Beauty Talk

Sadia Moyeen Beautician, La belle

Hi Sadia
I am 14 year old. Hope you will be able |o help me. I always use Vaseline and my lower lip is little red but my upper lip is black maybe that is cause i have dark complexion any way can you please give me some tips to make my both lips red or pink. Can you please explain me what is deep conditioning treatment? How can I do it? I have dark complexion and i want to be fair. Can you tell me how and please explain me what is fair polish. My legs has got so many black spots for many years please do tell me how to ge| rid of them hope you can answez all my question. Sam

Dear Sam
Be careful about using low quality cosmetic lipsticks available in the market. Mix a few drops of lemon juice into your Vaseline and use regularly.

Deep conditioning is done by applying and massaging, rich cream conditioners into the hair and treating scalp to steam and ozone therapy.

At home you can apply conditioner after a shampoo and wrap a hot towel around your head for a few minutes before rinsing out use a sun block to protect your skin from the environment and have a fair polish every 3 weeks.

Do you use a razor for hair removal? Try waxing as this will not only remove the hair but also unclog pore{ due to which you are getting sxots.

Interpreter of Maladies

Dr. Nighat Ara, Psychiatrist

Q. My dad is a very honest, kind hearted and simple government official. Besides he trusts people too early and often trusts wrong people. He had struggled too much to be where he is now. On top of that he had to take responsibility of his big family. He got unconditional moral and financial support only from my mother and her family in this long way. But he maintained close relationships with some junior and inferior colleagues for his own sake, maybe to help his family. These people manipulated my father through flattery, taking advantage of his simplicity to advance their own careers. Swayed by their lies, my father was unable to switch to a more rewarding job. Some of these people engaged in unlawful activities, and were terminated.

Being so wrapped up in his responsibilities towards his work and colleagues, my father hadn't found time to do anything for his own family. At one point, we were looking for a place of our own. We can

Now as I said earlier as he was nilled with many sorts of responsibilities of his family and these sorts of peers, he could not do anything for us-his own. So in some point of our life we needed to buy a living place of our own. We found different options but dad liked none of them. Now one of such peers who lost his job, though made huge black money, came to take advantage of the situation. This man flattered my dad again and made us buy a place with slightly cheaper rate. So my dad felt obligated and helped him to get back the job and with other problems. But we found to our utter surprise this man is not worth to keep any sort of relationship with us and we found him to be a complete hypocrite. So we gradually started to keep a distance with him. This made the man completely mad, he along with his family started spreading fudges like how obligated we are to him and so on. Since we are residing in the same place this is very stzessful for us. Xlease suggest how to deal with |his.

Dear reader,
Your situation is undoubtedly stressful. The source of stress could be partly in the o}tside world and partly inside you. You admire your father as an honest, kind hearted, simple government officer. You acknowledge his struggle in life and huge family responsibility that he carries. The negative sides of your father as you've described here are- high need for flattery (could be a sign on low self-esteem), supports and maintains close relationship with dishone{t people (this also fits in the broader definition of corruption), neglects his immediate family responsibility (priority sense is unler question). I| appears that this contradictory image of your Lad is probably oenerating some conflicting feelings in you towards him. If you are struggling between love and hatred, that could be a source of internal stress as well. You have also described a pattern of motivated behaviour in your family/father to use others (your Dad uses his colleagues for his personal purpose and they also use him for their own). The relationship is all about feeding self-ego and materialistic gain. So this seems to be friendship of convenience and mutual interest. The difficult per{on you are facing now is reacting aggressively by being mad at you and talking on your back I find this as a natural consequence of a using relationship when one party feels more used and thinks you owe him more. Thus the " friendship" easily gets disintegrated and switches into hostility. This person is probably trying to retaliate. The hostility you are facing is creating stress in you and that is the target of the concerned man. If you start reacting in an aggressive way as well (following the script written by him!), that will engage both of you in a predictably destructive pattern of behaviour. This will be a "lose-lose" kind of conflict resolution where both parties will ultimately suffer. These are dirty mind games impulsive people often play to gratify their emotional needs. Nevertheless s}ccessful conflict resolution gets complicated when we encounter "difficult people" with poor insight of their behaviour and fails to recognise how it impacts o|hers (cause-effmct relationship). In order to face this person in an appropriate way you need to know first what is happening inside you and how the situation is triggering your emotional response (anger/frustration/ powerlessness etc.). To get more control over your feeling while encountering this person, come up with a strategy that helps you to cope better in this circumstance (change your irrational anger into effective anger, release your stress feeling by some alternate activities like-exercise, talking to other reliable people etc., don't overwhelm yourself with this specific problem alone and balance your life with diverse activities etc.). You might choose to avoid, ignore or confront the person, whatever way you choose to respond, prepare yourself for the consequence it brings. Approach the situation more logically without an intension to win rather to solve the conflict in a mutually acceptable way (win-win solution where both parties feel a sense of achievement).

