Summer. What a delicious season. From the fruit to the fruity cocktails, everything seems so much fresher in the warm summer sun (well, everything besides our under-arms). Everything seems so much easier (besides the monthly bikini waxes). Everything is just so much…better (except the condition of our intensive-care inducing sunburns).We love the summer; really, we do. But, just like the killer hangover that comes after an awesome night of Sake Bombing, summer does have some downsides. Our writers weigh in on their least favorite parts of the season:

Sarah – NYU: Being drenched with sweat before I even leave my apartment in the morning. Gross.

Stacy Kidd: The weather; it just loves to pour buckets on me when the forecaster predicts sun, and conversely make me sweat buckets when rain is expected. Fantastic.

Diana Vilibert: Cute summer dresses that end in discomfort, thanks to inner-thigh chafing. (What, just me?)

Kate Bean: Sweating in my knee pit…or wait… is it “leg pit”? Read More »

My mother is 100% Italian. My father, a 100% Irish. My brother got my mother’s olive skin tone: the two of them could sit outside for hours, lathering up in baby oil and bake to a beautiful golden brown. I was the fortunate one (insert sarcastic undertone here) who got my father’s Irish skin. The two of us can’t go to a windy afternoon baseball game without using SPF 45, unless of course, we want to find ourselves covered in sunburn and blisters.

Last summer, I thought I was invincible when it came to the sun. My friends can get tan with SPF 4 or 8, so why couldn’t I? On two various occasions, I felt the effects of not listening to the realistic side of my brain in terms of summer sunshine. I spent a week in June in San Antonio, Texas, where it was roughly 95 degrees every day. As this was a more family-oriented – go out to dinner, do family related things – sunbathing took a back seat, until the last dreaded day, when I thought it was appropriate to lay at the pool, for three solid hours, with nothing – and I mean, not a drop of sunscreen – on my body. Read More »

When I was younger, I was fan of saying to my more melanin challenged friends when they offered me sunscreen, “I don’t need that! I don’t burn, I’m black!”

Oh how very wrong I was. It’s not that sunburn is all that different when you’re black, it’s just way more embarrassing. And way less attractive.

The first time I got burned by my hated enemy the sun was in Hawaii. Proof that you should screen up even on cloudy overcast days. The day albeit warm, was gray — but those wicked rays got me anyway. I didn’t know what it was at first. My shoulders itched and burned. I thought I was having some allergic reaction to something in the Hawaiian air. My mom took one look and said, “Ha! You got sunburned!”

The second time it happened I was in Africa and that was even more unbearable for different reasons. After that I decided that the sun and I just aren’t friends. Read More »

[Editor’s Note: New York Magazine does these Sex Diaries that are sometimes cool, sometimes lame. Sometimes they’re interesting portrayals of every day life, and sometimes they make it seem like EVERYONE in New York City is having copious amounts of crazy sex — which isn’t always the case, btw. What would happen, I wondered, if some of CC’s writers blogged about their sex life for a week? Would it be cooler? Funnier? More believable?

Let’s see…]

DAY ONE
7:05 a.m. Boyfriend wakes me up to kiss me before he goes to work, like he does every morning. Like every morning, I feel guilty about my morning breath, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
3:45 Boyfriend comes home early and suggests a quickie.
3:46 Boyfriend catches my unenthusiastic response and tells me never mind. I feel awful, as I do every time I turn him down, but I’ve been cleaning all day without a shower and I had just finished an hour of wii fit so I was sore. I promise him that I’ll make it up to him later that night.
1:22 a.m. Come home from seeing a friend’s band play. Still too sore and tired for sex, so I offer him a blow job as soon as we get home. Read More »

When the weather heats up, little shorts get pulled out of storage, and you double your daily dose of sit-ups so you can look that much hotter lounging on the sand, there’s a good chance your skin might start breaking out. While it totally sucks, there are a few easy fixes that can clear you up before you can say, “Of course I’ll be having another Mojito.”

I can most definitely vouch for these methods too. When I noticed a few clogged pores around my T-zone a couple of days ago, instead of going into crisis mode and lamenting how life could be so cruel, I made a few simple changes and things are already looking up.

You need to be careful of two things: sun and sweat.

Sun: Don’t think baking under the sun is good for your skin. Even if you don’t care about dying from skin cancer, the sun doesn’t clear up acne. It only burns the top-most layer of skin and doesn’t get to the heart of the cause of acne—the clogged pore. Read More »