The one color we bet you avoid when it comes to eye makeup is red. The fiery shade, usually associated with bloodshot eyes, is actually one of the most gorgeous shades you can wear this holiday season. After the success of Fall’s “pink eye” makeup trend, we’re calling it: red eyes will be the hottest look for the 2016 holiday season.
“The look is a unique blend of elegant and edgy,” Kelli J. Bartlett, director of makeup artistry at Glamsquad, told POPSUGAR via email. “It’s a perfect way to add an extrafestive or flirty flair to an otherwise chic and sophisticated barely there beauty look. It’s important to let other features find balance by sticking to neutrals on the lips (nudes look great!) and adding a touch of the red you used on your eyes to your cheeks to coordinate the look without appearing too dramatic.”
If you’re not ready to do a full ruby eye, try a smudge of brick liner (just on the bottom) with brown and mauve eye shadow. We like Chanel Le Crayon Yeux in Cocorange ($29) or Brun-Cuivre ($30). However, make sure to use it outside of the lashes. “Avoid using red eyeliner on the inner tear duct of the eye,” Bartlett said. “It can cause the eye to look irritated and bloodshot.”
Bartlett also advises to pop your favorite blush color on your eye. “Use a small, fluffy blending brush and swish back and forth in the eye socket,” she noted. “You can further test the trend by dabbing some of your favorite red lipstick (not the liquid matte kind, though) on your finger and swiping it back and forth on your eyelid. Use your finger to buff the color into the brow bone. Proceed with caution: some reds have a tendency to stain! Try swatching on the back of your hand first to test its stain potential.”
And for those of you who are brave and bold, she has tips, too! “For a fully saturated red stare, the key is to be sure to blend it with warm earth tones,” Bartlett explained. “Apply the red shadow on the lid and close to the lashline on the top and bottom and use a small, fluffy blending brush to bring a warm brown color into the crease. The result is a subtle yet statement and chic red eye.” Go all out with a mega palette, such as Anastasia Beverly Hills Modern Renaissance Eye Palette ($42).
Bartlett also weighed in on who the trend works best on. “Red shadow is especially flattering on green and blue eyes because they are complementary on the color wheel,” she said.
Keep reading to see how stunning red eye makeup looks on different skin tones and eye colors!
While the word “trend” suggests a beginning and an end, fashion folk know better than to say goodbye. Certain looks — from cuts of denim to standout styling tricks — repeat themselves. Even so, it’s nice to know where these fads came from. For example, we’ll never forget that Twiggy and Edie Sedgwick popularized the tights-and-shift combination in the ’60s or that the best place to search for a stretchy wire choker in the ’90s was Limited Too.
This year gave rise to a whole bunch of trends (23, that we could count!). Some of the style moves ahead are updated takes on older trends, but most of them we’ll date back to this exact year. Read on for a list of reasons 2016 was pretty rad in our book. And if you’re in the market for a fresh outfit or two, you’ve still got time to hop on the bandwagon.
1Chokers
Some came with extra hardware, while others were an extension of a dreamy blouse or just a thick ribbon knotted around the neck.
2Twinning
Stepping out with your best friend couldn’t have looked chicer this year. It wasn’t even Halloween, but fashion girls were all dressed up in the same “costume,” twinning in velvet boots, Vetements sweatshirts, matching leather jackets, and mirrored sunglasses.
3Block Heels
From the Chanel two-toned slingbacks to quirkier iterations and platform styles with more height, everyone’s go-to heel got a chunky makeover, keeping our feet firmly planted on the ground.
4Statement Earrings
If we moved onto delicate jewels in 2015, 2016 brought back drop earrings, chandelier pieces, and pom-pom-like jewels so long, they almost graced our shoulders.
5Showing Your Shoulders
Whether girls bared one shoulder or two, this was a subtle move that added instant sex appeal to so many looks, from daytime to nighttime.
6A Love Affair With Flats
We nixed stilettos for sneakers, ballet slippers, and functional loafers this year, even while at the office. Straightforward comfort was key, since we could add a hint of glamour with a voluminous top instead.
