Goodbye Natural HELL!

Sooo…I’ve decided to ONCE AGAIN get a relaxer.  I’ve decided the natural life isn’t for me!  I can’t get jiggy with dis ish.  I’ve been natural for 3 years, and cut off the rest of my relaxed ends last spring.  So you may be asking why I’m going back to the creamy crack.  Am I addicted? Losing my mind? Going insane? Forgetting my roots?  Actually, none of the above.  I loved when my hair was relaxed.  It was the longest it had ever been since I was a child.  I was relaxed for 2 years before “going natural” with no problems.  My hair was growing wonderfully and I enjoyed every minute of it.

My hair was mid-back length and very healthy when I was relaxed (~2013).

Now I know this may sound confusing to the readers out there.  The only reason why I went natural in the first place was because of a relaxer mistake.  While in graduate school (Michigan – Go BLUE!), I would often visit home every few months to get a relaxer.  Then there were a few months where I couldn’t visit home and I had so much new growth that I needed to find someone to relax the growth sprouting from my head.  So I found A WONDERFUL stylist to give me a relaxer.  He knew that I was a student that was traveling over an hour so he allowed me to do a consultation and a relaxer all in the same day.  While he did everything RIGHT, my hair just wasn’t consistent.  He didn’t give me a relaxer strong enough so, while I no longer had new growth I had two different textures.  My old hair stylist relaxed my hair until a wavy state, he relaxed it somewhere between just a looser version of my hair and a step up above wavy.  While I appreciate him not damaging my hair, it just wasn’t straight enough for me.  I still had a HARD time doing my hair in under an hour especially since I had to babysit my hair now due to dealing with multiple textures/curl patterns.  So at this point I made a decision to grow out my hair.

For months I dealt with a mixture of relaxed and natural hair, and it was a constant struggle.  I wore weaves and wigs for about a year to deal with my natural hair while working out.  However, it still was a lot of work to wash my hair every week.  So after a few more months of the natural struggle I made the decision to go back to relaxing.

This is your hair....

and this is your hair on CRACK

 

Too Faced Love Flush Swatch

Hey lovelies!

This will be a quick post showing a swatch of too faced love flush blush palette.  This palette is very pretty and I think most if not all of the colors will complement women of color nicely.  The color that I love the most is "Your love is king" the plumish color on the far right.

Has anyone used this palette?  Which is your favorite?

 

$135 worth of items for $7

So recently, I posted on social media my latest cvs trip where I spent $7 for $135 worth of product and received $25 extracare bucks (ecb).  Everyone asked me to share the details of how I was able to accomplish such a shopping trip.

 

The main key in making this trip work was being PATIENT and saving all of my high value coupons.  In total, I used $79 worth of coupons (including ecb) and combined that with the weekly sales ad in order to get maximum savings.  As mentioned before, I utilize coupon websites such as thekrazycouponlady.com and iheartcvs.com in order to plan my shopping trips.  I am also enrolled in the CVS Beauty Club, in which you earn $5 ecb for every $50 you spend on beauty products.  The $50 is calculated before coupons, which means it’s actually REALLY EASY to earn the $5 ecb.  So even if you only pay $10 for $50 worth of product you still earn the $5 ecb.

 

This is a breakdown of the types of coupons I used in this transaction:

Manufacturing Coupons are coupons that the manufacturer distributes to the public.  These can be found in the newspaper or online (coupons.com, facebook, and other social media outlets).

Extracare bucks are like CVS “money”.  They can only be used at CVS and can be used on almost anything in CVS.  You can earn these by enrolling in the beauty club, pharmacy club and purchasing certain deals at CVS.  I earn most of my extrabucks from purchasing certain deals in the CVS weekly ad.  

CVS Coupons are coupons that are distributed by CVS and can only be used in CVS.  These coupons are usually targeted at certain products or categories in the store.  An example of the ones I used in this transaction was $4 off $14 worth of body wash, liquid soap, or hand sanitizer and $4 off$15 hand or body lotion.  CVS also emails coupons to email subscribers, which I get just about every week.  For this trip I used a $10 off $40 purchase.

For this trip, I had $10 in manufacturing coupons, $51 in extracare bucks, and $18 in CVS coupons.  I had been saving all of my coupons for this trip for two weeks.  

How much have you saved in one couponing trip?