This Blog Tells You How to Make a Woman Orgasm

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The female orgasm has mystified people for years. While it’s true that some women achieve orgasm pretty regularly, for others it’s not that simple. In fact, research shows that men (regardless of sexual orientation) are more likely to reach the big O than women. All of this leaves a lot of women wondering: Wait. What’s normal?

Introducing “How to Make Me Come,” a Tumblr that’s giving women an anonymous platform to sound-off on this sexual disparity—and maybe get some answers, or at the very least, some peace of mind that they’re not alone.

RELATED: 14 Fascinating Things All Women Should Know About Orgasms

Inspiration sparked for the founder (who wishes to remain anonymous) after a conversation with a close friend about one of her own experiences. “The feeling of being so vulnerable and open through a conversation with one woman made me want to expand the conversation. I wanted to talk about this on a larger scale with more women!” she explained to Health in an e-mail. Female sexual pleasure is often “ignored, devalued, and misunderstood,” she said.

The about page on the blog reads: “This is a collection of anonymous essays by women talking about female orgasm… Imagine you could give this essay to a past or future sexual partner, free of judgment or repercussion. What would you want them to know?”

The page quickly grew in popularity, and now boasts 82 unique posts, detailing a spectrum of experiences. Some women, like No. 25, have no trouble when it comes to reaching climax. While others, like No. 72, have never had an orgasm.

RELATED: 8 Ways Sex Affects Your Brain

For her part, the founder has also used the blog to talk about her own sexual challenges, with the hopes of helping others with similar frustrations. She advises women: “Be kind to yourself. Don’t focus so much on climaxing during sexual experiences. Try and focus on sensations, [and] what feels good.”

The posts are honest, shocking, sad, funny, heartwarming, and often instructional (one woman actually created a complete syllabus). But what’s most important is these formerly taboo tales have a place to exist and be heard.

The creator explains she hopes all of these stories will “inspire more open conversation with friends and sexual partners.”

After all, one of the biggest hindrances to having great sex is a lack of communication. “We are doing a disservice to ourselves and our partners when we remain silent about how we feel, both physically and emotionally,” she adds. “The only way to approach the mystery of your partner’s experience is to have a deep awareness and sense of empathy for the spectrum of possibilities, and then have an open communication about what you are both going through.”

RELATED: 10 Ways to Deal With Painful Sex

This is important because a space for honest conversation about sex reminds us that everyone’s experiences are unique. The lesson: it’s okay if your sexual escapades don’t resemble Hollywood scenes.

“Give yourself permission to exist as you are,” she says. “Our sex lives are works in progress. Let’s not put pressure on ourselves to have it all figured out.”

To read all of the complete stories, check out the blog for yourself. Who knows, maybe you’ll even be inspired to share (or vent) your own story.

RELATED: Low Libido? 11 Drugs That Affect Your Sex Drive

 

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5 Time-Management Secrets From Successful Women

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For many people, the work-family-personal time balance feels like a constant juggling act where one or more components constantly ends up out of sync. Meanwhile, you can’t help but envy that one friend, coworker, neighbor who seems to make time for everything, all while rocking a smile and a skip in her step.

But we all have the same number of hours during the day—how does she do it?

“There is much to learn from seeing how people use their hours to achieve their goals. Learning their strategies can be empowering; it reminds us that we have the power to shape our lives too,” writes Laura Vanderkam in her latest book, I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time ($16, amazon.com).

In 2013, Vanderkam began asking professional women—who made at least $100,000 a year and had at least one child under the age of 18 living at home—to keep hour-by-hour logs that detailed how they spent each hour of the day from the time they woke up until they turned in for the night. They documented everything from a jam-packed day of meetings to the hour spent picking out a new J. Crew sweater online.

Excerpted below are some of Vanderkam’s takeaways. While time management is never one-size-fits-all, these tips may help inspire you to re-work things in your own life.

RELATED: The Simple Move That Will Save You Time and Make You Happier

Leave work on time—or even early

It’s easier said than done, but there are ways to shave off hours while maintaining productivity, Vanderkam explains—and a big part of it is simply making this commitment. She writes, “Building the life you want is about having the courage to do it … treating your personal life with the same importance and urgency as your work appointments increases the chance that you will leave on time. You’ll also have a life worth leaving for.”

