About Hair and Sugar Wax

Looking at my pattern of blogging, I think my unconscious goal was to update once a month. Hehe :)
I will make that two times a month!

Here is the Sugar Wax Tutorial!

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Who absolutely dislikes the stubble’s you get the very next day after you shave?
I do!

Who here hates the “black dot” that is left over from shaving? Especially your underarms…
I do!

A little Background of Hair

The “black dot” is actually the bulb of the hair that is left over in the follicle. Hair follicle is the “pore” or opening that your hair grows out from. The bulb is at the end of your hair, similar to a “root”, one that receives nourishment from the papilla. Papilla supplies blood and nourishment to the bulb or root of your hair. :)

For people who have thick hair, your bulb will most likely be still visible even after you shave. Shaving only slices off the tip of the hair that peeps out of your skin and leaves the remaining piece of hair behind. If you want your legs or your underarm to be smooth and clean looking, you would want to pull the entire hair including its root from its hair follicle. You may bleed depending on what stage of growth the hair is in. The first stage called the Anagen is where the hair is attached to the papilla, the blood source. Since the root of your hair is firmly attached to the papilla, you can bleed. But nothing dangerous! For those who are new to waxing and is wondering if this is normal, it is and nothing to worry about.

After waxing, please refrain from going to swimming pools, lakes, oceans where there are lots of bacteria and harsh chemicals that can get into your exposed follicle. Especially if most of your hair was in the Anagen stage and blood seeps out, it can get infected! Always wax a couple of days before going on a vacation. ;)

Besides, most people get red or red bumps, which is a sign of irritation AND a sign that your hair has been pulled out, but will go away in couple of hours, or a maximum of few days depending on how sensitive people are.

Stages of Hair Growth

Pulling the hair out from its root is the reason why hair will take 1-2 weeks for the hair to grow back out.
Some hair might grow out faster depending on what stage the hair has been pulled out.
Anagen stage is a period of growth with the root firmly attached to the papilla,
Catagen is when the root dislodges from the papilla,
Telogen is a period of rest, or the “shedding stage” [you know the hairs that painlessly falls out from your scalp? That is from the Telogen stage] and is where the Anagen stage starts over again with a new piece of hair growing from the papilla.

If your hair was pulled out from Anagen stage, it will take more time for the hair to grow out, if your hair was pulled out from the Catagen stage, your hair will grow out a tad bit faster, and if your hair was pulled out from the Telogen stage that is where you will most likely see a new piece of hair growing just after a few days.

So if you go to a spa and get waxed by an esthetician, and your hair is growing out the very next few days, it is not necessarily the esthetician’s bad waxing technique…it was probably because your hair was pulled out from its last stage of hair growth. That is why we recommend to get waxed every two weeks so the hair is growing at somewhat of a same rate.

Frequently wax and it might take a full 2 weeks or more to grow back. Yay!

When people say that some of their hairs do not grow back, it is because the hair has been pulled out from the Anagen stage, from its papilla and could have damaged the papilla in the process. If the papilla is damaged, hair will not be able to grow because its “food source” has been damaged. Thus, hair can not grow, in other words less hair growth. This is not always the case, but the more you wax, the more potential for destroying the papilla, and more chance of less hair growing in your later years! This is not an immediate result so don’t get your hopes up. :P

As far as I know, there is no serious consequences or complications arising from papilla damage. So wax away!

Alternative and Inexpensive

Now, going to a spa and getting waxed by an esthetician is comfortable, mess free, and very quick.
And they can get to places that you have a hard time getting at…
But it does get expensive. I’d rather spend my money on receiving skin Treatments!
And buying your own waxing kit is …even more expensive.

So. If your comfortable with the idea of waxing yourself, which by the way is no big brainer!, spend only about 16 dollars which will make you a month or more of supply of wax! And better yet, instead of using “pelons” and throw it away each time, you can use cotton strips and re-use them. This is called: Homemade Sugar Wax!

This is not my original idea by the way. This recipe has been out for ages! I just wanted to make an easy but detailed tutorial.

How to Make Sugar Wax

List of Items you need:

1. Sugar [Any sugar is fine]
2. Lemon Juice [Any lemon juice is fine]
3. Glass Jar [I used a glass canning jar]

4. Cooking Pot [Smaller the better]
5. Measuring Cups:
    - 1 cup
    - 1/4 cup

6. Candy Thermometer
    - I ruined the first two batches I made, so I highly recommend buying a Thermometer that goes past 260 degrees. Candy Thermometers go past 300 degrees.

