Beauty and Health Done Your Way By Molly Dutton February. Or should I say, the season of love (although it doesn’t quite feel like it given that we are currently still in a national lockdown). Personally, I feel that we should be showing ourselves that extra bit of love this time around. Self-care is a term that I have used frequently in my life but one that I didn’t really know the
true meaning of. It is thrown around daily on social media platforms, with influencers raving about the proven benefits of self-care and how it can change your life for the better. But what actually is self-care? From a very basic perspective, self-care is ‘the practice of taking action to preserve one’s own health’, which is very hard to narrow down for one article. In my experience, self-care can be an internal and an external process with things like meditation and nutrition that better your inner health alongside beauty, haircare, and skincare which better our outer self. It is very personal to the individual and how they find peace in their environment which, for me, is found in the joys of social events and family gatherings. This was going very well for me until big, bad COVID came around and lockdown meant that that social interaction became lost, being replaced by zoom calls and socially distance walks which placed me in a rather tricky situation as 40 CARDIFF TIMES
someone who relied on others to fuel their positivity. That was when I realized that it was time for some drastic change in my life; I needed to venture out (not literally, that would be illegal in these current times) and find other ways that could nourish my mind and make sure that I wasn’t in a constant slump for the months inside. Based on this mini epiphany, I decided that this month I would take you all on a little self-care journey so that we can all come out of lockdown 3.0 feeling refreshed, calm and, most importantly, happy. My tip for all of my new self-care apprentices would be to find a beauty-based activity that you can participate in once a month. This may seem like a silly suggestion, but I do believe that the majority of busy people don’t invest enough time out of their day to do something that makes them feel good about themselves which means that relaxation time can be long forgotten before you know it. A beauty activity can be something as small as a fresh paint of nail varnish (the chipped nail varnish of my past still haunts me to this day) or as big as a ‘self-care day’ filled with face masks, bubble baths and lots of good books. I know that this time can often be hard to find, especially for the millions of people who are working from home at all hours, but I promise that this small act of dedication to yourself can make a world of difference; there is something lovely about the way that it takes you away from reality for a second and brings you back to yourself (something that we can all do with at the moment). My new routine now consists of ‘Tanning Tuesday’ (to hide the reality that I’m starting to look like a Twilight character having not left the house in so long) and a long bath whenever I’m starting to feel any stress or negativity build up after a hard day. Each week you will find yourself looking forward to this time as it provides that much needed luxury which everyone deserves.
