

How To Slay A Foundation-Free Makeup Look
All of us want to be comfortable in the skin we're in - especially during scorching summer months when we could breathe easier and avoid melting underneath the weight of our makeup routine.
That's where a foundation-free makeup look comes in handy.
Although foundation is often seen as a vital step in any everyday face beat, it's very possible to still be flawless with or without it. In fact, here are some beauty tips to help you slay a foundation-free look.
Indulge in highlighter
Rico Images
Writer Kandice Guice
Just because you don't use foundation for the day, doesn't mean that you have to rob yourself of highlighter. Using a small amount of highlighter, or highlighting moisturizer, will give your skin a natural glow that looks amazing.
Related: 6 Tips to Elevate Your Highlighting Game
Apply your go-to highlighter to cheekbones, the center of your nose, and any place in between where you'd like to bring more light into your face. If you're really feeling ambitious, you can even add a tad of highlighter to your shoulders and collarbones. One word sums it up: Poppin.'
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Kandice Guice is a lifestyle and beauty writer who doubles as an attorney and entrepreneur. She prides herself on helping multidimensional women discover personal and professional fulfillment by encouraging them to live with ambition, sass, and a whole lot of pizzazz. When Kandice isn't closing corporate transactions or writing blog posts, she is usually cheering on her husband as a football coach or looking for new travel adventures with friends and family. Check her out at kandiceguice.com and follow her on all things social @kandiceguice.
This post is in partnership with BET+.
Kingdom Business is back for its second season, with even more sermons, songs, and serpents. The series picks up where it left off, with actress Serayah as Rbel caught between the stripper pole and the pulpit. With the first lady of the church working desperately against her, Rbel must find a way to live her dreams and honor her friend while figuring out her faith in the process.
Season one served a collection plate of rivalry, deceit, and revenge –– among many other tribulations. Between the 28-year-old’s acting, conviction, and harmonious voice, here are a few reasons why season two of Kingdom Business is a must-watch.
If the Spirit Doesn’t Move You, Serayah’s Singing Voice Will
Rbel, formally known as Rebecca Belle, is a stripper whose life forcibly takes a turn after suffering a tragedy. Through her quest to find the truth, Rbel finds herself at odds with the head of a local church, First Kingdom’s Denita Jordan, played by the legendary Yolanda Adams. Rbel unknowingly emerges as what a faithful Christian embodies: a perfectly imperfect human who works every day to try their best while leaning on God. Although struggling with her faith, each ballad sung by Rbel can be felt, as the lyrics relate to personal struggles we all endure in different ways. Gospel songs hit differently when your life is in shambles, and chile, Serayah is singing new life into folks.
Serayah is a Formidable Opponent to The Yolanda Adams
As one of the best-selling gospel artists of all time, it’s no easy task to take on the role of a person on the opposing side of greatness. Serayah’s Rbel does an excellent job meeting Jordan at her level while shining through her solos. Throughout season one, Rbel emerges as a top streaming artist, an accomplishment that begets something of a holy war.
Serayah’s Acting Range is Engaging
As a former stripper trying to make a name for herself in the gospel industry, you can imagine the struggles that could come with it. Rbel goes through a range of emotions, all understandable and relatable. Despite several crises of faith, Serayah ensures Rbel delivers a humbling performance that makes the audience root for her redemption.
The Kingdom Business Soundtrack is Everything
Streaming now on Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, the Kingdom Business: Season 1 soundtrack is one you’d want to add to your playlist for high and low times. Aside from four soul-soothing songs from Serayah, the soundtrack also features singles from co-star/Hamilton’s Chaundre-Hall Broomfield, gospel artist Chandler Moore, and legend Yolanda Adams.
Serayah’s Rbel Makes You Root For Her
With First Kingdom beginning to crumble under the pressure of lies, infidelity, and deception, Rbel’s window to take that top spot seems wide open; however, the end of season one showed us the Spirit had other plans. Whether you believe or not, Serayah’s Rbel makes you want to see her win. Who doesn’t love a good underdog with a laid 22” bust down? Whether she seeks Him or not, God is proving to be on Rbel’s side. But is it enough to turn everything around for her? Will Rbel lean on faith or fear?
With secrets coming to light, success within reach, and the devastating conclusion of season one, you don’t want to miss season two––especially with more guest collaborations. Kingdom Business returns to BET+ on Nov 2.
BET+ Original | Kingdom Business | S2 Official Traileryoutu.be
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In Pursuit Of Happiness: Why Joyful Connections Make The Best Adult Friendships
Many of us, 25+ women, are mindfully exiting toxic relationships and transforming good relationships into great ones by healing our inner child and returning back to childlike play. In the context of a post-lockdown society, we’re recovering from avoiding connection for years by discovering ourselves in community and interdependence, as is most rewarding.