In various time logs, she noticed that many women worked in “split shifts,” meaning they spent a large chunk of the day in the office, but cut out early to make it to say, kids’ sporting events. Then later on, they’d squeeze in another hour of work after bedtime.

Other tricks? Shorten meetings to get right to the point, while also sending the message that you have a clear agenda. Another idea is to “perform a 4 p.m. triage,” she writes. “An hour before you aim to leave, revisit your to-do list. Pretend an evil villain, laughing maniacally, has informed you he will steal your phone and laptop at 5 p.m. and keep them until the next morning. Knowing that, what would you still do? What wouldn’t you do?”

RELATED: 17 Ways to Lose Weight When You Have No Time

Re-think the weekends

In a dream world, Friday night through Sunday evening are blissfully free of work-related duties. But Vanderkam challenges that norm by suggesting that when done mindfully, weekend work can have its upsides. (The women who participated in her time log project also demonstrated this work-on-the-weekend habit: 40% of logs showed work on Saturday, and more than 50% showed work on Sunday.)

“Using the weekends makes a more limited schedule during the workweek possible,” Vanderkam writes. Think of it this way—”If you’re trying to work a certain number of hours, working five hours on the weekend translates to an hour less you need to work every weekday,” Vanderkam writes.

There’s also something to the concept of starting Monday out two steps ahead. “In the context of the whole mosaic, sometimes working on the weekend is less stressful than not working on the weekend,” she continues.

Instead, adopt “the Sabbath concept,” she states. “It’s good to take 24 hours off at some point to clear your head.” This way you still get a real recharging period, and the rest of the days of the week are less stressful overall.

Stop stressing over family dinner

This is part of what Vanderkam calls “the 24-hour trap.” We all feel this pressure to get a certain number of things done each day, including those daily rituals with our families.

But just because you can’t have a picture-perfect family dinner every night doesn’t mean that you’re not around, explains Vanderkam. “Of all the work/life narratives out there, the most insidious is this: success in the larger world requires painful trade-offs at home,” she writes. If you can swing family dinner two or three nights a week, you should view that as a success.

Vanderkam also noted that several busy moms spend their best quality time with their little ones in the early morning. “You can spend time with them first, before the rest of life gets in the way,” she writes.

You can even apply this mindset to your romantic life: date nights don’t have to be, well, at night. “Several women who worked near their husbands got together with them for lunch once a week,” Vanderkam writes. “Date breakfast might work as well.”

RELATED: 6 Things That Happen When You Turn 40

Remember to nurture yourself

This boilerplate advice is, let’s face it, annoying when you’re busy. But that’s again because of the “24-hour trap.” Taking time for yourself doesn’t have to be consistent day to day. Vanderkam writes, “Yes, daily rituals are nice, but they’re not the only strategy for building a productive life.”

If leisure time pops up out of nowhere, you also have to be prepared to seize it, she adds, referencing one woman who found herself caught off guard by free time and just read Facebook and Twitter and ate Girl Scout cookies instead of seizing the moment.

“Whatever your favorite activities are, knowing what they are, and keeping them at the top of your mind, helps you take advantage of the pockets of time we all have in our lives,” she writes. “Time is elastic. It stretches to accommodate what we need or want to do with it.”

Don’t sweat the small stuff

You don’t have to make your kids’ lunches every day unless you choose to, you can skip the long drive to visit an old friend this time, and if you can afford it, go ahead and spend your hard-earned dollars on time-saving perks like that grocery delivery service.

“If you’ve got food, a bed, and a healthy family, there’s really no reason to make life harder than it needs to be,” Vanderkam writes. “The laundry can wait. Contentment shouldn’t.”

RELATED: The Best Time of Day to Do Everything

 

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Sender Often Focus of Mobile Tweets, Study Says

THURSDAY, Oct. 1, 2015 (HealthDay News) — People are more likely to be focused on themselves when they tweet from mobile devices than from other sources, a new study suggests.

Researchers gathered 235 million tweets sent over six weeks and analyzed the frequency and ratio of words typically associated with certain social and behavioral characteristics.

