My friends and I are addicted to Gossip Girl.

Blake Lively is so adorable—and she’s on the cover of Lucky this month!

I love how her character has such effortless style. I imagine her beauty routine is equally easy, yet precise . (In other words, I doubt she goes to bed without washing her face!)

In the Lucky article, Blake talks about some of her favorite beauty products including Physicians Formula Bronzer and CHANEL Glossimer in Summer Plum .

Lucky for me, my mother is obsessed with Chanel lip gloss so I have access to several otherwise-unaffordable shades, but the Physicians Formula Bronzer is available at the drug store and won’t deplete my savings when I drop my bag and shatter the contents, as I’ve been known to do. I know I’ve talked about this before here at Teen Corner, but everyone I know uses this bronzer and loves it.

It’s nice to know ultra-cool Blake Lively shares in my obsessions.

Hi friends!

Does everyone here know how old I am? I am TEN YEARS OLD, plus five. Which kind of makes me just a baby. I mean, as far as responsibility goes, it’s a good week if I get all my homework done and stay under my allotted number of text messages.

What I’m trying to say is, sorry if my Teen Corner entries are kind of pathetic now and then. You don’t need to send me any more emails reinforcing my pathetic-ness—I totally get it. (It’s actually kind of funny to get emails from readers because 1) I really have readers! and 2) you people are just like my history teacher—he takes one look at my assignment and knows I spent exactly 3 minutes on it, no matter how hard I try to trick him into believing otherwise.)

So this weekend, I’m devoting all my free time to this column. I’m already on my fourth draft and I only have three paragraphs. (Does "Hi Friends!" count as a paragraph?) See how devoted I am?! (It has NOTHING to do with the fact that I’m grounded, I swear.)

And please don’t make me tell you why I’m grounded—because then you’d know that I’m not only pathetic, but I have a bad attitude to go right along with it. But that’s enough about me and my problems—let’s talk about my sister Bailey’s problems.

Bailey gets her hair highlighted and uses a straightening iron every day. Every day. If you don’t already know this, Highlights + Flat Iron= Damaged Goods .

Bailey with our cousin Rachel.

Wait, let me re-phrase that: Highlights + daily use of the Flat Iron at 425 degrees = Stupid sister with FRIED hair .

Thank goodness she has me in her life, because once we noticed the breakage (right where the arrow is pointing in the above photo—it’s kind of hard to see here, but the entire top layer of her highlighted hair has broken off, leaving her with "bangs" on the side of her head!) we got serious about fixing it. (Although, it would be kind of funny to see my sister with no hair—but I’m not that mean.)

Even if your hair is healthy and gorgeous, using a flat iron every day is going to cause damage. If you have highlights or damaged hair, you might as well be engaged to Spencer Pratt because your life is doomed.

Here’s a few tips to keep your hair healthy while maintaining that sleek, straight hair we all desire:

• Damaged hair is dry hair—keep shampooing to a minimum of every-other day. (Unless, like Bailey, you’re an athlete and break a serious sweat every day—please wash the hair. Ew!)
• Give hair an extra moisture treatment like Nexxus Humectress Ultimate Moisturizing Conditioner every time you shampoo. Comb it into towel-dried hair and leave on for at least three minutes.
• Use a heat protecting serum/spray before blow drying or straightening. I like to use Matrix Vavoom Gold Heat Protective Lotion and Protective Dry Mist .
• Set your flat iron on the lowest possible heat setting (that’s still effective, of course), and try to avoid the damaged areas. (Also, be sure hair is completely dry before straightening.)
• A few times a week, try some alternate styles that don’t require heat appliances—a headband with a loose side braid is super cute and so is a messy, high ponytail. (Be sure to use a non-damaging ponytail holder.)

Taking a little extra time and care will ensure your hair doesn’t end up like Bailey’s. We all want to look hot, but the line has to be drawn somewhere!

Hope you have a super fun week! (OMG did you notice it’s December already?! I LOVE this month.)

For the next four days, it’s nothing but PEACE AND QUIET at my house. Yes!!!

My parents have gone to Florida with my little sister and my other siblings are gone, too! (They’re actually staying with friends and family, but GONE is a good word, so I’ll stick with that.) (I should probably mention here that I’m not home alone—we have a family friend staying here at the house with me. When my parents go out of town without us, they like to split us up, having us each stay at different places—saying they wouldn’t wish all three of us together on their worst enemy. I guess we tend to get out of hand sometimes!)

All I can say is this: In addition to four days of silent bliss, I have FREE ACCESS TO THE BEAUTY CABINET!

(Just kidding, Mom.) (Kind of.)

As usual, my mother’s final words to me before she left for the airport were "Stay out of the beauty cabinet!"—and I think she meant it. The beauty cabinet, an armoire full of beauty product samples waiting to be tested and reviewed, is always off-limits to us—but that doesn’t mean we don’t snoop around in there when our mom is not home.

