Beauty's Best Hacks

Looking your best takes time. But no one ever said you had to spend that time Every. Single. Day. Liz Krieger reveals how to get things done on your schedule

- Liz Krieger

By now we all know the whole “effortless beauty” thing is a crock. It can take 10 or more products and twice as many minutes to look like you “woke up like that.” And if you want to pull it together for work every day—even in that not-trying-too-hard kind of way—you simply have to put in the time and money. The question of when you put in that time and money, however? For some women, that’s the secret. While seemingly high-maintenance beauty treatments, such as keratin hair smoothing and eyebrow micro blading, can have significant up-front costs, for many of today’s power players, the math more than works out in their favor.

Just ask Gabby Etrog Cohen, 37, vice president of public relations and brand strategy at SoulCycle in New York City. For the past five years, she’s been getting a Cezanne keratin hair-smoothing treatment (about $300; cezannehair.com) every few months to keep her “puffy, finger-in-socket” hair from ruling her life. With intense (read: very sweaty, very blowout-ruining) daily workouts a veritable job requirement, Etrog Cohen says, “This lets me get out of the shower, brush my hair, and let it air-dry looking semi-decent, instead of spending 40 minutes blow drying it straight and then styling it with a curling iron.” She estimates that the two to three hours she spends at the salon two or three times a year cuts her daily morning prep time by 75 percent.