The results showed that mobile tweets were more egocentric than those made from non-mobile devices.

The study was published Oct. 1 in the Journal of Communication.

“Very little work has been done comparing how our social media activities vary from mobile to non-mobile. And as we increasingly use social media from mobile devices, the context in which one uses social media is a critical object of study,” Dhiraj Murthy of the University of London, England, said in a journal news release.

“Our work is transformative in this understudied field as we found that not all tweets are the same and the source of tweets does influence tweeting patterns, like how we are more likely to tweet with negative language from mobile devices than from web-based ones,” Murthy explained.

More information

The American Academy of Pediatrics discusses social media and children.

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Science Probes Why Beauty Is In Eye of the Beholder

THURSDAY, Oct. 1, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Think Brad Pitt is as handsome as George Clooney? Why or why not?

A new study suggests your choice will be largely influenced by your personal experience.

Some aspects of attractiveness are common and may even be programmed into your genes, according to the researchers. For example, most everyone prefers symmetrical faces.

But beyond a few shared preferences, people have wide-ranging definitions of attractiveness, according to the authors of the study published Oct. 1 in the journal Current Biology.

“We estimate that an individual’s aesthetic preferences for faces agree about 50 percent, and disagree about 50 percent, with others,” research co-leaders Laura Germine, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, and Jeremy Wilmer, of Wellesley College, said in a journal news release.

“This fits with the common intuition that on the one hand, fashion models can make a fortune with their good looks, while on the other hand, friends can endlessly debate about who is attractive and who is not,” they added.

Researchers assessed the facial preferences of more than 35,000 people who took an online test. Then they asked 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of same-sex, non-identical twins to rate the attractiveness of 200 faces. Using identical and non-identical twins let researchers estimate the extent to which genes and environmental factors influence preferences.

“The types of environments that are important are not those that are shared by those who grow up in the same family, but are much more subtle and individual, potentially including things such as one’s unique, highly personal experiences with friends or peers, as well as social and popular media,” Germine said in a journal news release.

The findings could help improve understanding of human social evolution, according to the researchers. The next step is to identify environmental factors that play the strongest role in shaping facial preferences, they added

More information

KidsMatter explains social development in children.

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Secondhand Smoke Linked to Behavior Issues in Kids

THURSDAY, Oct. 1, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Early exposure to secondhand smoke may lead to behavioral problems in children, a new study suggests.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 5,200 primary school students in France and found that those exposed to secondhand smoke while in the womb and/or at a young age were at higher risk for behavioral problems, particularly emotional and conduct disorders.

The association was strongest among children exposed to secondhand smoke both during pregnancy and after birth. However, because this was an observational study, the authors can’t say for sure that secondhand smoke caused the behavioral problems.

The study was published online recently in the journal PLoS One.

“Our data indicate that passive smoking, in addition to the well-known effects on health, should also be avoided because of the behavioral disorders it may cause in children,” study leader Isabella Annesi-Maesano, research director at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, said in an institute news release.

The results support animal research findings that nicotine in secondhand smoke may have a neurotoxic effect on the brain. Those studies found that during pregnancy, exposure to nicotine smoke causes structural changes in the fetal brain, and that exposure to tobacco smoke during the first months of life causes a protein imbalance that affects the growth of neurons, the study authors said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about secondhand smoke.

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Too Few Women Get Counseling Before Breast Cancer Gene Test: Study

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Oct. 1, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Only about one-third of women receive genetic counseling before they undergo testing to see if they have a gene mutation that increases their risk of breast or ovarian cancer, a new study reports.

Such counseling is important prior to undergoing genetic testing for mutations of BRCA, a gene strongly linked to the risk of both cancers, the study authors said. And actress Angelina Jolie’s revelations about discovering she had a BRCA mutation and deciding to have her breasts and ovaries removed has raised awareness about the importance of genetic tests and counseling.

In the study, patients who received genetic counseling beforehand displayed better knowledge of the process and possible results. And they reported more comfort heading into the test, according to the study results published online Oct. 1 in the journal JAMA Oncology.