7Switching Up Your Denim
Two-toned patches, asymmetrical cuts, and major distress were in abundance this year. Girls got pretty inventive with DIY projects, proving that jeans were and still are a go-to fabric. This year was just the solution for ladies tired of their simple skinnies.
8Baseball Caps
They were the off-duty accessory every girl needed, and she gave up the fedora to work one with a bikini while on vacation. From Kendall and Kylie Jenner’s double statement to Victoria Beckham’s cap, which conjured images of her 2003 look, this trend provided a touch of nostalgia.
Ladies everywhere realized it pays to be chic. A scoop-back swimsuit in a splashy color or print is flattering and looks sophisticated. Maybe tanning that tummy isn’t all too important these days, when we’re trying to keep skin care in mind.
11Overalls
There’s a reason blogger Danielle Bernstein rolled out her own line of overalls, called Second Skin. This year, women are attracted to the one-and-done jumpsuit, and denim provides us no better structure. Right now, overalls are cool in a wide range of silhouettes, from flares to dungaree dresses.
12The Slip Dress
While we spent plenty of time trying to coordinate our panties with the naked dress last year, we made room for another slinky little number in our wardrobe in 2016: the slip dress. This lightweight piece took all forms — short, long, with lace inserts, or ruffled hems — and we grounded them with sneakers or chunky platform boots.
13A Wider Range of Sizes Was Introduced
Slowly but surely, diversity in fashion has arrived. Women like supermodel Ashley Graham are rolling out collections that flatter all body types, curvy and curve-less. These lines are inviting women to embrace their unique shapes and try silhouettes they never thought they’d wear.
14The Return of the Calvin Klein Model
The sporty appeal of Calvin Klein bra and panty sets sent supermodels and bloggers rolling around in bed in their designer skivvies. But when it came to running errands, white sneakers and crisp denim were an obvious cover-up. Even on Halloween, girls everywhere showed off a modern twist on the Kate Moss campaign we remember from the ’90s.
15The Bucket Bag
It might have been the leather Mansur Gavriel bag that sparked excitement over this new bag shape. In 2016, it took all sorts of forms and was complete with a dainty-looking top handle. Forget the compartmentalizing and drop in the small essentials.
16Matchy-Matchy
Standout 2016 looks weren’t just monochrome but overtly matchy-matchy thanks to prints like gingham, textured suiting, or sporty track pant sets.
Let your shirt come completely undone, or allow a lace bralette to peek out from your overalls or muscle tee. This romantic trend might have started in 2015, but ladies got even more daring with their looks this year.
22Extravagant Wedding Dresses
Beaded gowns with matching veils that extended the length of the whole dance floor sprouted up on our Instagram pages. The best part is, these fashion brides slipped into multiple swoon-worthy dresses for their lavish parties.
23Making a Political Statement
Hillary Clinton enlisted a whole handful of famous designers to create gear for her campaign, and though she lost the election, we doubt American women plan on stowing away their patriotic tees. These designs were fashionable in their own right and showed support for a very important cause: breaking that glass ceiling once and for all.
As 2016 comes to a close, the general consensus is that it wasn’t quite the greatest year ever. Violence, politics, celebrity breakups — in short, the world is due for some luck, that’s for freakin’ sure. So please don’t blame us if, momentarily, we buy in to some superstition, paying attention to the teeniest, and often overlooked, detail in our New Year’s Eve outfit: underwear color.
Legend has it that what you’ve got on when the ball drops sets the tone for the next 365 days. Want to bring in more dough? Yellow’s your go-to. Tired of Tinder? Wear red for love. Keep reading for all six shades of underwear that just might make 2017 pretty lucky. At the very least, it doesn’t hurt to try!
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Think twice before buying these products next year.
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1. Subscription boxes ‘surprises’
There seems to be a subscription box service for everything these days, from a “salami of the month” club to beauty products to toys for a pet. Signing up for such a service seems fun until you get a surprise you weren’t expecting: A shockingly low bank-account balance. Americans made about 21.4 million visits to subscription box retailers’ websites in January 2016, up from only 722,000 visits in January 2015, according to the e-commerce and consumer analytics company Connexity’s Hitwise division, in a report for the research firm Euromonitor International.
