Beauty Favorite || Coconut Oil

One of my recent favorite beauty products is also one of the cheapest beauty products I've ever purchased. Readily available for around $7 at most grocery stores, coconut oil has been my savior for the past few months for anything from skincare to haircare. 

Instead of listing the benefits and possible uses for coconut oil here, I suggest you look around online because there are so many! My two favorite uses for coconut oil are: 

1) Nighttime eye treatment - I use coconut oil instead of an eye cream at night and the next morning the skin around my eyes looks sooo plump and hydrated. The oil takes a while to sink into the skin, so it's best as a heavy night treatment, not for under makeup. 

2) Hair mask - I slather a ton of this stuff into the ends of my hair and after I wash it out, my hair feels unbelievably silky. Again, I prefer to use this as a night treatment. After I've slicked my strands with the coconut oil I throw my hair up into a bun to keep it off my face, sleep in it, and wash it out in the morning. I prefer to use a more clarifying shampoo to wash this out because if I don't make sure my hair is nice and clean the ends can feel a bit greasy even after I've washed them...because coconut oil is just that hydrating. 

I should also note that once I finish this jar, I'm planning on buying a jar of virgin coconut oil, which contains all of the proteins and lauric acid that the refining process strips out, and is therefore even better for your skin. The jar of coconut oil that I have is technically only meant to be used for cooking, but I've still had great results. 

P.S. Sorry for the crappy photo. The lighting's not that good because I took the picture at night - I suppose I just had a sudden need to rave about coconut oil...

DIY || Vanity Stool

BEFORE

For the past couple of weeks I've been doing DIY project after DIY project because I'm going to be going back to school and moving into a new apartment in a little over a week. First I stained an Ikea bed, then I made a slipcover for an Ikea couch, and repainting my dresser is on the list for this weekend. In between these fairly major projects I slipped in this little guy: the vanity stool "makeover." I'll be posting about my bigger, better projects later on, but I figured I'd start with the simplest one first.  

The reason I wanted to redo my brown vanity stool was because, as you can see, my vanity is white, the drawers I use to store my makeup in are white, and the stool just looks like the little black sheep of my vanity family. I actually used to have the crappy white stool that came with the vanity, but that broke years ago. For a while I was actually considering buying a completely new vanity stool, but I decided against it as stools typically go for about $30 and a can of spray paint only costs $5. (By the way, when I move I'm going to replace my well-worn, plastic Target drawers with the small Alex drawer unit from Ikea. I'm excited.)

AFTER

It took the entire can of spray paint (FYI: I used Rust-Oleum White Lacquer Spray Paint), and my finger felt like it was about to fall off by the time I was done (am I the only one who finds the little spray paint buttons incredibly hard to push?!), but I'm really happy with the final product. The best thing was, it was a super easy project. All I had to do was unscrew the cream-colored seat from the brown legs, and then spray the brown until it was an opaque white. Once it dried it re-screwed the seat on and voila!

The before and after pictures weren't taken at the same angle, but you get the idea. It's just a small change, but I feel like my whole vanity area now looks more like a single makeup station now.