Summer takes its toll on your hair with damage from the sun, surf and sand. Here we show you how to transform frazzled hair into fabulous locks.
It can be hard to maintain beautiful, lustrous waves during summer. Says George Giavis, of The Blonde Room, “Curls can become brittle, frazzled and crackly during summer, making the waves rigid rather than bouncy, dull rather than shiny. It’s important to boost conditioning treatments during this time, to ensure the curls are given loads of body and movement.”
To create this pictured style he says, “Ensure that freshly washed hair is completely dry, by tipping head upside down and removing all moisture with a blowdryer. To create more volume, spritz before drying with a volumising mousse or lotion [such as John /Frieda Luxurious Volume Bountiful Body Mousse, 212g, $16]. Then separate hair into sections and wrap hair smoothly around large Velcro rollers. Keep rollers in hair for at least 15 minutes, while doing make-up, then remove rollers and lightly break up the curls with your fingers. Spray with hairspray [John Frieda Luxurious Volume All-Out Hold Hairspray, 240g, $16].”
Whether it’s going for your brisk morning walk, rushing off to a dance class or even doing your strength/resistance training, remember that every time you exercise you need to include a warm up and a cool down.
Your warm up may be a 2-3 minute jog to raise a light sweat or even walking on the treadmill in your local gym. When you start to get a light sweat up, your body is preparing itself for more activity. It’s important to warm up to increase heat throughout your body and to reduce tearing or straining your muscles. Our body “warms up” because our blood is moving more freely around our body.
After warming up, we need to stretch. There are many benefits of stretching, for example:
Increased flexibility and freedom of movement
Prevention of injuries
Improved muscle coordination
Reduced risk of muscle and tendon injuries
Decreased muscle tightness
Reduced muscle tension and post exercise soreness
Increased coordination
Decreased occurrence of muscle strains
Improved circulation
Don’t stretch till it hurts
The best way to stretch is to stretch to the point of tension, but never to the point of pain and never when cold — the best time to stretch is when you’ve warmed up. Take your time to gently and slowly move into your stretches, holding for 15 to 30 seconds while breathing deeply all the way through, while concentrating on keeping the area you’re stretching relaxed.
Why not do a couple of stretches first thing in the morning before the start of each day; or whenever you feel stiff and need to release some muscle tightness.
If you’d like to increase your flexibility, a 20-minute stretching session 2-3 times per week is recommended. However, make sure you do a thorough warm up before doing this.
Don’t forget after any physical activity to do a cool down, perhaps a 2-3 minute light jog or a walk followed by 5-10 minutes of stretching. A cool down helps prevent muscle soreness and stiffness and helps flush out muscle waste products.
When Jeanette met David, he was a tough criminal who was wanted in Australia and facing the death penalty in Thailand. So why did she marry him? William Langley investigates.
Where do they end up, those shadowy super-villains and criminal geniuses whose lives seem to have been lifted from movie scripts? Usually behind bars, dead, or seeing out their days in forgotten places among the beautiful and damned. Few return to what David McMillan, Australia’s most notorious drug trafficker, calls “the warm heart of humanity”, and the reason may be that crime, along with its other hazards, destroys the ability to love.
David, 54, is sitting in a small suburban house, south of London. The lights are cheery, the sofas squashy and the soft buzz of domestic contentment neatly belies the fact that this most enigmatic of crooks should be 9500km away in a Bangkok jail. Snuggled at David’s side is Jeanette Dufaur, the woman who appears to have succeeded – where the justice systems of three continents conspicuously failed – in helping him stay straight.
At the height of his Australasian drug-trade ill repute, David was a multi-millionaire, with homes in Melbourne, London and Hong Kong, to name a few. For years, using charm, nous and ruthlessness, he built a sophisticated and lucrative smuggling network that crisscrossed the globe. He lived well on the proceeds, but he didn’t know when to stop. Just before Christmas 1993, he was arrested in Thailand and sent to Klong Prem Central Prison – known to its inmates as “the Bangkok Hilton”.
This vast, concrete sprawl was reputed to be escape-proof. David put his mind to work, and spent two years perfecting a plan. One steamy, August night in 1996, he cut through his prison cell bars with a hacksaw blade, shimmied down the wall using a makeshift rope, retrieved a ladder and wire-cutters that he’d hidden in a hobby store, crossed an open sewer, scaled the electrified outer fence and, as dawn broke, was in a taxi, heading for a safe house where a forged passport was waiting. Two hours later, he was boarding a plane out of the country.
The book he subsequently wrote about this episode,Escape, ends as he touches down in Singapore but it is far from the end of the story. Today, David is a changed man. Redeemed, he says, by his love for Jeanette, a vivacious, blonde interior design consultant. Not that turning his life around has been an easy process. Or a pretty one.
“Getting together has changed both of us,” says Jeanette. “We have been able to help each other. Both of us had difficulties in our lives that had to be overcome. When I first got to know David, I couldn’t believe how kind, how humble he seemed. He wasn’t like anyone I’d met before.”