Although several subscription services have more than a million subscribers, such as Birchbox and Ipsy, two cosmetics services, most Americans probably shouldn’t be stocking up, some experts have said. (Birchbox and Ipsy did not respond to requests for comment on this article.) “We’re spending before we even save and then never look back,” said Brandon Hayes, a financial planner and vice president at oXYGen Financial, a financial services firm based in Georgia. “With a cashless society, it’s tough to appreciate a dollar when you never see one.”
There may be a place in the budget for some subscription services that replenish household items people already need, like Dollar Shave Club, which sells inexpensive razors, experts have said. Yet for the most part, many consumers would benefit from putting their credit cards away and just saying “No” to items they don’t need, said Rachel Podnos, an attorney and financial planner based in Washington, D.C. Particularly for people with lower incomes, “you really need to live within your means and cut expenses wherever you can,” she said.
Disposable wardrobes are becoming increasingly common.
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2. Fast fashion clothing
Consumer spending on clothing continues to grow in the U.S., reaching $266.8 billion in 2015, up from $240.1 billion in 2010, according to the research firm Euromonitor International. “Fast fashion” companies are known for quickly manufacturing clothing and getting it into stores, have driven much of that growth. Consumers going through tough economic times after the U.S. economic recession often turned to these retailers to keep up to date with trends on a budget, Euromonitor found. (Zara’s parent company Inditex SA is the world’s biggest fashion retailer by sales.)
And yet while the fashions themselves may be inexpensive, the overall cost of producing them can be high. Reports have shown that several retailers have used factories to produce clothing, often subcontracted the manufacturing to third party companies in developing countries, resulting in fatal accidents including this factory fire in Bangladesh in 2013. (Zara did not respond to requests for comment.)
And a huge amount of clothing that Americans buy gets thrown away. The U.S. generates an average of 25 billion pounds of textiles a year, or roughly 82 pounds per U.S. resident, including clothing, footwear, accessories, towels, bedding and drapery, according to the nonprofit organization Council for Textile Recycling. About 15% of the amount produced gets donated or recycled, but 85% goes to landfills. The amount of waste is only expected to grow, from 25 billion pounds in 2009 to 35.4 billion pounds in 2019, the organization added.
Environmental organizations have long been raising alarm about clothing waste and dangerous manufacturing practices, but “the level of consumption, especially with the continued popularity among consumers of fast fashion, is raising the environmental impact of our clothing unlike anything we have seen before,” said Kirsten Brodde, the campaign leader for the “Detox My Fashion” campaign at environmental organization Greenpeace, in an email.
Some retailers have started to help with the clothing waste problem. H&M has started its own recycling program, in which consumers can drop off unwanted clothes (H&M clothes, or not) at their stores year-round. Once H&M collects the clothes, it sends them to sorting plants which determine how they can be used or recycled. And “fast fashion” companies have made clothing affordable for many who may not be able to buy higher-end, more durable items.
For those who struggle to pay for clothing, there are alternatives, said Courtney Jespersen, a retail and shopping expert at the personal finance company NerdWallet. She suggested keeping track of how many times one actually wears an item when deciding if that shopping strategy. Investing in fewer, more basic items may be a better choice financially.Consumers should also consider secondhand or thrift stores, she added. There are also apps including Poshmark that let people not only buy secondhand clothing, but sell their own.
And people are buying. Timeshare vacation plans have been around in the U.S. since 1969 — the first opened in Kauai, Hawaii — and they generated $8.6 billion in annual sales in 2015, up 9% from a year before, according to the American Resort Development Association, or ARDA, which represents many timeshare developments. Timeshare apartments and villas in sunny locales are associated with high-pressure sales tactics that get mocked relentlessly in pop culture and they’re often sold at a loss when it comes time to unload one. Plus, they come with annual maintenance fees that can easily top several thousand dollars and which often increase each year whether you use the timeshare or not.