“While there certainly are physicians who are capable of providing appropriate genetics counseling for their patients, there are many who are not, and many who admit they don’t feel comfortable trying to provide such counseling,” said senior study author Dr. Rebecca Sutphen. She is president and chief medical officer of InformedDNA, a national provider network of genetics specialists.

Not all experts agree with the importance of genetic counseling prior to testing, however.

An accompanying editorial in the journal questioned the value of pretest counseling, arguing that the emphasis should be placed on genetic counseling for women who have received a positive test for BRCA mutations, so they fully understand their medical options.

“I think it’s perfectly reasonable that the surgeon should order the test directly. I don’t see that, in 2015, genetic counselors add anything to the process,” said editorial author Dr. Steven Narod, director of the familial breast cancer research unit at the Women’s College Research Institute in Toronto. “If they have a mutation, they should see a genetic counselor. If they don’t, I think it just slows down the process.”

Narod also questioned the fact that the study was funded by the health insurer Aetna and conducted by researchers affiliated with InformedDNA.

“This is a paper driven by a for-profit company that sells genetic counseling services,” he said.

About 55 percent to 65 percent of women who inherit a harmful BRCA1 mutation and about 45 percent of women who inherit a harmful BRCA2 mutation will develop breast cancer by age 70, compared with just 12 percent of all women, according to the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI).

In addition, about 39 percent of women with BRCA1 mutations and 17 percent of women with BRCA2 mutations will develop ovarian cancer by 70, compared with 1.3 percent of all women, the NCI says.

BRCA mutations have been so strongly established as a cancer risk factor that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has added BRCA risk assessment and genetic counseling to its list of recommended preventive procedures. That means insurers compliant with the Affordable Care Act must pay the full cost of providing such counseling and testing if a woman has a family history of breast or ovarian cancer.

In collaboration with Aetna, researchers surveyed nearly 3,900 women whose doctors ordered BRCA testing between December 2011 and December 2012.

Slightly less than half of the women who underwent BRCA testing had a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, while slightly more than half had no personal history of breast or ovarian cancer, the researchers found.

Of those women, about 37 percent reported receiving genetics counseling from a genetics professional prior to testing, the study authors said. The most common reason reported by women for not receiving this service was the lack of a recommendation from their doctor.

The women who did receive genetic counseling by a trained genetics professional displayed greater knowledge of BRCA and expressed greater understanding and satisfaction, according to the results.

Dr. Mary Daly, chair of clinical genetics at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, called the low rate of genetic counseling “concerning.”

Such counseling is important to help a woman understand the implications of the test, especially since the falling cost of genetic testing means that doctors often order a test that covers dozens of genes.

“We’re no longer just doing a test for BRCA. We’re doing a panel of up to 25 different genes,” Daly said. “That makes the interpretation of the results that much more difficult.”

But only one out of every 20 women in this study came back positive for a BRCA mutation, which raises the question of whether the other 19 women received any benefit at all from the counseling they got beforehand, Narod said.

In the past, insurance companies required genetic counseling prior to testing as a cost-saving measure, to make sure that women without a family history of cancer were steered away from the then-expensive procedure, Narod said.

Women would be better served if the limited number of genetics counselors in the United States focused on helping them interpret the results of a positive test, rather than preparing them prior to the test, he said.

Women with a positive test might need to have their breasts or ovaries removed as a cancer prevention measure, or might have to undergo regular MRI screenings for cancer, Narod said. They also face passing along this knowledge of hereditary cancer risk to other female family members. By comparison, there’s no real genetic counseling required if the test comes back negative.

“The doctors are perfectly capable of ordering the test, providing the preliminary information the patient needs in order to decide whether to have the test, and interpreting a negative test,” Narod said. “The genetic counselor should focus on interpreting a positive test.”

More information

For more on BRCA mutations, visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

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CT Scans for Lung Cancer Turn Up Few False-Positives: Study

THURSDAY, Oct. 1, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Recently, CT-based screening for lung cancer in long-term smokers has been recommended by experts, and the scans are now covered by Medicare and some private insurers.

But will these scans result in too many false-positive findings, causing patients unnecessary surgeries and trauma?

A new study suggests otherwise. Researchers at Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington, Mass., tracked outcomes for almost 1,700 patients. The patients underwent low-dose CT screening for lung cancer at the hospital between 2012 and mid-2014.

