My obsession with Kora Organics is both long-standing and well-deserved. I first learned about the brand founded by the lovely Miranda Kerr when it expanded globally in 2017. In my search for clean skincare alternatives that were also effective, Kora Organics immediately stood out.
Read moreSimple At-Home Makeup Tips to Look Refreshed For Your Zoom Meetings
With the recent social-distancing and stay-at-home practices, the meeting game has literally changed overnight. Our meetings now happen almost exclusively online whether for an interview, work, or a catch-up with friends and family. The Zoom life can feel a bit intimidating with our faces magnified front and center on the screen so I put together a list of my easy make-up tips and tricks for you to be camera-ready! Scroll down to read about all my clean beauty faves.
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Hydrate & Prime Your Skin: I always start the day using my Olie x Melissa Meyers Golden Ray Glow Drops. This deeply hydrating luxury face oil creates the perfect canvas for make-up and leaves skin with a dewy, velvety texture! It’s formulated with active French Marine Algae, an antioxidant proven to stimulate the production of collagen. This is a multi-tasking product, and it can also be dabbed on cheekbones over makeup for a natural highlighted glow.
Use promotional code GLOWGIRL 15 for $15 off
I use the KORA ORGANICS Rose Quartz Gua Sha tool to massage the Golden Ray Glow Drops into my face. Part of Miranda Kerr’s clean beauty line, this tool works to enhance your natural beauty by sculpting the face. It helps to relax tense facial muscles, encourage blood circulation, and reduce puffiness and fine lines. Given this stressful time, it’s a great TMJ reliever!
Apply Light Coverage and SPF: Next, I follow-up with a tinted moisturizer. Two of my favorites are Coola’s BB Cream and Ilia’s Super Serum Skin Tint. These are both clean beauty lines containing SPF, formulated to even out the skin tone and hide imperfections. It’s important to remember to wear sunscreen to protect the skin from damaging UV rays if you are working near a window or outside in the garden, as some of us do here in L.A.
The formula by Coola is one I’ve been using for years and I love the medium to dark shade for my olive skin. The mineral broad-spectrum SPF 30 formula offers a barely-there feel, while a sheer tinted coverage blends and perfects your skin tone. A proprietary bouquet of rose stem cells offers an advanced bio-complex to smooth, moisturize and replenish skin's natural resilience and improve visible signs of aging.
The ILIA Super Serum Skin Tint SPF 40 is available in eighteen shades and doesn’t contain any silicones, oils, or fragrances. It’s formulated with non-nano zinc oxide to protect against UVA, UVB, UVC, blue and infrared light. Other skin-benefiting ingredients include hyaluronic acid, squalane, and niacinamide which leave the skin smooth, plump and moisturized.
Make Your Eyes Pop: Ere Perez, an Australian natural and clean beauty company, is another one of my favorite clean beauty make-up lines. Their soft jojoba oil eye pencil is not only gentle on the sensitive eye area but also contains anti-inflammatory properties, helping to soothe any prior skin irritation while nourishing, moisturizing and conditioning the lashes. This pencil comes in ten different tones, but I love the bronzed brown since it creates a natural-looking frame that subtly and beautifully defines the eyes.
I like to use ILIA Limitless Lash Mascara—it gives lashes the perfect thickness and length. I love that the formula contains organic ingredients, such as natural shea butter, as well as bee and carnauba waxes to condition and nourish lashes, keeping them long and healthy. Plus, the applicator is very easy to use, which is the key!
Define Your Brows: Another favorite of mine from Ere Perez is their almond brow pencil. It’s perfect for creating brows that look naturally full and accentuated. Since stress and hormone shifts can lead to hair loss and thinning eyebrows, this pencil is perfect for filling in those bare spots that can crop up. The sweet almond oil nourishes the hairs and the skin under and around the brows, while Vitamin-E oil nourishes the roots, stimulating the growth of thick, dark and more resilient eyebrow hair. This product comes with a brush, which is perfect for shaping brows.
Add Some Color To Your Face: We don’t want to look pasty-white on-screen, do we? I like to dust my face with a bit of bronzer and dab the apples of my cheeks with Jillian Dempsey’s Cheek Tint to add a natural-looking, healthy glow. Jillian Dempsey uses bamboo stem extract along with other natural and organic waxes to glide on smoothly while delivering the perfect flush designed to last through zoom meeting after zoom meeting!
