This Storyteller On The Skincare Routine That Alleviates Her Hyperpigmentation Woes
In About Face, xoNecole gets the 411 on IGers who give us #skincaregoals on the daily. Here they break down their beauty routines on the inside and out, as well as the highly coveted products that grace their shelves and their skin.
Keeping your glow-on-go can feel like a full-time job, but LA-Based creative storyteller, Sammy Approved isn't about to let adult acne steal her shine. The 27-year-old digital content creator recently sat down with xoNecole and spilled the tea on the brightening skincare routine that she can't live without and we have all the details.
With adulthood comes the need for an effective beauty regimen and according to Sammy, although she's somewhat new to the skincare game, she's true to it. Sammy shared, "My view on skincare has changed significantly because as I've approached my mid-late 20's, my skin calls for different products and more attention."
Instagram/@SammyApproved.
With an arsenal of products discovered through trial and error, Sammy says that she has now developed an effective routine that both brightens her skin and gets her hyperpigmentation all the way together. She told xoNecole, "Adult acne is a thing. I never had serious acne breakouts until adulthood. I don't have the luxury of not 'being on' 24/7. When my job calls for lights, camera, action, I have to snap into it and my skin should be the least of my worries. So finding a skincare regimen to practice twice a day has yielded in great results for me."
In our chat, Sammy also broke down why a DIY Aztech Clay Mask, blotting papers, and a fresh set of pillowcases are all essential to leveling up your self-care game.
My earliest beauty memory...
"My earliest beauty memory was when I was 16 years old preparing for senior photos with a local photographer. This was a pretty big deal because I had signed up to be an ambassador for his company to encourage other seniors to book with him for senior photos. I remember my mom taking me to several department stores to find a few different looks to wear. We stopped by the makeup counter in the mall and suddenly it was time to make one of the hardest decisions of my young life: What brand of foundation would I choose for the first time?
"My mom had been using MAC foundation for as long as I could remember but that day she mentioned how heavy it can be on the skin and that I may not need that product as my first product in the makeup game. I agreed and we continued looking. The next encounter happened to be Lancôme. I remember being enticed by their makeup stand. It was bright and inviting. Someone matched me for the foundation and I remember my skin looking and feeling so smooth, light, and flawless. It was the perfect first foundation."
My most significant beauty lesson...
"Wash your face! No matter how lit the night was, how tired you become, or if you fall asleep at someone's home without your must-have products, find a way to wash your face. At this point, I carry makeup wipes with me just in case. That pimple will rise to the surface if you don't rid your skin of the sweat, dirt, and makeup you built up throughout the day. Also, it helps to wash your pillowcases often. I'm a natural girl so I use a number of products in my hair. If you don't think that sits on top of your pillowcases and slowly finds its way on your face, you're mistaken."
For my skincare routine in the AM...
"I wash my hands first. Then, I use Ren's Ready Steady Glow AHA Toner to get rid of that first layer of dirt. Your face will thank me for this toner! Next, I wash my face with Ancient Cosmetics Even Skin Hyperpigmentation Turmeric Face Wash. I have issues with scarring from terrible breakouts here and there so this particular face wash helps with getting that even skin tone we all want. After cleansing, I moisturize my skin with Fresh Vitamin Nectar Moisture Glow Face Cream. It's not a heavy moisturizer and you don't need to use too much. I like that it's light and does the job. If I am preparing to go out, I'll finish with Glossier's Futuredew Oil Serum Hybrid. You will glow effortlessly! I also started using these blotting films from Sephora after traveling on tour for a few months. My best friend suggested these to use throughout the day so that the oil and build up doesn't sit on your skin all day."
For my skincare routine in the PM...
"At night, I follow the same morning routine but I use one additional product under my eyes before I moisturize. The Body Shop's Drops of Youth Bouncy Eye Mask reduces puffiness under the eyes and fades dark circles which is something I struggled with from lack of sleep. It's a little on the pricier side but you don't use a lot of the product––just a small dab for both eyes."
My go-to makeup look consists of...
"I wear makeup here and there but it's definitely not a daily practice. My go-to makeup look consists of Nars Weightless Luminous Foundation, Nars Concealer, Anastasia's Dipbrow Pomade, Maybelline's Classic Great Lash, Maybelline Master Chrome Highlighter and a little Glossier lipgloss."
What self-care looks like to me...
"I'm an environment person. I need incense, candles and essential oils to create a comfortable and inviting ambiance in my space. I live for a good mask like the Aztec Clay Mask or any other sheet mask I may find in my local grocery store. I must also have my journal and bath salts to soak in."