Making the sugar wax:

Scoop two full cups of sugar and pour its contents into the cooking pot.

I wanted my homemade wax to be organic made, meaning chemical free, so I purchased all organic products. You support our environment and organic farming in little ways by purchasing organic! :)

Pour 1/4th cup full of lemon juice into the cooking pot.

Supposedly any lemon juice is okay. Even concentrate, those juice that comes in yellow lemon shaped containers. I chose an organically made pure lemon juice.

Pour 1/4th cup of water into the cooking pot.

Mine is a little hazy because of the left over lemon juice. Swirl the water in the cup and you can get the tiny last drops of lemon juice.

Mine looked like this. You just pour all the contents into the cooking pot. No special order of contents or mixing required. My sugar looks brown because it is organic.
Put your cooking pot on the stove and turn the heat to medium. You don’t want to spike the temperature up.

Take a whisk or a spoon and mix the ingredients. You can just mix periodically.

As the heat goes up, you can see the sugar liquefying. So your contents look more watery rather than kind of thick when you first mix the ingredient.

Your contents will start to boil like this picture in approximately 7 minutes into cooking.
Everyone’s stove works differently. So pay more attention to the thermometer.

About 8 minutes into cooking, your contents will bubble and foam up like in the picture.

Use your thermometer.
For me, after another 2 minutes into cooking, I found my temperature to be in 222 degrees.
Take the pot of the stove and angle it, if you need more liquid space for the thermometer.

Don’t worry about the foaming, it will eventually go down.
Try lowering your heat just a little. Stop stirring.

Keep checking your thermometer. Stop until it reaches 250 degrees or so.
♥ For me, it took me a total of about 25 mintues to reach 250 degrees.

After your contents have reached 250 degrees or so, pour the hot sugar into the glass jar and leave it open until it cools so that you do not trap water. Careful not to touch the glass, it gets hot! I closed my jar when the outside was lukewarm to touch.

If your glass jar opening is narrow like mine, it will develop tiny beads of water at the top inside edges. Just wipe of most of it.

The lighting in this picture resulted in a light amber color, but in reality the color of the sugar is a strong dark amber. The contents will thicken as it cools.

And that’s it! I have waxed my legs and underarms and the wax works marvelously!

You can use the wax right away when it cools down to a comfortable temperature, or store it in room temperature or refrigerator for later use. Just re-heat to a comfortable temperature. :)

How is my very first tutorial?
Any comments or questions write below!

Tutorials on how to wax your legs will be coming up next!

Hello!

Hi everyone!
I seem to always forget that I even own a website…
That I have prepaid a year for my domain and my name.
What is everyones secret to regularly updating? :)

I apologize to those who have been awaiting my skin care articles…or some kind of regular update from me. :(

BUT. I have a motivating reason to be updating more now.
I read in a couple of articles in a magazine how great online friends are!
Online friends are diverse, you can come in contact with people with similar interests, similar problems and they are there to support you and help you give advice to your problems!

We can’t escape the fact that online world is becoming a part of our lifestyle now. <3

Annnd...my pathetic attempted posts. :)

You see…I wasn’t being completely ignorant of my website.. :D
So don’t give up hope on me! :))
I have developed this stress related thing about releasing my post and then thinking that it is not good enough! Which makes me put off the release date later, and then I completely forget about it. And the cycle repeats itself.. This ‘personal’ blog of mine somehow turned into this ‘pleasing’ my audience in my mind. In other words, I became self conscious about what I write…

Whose with me??
Or am I the only one with this problem? Hehe…

P.S. I am working on a sugar wax tutorial. I have already taken pictures and even tried it out…
I was jumping in excitement because it actually works!
Cheers to inexpensive, 100% organic and natural, homemade sugar wax!

By the way, who likes waxing?
And, how has everyone been doing this summer?! :3

♥  Jihyeon

Overdue Update

Hello~!
I would like to thank Cat and Jenny for suggesting that I should put an 1 x 1 color block image for my background. Fixed the problem right away! I noticed that my menu alignment is off in i.e for windows but looks fine in firefox windows… Luckily, only the “home” part is cut off…Eh! I don’t want to tweak anything else at the moment. :)

For my lack of updates, I have been struggling with some personal issue. It took me full four weeks to finally get over it. Now I am just momentarily lapsing into pining, self-reflecting, and sighs of regret. STOP. Time will heal. ^__^

I went to Vancouver, Canada on Sunday and stayed until Monday afternoon. I attended the International Spa Estheique Show. It was my first time and it was great! The lectures were my main interest and there were so many booths as well. I mean SO MUCH that my brain got overwhelmed and after all the lectures I could attend, I called it a day and went back to my hotel room. The hotel was so nice as well. <3

My favorite booth was of course, Eminence Organics. I LOVE them and their products. Their booth was stunning!
I personally think that Eminence Organic Skin Care is the best Spa brand to use. It smells natural and it is, it smells like nature itself and it pretty much is, it smells divine, heavenly, pretty; AND they practice green. And that is so wonderful! That green practice is such a BIG plus! I also met the owner of Eminence in one of his classes. His class was one of the most exciting! LOL. I have never guessed Mr. Boldijarre to be so flamboyant, comedic, and so sensual. Hm, wait I think the word “naughty” is a more correct term. ;)

I laughed throughout his whole session. He is such a funny man! He seems to really enjoy his work too. He gives of this exciting positive energy and makes facial treatments look so fun! I got inspired. I can’t wait until I officially attend one of Eminence trainings.

The only problem now, is that I ran into the Ilike Organic Skin Care spa brand and they are very much similar because they apparently had some sort of connection with each other in the past. I heard a few different stories so I don’t know which is true. I don’t know what to make of Ilike and Eminence now. Hum… One thing I know for sure is that Ilike is more expensive than Eminence. I mean Eminence is already expensive enough…

Despite this, it was a fun adventure! This was my first time traveling “on my own” with a friend so I experienced some home sickness. :P

I have some few skin care articles in mind. I think I would start out with Drugstore vs. Department vs. Spa brand skin care products. It will talk about how the products are different, which is more effective, costs, etc. I think that is a nice base article to start with.

By the way…does anyone else get lots of spam? On April 18th, I received 12 Spam..all in one day! And then other days include the 16th and the 24th. Is this normal? Of course these were collected by Akismet. So Odd…

psst. This month was my birthday. Oh how it passed so sadly without much celebration. April was such a sad and depressing month for me. Hardships makes one stronger. ^__^

First Post

Hello Everyone! ~ First post on my new domain. :)
I hope my layout looks okay in whatever browser you are using…
I am still very much new at this, so whatever bug you see, please tell me. ^__^
Sadly, I know my background color does not match with my layout in Internet Explorer and Firefox for windows…
Which is odd, because I also had to tweak my colors for my mac firefox and safari. Anyone know the solution to this problem? I tried saving every image with the same color profile. I tried without embedding any color and that really drained the vibrancy of my colors. Any help would be wonderful~~

My domain name was originally supposed to be “snowflique.com” but that didn’t really sound original at all. And I figured my domain will be mostly personal so why not my name? jihyunkim, jeehyunkim, taken. BUT jihyeonkim was not! I think the proper way to spell any “un” sound in Korean English is “eon”. Yeon, hyeon, seon, etc. I will now spell my name as Jihyeon, instead of Jihyun. ;)

The contents are pretty much the same except a few tweaking in about and drawings, and put a whole new line of layouts I forgot to add in the graphic section. Ah~ I love my wall of layout collection. Can you tell I love fall colors?

Anyone curious how I built my theme I went here:
>>>Stop Tweaking! Create your own wordpress theme.
>>>>So you want to create a WordPress themes huh?

I also used google a lot. I found codings for comments, css styling for avatar, images, cool plugins, and ecetera ecetera. I also downloaded free wordpress themes and installed them and messed with the css styling and php pages to see how they did their styling. It was a long process…”What happens when I change this…*save*…oh i see”

If it wasn’t for that cool program XAMP which allowed me to install wordpress locally to my mac…
I probably would have spent all my bandwidth this month and got suspended! >___<

I spent HOURS AND HOURS on my chair stooped. I went to a massage therapist two days ago and she asked me how long have I been on the computer. Ah~~ It was the best massage I ever had…

So how do you like my layout? How does it look on your browser?
Any recommendations or critiques are welcome! Please. :)

♥  Jihyeon