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...

Website Favorite || Stalkthis

A couple of months ago I was watching makeup videos on YouTube (as I tend to do), and I stumbled across a video by Chloe Morello in which she gives the lowdown on a new Pinterest-like website: www.stalkthis.com. You can watch the video here; it includes a well-done tutorial on how to use the website, so I'm not going to get into that in this post. Basically, Stalkthis is similar to Pinterest in that you are tagging pictures of things and saving them to your profile, which you can look back on later.

The big difference is that Stalkthis was created for the purpose of tagging products you're looking to buy but that might cost a tad more than you're willing to pay. Stalkthis keeps track of the prices of the products you've "stalked" and sends you email alerts when they go on sale or drop in price. As you can see from the picture above, it also keeps track of the alerts on the website itself. You can even sort the items you're stalking into categories As a penny-pinching college student,  Stalkthis has already helped me save money on a couple of clothing items, which is why I like it.

But!

Stalkthis is still in beta form, meaning that its creators are still working out some kinks in the website (that's what beta means to my understanding, at least). I've definitely noticed some major glitches which make use of the site less enjoyable, so I hope those get worked out in the future. Here's a list of some of the major/most annoying ones that I've noticed:

• Stalkthis forgets what you bought. I find this to be the #1 most irritating glitch on Stalkthis. What happens is this: After you buy an item, you can edit it on the site to say "Got It" over the picture, as I've done with that awesome Hindu-inspired elephant T-shirt (see above). I like this function because then you can come back to your account later and look at all the things you bought and it just makes me happy for some reason. The problem is, after a couple of days, if you log back into Stalkthis the "Got It" banner disappears. For a while I kept re-clicking the "Purchased" button to make the banner re-appear but now I just delete the item for the most part. Disappointing. 

• Certain product pictures don't load on the site. Again, if you look at the screen shot above, you an see that I tagged something on beautybay.com...but the picture just doesn't load on Stalkthis. I'm not sure why this is, but it annoys me to no end and I have to delete those pictures too. (FYI: The product I tagged was Alpha H Liquid Gold, which you can buy here.)

• The "Category" button in the Stalk toolbar doesn't work. To be fair, this has only happened to me in Safari and only happens sometimes. But it's annoying because if you want to categorize an item, you have to log into the actual Stalkthis website and edit from there, instead of categorizing from the "Stalk" toolbar, which is more convenient.

Hopefully this blog post didn't get too too technical and nitpick-y. The bottom line is that I really like Stalkthis.com because it helps me keep track of things I want in a fun, visual way, and most importantly saves me some cash.