For over fifteen years, Laura Slatkin has been a leading player in the luxury home fragrance market. From co-founding Slatkin & Company with her husband in 1992, to launching Candela Group, a home fragrance company which focuses exclusively on developing home fragrance and bath and body products for over 45...

From the recycled glass vessels with handcrafted copper crowns that house soy wax candles, to the vibrant patterns that conjure art and fabrics from the Spanish Renaissance to Moroccan tapestries that adorn their packaging, Altru, the upscale interior fragrance collection of candles, fragrance oils, incense sticks, and incense accessories,...

Carol Shaw is one of Hollywood's most coveted makeup artists. With a hairstylist father and a manicurist mother, it's safe to say that LORAC creator Carol Shaw was born into the beauty business. As a teenager, a makeover at a Beverly Hills salon (a graduation present from her aunt) changed...

Sometimes the route to finding the best skin products is about tuning out the noise and listening to yourself. Smug brands, dime-store estheticians, clever packaging (of course we want that crystal jar and the bejeweled case! It's healing properties are on the verge of mythic!), are not only confusing, but...

In this precarious economic climate, non-profit organizations are suffering. From dramatic declines in government grants and private donor funding to escalating community needs, non-profits are struggling to sustain themselves. Many have opted to consolidate resources with other smaller organizations, while some have thought of creative, strategic ways in which they...

A enigmatic force in the fashion industry, Tina Aldatz has always had a love/hate relationship with her feet. It all began when, as a teenager growing up in Orange County, she burned the soles of her feet on hot charcoal during a beach bonfire. For months, just the simple act...

The past two years have probably been the most tenuous this generation has known. For me, the recession of the early 1990s is a distant, hazy memory, but the time in which we live now is clear in its uncertainty. People are out of work or in fear of losing...

New York City songstress Lizzy Grant makes her debut into the music world with a video for her single, "Kill Kill." Armed with her three-track EP, devastatingly retro-sexy look, and haunting, soulful voice, Grant is one to watch in 2009. Lizzy Grant is the kind of singer/songwriter that walks...

A few weeks ago, a writer for the Huffington Post embarked on "a personal health journey" which was inspired by Shawn Phillips' Strength For Life. A week into his detox, the writer bemoaned his sober state, suffered a deep lamentation on missing out on "reminiscing about the last...

Lately, I've been in serious debt reduction mode. We're talking a no-frills lifestyle. We're talking PB and J for lunch. Last week you might have spied me on Fox Business News blathering on about how to pinch pennies in these precarious economic times. However, I wasn't able to fully...

In Brooklyn, my mother and I lived with a man named Avram who taught me two sentences in Hebrew: I love you and I need five hundred dollars. His body was covered in hair as thick as wool, but his skin was slick, smoothed with baby oil. He never left...

Growing up in Brooklyn, our refrigerator was home to the imitation Idaho potato, sticks of Parkay, and the lone liter of Schweppes ginger ale. One summer, my mother and I subsisted on bags of potatoes cooked every which way one could fix a potato. We cut them into wedges and...

When you were fourteen, your scalp was burning, you left the cream on for two hours longer than the instructed forty-five minutes-you desperately needed this product to work. That night you almost had to go to the emergency room because you were blistering, bleeding and screaming.
When you...

For some, the holidays are a whirlwind of tree decorating, turkey carving, watching It's a Wonderful Life whilst sipping eggnog by the fire and cuddling our loved ones. This is a time for bonding, tearful toasts and Sears family portraits. For the rest of us, the holidays are a harbinger...

My first foray into the kitchen was a disaster of epic proportion. Think gastronomic Chernobyl. Julia Child would have fallen into a fit of palpitations; Martha Stewart would have surmised that Felicia Sullivan in the kitchen was not a "good thing." Mine wasn't your casual egg-curdling snafu or beef cooked...

When Kate* announced that her boyfriend of two months was moving in with her, the same apartment where her ex-boyfriend's paintings still decorated the walls, where the cable bills (which were still in his name), were delivered, I nearly choked on my dumpling. We were in Taiwan, on holiday, and...

We face one another picking apart our chicken cutlet parmesans. While my mother complains about the thieving coked-up whores in her diner, I assemble piles of mozzarella cheese -- eyes transfixed on the clock. I keep time; will it to pass by. It's 1996 and my mother and I sit...

In Brooklyn, my mother and I lived with a man named Menachem who taught me two sentences in Hebrew: I love you and I need five hundred dollars. His body was covered in hair as thick as wool but his skin was slick, smoothed with baby oil. He never left...