My approach to beauty from the inside-out...
"I practice meditation. I speak daily affirmations to myself that encourage and motivate me to turn on the light within. You can shine on the outside once you glow internally. I also write often to release any emotions I may hold onto throughout the day. This is also a practice that helps you look and feel less stressed and uneasy. Having control over our emotions translates to how our skin looks and feels so it's important to have an outlet or two to maintain the internal as well."
How I do skincare when I travel...
"Most of my current daily routine I use while traveling because I was on a two-month tour across the country and many of the products I use now were purchased on the road. When traveling, I am just a lot more conscious of how often I wash my face and pillowcases. I definitely would recommend traveling with your own pillowcases. The blotting films are essential when you're moving from place to place on the road to prevent that dirt buildup in your pores throughout the day."
For more of Sammy, follow her on Instagram!
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Featured image courtesy of Instagram/@SammyApproved.
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Taylor "Pretty" Honore is a spiritually centered and equally provocative rapper from Baton Rouge, Louisiana with a love for people and storytelling. You can probably find me planting herbs in your local community garden, blasting "Back That Thang Up" from my mini speaker. Let's get to know each other: @prettyhonore.
Beyond Burnout: Nicole Walters' Blueprint For Achieving Career Success On Your Own Terms
Nicole Walters has always been known for two things: her ambition and her ability to recognize when life’s challenges can also double as an inspiring, lucrative brand.
This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
Courtesy
“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
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I mean, you see the title. You know what it is. LOL. I will share the inspiration for this real quick before diving all the way in.
I must admit that I don’t watch The Real Housewives franchises all that much. There are several reasons why, yet the main one is there seem to be less and less actual wives on the show, so — the title is hella misleading. Sometimes, when I’m channel surfing (is it just me or does it seem like we’ve all got a ton of channels with not much merit on ANY of them?), I’ll find myself intrigued. And so, not too long ago, when the ladies ofThe Real Housewives of Potomac got into the topic of who swallows — yes, sperm and semen — Robyn Dixon copped to it while everyone else looked appalled, two things came to my mind.
One, what do women think that men go through when they go down on them? It’s not like it’s exactly the Sahara Desert down there, so how would they feel if their partner got up and “spit them out” during oral sex? And two — an article that I wrote for the platform years ago that received quite a bit of traction is “Do You Swallow? The Unexpected Health Benefits Of Sperm” and when it comes to how good it can do your body? Sperm and semen (the fluid that carries it) are loaded with protein, reduce stress, boost moods, help with balancing hormones, and reduce inflammation, is basically a supreme multivitamin and can even extend your longevity.
Now, am I saying that swallowing is like a trip to Baskin Robbins? No. Yet, my personal opinion is that the texture/consistency, more than the taste itself, is what takes some getting used to (tell your man that water and a high vitamin C diet do indeed help in both departments). Either way, though, a lot of the…let’s go with trepidation that a lot of women have is in their mind more than anything. And besides, it’s not like there aren’t some proven hacks that can help to…“make the medicine go down” more easily.
Listen, I know that some women are never gonna be sold on swallowing. I also know that far too many men have told me that it definitely takes experiencing fellatio to an entirely different level. So, if you’re open to giving swallowing (more of) a shot, I wanted to help you out by providing some hacks that could very well…turn you into a swallowing master.
Take a deep breath. Exhale. Now let’s get into it.
1. Suck on a Mint
GiphyOkay, so if you have tasted semen (I’m gonna go with that from now on since sperm “travels” in it) before and you just can’t seem to get past how bitter or salty it is, one thing that can help is to suck on a peppermint or Altoids before the act begins. It can help to mask the taste — plus, the sensation of the menthol is something that a lot of men enjoy experiencing because it provides a sensation of coolness that, when combined with the suction sensation, is pretty incomparable.
2. Put Your Tongue Down
GiphyI’ll never forget playing a round of Never Have I Ever with some friends back in the day, and when the topic of swallowing came up, one of them said that what she does is she asks the guy to let her know (either by vocalizing it or tugging on her hair) when he’s about to cum and she puts her tongue down until/while he does. Meaning, that she stretches out her tongue and tries to lay it as flat on the bottom of her mouth as possible. What this does is prevent you from tasting most of the semen (especially since it shoots out during ejaculation at around 25-28 MPH). Again, just make sure that he gives you a heads-up. You don’t want to choke because you weren’t exactly…well, prepared.