My go-to bronzer is by W3LL People. Their Bio Baked Bronzer Powder is a universally flattering shade with the perfect soft-matte finish. It’s baked like a powder but blends like a cream and is long-lasting, flawlessly balancing out skin-tone and helping me to look awake and glowing during my video calls. Super clean and eco-friendly, it also contains special ingredients such as squalane and honokiol help protect against free radicals.
Add Some Shimmer and Glow: To finish off your best video-meeting look, I recommend adding some highlighter to brow bones, bridge of the nose, and cheekbones to contour the face and define your best features. Natural light from windows, as well as indoor-lighting, will reflect off the product and light up your face for a refreshed, radiant and youthful glow.
Below are the highlighters that I’m currently obsessed with.
The rms beauty Luminizer comes in six different shades and contains castor seed and vitamin-E oil to hydrate and calm the skin, while also giving the face a soft luminous finish. The OG of highlighters, the light reflecting sheen never feels sticky or looks glittery. I love to use this one on my brow bone.
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The Westman Atelier Super Loaded Tinted Highlight by Gucci Westman complements any skin shade and type and contains key ingredients such as hyaluronic acid to help smooth and fill-in wrinkles, caper extract to reduce inflammation and jojoba oil, an antioxidant that helps to moisturize and protect against pollution and UV damage. Since it can also be used on the sensitive eye area, I like to wear this instead of eye shadow to make my eyes pop on screen!
I’ve also been addicted to The All-Glowing Creme Highlighter Stick in Rose Gold by Au Naturale for some time now. Formulated to be clean with organic oils, it provides a creaseless and weightless finish. I typically apply this product to my upper cheekbones and brow bone. It does a great job of highlighting my best features!
Add Gloss To Your Lips: I like to add a natural, universally-flattering pink-nude color to my lips, and my current fave also contains CBD to calm my nerves…yes, please! Saint Jane’s CBD- infused Lip Shine, in the color Bliss, is combined with sunflower, chamomile, and aloe - the perfect remedy to condition inflamed, dry, chapped lips. It glides on super smoothly to soothe and hydrate.
I hope these products brighten up your virtual meetings as much as they do mine! If you have any questions about any of them, feel free to DM me on Instagram or leave me a comment below.
Stay safe, healthy, and keep on glowing!
xxMelissa
My Experience with Celebrity Chinese Astrologer Anita Rosenberg
Following my ‘Celebrating International Women’s Day’ post in March, this week starts the launch of a new female partnership series on The Glow Girl blog. One which celebrates women and invites them as a guest feature every month bringing their unique knowledge to you. Today we start with celebrity Chinese Astrologer Anita Rosenberg and I am excited to be sharing my experience with her - once you read on, you will understand why she is an important resource for me and can be for you too!
INTRODUCING
Meet Anita Rosenberg, former movie director, award winning writer of Feng Shui Luck and ‘go-to expert’ in Los Angeles, Aspen, India, Panama and Vietnam for Feng Shui & BaZi Chinese Astrology. Anita helps people reach their wealth potential, improve their businesses and enrich personal relationships. She works with many notable clients including Miranda Kerr, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow and many fortune 500 CEO’s. Anita’s unique blend of Western and Chinese Metaphysics along with a vast knowledge of many spiritual modalities, from tarot to kabbalah, crystals and wicca allows her to transform and illuminate homes, businesses and the lives of each client she works with. This was certainly true of the wisdom Anita poured into me during my time with her.
“I have opened the portal to a more spiritual way of being in the world and there's no going back only forward.”
HOW WE MET
When I first moved to LA six years ago, a mutual friend in New York introduced me to Anita. We soon met for lunch and she told me all about her Chinese Metaphysics and Feng Shui journey and to be honest, this kind of talk was way too California ‘woo woo’ for me. Although I found her story interesting, I still remained reserved about booking a BaZi Chinese Astrology session with her - I kept thinking this is kinda out there for me, especially as a born and raised pragmatic New Yorker! Crystals? Feng Shui? Meta-what?!
