"Guaranteed to make your outfit and your day."

So it's been a while since I did any beauty-related posts. And I thought about this and realized why: it's the summer. Who does much of anything beauty-related in the summer? You're tan, your hair has lightened a little, you get to wear basically fancy bags with holes for your head and arms to work (and I mean that in the best way possible, wardrobe! Summer dresses are not that complicated!). Plus, the way this summer has been going, you've basically sweated your face off just getting from your house to the car (or any other form of transit for my urban readers) to your place of work.

(A moment of TMI for you, dear readers: this summer RJ has had to tell me to wipe my upper lip a number of times...due to the clearly visible beads of sweat forming in that very location. How lovely is that??)

Plus, due to summer hours (I go in a half hour earlier and leave an hour earlier during the months of July and August -- thanks, CSEA!) and our, ahem, rather vigorous social schedule, I've taken to rolling out bed, hopping into the shower, and throwing something on and running out the door in less than the time it usually takes me to pick out my outfit in the colder months.

This sort of routine has, in the past, led to some rather unfortunate-looking locks. If my hair was absolutely dripping wet, I would roll down all of the windows in the car and try to dry my hair in the twenty minute commute to work. Or I would attempt to tame it into a low, severe bun and let it dry sort of weirdly
shellacked to my head. Either way, by midday: eh.

But then I discovered Emi-Jay. Created by Emily Watson and Julianne Goldmark, two 17 (!) year-olds from Los Angeles, they're these cute elastic ribbon-y things.

And they are super cute in your hair! They don't create that weird bump in your hair that you get from typical hair ties (long-haired girls, you know what I mean), and they look like you're tying your hair up with pretty ribbons. 

Only problem: for a six-pack of ties, they run about $11. At the rate that I lose hair ties, this could be quite an expensive habit. (I will say that 20% of their proceeds go to Locks of Love, which is awesome.) But a five second google search shows me that they are incredibly easy to make. I've already ordered some satin fold-over elastic for when I lose all of my Emi-Jays. Maybe when I'm rich and famous like Jen Aniston I can afford to spend that much on hair ties, but until then, right?