3. Deep Throat It
GiphyAnyone who knows about Lil’ Kim (whose flow still rivals just about any and every female rapper in my opinion) and her lyrics can vouch for the fact that it’s rare when she’s not gonna find some kind of way to say “deep throat” at least once per song (LOL). For instance, I was listening to “Freaky Gurl” (featuring Ludacris and Lil' Kim) not too long ago, and yep — she talked about it. I’m thinking that most people know exactly what deep-throating is; however, just to be sure, it’s the act of taking as much of a man’s shaft into your mouth until it feels like it’s hitting the back of your throat; that way, you barely notice your partner’s ejaculate at all. Now, if you’ve got a gag reflex, the next tip is what will get you through it.
4. Tuck Your Thumb into Your Fist
GiphyDid you know that if you put your left thumb into your fist and then squeeze, it relaxes your throat? I’m dead serious. The method behind the madness is it hits the pressure point that helps to suppress your gag reflex. Might sound odd but hey — don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, chile. While we’re here, there are also throat-numbing sprays that will reduce the chances of you gagging, too. One is here. Another is here. And still, one more is here.
5. Become a Human Vacuum
GiphyThis one right here? I mean, the tip is exactly what it sounds like. The more passive you are about, umm, “receiving him,” means you will have more time where the ejaculate lingers in your mouth. On the flip side, the more intentional you are about sucking more during the time when he’s cumming, the faster it all comes out, the less you will taste anything. Oh, and LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING (and yes, I am totally yelling here!), it’s also the more you just got him to want you on a whole ‘nother level. Human vacuums change lives out here. Straight up.
6. Bring Flavored Lube into the Mix
GiphyBringing lubricant into your boudoir is beneficial on a myriad of levels (check out “The Wetter, The Better: 10 Creative Ways To Use Lubricant”). As far as giving oral sex goes, flavored lube is bomb because not only can it help your taste buds to focus on it more than semen, but if we’re gonna be real, the textures are quite similar — which, when you really stop to think about it, is proof that a lot about swallowing is all up in women’s heads because, who do you hear complain about putting lubricant in their mouth? And since the lube and semen are quite similar, if you have some lubricant in your mouth as you’re performing the act, it will make things super slippery, which is a win for him, and harder for you to detect the semen, which is a win for you.
7. Incorporate a Sex Condiment
GiphyAnd what if you’re someone who actually does loathe the taste and consistency of lube? How about incorporating what I call “sex condiments” (check out “12 'Sex Condiments' That Can Make Coitus Even More...Delicious”)? Honey. Frosting. Whipped Cream. Fruit Puree. These are just some of the things that, if you enjoy how they taste, they too can make swallowing so much more of a pleasant experience for you.
8. Keep Your Favorite Drink Beside You
GiphyBack in the day, when we had to take a medicine that we didn’t like, drinking something that we enjoyed right after helped to “wash it all down.” Along these same lines, if you’re only even merely considering swallowing in order to please your partner, keep a favorite drink on your nightstand to see how that works for you. It really will help to get the taste and texture out of your mouth rather quickly. Plus, you can look at it as a “reward” for doing an act that was so…selfless.
9. Go the “69” Route
GiphySometimes, all you need to do in order to become an expert swallower is incorporate a bit of distraction — and I’m not sure that anything tops the number (which is also a sex position) 69 when it comes to that. Listen, I wish I could find y’all the Instagram (they need to do better with their searches). I saw a few weeks ago where a sistah was talking about how she has absolutely no problem cooking at any time of the day or night for her partner. Why? “Why wouldn’t I make sure my eater eats? Are y’all dumb? It’s hard to find a good eater in these streets.” She ain’t neva lied. And when you’ve got someone who has you damn near losing your own mind — one, you want to please him back, and two, you’re usually too caught up to be focused on if he’s about to cum or not. Yeah, out of all of the hacks, this one reigns supreme. Get into that 69. Not sure how you could regret it. Him either.
10. Stop Overthinking It
GiphyTo be honest with y’all, whether you follow through on these hacks or not, nothing is going to seem like it helps if you’re constantly overthinking what the experience is going to be like. Just like overthinking, in general, causes anxiety and stress, makes it difficult for you to concentrate, results in you second-guessing your decisions, and can make you create problems that don’t actually exist — it can definitely manifest in those ways when it comes to performing and completing, fellatio. So why make things harder — no pun intended — than it has to be?
Make the decision. Stop thinking that it’s gonna be worse or more than it is. And enjoy the hacks and the experience. The more you do it, the easier it gets, and the more your man will appreciate you for it. Hands down — remember tongue down, too. #wink
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