Then about six months ago Cristina Cuomo, editor of The Purist invited me to a celebration for Donna Karen’s 70th birthday at Urban Zen in West Hollywood where Anita was also a guest. I was so happy to see her - we chatted quite a bit and I truly felt like the universe reconnected us that night. In light of the more holistic direction I am heading these days, I decided to explore Anita’s gifting further and my time with her was certainly enlightening.
‘Pay attention to signs when certain people enter your life even if you are not sure why at the time’
WHAT IS BAZi?*
BaZi (Destiny) is a life map. It does not predict the future - it DESIGNS it. Based on your birth date, BaZi charts read like the story of your life where you are the star. It shines a spotlight on your true nature so you can maximize your talents, excel at work, strengthen relationships, overcome weaknesses, make healthier choices and inform decisions based on luck cycles. BaZi is not a fixed outcome, which is why it’s so interesting. Using the element of free will, you decide to do things differently allowing control over outcomes. Understanding BaZi will shed light on what makes YOU happy and which is achievable.
MY SESSION WITH ANITA
During this session I had so much to learn, luckily Anita produced a report with my BaZi Chinese forecast. A life map with specifics to my health, wealth and career. It was fascinating with the last sentence saying “when you are clear on who you are, everything is easy.” Anita’s endearing approachable character, gleeful presence and 18 years of spirituality brought something into my life that was very powerful.
A few interesting things to share according to my chart…
. I am a Gui water person so always like to be out and about like a mist (true)
. Setting boundaries is always an issue for me as well as being organized (true)
. I have 6 earth on my charts …more than 2 is procrastinating (true)
. I have money in every pillar, it’s in the bottom meaning in grows (yay…hope this is true)
. Adding water strengthens my chart so I should travel more, drink more water, live out west (yup)
. Partnerships are the key to my success in 2019 (a good one!)
This was so interesting to me as I started the year with the goal to pivot The Glow Girl into a more holistic health and wellness space, supporting, promoting and working with products, services and connections which bring to the life the true essence of a Glow Girl. I am grateful to Anita for recommending that I include a selenite stone and intention card with each purchase of my LOOMA X Melissa Meyers Glow necklaces for additional healing energy (see below for purchase with discount code).
Anita also gave me a quick education on some stones, crystals and magical candles that would be helpful to me in reaching my spiritual goals. She suggested that I select a Lemurian crystal wand when I had my session with her. Then, she had me stand with my back towards my personal Qi Men direction (you need your chart plotted to know this information) and ask it a question for guidance while circling the wand in from of me. If I felt pulled toward the wand, then the answer was a “yes,” if away then a “no”. It was kinda crazy but strangely enough, it works!
Lemurian crystals are all wands and as such, conduct, amplify, and focus the Universal Life Force, augmenting the healing power of the healer. In spiritual healing, wands focus the healing elements of the Universal Life Force on areas of the body that are weak or suffering from being out of balance. Lemurian wands are used to bring a sense of oneness to a person suffering from feelings of disjointedness or detachment. When life seems to be swirling around someone, and they seem to be lost in the whirlwind, use a Lemurian Seed Crystal in the healing process.
My morning meditation look: Leopard PJ Salvage Pajamas (40% off), slides by R0AM
Melissa Meyers X LOOMA Glow Necklaces (including selenite stone shown above with intention card.
Use code GLOW20 for 20% off! Click here to buy now!
Below are some of my favorite products which help support me in my wellness space.
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WHAT’S TO COME FOR YOU
I learned from Anita that the 2019 forecast in relation to the year of the pig will be a year to rejuvenate and replenish because of the earth-water combo. The best use of this energy is to make plans for the future, tie up loose ends from previous years and get ready for a new cycle starting in 2020. Therefore, nurturing and building relationships will help you move forward to accomplish goals and establish new partnerships. I hope you get a chance to check out Anita’s website and learn more on how you can live your best life this year!
xx Melissa
Look out for our next guest post with Anita on being ‘Crystal Crazy’
For more information please email Anita - Anita@AnitaRosenberg.com
Glow Girl Faves from Anita Rosenberg
Anita stocks a range of products which all hold healing or prosperous properties. I love the Ganesh Magic candle for prosperity, success and happiness.
*Cited from Anita Rosenberg BaZi Chinese Astrology report.