in the Parish, and Clergy Image

Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Victoria Weinstein will be visiting the UTS campus on Monday, October 20 and Tuesday, October 21. If you are interested in joining our conversations over lunch on Monday or the longer presentation (also over lunch) on Tuesday, please leave a comment and we will send you details and register you. Free-will offering to help pay Rev. Weinstein’s travel expenses.

Victoria Weinstein is the Minister at First Parish Unitarian Church in Norwell, MA. She is Adjunct Professor of Worship and Liturgy at Andover-Newton Theological School and the author of the popular blog, PeaceBang’s Beauty Tips For Ministers (www.beautytipsforministers.com), an irreverent but relevant public ministry that has received national media attention and has clergy and lay readers all over the world.

Storing Stoles

This is a grand question and I thank Lela for submitting it,

Lela, mazel tov on your new closet! How did you manage to get one? I’m jealous! Like many ministers, I don’t have a closet in my study at church so I hang my vestments on nice suit hangers on a coat rack and hang some of my stoles over the shoulders of my robes. Some stoles are folded neatly and stored on a shelf and I shake them out once a year to make sure they’re not getting dusty or creased.

I have to admit that when I first started in ministry, I treated my robes and stoles with tender care, as though they were artifacts from the Vatican or as fragile as a Faberge egg. I’ve learned that they’re all pretty sturdy, in fact, and am not nearly as nervous about carting them around in garment bags, hanging them on wooden hangers, and folding and tucking stoles into my preaching folio or computer bag on some occasions. For me, the real nervousness comes when it’s time to spot-clean a stole. I use a white washcloth soaked in cold water with some Woolite wooshed into it and then carefully wrung out. I dab, dab, dab with furrowed brow and fear in my heart praying that I don’t spot or stain the garment. So far, I haven’t.

Candle wax removal can be very difficult but I ice any wax drips and then carefully scrape them off with an antique butter knife.

It never ceases to amuse me how people exclaim over the beauty of stoles I’ve worn dozens of times over the years and ask if it’s a new one.

Lela, here’s to you and your savvy and stylin’ ministry.