Don’t let people tell you your 30s will be the best time of your life in a tone that suggests your looks will fade so you better find inner peace. Vicki’s Pick is a weekly beauty column that features Vicki’s all-time favourite beauty products and latest discoveries for women in their 30s who plan on staying pretty on the outside for a long, long time. Inner peace is optional.
If there’s a time of year when I feel the ugliest, it’s April. Aside from being completely Vitamin D-deprived for the past five months, I’ve stopped remembering what it feels like to go out in public in anything less revealing than a Queen-size comforter with arm holes. I can’t tell you if I’ve gained weight or lost weight this winter because sweatsuits are forgiving in that respect. And then out of the blue comes April. T. S. Eliot wasn’t kidding when he said April is the cruelest month, which is the very first line of The Waste Land. And it’s probably no coincidence that the first line of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, 1984, starts with a reference to the dreary month as well: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Suddenly it’s above zero, the snow is gone, and we’re expected to put our best face forward, like we haven’t just spent the last half year living like biblical era lepers. I can’t tell you the last time I even trimmed my hair, and I hold hairstyle-damaging toques and seasonal affective disorder entirely responsible.
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Fortunately, faking perfectly coiffed hair is a lot easier than it seems, and it requires minimal effort for those of us still suffering from vanity-depleting winter blues. My personal saviour for the task, and one that’s especially great for women with curly or wavy hair, is Moroccanoil Volumizing Mousse ($28). Sure, it’s a tad on the expensive side for a mousse, but that’s because it doesn’t crust up like lower quality brands and yet it’s still capable of flexible, gravity-defying hold. It also has a subtle, barely detectable fragrance, which is great if, like me, the stench of lower-end brands gives you unwelcome 80s flashbacks. Laugh, but I’m pretty sure that a scratch-n-sniff sticker featuring the cast of Saved by the Bell would smell like Dep Styling Mousse, amirite?
For best (read: a lazy person’s) results, I like to put this stuff in my hair at night right after shampooing and conditioning my hair. I let it air-dry as I get ready for bed and then I just go to sleep with damp hair. When I wake up to my dry rat’s nest of a mane, I use a 1.25-inch curling iron to smooth out my hair in about 20-odd sections before brushing it out into full volume sexiness, which takes 10 minutes, tops. You can’t even tell how many split ends I have in all that oomph, can you? If this easy ‘do doesn’t get me through to May, I’m making my Daenerys Targaryen DIY Halloween costume (made from cornstarch, a bed sheet and a lack of shame) my new signature spring 2014 style until bikini season.