This meeting happened in the late 1990s after Jeanette’s husband, David Dufaur, a London gem dealer, known as “Diamond Dave”, was arrested in Pakistan on drug smuggling charges. Although the evidence appeared flimsy and Dave loudly protested his innocence, he was taken to a remand prison in Karachi. One of the first people he met inside was David, who – having quickly returned to his bad old ways after the Bangkok caper – was being held in the same cell block.
When David secured his release, he called Jeanette to give her news of her husband. Soon they were chatting regularly and a frisson of attraction between them began to blossom. Before long, Jeanette left her husband to be with David.
A few years later, does Jeanette worry David might reoffend? “I hope that he won’t,” she says. “If he does, he is stupid, because he will lose everything. If he loves me, as he says he does, and he loves the girls, who think the world of him, he won’t do it. I hope he won’t because I’ve had enough disappointments in my life…”
Read more of this story in the February issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Would you marry a wanted man? Do you think David has left his life of crime behind for good? Share your thoughts with us below.
Most of us treasure the memory of our first love — the butterflies in our stomach, the tender first kisses and the daydreams you share about the wonderful things that lie ahead of you. But psychologists have warned that while reunions sometimes have happy endings, they can also wreak havoc on lives and relationships because they unleash unexpectedly powerful emotions.
Thanks to social networking and websites such as Facebook and Friends Reunited, it is now easier to reconnect with former loves.
This month, The Weekly meets couples who are now married after being torn apart as teenagers and reuniting online.
But away from the success stories, beware as there are some hidden hazards.
The risks of going back to an ex
Psychologist Nancy Kalish of California State University has studied 2000 “lost love” relationships over the past 15 years. Lost loves, she says, are defined as those who were separated from their loved one midway through a happy relationship when they were young.
“A lost love is someone with whom you did not get closure, or something was not explained to you,” Dr Kalish tells The Weekly.
“They’re left wondering what might have been, could have been, should have been.”
Often the relationships are forcibly broken up by family members who disapprove.
“I was talking to someone today who went out with a young woman for four years in high school, was about to get engaged to her, and, out of the blue, her sister sent him a note saying his girlfriend never wanted to see him again,” says Dr Kalish.
“For 40 years he wondered why. When he finally talked to her, he found out that her sister told her that he’d broken up with her. It’s tragic.”
Dr Kalish has found that reunion can have devastating consequences for people who are in relationships when they reconnect with their lost love.
“Someone goes onto Facebook, they say hi, they start chatting,” she says. “People who have happy marriages aren’t thinking of a reunion. But the feelings come back. If they talk on the phone it becomes more compelling, then it becomes secret. There’s all that anxiety mixed in, it becomes exciting.”
See this month’s Women’s Weekly for more details on the joys and pitfalls of reuniting with a lost love.
Your say: Have you ever contacted a lost love? Would you be upset if your partner did? Share your thoughts with us below.
It’s “Phantom of the Ballet” as Natalie Portman stars in Black Swan, the much-hyped psychological thriller, directed by Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler) which will attract as much comment about the sex scenes as the dancing.
Nina (Natalie Portman) is an aspiring ballerina, driven by an obsessive mother (Barbara Hershey) and her own perfectionism. She is shy, awkward, almost frigid and literally dreams of being the White Swan in Swan Lake. Director Thomas (Vince Cassel) is deposing diva Beth (Winona Ryder) and is looking for a new head swan. He tells Nina she is technically perfect and graceful, but doesn’t quite have the passion and darkness required to be the Black Swan.
Despite Leroy’s criticism and a poor audition, Nina somehow manages to land the role. Standing by is Lily (Mila Kunis) who is a naturally sensual, friendly and flirtatious dancer and is both Nina’s rival and only friend. She becomes the pathway to opening Nina’s dark side, and a night on the town helps Nina find, and play with, her inner demons.
This could have been a clumsy coming-of-age story, but things aren’t quite what they seem. Nina is driven, bulimic and self-destructive. We see the toll the ballet takes on toes and feet, and the mind. The bleeding finger scene is uncomfortable, and the first hint Nina is becoming delusional.
There are some great scenes in this movie. Portman is reportedly very uncomfortable about her sex scene with Kunis, and her masturbation scene, which turns comic, but there is nothing to trouble censors here; it is more the power of erotic suggestion and strong acting which carries them.
The two leading ladies, particularly Kunis, are excellent. Portman is captivating as Nina and Kunis exudes sensuality. Hershey is suitably shrewish as the mother, but you have to wonder why Ryder chose to sign up for just a handful of minor scenes. And Cassel is a fine actor; one good enough to wince at his performance.
As opening night nears, Nina’s behaviour starts to unravel; illusions become delusions (and I’m not referring to the direction) and the story seems to start to lose its way. What starts as an interesting exploration of the pressures of perfectionism, turns to trickery instead, and you know you’re in trouble when a psychological drama needs special effects to make its point. The camera goes from wobbly hand-held, to steady, and Aronofsky chooses greys and blacks for a dull set design, when it could have been so much richer.