On the plus side, the U.S timeshare industry contributed an estimated $79.5 billion in consumer and business spending to the U.S. economy in 2015, according to a study conducted by accounting firm Ernst & Young for the ARDA. This not only includes jobs on the resorts themselves, but sales and marketing offices, corporate operations, construction of new resorts, renovation of existing resorts, and vacation spending. Timeshares can guarantee you vacation time since they often come with fixed annual dates for right-of-use, at least for people who like to go to the same place year after year and, experts say, are typically larger than an average hotel room.
But as this writer to MarketWatch’s advice columnist, the Moneyologist, discovered, sometimes the only way to offload them is to die. Resorts and locales come in and out of fashion, and owners are often stuck with rising maintenance fees. And many people use these timeshares to exchange with other timeshare owners (they may never even visit their own timeshare), and enjoy the bartering and excitement of going to a different location every year. However, this is usually done via a timeshare exchange company, which has its own set of fees.
—Daniel Goldstein and Quentin Fottrell
TriStar Pictures/Everett Collection
Recalled toys can be dangerous.
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4. Recalled toys online
When it comes to buying anything for a child this holiday season, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. That may mean forgoing online purchases of recalled toys, even if their manufacturers have fixed the issues. Sometimes, as seen in a recent research report from nonprofit U.S. Public Interest Research Groups Education Fund, toys recalled for excessive lead, choking hazards or overheating make it back onto the market.
In some scary situations, the wrong toy could end up on your doorstep after you purchase it online, the report showed. Companies will fix problems with the toys and put them back on the market — third-party retailers may (or may not) do the same. Luckily, there have been less recalls in the last few years: there were 24 toy recalls this fiscal year, down from 172 in 2008, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency that manages recalls. Still, it’s always best to be proactive.
The first step should always be to analyze the toy and its potential hazards, and ensure the toy wasn’t recalled, which can be done by searching the CPSC’s database. If you do end up buying the toy, go a step farther before giving it to the child by cross-checking item numbers of the product with those that were recalled. This is especially important with third-party sellers, which may still be selling the original recalled product. You can always call the company to make sure, too.
Of course, wireless headphones, which are available from companies other than Apple, don’t solve all these problems and they create some issues of their own. They last just five hours and need to be charged or housed in a separate carrying case to increase the battery life.
But even if Apple hadn’t tried to force our hands (and ears) this year, it would be worth reconsidering our affinity for those little buds with the long cord. For one, they may be hurting our hearing. More than 1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss from listening to their personal audio devices through headphones, particularly earbuds. What’s more, they’re constantly tangled.
So give your ears and your sanity a break this year and buy some over the ear headphones — or simply listen to the world around you.
Although these smart models seem like the fridges of the future, the steep costs and security risks may outweigh any convenience offered by the built-in apps and high-tech features. The Samsung Family Hub, for example, retails at $3,800. The connected fridge comes with a touch screen on the front door from which users can order groceries online and control other utilities in the home. It is also equipped with built-in cameras that “allow you to see what’s inside the fridge without wasting energy.” Like, you know, opening the door. A similar model from Whirpool WHR, -0.78% retails for $3,800 and can be controlled by an app on your phone.
Even if you think these features are worth the extra money (a standard LG 066570, +0.19% refrigerator sells for around $1,000, for comparison), security risks are probably not. Most connected devices, including fridges, are easily hacked. While you might not care if a stranger on the internet can peek at your groceries (you should), these breaches can affect security on an international scale when devices are harnessed for major attacks.
In October, a number of hacked smart devices were used to carry out a distributed denial of service attack on internet provider Dyn, flooding it with traffic and causing websites like Twitter and Spotify to crash. Some security experts said consumers with devices that were hacked and provided a gateway to their internet still used the default passwords they had when they bought the equipment.
Although smart device manufacturers are increasingly taking security into account, American consumers might want to keep our kitchens off the grid, at least for now. (Samsung and Whirlpool did not respond to requests for comment.)
