total beauty summit - home again

I'm back home after spending three amazing days in Los Angeles with blogger-members of totalbeauty.com What a fantastic experience this has been! The sumit was officially over on Sunday afternoon, but since I had a Monday flight, I wandered downstairs in the evening to get some dinner and go to the Starbucks. I wasn't wearing any makeup, and had on my exercise duds. Of course I thought no one would see me, but I broke the golden rule not to go out in public, unprepared. In the lobby, I ran into a group of much more elegant beauty bloggers(including Erika Valente at Total Beauty, Elke von Freudenberg (Beauty Blog Network) and Julia (All About the Pretty) who were getting ready to head for the airport...each with a huge box of "beauty booty." I wasn't was prepared as these savvy ladies, and had to stuff my loot in every nook and cranny of my suitcase, purse, and laptop bag...but it was worth it!


I am having some difficulties with my blogger program today, although I want to post more photos of the totalbeauty.com blogger's summit, and this is a bit frustrating, but I'm hoping all will be resolved shortly. I am hoping to get the "before and after" photos of my hair makeover that I was amazingly fortunate to get during Saturday's summit at Intelligent Beauty (courtesy of celebrity hair guru Dusty, whose reality show we all cannot wait to see when it starts in the Fall). I did have two photos on my cell phone from the beauty blogger's brunch on Sunday that I managed to upload to Flickr.

www.flickr.com Foffner's bloggers brunch photoset

We were at the Ayres Hotel, sitting in the sun (but with umbrellas to protect us at least a little bit from the sun's rays), enjoying a lovely bruch and getting to know one another a little bit better. Sitting with me: celebrity makeup artist Agostina from makeup2beauty, Marsadie from Frappelattes, Cailin from The Beauty Bunny and Phyllis Li from MakeupForLife
. Thanks to Chloe from Totalbeauty.com for taking the photos from my blackberry pearl-pinch-hitting as a camera

Best Part of the TotalBeauty.com summit? Meeting all these amazing, beautiful, intelligent, entrepreneurial and charming women was the absolute best part of the weekend. There's nothing better than meeting people who love to do what you love to do (in this case, write about beauty) and who are talented and friendly. I got a chance to chat a bit more with Agostina (in the hot pink top from Makeup2Beauty) who won a special achievement award from TotalBeauty.com for the work she does as a celebrity makeup artist, and a blogger; Annie Fritz (jet Set Girls--with red hair still much prettier than even Dusty could make mine); Phyllis Li (Makeup for Life); and the adorable Calin Honeycutt (The Beauty Bunny) who gives Texas women (and the rest of us) a special view of beauty. I hope we will all find ways to keep in touch, as we come from all part of the United States and Canada.

I have a mountain of things to put away, and lots of email to answer...so more, later!

TotalBeauty.com Blog Community Summit

This weekend I flew to Los Angeles to attend the first TotalBeauty.com's Blog Community Summit. Total beauty Media, operator of TotalBeauty.com, the most comprehensive online catalog of beauty products for women, is hosting this unique event in partnership with for some of the nation’s top beauty bloggers. The AdviceSisters finally had the chance to meet some of the creative writers and producers of super-popular blogs such as Tia Williams (Shake Your Beauty), Anne Fritz (Jet Set Girls), Nadine Habosh (Jolie-Nadine), and Annie Tomlin (PopSugar/Bella Sugar). The photo here is of the very informative (and excellent) panel.

The Advice Sisters recently joined TotalBeauty.Com. Although I have been online for a long, long time, this is the first online community/organization that I have ever joined. I did so because I think Total Beauty.com "gets" what is happening online, and has vision and creativity. In fact, In just five months, TotalBeauty.com has become one of the top beauty destinations on the web for women. The Advice Sisters blogs joins a blogger community of over 120 beauty bloggers and beauty-related sites that collectively generate over 1.2 million monthly unique visitors. That's an astounding amount of people who want to read what the Advice Sisters and other bloggers, are writing about.

It's been a long two days, and I'm in my hotel room trying to post this from a borrowed laptop that I'm not used to typing on, so I'm not going to go into too much detail right now except to tell you that the amount of information and camraderie generated in the beautiful office of Intelligent Beauty today, is unlike anything I've experienced anywhere else when it comes to the Internet. This is a awesome opportunity for bloggers and beauty writers to learn about new brands, talk about trends, get inspired. I expected to come away from this beauty summit with some products to try and some business cards, but I'm also incredibly lucky--I was picked for a makeover from celebrity hairstylist Dusty Simington from Salon Gregories and founder of Kronos Hair products. I am now a redhead (auburn with copper highlights, actually) which is pretty startling, but gorgeous!

I will hopefully get a new head shot and I'll post it here...the transformation is pretty astounding!

Most of the bloggers are at a club in Venice Beach tonight, but I stayed at the Hotel and had dinner with my cousin Jon, because I don't get to see him very often, and, well...family first. But I did go to a lovely cocktail party and dinner at the offices of Intelligent Beauty last night. The photo at the top of the page shows some of the TotalBeauty.com bloggers at the opening night cocktail party. More photos to follow!