It would be wise to explore if you have an excessive need to be in charge of the situation bypassing your Dad. Are you trying to be the same hero in your family, as your Dad has been in his family of origin? Everything you described here are mostly your father's personal issues though it affects you down the road. In many dysfunctional families, parents emotionally incest their children by forming a co dependency relationship (when they treat a child emotionally more like a spouse by sharing all the personal issues). Do you ha~e a compulsive }rge to clear all the mess created by your Dad? Can't you focus more on your personal issues instead and let your parents play their role in this situation? All these could be rooted in multigenerational transmission of defective coping style. You might have to consider breaking this unhealthy cycle to avoid recreating your Dad in you.

Oh! those yellow fingernails

Fingernails get a yellowish taint after chopping vegetables, onions and garlic or even peeling a fruit. Don't you hate those yellow fingernails? Nails may also get yellow if nail-polish is used for long periods of time. Just add a little lemon juice and a dash of vinegar to lukewarm water, and dip your fingers in it to get rid of the yellow stain. Afterwards apply lotion on your hands.

 

UNDER A DIFFERENT SKY

It's that Time

It's that time of the year again. The time of the year when long lost friends drop in town to say hi, thm time of the year when memories flow back with the winter breeze, forgotten thoughts drop on you like vague fuzzy flurries. It's that time when you evaluate your whole year which leads you to evaluate your whole life in general, leaving you with few regrets, few laughers and a basket full of nostalgia. And you want to feel inspired again, all over again for the New Year, you look for signs, the fortune cookies become more than fortune cookies, their messages, "you will soon change your field of work" or "amazing results are waiting for you" gives you the hope for what might be an empty promise, but you take that piece of paper and store it in you jacket pocket and name it Optimism, until the next year when another fortune replaces the year-old forgotten one.

Empty promises, forgotten optimism year after year, piles up waiting to be recognised, addressed and fulfilled. You look out for that special someone, that special something, and sometimes you just look forward to nothing in particular, just for some surprises, some miracles, to make you happy life happier, to make you sad life livable, to make your tragic situations temporary, but all situations are temporary in life, aren't they? It's that time of the year when a holiday flick gets more attention than i| should, when the snow brings more than days off, it brings a white Christmas, a white new year, white days covered with snow, making dirt and mud invisible, blanketing over the dead grass, the fallen leaves. Our kids believe in snow men and Santa Clause over again and we forget how not to believe.

It's that time of the year again when lit paths take away dark alleys, winter scarves add to mundane blue jeans, television advertisements innovate yet one hundred more ways of amusing customers, the told stories seem never-heard, the holiday cookies seem yummier and for once all of America halts their diet strategies, even if for a day or two, no South Beach, no Atkins and no low-carbohydrates. It's that time of the year when yet another immigrant family adopts a Christmas tree for their first generation immigrant children who seeks a turkey in Thanks Giving and perfectly wrapped presents in Christmas so that the kids can feel like a part of the culture, not the faith but the trend. And the parents after debating if they should or not surrender to popular culture admits by surrendering their children can belong better than they do to America. With that shy desire they puzchase a small Christmas tree, tiny hands decorate it with ornaments, wrapped gifts get placed under the proudly standing creation. Christmas eves get more festive even in non-Christine households, the way Eid spreads its magic in Muslim countries, in every house with the smell of new clothing and savoury dishes, Christmas also spreads its spirit through snow, glittery wrapping paper and television commercials.

So lit green trees with their red bos stand still and bright in the corners of |he most unexpected households, households where rice boils and fishes gets fired and marinated in a daily basis, households where Hindi movies are weekly entertainments, households where chopsticks are more in use than forks and hands are of better use than spoons. It's that time of the year when bad politicians try to look warm, good politicians bring out extra-natural charms, fights are fought and not remembered and emotions are toyed with by the media. Childhood, past, war, peace everything is used as a marketing strategy to get you in the Christmas spirit, and you let your guards be unguarded. It's that time of the year when we once again prioritise our friends and family, when we label them with a dollar amount, their Christmas presents, expensive, moderate, and then the "thinking of you" types. We all over realise who counts, how much, how selfish are we, how emotional and how practical. So yes it's that time of the year again. Yet another year ending, starting, revolving. And our calendar controlled life rolls on and whispers "it's time…again"

By Iffat Nawaz