Black Swan will be divisive, but it is the most interesting movie to come out of Hollywood in years; it features excellent performances, lovely dancing and inner irony. However, while the ugly duckling blossomed into something more beautiful, this little swan goes in reverse, and the direction loses confidence in its performers. For me, what begins as an interesting journey ends as something that feels a little plucked and overdone.
Your say: What did you think of Black Swan? Do you think Natalie deserves her Best Actress Oscar nomination?
Why they aren’t married: Because the kids haven’t asked them yet.
“I think it would be hard to say no to the kids,” Jolie said. “They’re not asking. They are very aware that nothing’s missing.”
Ricky Gervais and Jane Fallen
Time together: 29 years
Why aren’t they married: Because Ricky doesn’t believe in God.
“There’s no point in us having an actual ceremony before the eyes of God because there is no God,” he said.
Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn
Time together: 28 years
Why they aren’t married: Because they know they can leave at any time.
“I wake up every day knowing I can walk out at any moment”, she said. “It’s [that knowledge] that keeps things fresh.”
George Clooney and Elisabetta Canalis
Time together: Three years
Why they aren’t married: He has been there, done that.
“I hate to blow your whole news story, but I was married,” he said in a Piers Morgan interview. “Yeah, so I’ve proven how good i was at it, and I just… I’m allowed one.”
Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves
Time together: Five years
Why they aren’t married: He isn’t ready yet.
“I’ve got nothing against marriage. Um, I’m just not getting married right now,” he told Access Hollywood.
Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis
Time together: 13 years
Why they aren’t married: He doesn’t want to ruin her last name.
“Marriage is really from soul to soul, heart to heart. You don’t need somebody to say, okay you’re married.” “If Vanessa wanted to get hitched, why not… But the thing is, I’d be so scared of ruining her last name,” he said. “She’s got such a good last name.”
Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber
Time together: 6 years
Why they aren’t married: She’s not in a rush.
“My mother married twice and had two divorces. And Liev comes from the same kind of background. Maybe one day we’ll just wake up and go, ‘Hey, let’s do this.’ And maybe not,” she told Parade Magazine.
Oprah Winfrey and Stedman Graham
Time together: 25 years
Why they aren’t married: She is not the marrying kind.
“The reason this relationship has worked as well as it has is because we each got to define ourselves in it and not in a traditional form,” she told Piers Morgan. “… I am a different kind of woman in that I am pretty assured that had I married I wouldn’t have remained married.”
He has been named the king of the corset and now Australian fashion designer Alex Perry can add successful jewellery designer to his list of achievements, following the release of his third jewellery line with Diva.
His new high summer collection includes stunning jewelled neck pieces, pretty soft chiffon bracelets and feathered drop earrings all available at an affordable price.
Flick through the pictures of the new Alex Perry range for Diva here and then watch our interview with the famed designer where he talks about his style tips, his stint on Project Runway and his favourite celebrity fashion muse.
The Aussie power couple made waves with their hot bodies while holidaying in Perth.
With a body this good, life after Australian television is clearly agreeing with Rove McManus.
Rove and his wife, actress and author Tasma Walton, turned heads with their trim and toned physiques during a recent visit to his home town of Perth. Looking as buffed as the man of steel himself, exercise-lover Rove wasted no time stripping down to just shorts, jogging shoes and – what else? – a Superman baseball cap.
As the temperature soared, a very fit Tasma opted for a cooler and more laid-back activity at WA’s famous Cottesloe Beach. Glowing in a green paisley bikini, the City Homicide star, 36, had every reason to be proud of her fabulous bikini body as she dived into the sea for a refreshing dip.
When Rove, 37, appeared at the G’Day Australia reception in LA last week, he had just returned from his holiday to resume work on Rove LA – his new chat show for Foxtel. But most of the chat was about his body.
“I have been enjoying having the time,” admits fitness fanatic Rove. “I don’t have a trainer, but I’ve just been relaxing and looking after myself. “I guess it just comes with having a bit of time off to feel recharged – in every possible way.”
Magda Szubanski is relishing her new life as a healthy person who can do anything she wants.
It’s a scorching Sydney summer day and Magda Szubanski is with friends who are keen for a dip at Bondi Beach to cool off. In the old days, prior to her dramatic weight loss, Magda, 49, may have thought twice about this suggestion, but not today.
Within minutes she’s splashing around amid bikini-clad babes and men sporting sixpacks without a care in the world. While she was wearing shorts, not skimpy swimmers, for Magda it’s a spur-of-the-moment decision that has much more to do with convenience than camouflage.
“I’m pretty sun-conscious, but also it was an impromptu decision with friends to jump in the water so that was just what I had in the car,” explains Magda of her outfit. “I’ve always swum and enjoyed the beach. I think it’s vital that people of all shapes and sizes get out and be active.”
These days, when Magda heads into the water it’s for a more energetic swim. Her newfound stamina means she doesn’t just try to stand up to the waves. Instead, she dives and body surfs, something she would have found impossible two years ago.
No longer does she also have to worry about the gruelling soft-sand trek back to bitumen, or the stares of the beautiful people reclining on their beach towels as she labours for each breath under her excess bulk – bad memories of an unhappier time.
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