Today I kept myself busy digging through tons of skincare items until I found this:

The warmest, yummiest, vanilla scent I’ve ever smelled. It’s called Perfect Vanilla by Creative Scent and it’s really really good. I also found a sick mascara that I need to wait and tell you about tomorrow because I need to make sure it continues performing for the rest of the day (I’ve only been wearing it for three hours, but so far, it’s a dream mascara).

Check back tomorrow for my dream mascara review! xo-Bree

Sorry my column is late this week! You see, there’s this boy… and I think I like him, and we’ve been hanging out and all. Which makes the weekend fly by and before I know it, my mom is nagging me about Teen Corner and why haven’t I written my entry because there’s readers waiting.

To this, I laugh. Because I highly doubt there’s anyone out there waiting for my Teen Corner entry! (And if there actually was someone interested in what I have to say, she’s probably very happy for me that there’s this boy…)

What I did have time to do this weekend is experiment with pressing MAC pigments into pans. Every time my mom receives a package from the MAC PR department with samples of the new collections, my sister and I go nuts. Bonkers , really. And then Mom says no, we can’t have this, or we can’t have that because she wants to give it away to her readers. (No offense, readers—but if you were in my position, you would want to keep it all for yourself, too!)

In the end, she let us keep a few pigments and some brush sets.

MAC pigments and I have a love/hate relationship. I love how they apply smoothly and allow me to vary the color intensity with layers. I hate how the powder gets EVERYWHERE (I’ve spilled more bottles of pigment than I care to admit). The other issue I have with pigments is that my sister and I like the same colors. This means there’s a lot of stomping from my room to hers (and her room to mine) to snatch back a pigment that we each like to think is exclusively ours, even though we’ve been given strict orders to share . (Sharing is not something either of us is fond of.)

So this weekend, as we were fighting over who was going to keep the Sweet Sienna pigment from the MAC Royal Assets holiday collection, I suggested we press the pigment into pans so we could each have our own. I’m so clever!

If you’ve never tried pigment-pressing, here’s what you need:

• Pigment
• Empty pans (I used ELF Cosmetics pans for $1 each, but you can also use old MAC eye shadow pans)
• Rubbing Alcohol
• Quarter (or, a Chuck E. Cheese token, which is a little larger and fits better into the ELF Cosmetics pans—a quarter is perfect for the MAC eye shadow pans)
• Cheesecloth or some other thin cloth (I used a Kate Spade handbag dust cover which threw my mom into a tailspin when she saw that I had cut it up! Word of Advice: If you want to use a dust cover from your mom’s closet, you should probably ask first .)
• Toothpick, bobby pin or some other small object for stirring
• Optional–small spray bottle for alcohol

In your empty eye shadow pan, mix alcohol and pigment–stirring with a toothpick or bobby pin–into a paste. (I used a baby medicine dropper to add alcohol in small amounts.) Fill the pan to the rim with this paste and let dry.

While I was waiting for this to dry, I fixed all my cracked eye shadows—which made me soooo happy. I now open my MAC palette and see perfectly perfect eye shadows. It’s amazing.

Here’s how I fixed them: With a toothpick, break up the cracked portion of the shadow and smooth out. (For your much-used shadows where there’s a circle of pan showing at the bottom, break up the remaining shadow and smooth over the entire pan.) You’re pretty much making your eyeshadow look like pigment powder. With a small spray bottle (the kind that sprays a fine mist) filled with alcohol, spray from about 18 inches away until the shadow is damp, then you can get closer with the spray bottle to soak the powder with alcohol. (If you go too close before the shadow is damp, you’ll blow it all over creation with the pressure of the spray.)

Wait a minute or two and press hard with a quarter wrapped in fabric. The fabric will absorb any excess alcohol and you’re left with a perfectly smooth eye shadow–no cracks!

Because the pigments are saturated with alcohol, they take a lot longer to dry. I waited a full day before pressing them with my Chuck E. Cheese token (I was using the Elf pans for my pigments). I made the mistake of trying to press Sweet Sienna after just a few hours, and this is what happened:

In addition to the alcohol, the cloth also soaked up blue dye from the pigment. Oops!

So I made another pan and here’s how they turned out:

The funny thing is, both of these Sweet Sienna pressed pigments look NOTHING like the original pigment.

Here’s the swatches:

I think it’s safe to say that I messed up on that one. The good news is that I now have two new shades of eye shadow—I’m calling them Sweeter Sienna and Sweetest Sienna !

All was not lost, however. I did end up with several pressed pigments that turned out good:

Sweet Sienna and Forest Green are my two favorite pigments from the MAC holiday collections. They are even more gorgeous than they appear in these photos.

If some chemist/mad scientist out there knows why my Sweet Sienna turned blue after adding rubbing alcohol, I’d really like to know (especially since I can’t detect any blue in the original pigment)!

Thanks, mwah!

PS- Here’s Bailey and me in our Fook Mi and Fook You Halloween costumes: