How To Look Good On Your First Virtual Date Night
Sigh. So you're on day 182 of the quarantine and you decide to get on Bumble, Hinge or whatever dating app that allows you to chat without commitment and swipe all your heart desires. You exchange numbers with a guy or two, the first couple of phone conversations go amazingly, and eventually they ask the dreaded question: When can we FaceTime? It's only dreaded a la self-quarantine and most of us walk around looking like zombies on our worst day and blah on our best.
If that sounds familiar, here's how to go from "Eh I'm not sure (let me see how long it will take me to do my hair)" to "Sure, of course I'd love to tonight at 7" for your first virtual date night!
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
First, get your essentials together, also known as, a cute dress or top and some simple jewelry. The key is to shoot for cute but simple because, ahem, we are going to our laptops or phones to chat, not Ruth Chris. Get a simple dress that shows off your décolleté and fits you just right but is also comfortable to lounge in your ergonomic chair in. Then, pair it with a pair of gold hoops (because they make any outfit go drab to fab in .5 seconds) and a simple bangle: I chose my Alex & Ani phases of the moon bracelet since it represents femininity.
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
Next, is makeup. After not wearing any for umpteen days, my skin is popping so I like to keep it simple because ladies, we all know any makeup looks BOMB if your skin is acting right. Want to beat your face? Go for it! But as for me and my house, if my makeup doesn't come off easily (especially after not wearing any for so long), I will definitely be annoyed so less is more. So I do a simple, "no makeup, makeup" look with dewy skin, a little color on my cheeks, some mascara to make my eyes pop and a nude but supple lip. Easy, peasy.
From (L to R) Glossier Cloud Paint Seamless Cheek Color in Dusk, Glossier Perfecting Skin Tint, Glossier Lash Slick Mascara, Fenty Beauty, Glossier Stretch Concealer
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
Lastly, but most importantly (to me), is hair. Since I've been keeping my hair in twists after two weeks, I'm ready to take them out and wear my hair big and curly if I know there's a chance I might be on FaceTime more often than not. For a virtual date, I like to wear a cute updo so I put my hair up in a puff, fluff it out and go. Curls poppin', skin glowing and keeping it sexy yet classy.
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
Annisa LiMara/xoNecole
No frills. Just keep it simple and to the point. We have no idea what will become of this pandemic so keeping your look light will help keep the conversation light...hopefully. Trust me. Your skin (AND TIME if the date is a bust) will thank you later. Happy [virtual] dating, ya'll!
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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.”
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“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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My mother says that the reason why she didn’t send us to the dentist as consistently as she should have was because she had her own fear of seeing them. Hmph. I think that her stuff ended up getting projected onto me because if there is one thing that I loathe, it’s making a dental appointment. Still, it really is an unnecessary evil, especially as you age, because the reality is that, over time, enamel gets thinner, teeth become weaker, and all kinds of oral-issue-hell can break loose if you’re not proactive about your oral health needs.
Okay, but what do you do if you know that you’ve been a bit more negligent when it comes to your teeth than you care to admit? Are there proven, all-natural things that you can do to restore your enamel, heal your cavities, and even remineralize your teeth?
Listen, you need to see your dentist on an annual basis; there’s no way around that. At the same time, the dental industry is still a business, so it’s important you know that there are things that you can do to make seeing your dentist less painful when it comes to your mouth and your wallet.
Read on for 10 ways that you can get your teeth back into the condition that you’d like with a bit of know-how, patience, and consistency.
1. Eat Calcium-Enriched Foods
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Something that you probably learned in elementary school is that if you want your teeth to remain healthy and strong, you need to get some calcium into your diet. However, what you may not be aware of is the fact that calcium is a nutrient that your body does not naturally produce, which is why you have to be proactive and intentional about getting it into your diet.
Otherwise, not only could the enamel of your teeth weaken, but you could also end up experiencing muscle aches and cramps, fatigue, brittle nails, extreme PMS, and depression symptoms. That’s why it’s a good idea to consume foods that are rich in calcium, like lentils, dark leafy greens, canned salmon (salmon croquettes, anyone?), yogurt, cheese, and chia seeds.
2. Consume Some Bone Broth Too
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Another food that I’ve been getting into more and more often over the past several years is bone broth. It’s pretty much what it sounds like broth made from meat bones that have simmered for many hours.
Some of the benefits that come from bone broth include its ability to promote gut health, boost immunity, reduce joint stiffness, and even promote a good night’s rest. Since bone broth also helps your system to produce more collagen and collagen not only fights signs of aging but also helps to prevent tooth decay — if you’ve never tried bone broth before, now is just as good a time as any, right?
By the way, if you happen to be vegan, there are alternative recipes like mushroom bone broth that you can try. One of them is here.
3. Drink Mineral-Rich Water
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If you’re looking for the kind of water that can help lower your blood pressure, prevent heart disease, and relieve constipation, mineral water can make that happen for you. Between the natural carbonation that it oftentimes provides (because mineral water typically comes from springs) and the minerals like calcium and fluoride that are in it, I’m pretty sure you get how it can help with your overall oral health and well-being.
In fact, there are studies to support that women who drink mineral water on a fairly consistent basis end up with higher bone mass density than those who don’t. Just something to think about next time you’re at the grocery store, and you’re considering picking up some sort of bottled water. Mineral water is beneficial on a few levels.
4. Also, Drink Juice Through a Straw
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Acids and teeth enamel are not exactly the best of friends — and that’s putting it mildly. The reality is that a lot of people end up experiencing tooth decay because they underestimate what the acidic levels of soda, coffee, and even juice can do to their teeth over time. Now, no one is saying that you should only drink water for the rest of your life. However, if you do want to get a leg up on keeping your enamel nice and strong, try to drink acidic stuff through a straw as much as possible. It’s a small move that can make a big difference over time.
5. Take a Vitamin D Supplement
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Vitamin D is essential to your overall health and well-being for a few different reasons and on a few different levels. It supports your immune system. It helps to regulate your moods. Studies reveal that those who struggle with weight loss tend to have less vitamin D in their system than they should. During cold and flu season, it can reduce your chances of coming down with either one. And as you probably already know, vitamin D helps to keep your bones healthy — as well as your teeth.
To take it a step further, the dentin that helps to support your teeth’s enamel can sometimes repair itself if you’ve got enough vitamin D in your body. So, since we, as Black women, tend to have a lower amount of vitamin D in our system than other demographics, aside from being intentional about eating vitamin D-rich foods like mushrooms, eggs, and fatty fish, it can never hurt to take a vitamin D supplement on the side too.
6. Brush with “Artificial Enamel”
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As far as toothpaste goes, the kind that seems to be gaining quite a bit of traction these days has the technical name of “biomimetic hydroxyapatite.” Its nickname? Artificial enamel. From what I’ve briefly read and researched, artificial enamel is slowly yet surely becoming a favorite over fluoride because it is able to “mimic” enamel which helps with strengthening weak teeth. If you’re interested in giving this type of toothpaste a shot, a brand that appears to be pretty well-liked on Amazon is Bioniq. You can look more into it here.
7. Or DIY a Remineralizing Toothpaste
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Your teeth have minerals like calcium and phosphate in them. However, as you eat and drink throughout the day and if you don’t take care of your teeth daily, that can cause your teeth to lose minerals — and that can ultimately lead to weakened enamel and tooth decay. That’s the bad news. The good news is you can actually remineralize your teeth. No, it doesn’t happen overnight, yet it can indeed happen with the help of eating less sugar, chewing more gum (saliva carries some of the minerals that your teeth need), drinking more water (to remove acid from your teeth), brushing and flossing consistently — and using a homemade remineralizing toothpaste. Two recipes that are relatively simple to follow are found here and here.
8. Do Some Oil Pulling
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If you’re familiar with the term “oil pulling,” yet you’ve always wondered where it came from, it’s most popular in Ayurvedic medicine. Basically, what you do is put some oil in your mouth and swish it around in order to “pull out toxins” from your teeth. Although coconut is probably the most popular oil that’s used, sesame, peppermint, and extra virgin olive oil are good options, too.
Simply put a teaspoon of the oil of your choice into your mouth and swish it around for 10-20 minutes. Then rinse. Even though you’ve been using an oil, you’ll be amazed by how squeaky clean your teeth feel once you are done with the oil pulling process.
9. Apply a Mixture of Pure Aloe Vera Gel and Tea Tree Oil
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Gingivitis is basically a common and mild form of gum disease. When plaque and tartar build-up get onto the teeth and gumline, it can lead to swollen and bleeding gums, bad breath, and gums that are darker than usual. That said, even though tea tree oil isn’t pleasing to the taste buds by any stretch, research reveals that if you use tea tree oil as a main ingredient for a DIY mouthwash (don’t swallow it), it is pretty darn effective at getting rid of gingivitis.
As far as aloe vera gel goes, it might be surprising to know that studies indicate that it contains properties that actually help to prevent the bacteria that lead to tooth decay from growing. That’s why it would make all the sense in the world that if you add a drop of tea tree oil to a teaspoon of 100 percent aloe vera gel and then apply it to your gum line, it could help to heal your gums and prevent gingivitis from increasing in your mouth.
10. Snack on Some Licorice Root
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It might not be something that you hear about every day, but listen here: if you’ve got digestive issues, get yourself some licorice root. Trying to get over a bacterial or viral infection, get yourself some licorice root. Menopause driving you up the wall, yep — licorice root to the rescue. Also, look into it if you’re trying to prevent or heal an ulcer or if you want to get some of your weight down.
As far as your oral health goes, licorice root is a wonder because its potent antioxidant, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory properties can help to reduce acid reflux (which can also play a role in damaging tooth enamel) as well as keep cavities from forming in the first place. So, take it in supplement form, sip on some licorice root tea, and suck on some licorice root sticks. It’s just one more all-natural way to get your teeth back into superior shape and condition. Enjoy!
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