I would consider myself a systematic person in most parts of my life.  I work full time, I am a full time doctoral student and I babysit for multiple families consistently; additionally, my friends and family enjoy the pleasure of my company occasionally. If I didn’t follow routines my life would be chaos and I would never get anything done.  They are what help me make it through the day feeling slightly less overwhelmed about everything I have going on.  It shouldn’t be surprising that these routines have followed me into my new found beautysphere. 

My night time routines are somewhat epic.  My friends like to tease me about these rituals and saying I only have time for them because I don’t have children.  I don’t think this is true.  I have always set aside enormous amounts of time for things that I enjoy, and I genuinely enjoy my skincare and makeup regimens.  What I don’t specifically enjoy is the weekly maintenance. 

Each Sunday I set aside time to take care of things that I have avoided all week.  Below is a “Sunday Night in the life…”.  I have detailed more or less everything I do to keep up the various beauty regimens (and their devices) I have in place. I have included links for where to purchase items from the products website, Ulta or Amazon!

I have been blessed (and at times cursed) with extremely thick, coarse hair.  Thank goodness my hair came from my mom’s side of the family or else this would be an entirely different blog!  One of the benefits of having hair as thick as mine is that it can hold a style for days.  I easily get away with washing my hair once a week and you would never know (of course, I take steps throughout the week to extend the life of my blow out, but I’ll save that for another time).  A major downfall of my hair is that it takes what feels like years to dry.  Every Sunday I take the time to wash and blow dry my hair.

Once my hair is washed and I’m out of the shower, I put on a trashy reality show that I have DVR’d during the week.  I choose shows like this because if I miss something I don’t particularly care.  Also, I can typically keep up just listening to the drama without ever watching it.  This week I “watched” the Teen Mom OG Reunion Special.

Next, I get my hair ready to be blow dried.  First, I spray It’s a 10 Miracle Leave in Conditioner throughout my hair and then comb through it with a wide toothed comb.  Next, I spray my hair with Kenra Blow Dry Spray.  Not only does this product smell amazing, it speeds up the drying time and leaves my hair feeling super soft!  Because I know I will curl my hair at some point during the week, I sprayed it with Tresemme Curl Activator (this used to be fairly hard to find, but I can consistently pick it up, on sale, at Ulta).  Before blowdrying I pin back about half of my hair.  If I skip this step, the middle sections of my hair never dry!  Using my T3 Featherweight Luxe 2i hairdryer and Olivia Garden Fingerbrush, I blow dry the bottom sections of my hair.  I don’t do this neatly, I just need to get it dry.  Once 75% dry, I take down the top sections of hair and messily dry them.  I prefer styling my hair after one sleep, so I don’t worry about giving myself the perfect blow out.  I put my hair back and continue with the next task.

I am trying out new products and devices all the time. Because of this I take weekly pictures of treatment areas.  I like doing this as part of my Sunday routine so that the lighting and my rest levels are about the same.  Pictures are taken in the same area each week, right after I have showered and blow dried my hair. This helps ensure that I am adequately measuring the performance of whatever I happen to be trying.

I love exfoliating my lips and look forward to doing it each week.  I have a number of different lip exfoliators but received the Pure Vanilla smoothing lip scrub as a gift and LOVE it!  Using the LUXE Satin Precision Brush Head for my Clarisonic, I rub the lip scrub over my lips, brush over it with my Clarisonic and then remove any excess product with a damp cotton ball.  Lip scrubs often remain on the brush head, leaving it grimy, so make sure you clean it right afterwards!  The final step is applying a moisturizing lip product.  I have recently been loving the Yes To Coconut Cooling Lip Oil!

After exfoliating my lips I apply the Aztec Indian Clay Healing Mask.  This is my absolute favorite mask!  Just mix equal parts apple cider vinegar and the mask powder, slap it on your face and feel the pulsating begin.  Although I love this mask it takes a tad more work than the others I apply throughout the week, so I save this bad boy for Sunday’s when I know I have the time!

With Teen Mom playing and my mask tightening I begin my most dreaded chore: cleaning my brushes.  Words can not describe how much I hate cleaning my brushes.  Even though I am always excited to use my fresh brushes the next morning, I despise cleaning them.  To clean my brushes I use two items: a homemade solid brush soap and a Petmate glove (I would really love the Sigma Spa Glove, but can’t justify the purchase price.  I will happily pay $10 for this glove instead; it works great).  I wet my dirty brush, rub it into the soap and then swirl the brush around on the ridges of the glove.  The glove ensures that the soap is being applied evenly to all parts of the brush and provides a deeper clean.  Once clean, with the extra water is squeezed out, the brushes are inserted upside down into my brush tree to dry over night. I follow the same process with my various Clarisonic brush heads, aside from putting them in the Magik Drying Pro Brush Drying Tree.

I finish up by cleaning my Rodan and Fields** AMP (microneedling roller).  I simply add warm water and a purification tablet to the tumbler, submerge the roller and wait for the water to transform from blue to clear (approximately 15 minutes).

After removing my mask and completing my skin care routine, I get out a power strip and charge my Clarisonic Plus, Clarisonic Opal and Philips Philips Sonicare Toothbrush.  Some of the devices can go longer between charges, but I wouldn’t be able to keep up with that, so I charge them all on Sundays.  Note, this is not the place where I normally charge them, but I could not get a decent picture from their “normal spot.”

The final step of my routine is hand care.  A few years ago I was obsessed with nail polish.  I acquired it quickly and would spend hours looking up nail art.  Because of my love of all things nail related a friend of mine bought me the True Blue Spa 60 Second Manicure Hand Sugar Scrub for my birthday.  It is amazing and will completely transform the texture of your hands.  I follow this up with Burt’s Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Cream and Julep’s Age Defying Hand Brightener (no longer manufactured).  As I have previously mentioned, I am not that into lotions, but I received this in a Julep Maven Box around the time I discovered the 60-second manicure and they seemed to work well together so I kept buying it.

That completes a Sunday night in the life of Jessica’s Gone Viral!  All in all I typically complete this process in the time it takes to watch one episode of trashy television!

*Whenever possible I provided links directly from a brand’s website

** I am in no way affiliated with Rodan& Fields, I just decided to purchase one of their products.