Monochromatic

I love the monochromatic look.

Wearing a monochromatic look is supposed to be slimming and make you appear taller. I’m tall enough and was always pretty slim, so I didn’t ‘need’ to dress monochromatically, I just like to.

When I was in my late teens, I had a boyfriend who gave me a couple of his old vintage suits. One was a marine blue sharkskin suit, and the other was a brown with orange and white pinstripes. I love the menswear inspired looks and really rocked the look. I used to wear a brown turtleneck and my brown suede cowboy boots with the brown suit and with my brown hair, my mother would tell me that I looked like a tree trunk. I didn’t care. I wish I had pictures of the fashion I rocked in the early nineties. I was attending fashion college and hanging out at clubs a lot, so I was pretty creative with the things I wore.

I still like wearing all one colour. I especially like doing the matching shoes and tights thing. I have good legs, so I feel that this accentuates the look and provides a long, clean line. I try to break up the one colour with a skirt or shirt of a different colour so I don’t look completely all in black (or brown, or tan, or navy, or grey…), but not always. I even match my nail colour.

Here are some samples of my monochromatic looks:

Brown tights with brown suede pumps, Black sweater tights with black suede boots, Black tights with black suede boots

I have the best hairdresser!

I have been with Tristann Ford Gordon at Unity Salon in Salt Lake City for ten years. I have followed her through four salon changes and will probably follow her to the ends of the earth. I have only had one other stylist that was as talented, Les at Moods Salon in Vancouver, but I didn’t like him NEARLY as much as I like Tristann.

As mentioned earlier, I have been colouring my own hair since I was fourteen. I don’t have much experience with permanent hair colour, I have usually stuck to the wash/fade out dyes.

Soon after Huey was born, my husband mentioned to me how he wanted me to go blonde. Normally, my husband doesn’t care about my hair or what it looks like (long, short, curly, straight, blonde, black, red…) so I thought it might be fun to go blonde. I hadn’t been blonde since I was a child. Huey was born with blonde hair, and my husband has dark brown hair, so folks would look at us and ask, “Where did he get his blonde hair from?” I got sick of answering that he got it from ME, of course, so I decided to go blonde. I went to my local grocery store, to the hair colour aisle, where I always went to get my hair colour (hair stylists around the globe are letting out a collective gasp) and picked out the blonde that I wanted.

I have told you about my super duper thick hair, right? Well super duper thick hair is tough to bleach. The texture of my hair is coarse in places and fine in others, so the bleach took really well in places, and not so hot in others. For the most part, my hair was bleached out Billy Idol blonde, but in the places where it's super thick, it was a sort of orange colour. It did not look at all like the hair colour on the box!! I have never experienced that before.

Just after I did this, I met Tristann. We clicked as friends first, and then she offered me free hair dressing if I would teach her how to sew. DEAL! I hadn’t found a stylist that I loved yet and I had been living in Salt Lake for five years.

I set an appointment with her, took Huey with me and said, I want you to match his colour. I had never had my hair coloured by a professional before, and let me tell you: since that day, I have NEVER bought hair colour from a drug/grocery store and never will again.

She matched Huey’s beautiful sunshine blonde perfectly.

Tristann is a genius with colour. I have had every shade from blonde to dark chocolate brown with her. I have had every kind of type of highlights. She always gives me the most beautiful colour. When I want to make a drastic change, she sits down with me and hashes out all the reasons why, pulls out the samples, and talks me out of a colour that will not match my skin tone or eyebrows. The copper colour I have now is all her. I have never been disappointed with my colour. I used to be one of these people that changed hair colours every time my roots would start to show. I have had this same copper for over three years. It is my very favourite colour and suits me perfectly. I have never been this satisfied with a hair colour. I love it and Tristann is the one who helped me get here.

Now let’s talk about her skills with the scissors. I have a thick, dense, forest of hair that varies in textures. Tristann has tamed the enchanted forest and given me the most beautiful hair. I have been pixie short and down to my bra strap long and everything in between with her.

I was getting tired of constantly changing my colour, so I decided to grow it out for Locks of Love. Tristann matched the colour of my natural hair, and cut it all one length so I could grow it out. She kept me in trims so it would stay healthy, and a year later when it was long enough, she was the one who cut it all off for me.

She has a client for life and as long as she is doing hair, I will never ever leave her.

If you live in the Salt Lake Valley and are looking for a new stylist, you cannot go wrong with Tristann Ford Gordon at Unity Salon.

Weigh in 161.2

I mentioned that I needed to lose 5 pounds, so I cut my hair off. I had been hovering between 165 and 164 before my haircut, and now I’m around 161, so I guess it worked!

I haven’t been blogging partly because I was sick of taking a daily photo, because I was bored of my clothes, and also because I was frustrated with my weight not going anywhere.

I’m still weighing myself every day, I’m just not blogging about it daily.

Being frustrated with where I was caused me to act. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere with my weight because I wasn’t doing anything about it.

I started cutting down the fast food and Dr. Pepper. I found I was going out to eat for lunch 4 to 5 times a week, and drinking 44 oz of Dr. Pepper every day. Not only is this bad for my body, but it’s expensive too. I decided that I would cut this down to once a week. I have been doing this for three weeks now, and I have noticed the weight staying around 161 rather than 165. Now I'm trying to go two weeks and see where it goes.

I have also decided to start walking my dog again. When we first got Orso, I walked him every day, sometimes twice a day. On weekends, we would go for miles. In the first three months, I lost ten pounds! It started getting too hard to get up in the morning to take him out, and afternoons/evenings can be crazy in my family, so I quit walking him all together. I still have a hard time getting up in the morning (thyroid issues), but I have found that if I take Orso out after I get home from work, it gives me the energy boost I need to get what needs to get done in the evenings. It clears out the cobwebs of sitting in an office all day, gives me some fresh air and endorphins, and lets me deal with the rest of my day. It’s also a good way to wind down from work and change gears into Mom mode.

I will let you know my progress next month!

Pic for beginning of Feb

Black Manicure

I love nail polish. It’s a small addiction. I have been doing my nails and my mother’s/sister’s/best friend’s nails since I was six years old. I am considering a career in nails. I'll let you know how it goes.

I love to be creative and different. When I was a kid, I had to wait for Halloween for the funky colours to come out. Otherwise, I was stuck with the basic reds, corals, and pinks. About the time I was ten, Wet and Wild started coming out with colours like blue and green and yellow. I was in heaven!!

My mother is one of these people that wears one colour of nail polish: Champagne pink. She discouraged me from wearing any of those wild colours and I ABSOLUTELY was not allowed to wear those colours to church. My Nana was a big influence in the whole “ladies don’t wear black/orange/blue nail polish” campaign as well. Growing up, I did not wear funky nail polish.

When I got married, my girlfriends pooled their money together and gave me a massage and manicure/pedicure as a shower gift. It was one of the best gifts ever. I had never had a professional pedicure before. (I missed my manicure due to issues with Immigration, but that’s a loooong story) I got to keep the bottle of nail polish that the manicurist used, thus introducing me to O.P.I. nail polish.

I now have approaching 40 bottles of nail polish. Most of them are O.P.I. I have every colour of the rainbow, including black and white.

I have recently been trying Essie nail polish because it’s made here in the U.S., so it’s better on the environment, what with shipping causing all kinds of carbon footprinting.

This colour is Essie’s Licorice. It’s the first true black nail polish I’ve ever owned. I used to save the dark colours for my toes, but in the last year or so, I have been taking the time to sit down and pay attention to my manicure rather than quickly swiping on a colour, so I’m able to pull off a dark colour on my hands more effectively. Sitting down and paying attention allows me to not miss, do a base coat and top coat, and have everything looking even and uniform. I see my hands more than any other part of my body, so having a flawed manicure can really distract me.

I wore this colour for the Valentine’s Dance. I was already wearing a top with red flowers, and I’m nothing if not non-traditional, so I skipped the red polish in favour of black, figuring that black can also be an appropriate colour for Valentine's day.

I needed to lose 5 lbs, so I cut my hair off.

Hair before

Hair after

I have really thick, heavy hair. It’s like the rain forest.

I’m really proud of my hair. I’ve always thought I had good quality hair density.

When I was three years old, my long, blonde, wavy hair was halfway down my back. My grandmother noticed how docile I was and told my mother she needed to cut my hair because it was “sapping her energy”. My mum thought she was crazy, that I was just a mellow kid. That summer she gave me a Dorothy Hamil pageboy and she said that it was like I was floating I had so much energy! I became a normal kid!

Weird, right?

Wrong.

I have this long, thick, wavy hair. When you run your fingers through it, you can get lost. It is SO heavy. It hurts my neck. Several times in my life I have grown it out long because it’s so pretty, but I can’t handle the weight or the maintenance of it. It doesn’t matter how many layers I get, it’s still so thick and so heavy.

Also, it doesn’t grow straight down like Marsha, Marsha, Marsha, it grows OUT. Like a triangle. I grew it down to my waist when I was on my mission, and it was like a cape around my shoulders in the winter time. That was a good thing because it helped to keep me warm. In the summer, I just French braided it and tucked it up so that it wouldn’t weigh me down.

I was growing my hair long so that I would have long beachy hair for our trip to Kauai. It was driving me crazy because there was so much of it, but I endured. I found that if I invested the time to blow it out, that the style would last for days and I didn’t have to do it every day. It takes 20 to 30 minutes to blow out my hair. In order for it to be done properly, I have to section it off in four layers, blow it out with a big round brush, and then flat iron all the sections.

My arms and shoulders hurt so much after spending so much time up above my head. Between washing it (ten minutes of scrubbing and making sure that all the soap got rinsed out), having my wet hair be EVEN more heavy, and then all the sectioning, blow drying, and flat ironing, it was a wonder I didn’t have massive guns. Drying my hair was exhausting.

I had planned on cutting it off into a shaggy bob when I got back from Kauai, but a couple of girls in my neighbourhood just cut off their long hair into the exact same haircut, and I didn’t want to look like I was copying them, so I debated whether or not I was ready to cut if off just then. Maybe I should wait until spring or something.

When we got back from Kauai, I noticed my weight was up to 165, so I decided it was time to chop. The last time I cut my hair off two years ago, I got a longer pixie/shorter shag cut and I really liked it, so that’s what I got.

I feel free again!

The only downside is that this haircut does not look good curly. I have to at least iron my bangs. I’m okay with doing this as it takes less than 10 minutes to do my hair now. That includes washing.

The funny thing is, my hair cannot be around humidity or it curls. Living in Utah, that is not usually a problem, but this month has been one of the wettest Februarys that I can remember, so my cowlick is now out in full force.

Ah the irony…