—Kari Paul
Shutterstock.com
Choose fresh lettuce and vegetables over smoothies and grain-filled wraps.
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7. These foods that are touted as healthy
When it comes to healthy eating, a quip by the comedian Kevin Hart comes to mind: “Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work.” Vegetables, fruits and whole grains make up the day-to-day drudgery of health. And research shows that losing weight is even harder than most people think, since metabolism slows as dieters make progress, and sometimes even more than scientists expected.
So it’s no wonder people go instead for the seeming workarounds, which are flashier and more fun: snack foods masquerading under a health halo, fad diets, and their ilk. “Name a trendy diet that has been proposed by pop culture at any time that panned out to be true and worked. Atkins, juicing, the Zone diet, carbo-loading, you name it,” Timothy Caulfield, a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta, Canada, said.
So in 2017, let’s swap hype-ensconced, sugar-packed green juices for a cheaper and more filling protein source — actual vegetables, say both Kirkpatrick and Caulfield. Don’t focus on the “spinach” or “sun-dried tomato” labeling on wrap sandwiches and ignore their fried fillings. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, Caulfield said. Healthy living is work. Do the work. And try to avoid eating too much food that doesn’t masquerade as healthy, like candy.
—Emma Court
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Actor and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda has joined the fight against ticket scalpers.
Regulators can’t easily target bad actors, either, since all states have different ways of handling ticket “scalping.” New York Senator Chuck Schumer announced proposed legislation earlier this year that would ban ticket bots, a fight Lin-Manuel Miranda, former star of Broadway’s Hamilton, has joined.
Though a few ticket selling websites, such as StubHub and Ticketmaster, provide a 100% price guarantee that the seats are verified or your money back, having to go through the vetting process to ensure the authenticity of tickets or, worse, finding out the tickets are fake after buying them, can be a hassle. And there is sometimes little other alternative: some concerts sell out in minutes, while certain sporting events are sold out months in advance.
“StubHub is firmly against any technology or activity that makes it harder for regular fans to purchase tickets,” a spokesman for the company says. “We believe in a secure, fair and open marketplace, and we will strongly combat any unfair and deceptive practices that make it harder for fans to buy and use event tickets in an open market.”
The government has recommended flossing since 1979, but does it work?
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9. Dental Floss
There was a moment of relief in 2016 for Americans who are scared to go to the dentist for fear they’d be admonished for their failure to floss. An investigation (yes, there was an investigation into flossing) by the Associated Press revealed that the effectiveness of the practice had never been rigorously researched, even though the government has been recommending we floss since 1979. It turns out most of the evidence that the combination of flossing and brushing is more effective than brushing alone is pretty weak, the AP found. The government stopped including flossing in its dietary recommendations this year as a result.
Dentists will tell you that it’s a mistake to use the findings as an excuse to abandon flossing. And we grudgingly admit that they’re probably right. As an essay in the New York Times pointed out last month, the so-called weak evidence supporting flossing was the absence of a study using randomized controlled trials that definitively proves flossing is beneficial to your health. But there’s evidence, clinical and otherwise, that indicates flossing is good for you. And there’s no indication that flossing is actually bad for you.
No matter what you think of these brands, however, they wield major influence, and it allows the fans to feel like they have a connection with their favorite pop star, movie star or reality TV star. In March, West generated $2 million sales out of a pop-up shop in New York City and created chaos when he opened others. He’s argued in the past his pitches for styles like leather jogging pants have been rejected by major labels only to be mass-produced in a few years.
For many, dressing up is a big part of celebrating New Year’s Eve, which means the outfit planning begins now. Thankfully, we can always look to our favorite bloggers for some style inspiration — taking the guesswork out of what to wear. They know how to go out with a bang in the cutest and sexiest outfits possible, and we’ve decoded their strategic fashion choices ahead. Read on for nine fashion tips to put to use this NYE.
1Style to Steal: A Sexy, Strappy LBD
Don’t just go for any LBD, opt for a dress with skimpy straps to give a peek of skin.