When I spend a lot of time on Pinterest (or watch copious amounts of HGTV) I get a bit overconfident and think that I can easily recreate anything I see. Normally I am somewhat limited in what I can do because I live in a studio apartment with less than 300 square feet, but beauty tips and tricks don't require a lot of space or tools. As you may remember, I did a very successful DIY project that involved making lip balm from coconut oil and crayons, so I started looking up things to do with the remaining coconut oil. 

According to Pinterest, coconut oil can be used for everything, so I followed someone's instructions for using it as a deep hair conditioner. Basically you warm it up, rub it into your hair, let it sit for a few hours, and then wash it out with shampoo and water. Easy peasy, right? Well, I have fairly thick hair so it took quite a bit of coconut oil to coat my hair, but I wasn't worried because the instructions said that any extra coconut oil would just wash out. Yeah, that did not happen. At all. 

I applied the coconut oil in the evening and washed my hair right before I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning my hair was greasy and stringy and a little bit crunchy. I washed it again immediately, thinking maybe I hadn't shampooed vigorously enough the night before to get the oil off. No luck. I waited until it dried completely to reassess and though it was no longer crunchy and stringy, it was still quite greasy. I washed my hair a third(!!!) time, this time leaving the sudsy shampoo in my hair for ten minutes before rinsing it out and that finally did the trick. 

Unfortunately three washings in a twelve hour period was a little rough on my hair so after all that work I was left with hair in desperate need of conditioner! What beauty tricks have you tried that turned out to be more trouble than they were worth?

The cold weather here in Chicago has been keeping me indoors, so I have been staying busy with crafts! When I saw a post about DIY tinted lip balm from Never Say Die Beauty, I knew I had to try it! So I gathered the supplies, called up a couple friends, and turned my kitchen into a makeup lab. This project was more successful than any of us expected it to be and on top of that, it was easy and loads of fun! For the full instructions, check out the original post from Never Say Die Beauty. She covers the whole process from start to finish and will not steer you wrong.

My advice after trying out this project:

• If you are doing this project with a group of friends, I highly recommend getting a large box of crayons. By the time we made 9 batches of lip balm, we had pretty much exhausted the reds, oranges, and purples in the Crayola 64 Box. 
• Since there was a warning in the original post that the tinted lip balm could be a little messy to apply with a finger, I picked up some $1 e.l.f. makeup brushes. Great decision! That allowed us to try out the lip balms right away!
  
• Do it! Now I have 9 lip colors to try out and most of them are bold colors I would not have bought individually. Below are photos of three of the colors we made to prove that they look as great on the lips as they do in the jars. (And if you're wondering, the lip balm does NOT taste like crayon or even really like coconut. It actually has less of a taste than most drugstore brands of lip balm!)