Fresh Kiss & Tell - New York This Weekend - Neiman Marcus Party Last Night

Fresh is having a Kiss & Tell Promotion. With a contest online that you can enter at Facebook, you could win $2,500 in Fresh products - just by sharing your sweetest kiss ever (in 100 words or less - tougher than Twitter). Make sure to enter by July 8.

This weekend in New York City, a Kiss & Tell Pop-Up Truck may be in your neighborhood. Inside the Kiss & Tell Trucks, you will receive a free Sugar Lip Treatment of your choice - and have a chance to experience a Sugar Lip Experience, a beauty ritual that nourishes, protects, and perfects your lips. You can see the schedule for the truck's stops at this link. With four locations, anyone in New York should be able to make it. Jawn Marques will be there this weekend, so you will have a chance to meet him. I guarantee you will be enchanted. More below.

You can also send a Kiss & Tell e-card to one of your friends. Tell a friend why you love the Sugar Lip Treatment Collection, and the lucky recipient will receive a free Sugar Lip Treatment with any $50 purchase on fresh.com. How cool is that? Check out this link to send a card.

I'll bet many of you know Fresh primarily for the iconic Sugar Lip Treatment SPF 15 ($22.50). Often featured at Sephora, this lip conditioner, along with the rest of the Sugar Collection, put Fresh on the beauty world's map in 1997. Fresh founders Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg were inspired to use sugar as a natural ingredient in their formulas by childhood memories of their grandmothers using it as a natural antiseptic to heal cuts. As they say, the rest is history. Fresh's Sugar Collection remains a pillar of the brand today. To know Sugar is to love it, but a failure to explore the rest of Fresh is an oversight you need to correct!

Last night, a select group of shoppers and friends had an opportunity to get up close and personal with Fresh at a master class and party at Neiman Marcus Tysons Galleria. With plenty of wine and food, we feasted while Jawn Marques gave us an overview of Fresh, the company's philosophy, and skin care. He touched on fragrance and color, but Jawn stressed skin care. After all, your skin has to look good for your makeup to look good!

The Fresh candle-lit table was set elegantly for our group of beauty lovers - all of whom sampled as Jawn started with Crème Ancienne, Fresh's couture anti-aging formula, handmade in a monastery, and ended with fragrances, covering all the options (serums, moisturizers, eye creams, masks, you name it) to keep our skin looking fresh and healthy. Toward the end of our party, Alyson O'Brien and others helped our partygoers spruce up for the evening. I love visiting with the Fresh team and appreciate the special effort they made (in rush-hour traffic) to pop down to Virginia to spend the evening with us.

Afterwards, we got Jawn and Alyson set up on Twitter, so make sure to follow them today! They are @Jawn_Fresh and @Alyson_Fresh. I took this photo upstairs after the party - the lighting in the Café wasn't great for photos. Let's show them some love on Twitter!

That's the morning report! I'll have a makeup feature for you in a bit.

Photos courtesy of Fresh; Jawn and Alyson's photo by Best Things in Beauty

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Fresh Soy Face Cleanser and a Coming Attraction

Did you know that Fresh Soy Face Cleanser ($38) is Neiman Marcus's best-selling cleanser? I didn't until I started talking with a Fresh representative who had given me one. It was also a Neiman Marcus Beauty Award Finalist in 2010, voted by customers.

I told one of my "Fresh friends," Alyson O'Brien (remember Alyson? she wrote a guest feature for us), about burning my lips recently with glycolic acid and that I had used only pure, gentle products on my face the week after. I didn't want to apply anything that would exacerbate the burn and accompanying pain. My Fresh Soy Cleanser had arrived recently, and it seemed like the perfect choice for removing makeup at night and washing my face in the morning shower. I knew it was mild, so it has been my go-to cleanser since. I love it!

Soy Face Cleanser has a unique, multifunctional, soap-free formula that promotes a pure, clean, healthy complexion. Ideal for all skin types, this ultra-gentle face wash contains nourishing amino acids, rich soy proteins, and soothing botanicals to hydrate, calm, and tone. The lightweight, natural cucumber- and rose-scented formula has a refreshing and cooling effect (good for the dufus who her burned her skin). It effectively removes every last trace of my makeup, even around my eyes - no raccoons here (inside at least)! It even conditions your eyelashes.

Fresh’s unique crème-gel formula won’t strip the skin of its essential nutrients. It leaves my face feeling hydrated and clean. Because it's safe for use around the eye area, I apply and cleanse with abandon, which is how I got myself into trouble with the glycolic acid. No worries - Fresh wouldn't hurt us.

The ingredients of this French-made cleanser contain pure, organic extracts of rose and cornflower, mallow, and aloe vera, cucumber, and ginseng.Then, there's the soy. Soybean extract is a valuable protein that protects the skin and improves texture and resiliency. Soybeans provide amino acids that are essential in helping the skin to retain moisture, maintain elasticity, and preserve a smooth appearance. They contain a high concentration of isoflavonoids, a type of polyphenol that exhibits antioxidant properties. Soybean germ extract is derived from the soybean; after the hulls and oil are collected, the remaining flakes, which represent this valuable protein-rich extract, are crushed into a fine powder and used to make this soy extract in the cleanser, which is a liquid-gel that dispenses easily and feels great. It also contains soybean oil. It has an unusual botanical fragrance - floral, fresh, fruity - more like cucumber than rose.

I can see why so many women have discovered it before me. If you share your house with a man, you may be fighting for the Fresh! You can find it at Neiman Marcus, Sephora, and Fresh's Web site, along with the rest of Fresh's Soy Collection. This mild cleanser has earned a permanent spot at my house.

Heads up: Jawn Marques, Creative Director of Fresh, is coming back in June! We are having a Fresh party at Neiman Marcus after work. E-mail me if you'd like to attend.

Photo courtesy of Fresh

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