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This winter, ensure you have a healthy skin by following these morning routines!

Who doesn’t love a healthy and glowing skin? While the cosmetic industry has tarnished the idea of a good skin by incorporating the ideals of our complexion to be white or light, a healthy skin, on the contrary means to have a well hydrated skin with an even texture, to prevent environmental damage. It is pivotal to look after our skin, especially in this day and age with the growing concerns of pollution.

Here are some of the morning rituals one should observe and try on a daily basis, to make your skin more immune and susceptible to the changing weathers.

The blissful union of honey, lemon and water

It is one of the most common and easily prepared things, and you should definitely start your day with it. Drinking honey and lemon mixed in hot water kick starts your metabolism and ensures all the toxins are flushed out of your system. Lemon has oil controlling qualities and hence aids in removing the excess oil from the skin’s surface. It is a good drink to improve your immunity as well.

Lemon Tea

A slight variant of the above concoction, this drink is divine in taste and purpose. It gives you the Vitamin C kick in the morning. Try adding honey instead of the sugar in the tea to ensure you have a healthy sweet variant in the morning.

Curd and Honey

It is a healthy and fulfilling snack in the morning. It is a perfect and ultra tasty combination to achieving a healthy skin. The two provide exfoliating properties that give you a glowing skin and an even texture.

Enjoy the season’s fruits and vegetables to the finest

Indulge in carrot and orange juices, eat them fresh or simply take them as your go to meal. The more natural intake is increased, the better the toxins will drain down the system. Besides, having juice in the morning really wakes you up and tries to put the jump into your blanket and sleep state of mind at par!

Goodbye to chapped lips with Mustard oil

While this sidelines more as a night time ritual, but applying mustard oil on the belly button or navel is a good way to ensure waking up to a moisturized skin. It is a great way to prevent the constant chapping of lips. The navel is the most important part of the body, being the meeting point of a lot of nerves. Massaging the belly button with mustard oil, hence is a great way to ensure you take care of the nervous system as well!

Saffron Tea

Winters are not complete without enjoying the luxury of saffron. This expensive spice imparts exceptional benefits for the skin owing to its anti-bacterial properties. It aids acne prone and dry skin and daily consumption of saffron tea ensures a glowing skin as well!

Another variant of this ritual is drinking hot saffron and turmeric milk before bed every night.

A good diet!

It is everything that happens in the internal which reflects on the external. While face packs and cosmetic products remove the exterior problem, the roots stay unaffected. The key to a good and healthy skin is a good diet. Consume a lot of fiber, in the form of fruits and vegetables, have sufficient water and eat fatty foods or junk in a controlled amount. A conscious effort towards skin care is pivotal!

Ensure proper exercise

Sitting in the house or simply working all day long is not an ideal lifestyle. We all need some work out activity from time to time. All of us have extremely busy lives, but even sparing a mere thirty minutes to health and fitness in a day proves sufficient. A morning session of running, jogging or even yoga is a good step to ensuring your path to fitness.

Identify your skin type what suits your skin best

Use moisturizing and skin care products which really suit your skin. Depending on your skin type, it’s essential to invest in skin care which really suits your skin the best.

Almond oil works as a good toner and moisturizes the skin. You can use that or almond based products, if it suits your skin.

Stay hydrated

Winters don’t really entice us to drink gallons of water, however, staying sufficiently hydrated is a must. Water is a key essential and helps in increasing energy, regulating complexion and flushing out toxins. It also helps in boosting the immune system.

Hence, these winters, stay protected and give your skin the best treatment ever!

Feature Image credits: Stylecraze

Avnika Chhikara
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As we welcome the winter months with open arms, the Indian wedding season comes following it, making it that time of the year when the baraat, babbling relatives and the music just won’t stop, not so much to everyone’s delight.

As we enter into these awfully pleasant months of December and January, when we are finally offered some respite from the ruthless heat of the north and can finally say with a smile, “Winter has come”, it is not all good news. The arrival of winters also brings with it the arrival of the wedding season at its tow, though an information of joy for many, but also nightmare-inducing for certain innocent children, not very much unlike me.

The Indian Wedding business is a multi-million industry with people splurging money on the weddings of their daughters and sons and nieces and nephews and sisters, like crazy. No matter how stingy a person is all his life, the one time they are ready to spend notes and notes of rupees, is on their daughter’s wedding, because obviously family honour will be tarnished otherwise and it is above all. The truckload of gifts that arrive at the house, being distributed to even the son-in-law’s distant Chachiji’s daughter’s husband’s sister, only the complaints regarding the gifts outweighing the gifts itself.

The constant playing of ridiculous songs in the baraat, giving many sleepless nights, and the stop that it puts to the already slow-moving traffic. The baraatis go on about their business with much aplomb and no care in the world, relaying the exact emotion in fact with songs like aaj merey yaar ki shaadi hai (It is my friend’s wedding today). Of course, that is a good enough reason for the hundreds of people to be stuck in traffic for three hours while the dhol waale bhaiya is busy entertaining all the “once more” requests.

A wedding, if we were to go by the notional meaning of it, is the getting together of two people who have decided to spend the rest of their life together. An Indian wedding has a somewhat different meaning which is often of two people who are brought together by the families and then everything about the wedding becomes about the families, and not the bride and groom. When I say ‘family’, I have taken the liberty of including even those relatives you wouldn’t recognize if you were to pass them on the street. However, they would still come, gushing to savour the shaadi ka khaana, while the bride is busy placing them. Later, the same relatives would be seen criticising the bride’s lehenga, with seasoned critical opinions straight out of Vogue, and parallel comparisons with another Sharmaji’s shaadi they went to.

As much as there is to look forward to in weddings, Indian Weddings as a whole just can be a handful at times. If we were to take out a certain materialism, and retain the cultural aspect of it as it truly is, I’m sure it can be a whole deal bearable, even enjoyable.

Feature Image Credits: Bride Box

Anoushka Singh
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