Category: Pop Culture

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Personal Style Pop Culture Power Figures

The Sparkly Life’s Alyssa Hertzig on Beauty and Lifestyle Blogging

Welcome back to Power Figures, our series profiling ladies at the top of their game who are kindly enlightening us as they ascend. This month, we had too much fun chatting with Alyssa Hertzig, a beauty editor at some of the world’s top magazines who recently had the vision and courage to leave the world of glossies for a turn as a full-time lifestyle blogger and freelance writer.

The Sparkly Life follows her passions both professional (your new source for beauty reccos from someone who knows a BB cream from a CC cream) and personal (scientifically proven fact: no one throws a Pinterest-worthy party like Alyssa), candid (fair warning, grab a tissue before reading “The 3 AM Struggle is Real”) and chic as all get-out. She’s equal parts aspirational and attainable: a “cool” mom, a thinker of deep thoughts yet a self-proclaimed fluff junkie. She optimistically makes the daily juggle look damn good, one bouncy hair blowout at a time, and for that, we salute her.

(Have a suggestion for Power Figures? Email blog@barenecessities.com to nominate someone.) Without further ado, meet Alyssa…

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Behind the Seams Pop Culture

Selfie Tips: How to Take the Perfect Selfie

The preferred method of sharing what’s going on in your life has inarguably shifted from status updates to photos and videos. It’s how we communicate. That’s why it’s so important to learn how to take the perfect selfie.

Pro: A picture can be worth a thousand words.
Con: Always needing to be camera-ready!

You owe it to yourself to learn how to manage the image you put out there and, by virtue of having a smartphone in your pocket, you can easily learn to be your own best paparazzo.

No one knows how to curate the living daylights out of an Instagram feed better than our photo studio crew. We lured them out from behind the lens to share all they know about taking amazing pictures and how to translate that into top-notch selfies. Here are their rules for how to take the perfect selfie:

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Inner Beauty Pop Culture Power Figures

The Ashley Graham Collection Launches at Bare Necessities

Ashley Graham—designer, model, body activist, disruptor of the status quo—and Bare Necessities have something in common: We’re both preoccupied with lifting women up. To celebrate today’s debut of her lingerie line, we sat down with her for an exclusive Q&A at our headquarters with BN staffers and plus-size style bloggers.

Since Ashley was discovered at age 12 in a mall in her native Nebraska, she’s been working nonstop to shake up the notoriously intractable fashion world. The proof is in the press: This year alone, Ashley simultaneously joined and forever altered the ranks of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover models, and Forbes magazine named her a “30 Under 30.”

“My mom and dad told me, ‘If you try it, you have to stick with it,’” says Ashley, and those words drove her. At 17, Ashley moved to New York by herself. “I gained my freshman 15…more like 30. I was still working, I was still fabulous, but I had agents literally waving money in my face saying, ‘if you lost some more LBs, baby, you’d get a lot more of this.’ In that moment I realized, ‘Why am I modeling? What is this for?’” She knew she had to blaze her own trail, but something was holding her back:

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Pop Culture

BN on the Road: The 3 Most Inspiring Songs from Newport Folk Festival 2015

Nothing is as uplifting as hearing the right song at the right time. Something clicks into place and, bam, your whole outlook changes. So when Bare Necessities attended the 2015 Newport Folk Festival two weeks ago, it felt more like a spiritual retreat than a concert.

Newport Folk Fest is the festival that launched all the others. It’s been a half-century since Bob Dylan’s legendary, jaw-dropping swap from acoustic to electric guitar there, preeeetty much changing the course of popular music as we know it. And that storied history has carved out a space for so many artists on their way up, like this year’s Courtney Barnett, The Suffers, Joe Pug, Lord Huron, The Lone Bellow and Tallest Man on Earth, to name just a few worthy of your time. (We know you’re busy. We wouldn’t steer you wrong.)

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