According to the researchers, false-positive findings were uncommon.

“Surgical intervention for a non-lung cancer diagnosis was rare — five out of 1,654 patients or 0.3 percent,” study co-leader Bryan Walker said in a news release from The Society of Thoracic Surgeons. “That incidence is comparable to the 0.62 percent rate found in the National Lung Screening Trial that helped secure screening coverage in the U.S.,” he explained.

The Lahey team said that — if deemed suspicious — the results of the CT screen were assessed by a multidisciplinary group of experts, which included surgeons, who gave recommendations as to next steps.

Overall, 25 of the patients screened underwent a surgery because of the results of the CT scan. Of those, 20 were diagnosed as having lung cancer and 18 of them had an early stage of the cancer, where there is still a high chance of a cure, the researchers said.

Prior research has shown that screening with low-dose CT can reduce lung cancer deaths in high-risk patients by as much as 20 percent.

“Lung cancer screening saves lives, and our study serves as a model for how to set up a screening program that is safe and effective for patients,” study co-leader Dr. Christina Williamson said in the news release.

Two experts agreed that proper assessment of CT scan findings is key.

Dr. Corrine Liu is a radiologist at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y. She said her hospital also has a similar team in place to assess the results of a patient’s CT scan with regard to possible lung cancer.

Liu believes that this approach “reduces the need for intervention for benign disease and maximizes the benefits of lung cancer screening.”

Dr. Len Horovitz, a pulmonary specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, believes that “lung cancer screening of high-risk patients with low-dose CT can detect cancers that may not be visible on chest X-rays.”

According to Horovitz, the new study “shows that early intervention for a lesion seen on CT that is clearly growing — therefore likely malignant — does not lead to unnecessary surgeries.”

The study is published in the October issue of The Annals of Thoracic Surgery.

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about lung cancer screening.

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‘Drugged Driving’ on the Rise in U.S.

THURSDAY, Oct. 1, 2015 (HealthDay News) — More Americans are under the influence of drugs while they drive, even as drunk driving rates decline, new research shows.

In the report, 38 percent of drivers killed in accidents who were then tested had drugs in their systems, while about 42 percent of those tested for alcohol had positive results. And the number of drunk driving deaths has been sliced in half since 1980, government statistics shows.

Over one-third of the drugs identified in the tests were marijuana in some form, followed by amphetamines, at almost 10 percent, the researchers found.

“Every state must take steps to reduce drug-impaired driving, regardless of the legal status of marijuana,” Jonathan Adkins, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), said in an association news release.

Marijuana is now legal for medical use in 23 states and the District of Columbia, and it is approved for recreational use in four states and in Washington, D.C., the report authors noted. Meanwhile, prescription drug abuse in the United States has quadrupled since 1999.

The most recent roadside survey by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found 22 percent of drivers tested positive for some type of illegal drug or medication when pulled over, the report added.

Any drug — prescription, over-the-counter or illegal — can impair a person’s ability to safely operate a vehicle, the report authors said.

“This is the first report to provide states and other stakeholders with the information they need,” Adkins said. “We look to the federal government to take a leadership role in this issue similar to that of drunk driving and seat belt use.”

The report makes a number of recommendations on how federal and state officials should tackle the issue, including: educating drivers about the risks of drugged driving; gathering and analyzing data; assessing and updating drugged driving laws; training for police, prosecutors and judges; referring offenders to treatment if needed; and continued research into how drugs impair driving ability.

“While this report summarizes the research and data available, it also highlights how much remains unknown,” report author Jim Hedlund, a former senior NHTSA official, said in the news release.

“For example, we still don’t know with certainty how much of a specific drug will cause impairment or if such a relationship can even be defined,” he said.

“Many states do not have the data to measure their drug-impaired driving scope or characteristics. The recommendations in the report will help states refine and augment their efforts to detect and deter drug-impaired drivers,” Hedlund said.

More information

The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has more about drugged driving.

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Psoriasis, Depression Often Go Hand in Hand: Study

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Oct. 1, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Regardless of severity, patients with the often disfiguring skin condition psoriasis face an elevated risk for depression, new research suggests.