They say raising a child takes a village, but we don’t stop needing a village to become well and good people in adulthood - after all, we are but tender children looking for love, safety, and fun on the inside.
After the obligations and responsibilities of work and home life, there is little left of us, which is why and how we spend what little time we have with others matters. We cannot rely on convenience or proximity to form rich adult friendships that fill our cup, but rather something more substantive.
As a Brooklyn-based community builder who runs a collective to help women make adult friendships, I would say the best return on investment in new friends comes from meeting people where their joy exists.
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When it comes to the development of such friendships, we might need to return to the sandbox and the vulnerability of asking another human if they want to play with us. As kids and young adults, community is compulsory. By way of school, church, extracurricular activities, sports, cul-de-sac friends, and third place galore, we were surrounded by peers from all walks of life, even if we didn’t necessarily intend to be.
Unlikely to consider if these spaces were even truly fun, safe, or beneficial, I’m not sure we even knew that community was what we were participating in.
A lot of folks struggle to make friends beyond their early twenties because the security blankets have been removed.
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21 is the average age that most meet our best friends, according to The Friendship Report, a global study commissioned by Snapchat in 2019. We can theorize this is because of factors like college environments, frequency of social events, bonding over canon events like first serious romantic relationships, and simply having idle time.
As we age and our responsibilities start to weigh heavier and heavier, we connect less over levity, play, and gossip and become more concerned with romantic partners - which society assigns greater importance - taxes, mortgages, children, increasingly aching bones, and the looming anxiety of legacy.
Here’s the thing: Loneliness is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Our health quite literally depends on having fruitful connections that aren’t grown from obligation. We need friends who choose us because they love to see us happy and light.
We need friends who choose us because they love to see us happy and light.
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The average American spends a very sad 41 minutes a day socializing. We are not socialized to value regular attendance to third places or interest-based activities/hobbies, so this makes sense, but it’s the greatest inhibitor to finding other adults we’re delighted by rather than trauma bonds with coworkers who also hate your boss or neighbors who are fine, but don’t share our values.
Not only do we need to find third places, not only do we need to commit intentional time daily to investing in friends, but we also need to connect with our friends over soul-enriching and genuinely fun activities. Things that help us know each other intimately. What we do while we spend time with friends is what makes the friendship.
According to Jeffrey A. Hall of the University of Kansas, it takes over 200 hours of committed time to truly build a friendship, but as the time committed to leisure increases, so does the reported quality of the friendship. Hence, meeting our friends where our joy is.
Hence, meeting our friends where our joy is.
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I was not the kind of person who ever got to make friends for a good or long time. I moved a lot as a child, went to university across the country from my family, where I didn’t have the ideal experience, then moved across the country again to New York post-college - a city notoriously densely populated and yet incredibly lonely.
I was experiencing no shortage of interactions with people, but a shortage of A) time outside of work and B) vulnerable experiences that don’t involve going to a bar to truly bring me closer to other humans. Today, I have certainly met my people.
While I’m emotionally available to kind folks always, my cup is filled constantly by those who have met me where I am happiest with consistency. I know the context of the way these relationships developed has greatly impacted them.
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Last year, a new friend of mine noticed I volunteer at a local food bank every week. We are both founders and hobbyists with little extra time on our hands who really value being of service to the community, so I asked her to join me.
Over the period of a year, she and I developed a ritual of buying each other coffee, coming to our “sacred place,” as we call it, and spending time in the kitchen catching up on family chat, dating gossip, therapy updates, and everything in between. We kiss goodbye and promise to see each other soon, and we always do.
Several of my friends are travelers, so we spend time eating delicious food and putting our toes in the finest sand in the world together. Several of my friends are obsessed with and work in music, so we enjoy attending the concerts of our favorite artists. My friends and I each have our rituals of sheer, unadulterated joy.
My friends and I each have our rituals of sheer, unadulterated joy.
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When I plan events for my community collective, I keep this in mind. We don’t just meet over dinner to talk about work - we do yoga together, we make homemade pasta, we grab ice cream, we learn breathwork, we run around the park, we go on nature walks, we meet to debrief books.
It dawned on me recently that because we grew up forced into dynamics with each other, we never truly learned what community means to us and don’t know how to choose it. As we age, the foundation of our survival shifts from being liked by others to liking ourselves and building a small but mighty team of people who support us in doing so and brighten that light in us out in all of its luminosity.
Your friendships and community are, in essence, a team of people who are co-creating your reality, with each person offering a slice of deliciousness to round out your life pie.
Valuing yourself and committing time for joy is the gateway to friends who bring you joy and want to find you there.
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