Meanwhile I walk around mostly makeup free, with my hair wet after a workout. I sometimes get looks from the ladies around here so scathing...like I'm bringing down the neighborhood's (or maybe worse, the whole city's) standards! So when I discovered that my very first cooking class at Kitchen Lab in October of last year was going to be sponsored by Kiehl's and full of prominent local beauty and fashion bloggers, I was more than a little intimidated (the photo above is from that night in the kitchen). However, they were lovely and terribly good sports about getting stuck into the cooking that night and now several of us follow each other on Instagram. I'm in awe of the amount of time, money, and effort these ladies put into keeping themselves looking a certain way. The standards here are very, very high.It's also much cheaper to pamper yourself here than in most major Western cities. Here a blow dry in my fancy neighborhood costs about $10 and a manicure about the same.