The depression risk may be driven more by concerns about appearance than by the actual status of the skin, said study author Dr. Roger Ho, an assistant professor in the department of dermatology at New York University School of Medicine.

“One small area of [psoriasis] involvement might mean a lot more to one person than an area three times the size for another person,” said Ho. “I think the location of skin lesions, such as lesions in a more visible area or lesions in an area that impairs daily functioning, might play a bigger role.”

Between 2 percent and 4 percent of North Americans have psoriasis, Ho said. The autoimmune disorder causes red, raised patches of skin covered with silvery-white scales. These patches usually appear on the scalp, elbows, knees, face, lower back, hands and feet.

People with psoriasis often struggle with other serious health concerns, including obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and, ultimately, heart disease and/or stroke, Ho said.

To see whether depression is also among those ills, the research team sifted through disease data on more than 12,000 men and women collected between 2009 and 2012 by the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Participants were aged 18 and up, and all answered detailed questions regarding any history of psoriasis. Any recent history of depression was also noted.

After identifying psoriasis among nearly 3 percent of respondents and major depression among nearly 8 percent, the team found that almost 17 percent of psoriasis patients also had depression.

Although unable to determine which came first, the research team concluded that having psoriasis was “significantly associated” with also having major depression. And the researchers also observed that depressed psoriasis patients were more likely to be functionally impaired than depressed individuals without psoriasis.

However, Ho stressed the researchers can “only describe this as an association, not a direct causal effect.” But the researchers found that the link held up even after accounting for gender, age, and race, as well as lifestyle factors such as exercise, smoking and alcohol use, and obesity.

“I think further studies are necessary to definitively investigate recognizable risk factors that might predispose a psoriasis patient to depression,” said Ho.

The findings were published online Sept. 30 in the journal JAMA Dermatology.

Another dermatologist had a different take on the association between psoriasis and depression.

While profound concerns about self-image likely play a role, depression risk may also have deep physiological roots, said Dr. Gary Goldenberg, an assistant professor of dermatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

“The more we know, the more it becomes clear that psoriasis is not just a skin disease, but a systemic condition associated with all sorts of other health issues,” Goldenberg said. “And this study just gives us a new level of evidence that this thinking is in fact correct.”

Noting it’s possible that depression and psoriasis share the same pathways, Goldenberg said the next logical step in psoriasis treatment is to see if the drugs used to treat psoriasis also have an impact on depression.

“We may ultimately find out that the same inflammatory mechanisms that contribute to psoriasis also exacerbate a chemical imbalance that leads to depression risk,” he said.

More information

There’s more on psoriasis at the American Academy of Dermatology.

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How to Get Jessica Biel’s Loose Waves

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There’s nothing we don’t love about Jessica Biel, who is quite simply one badass chick. Not only did she speak at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting on Monday, but the woman co-founded a kid-friendly restaurant with the best name ever — Au Fudge. So when she strutted around New York City this week with to-die-for loose waves, we needed the details.

Celebrity hair guru Sarah Potempa, who is also the mastermind behind styling tool The Beachwaver, crafted the pretty look for the actress and shares her secrets with us.

To start, Potempa created a clean center part using a tail comb, then applied a smoothing product, like Aussie’s Mousse + Leave in Conditioner (walmart.com, $3.43) from roots to end. She used Beachwaver’s On Set Styling Brush (beachwaver.com, $42) to blow dry Biel’s hair smooth. This particular brush is a nylon and boar bristle mix, which aids in laying down the cuticle and reducing frizz.

Next, Potempa sectioned hair up with a Darby Clip (ulta.com, $16) and started curling from the bottom, working her way up. She recommends curling 2-inch sections with The Beachwaver S1 (ulta.com, $129) by clamping near the ends and pressing the arrow away from the mirror. Because this particular styling tool rotates in both directions and you have total control, it makes it easy to get the perfect wave.

For the top layer Potempa suggests sliding the button on the side of the Beachwaver to slow, which reduces the speed of the iron’s rotation to achieve a smooth wave at the front.

Wrap up the look by misting the On Set Styling Brush with a flexible hairspray, then brush all the waves together for the soft, fresh finish.

This article originally appeared on MIMIchatter.com.

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