New York City travel - beauty tips
- Oct 05, 2010
The latest Virgin.com guest blog is on New York travel, and beauty tips for your star in the Big Apple.
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New York is a town noted for its style and glamour, but how can you stay looking beautiful on its smoggy streets? Big Apple resident May Levy gives her top town beauty tips.
Living in New York is exhilarating, but it can also be a harrowing battlefield for women trying to keep their makeup from looking like a circus clown.
You may think this is a trivial conquest but you'd be wrong, with good reason. To women, being beautiful and trying to stay healthy is a priority.
We were raised – rather programmed – to believe that only beautiful women are desirable. However, not everyone is born with a Hollywood face that is made for print media.
Most women rate themselves as average in terms of beauty. Physical beauty starts with the face. Keeping one’s skin clear, free of blemishes and unwanted hair is the number one priority. Hair removal treatment centres, beauty salons, and spa practically line the streets in the Village, where the fashionista New Yorkers get made up to prepare for exciting nights of socialising in New York's ever popular and vibrant night life scene.
Even your average alpha male knows that we girls put in a lot of time making sure we look as beautiful as possible. This often includes rigorous and painful routines, waxing, nails, appropriate facial makeup and texturing, and maintaining the right hair style for your particular face is important.
All in all, these beautifications help a woman feel more self-confident and assured. But an enemy lurks in the streets of the city, and this enemy’s goal is to prevent you from keeping your face beautiful. The enemy is smog.
Derived from vehicular emission, internal combustion engines and industrial fumes, smog is terrible health-wise for your body. Free radicals are biologically damaging. They can cause cancer and prematurely age your skin, causing ugly aging spots.
Pollution from all the smog and smoke New Yorker's breathe every day just by walking the sidewalk kills more than 500 people per year*. Many others get asthma, and dried out membranes, which cause face makeup to melt into a sloppy blur. With smog and pollution and being on the run constantly, it is hard to have time for your looks.
You have to fight back, starting with the essentials. You need to use antioxidants as your defence, especially during the warmer months when the smog is worst. This helps with all the ugly free radicals. Vitamin C, E, and A along Beta Carotene, and Coenzyme Q10 are all your weapons to stay beautiful.
Eat those fruits and veggies, and avoid sugar and carbs. This also goes for what you drink. Start drinking water more to flush out the toxins in your system so you can become and stay healthier. Don’t forget your calcium. Either drink milk or grab some yogurt while on the run.
Even taking the stairs sometimes instead of the elevator will help strengthen and tone your body. Start with the little things; it won't be long before you see differences in your health, energy, and even your weight.
One main product to look for is mineral makeup made from plant extracts, this fights off free radicals and all the damage from the elements, as well as prevents wrinkles, and reduces fine lines with anti aging antioxidants.
Remember that beauty is an internal property that comes out externally in a smile, in maintaining good eye contact and in learning to be socially graceful and friendly. The essence of true beauty for a woman is her personality and demeanour.
The way a woman carries herself is truly the most obvious and compelling characteristic of beauty. True self-esteem comes from within, not from without, and because of this, beauty is in the heart of a woman herself.
* Air pollution by ozone across Europe during summer 2009 Table 1.1 of European Environmental Agency (EEA) Technical report No 2/2009, Overview of exceedances of European Commission(EC) ozone threshold values for April–September 2009
May Levy is a publicist and social media strategist living in Queens, New York.
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