MyShoppingPal.com Blog

Prom Dresses & Shoes: Trends & Styles

Simple way to summarize  this years trends for prom dresses is “Short, Shiny and Bold”. Short dresses all the way from knee length to thigh high and baby doll lengths are hot this year. The most popular styles are strapless, halter and one shoulder dresses. The vibrant spring colors and  gemstone dress colors are sure to brighten up the prom attire.

Dress Length

Short and sweet is the way to go this year. One word of caution is that you do not want the hemline to cut where your legs are the thickest. If you are thick on the legs you may want to pick one that falls just below your knees. Short dresses give you the ballerina or salsa look can be an absolute show stopper for the prom night.

Check out this really smart thigh high length dresses in a shimmery fabric.

Or if you want to show off those sexy legs here is a baby doll dress is the way to go.

Should I go strapless, halter or may be one-shouldered?

They are all very trendy this prom season. Strapless and halter dresses work for almost any body type. A strapless dress tends to feature elegant shoulders and neckline, while attracting attention to a girl’s facial features. If you are a plus size teen or top heavy you may want to consider a halter. Too modest for strapless or halter you could flash a saucy shoulder and collarbone with a one-strap dress.

Example.

1. Go with a gold or silver halter style gown, complete with golden gloves. Metallics are one of the latest prom trends for 2008 and guarantee a stunning look. 
   

A nice alternative to halter dresses are strapless dresses and one shoulder dresses.

Popular Colors This Year

“Bold is Beautiful” is the trend this year. Bright spring colors like lime, turquoise or fuchsia, red will sparkle the prom attire.  Gemstone inspired colors like amethyst(deep lavender), emerald (sage green) and sapphire compose some of the season’s hottest dresses.

Confused about what color will work for you?

Black works on all skin tones. Pale pinks and peaches may not work if you have ivory skin, but darker shades of pink and apricots may be the perfect color to complement your lighter complexion. Also what kind of look do you want a sophisticated or glamorous ?

A clean black column dress or elegant cocktail length version would give you just that.

Metallic trims, Ruffles, Sequins they all give you that very classy look.

Beading, lace or metallic trim on bodices, and ruffles in skirts transform many ordinary prom dresses into high fashion masterpieces.

What shoes should I wear at the prom?

Ballet shoes are in. High-heeled sandals with strap designs were in fashion for a while. When planning what to wear you may want to consider how they will look with ballet shoes. Other popular styles this season are glossy oxfords, and embellished sandals.

MyShoppingPal.com uses your body type, and preferences to help your find your prom dresses that will look good on you and go well with your style. MyShoppingPal.com also has access to products from all premium stores on the Internet. You can find dresses for all sizes, junior dresses to misses dresses, petite dresses, and plus size dresses for all name brands at  reasonable price. Here is our old post on how MyShoppingPal.com helps find women dresses that look good on them and go well with their style.

WHAT NAME BRAND HAIR CARE IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

Hair is the crowning glory of one's beauty but require regular maintenance due to the changing weather or work conditions. They require you to use appropriate products which can improve your hair condition along with treating your hair problems. But out of hundreds of name brand shampoos, name brand conditioners, hair styling products, hair relaxers, hair loss products, and hair treatment products available in the market, how do you make a decision that which one of them is right for you? And how many of us visit trichologists to find about the type of products that will suit our hair?

Advantage of buying hair care products online is that you can get huge varaiety and all the name brands at your finger tips and you can also save significant money on your purchase compared to what you need to pay at a nearyby beauty shop or department store. But the question remains how do we decide what product is right for you.

Understanding these concerns of consumers, MyShoppingPal.com has built personalized intelligent shopping search engine that helps users find items that suit them the most. it also has access to product inventory of all premium online merchants. For hair care products, it has incorporated the expertise and knowledge of trickologis in its search engine. It uses this knowledge along with user ratings to help you find your best hair products at the best price. MyShoppingPal.com just needs to know your hair type which can be oily, dry, normal etc. Along with that you can also specify your hair problems like dandruff, thinning hair, hair loss, lice etc. The better you specify your hair details, the better it will be for it to analyze your hair.

So while choosing any shampoo or conditioner, make sure that it suits your hair type and doesn't exaggerate hair problems. You have to be extra careful while buying name brand hair colors, becuase hair colors usually have strong chemicals which can be harsh on your hair. Along with this, the color you choose should also suit your complexion and original hair color.

MyShoppingPal.com, a smart search engine for hair care products, will help you find the most suitable products in an easier and faster way. You can also indicate your preference for particular store or brand or products to make the shopping customized for you.

MyShoppingPal.com is also a gateway to all hair care name brands. it is the largest selection of choices for all top selling hair care brands such as Frederic Fekkai, Jonathan, Rene Furterer, Phyto, T3, Lush, The Body Shop, Philosophy.

What to Wear and What to Skip: Spring Trends 2008

The top spring trends for women this year are bright & metallic colors, florals, full skirt dresses, shirt dresses, waist focussed dresses, high waisted or high rise pants, safaris, trench coats, and blazers. MyShoppingPal.com can help you find trends that will work well for your body type and go well with your style.  Here are few tips that can help you in your spring or summer shopping:

Bright Colors: Great for slim and thin figures. Avoid bright tops and dresses, if you are top heavy. Avoid bright skirts, if you are bottom heavy.

Florals: Works for most body types other than the rectangle shaped body types.

Full Skirt Dresses: Works for most body types other than petites.

  Shirt Dresses: Works for most body type.

Waist Focussed Dresses: if you have well defined and slim waist, these dresses will do wonders.

High Waisted Pants: Great for most. Women with long legs or the ones who are tall should avoid them.

Safaris: Works for most unless you have heavy figure.

Trench Coats: Great for most. Avoid them if you are petite or have short legs.

Blazers: Great for most body type, especially women with atheltic build.

Valentine's Day Gift Deals

Valentine's Day is next week. Make sure to put a smile on your Sweatheart's face on Fabraury 14th. We have listed a few valentines' specials. For the rest, check the deals section of MyShoppingPal.com.  A number of merchants are offering special coupons to save extra money on your gift shopping for Valentine.

Perfume Emporium has 70% of sale. Check a number of our coupons to save extra money all the ways from free shipping to $20. Diamond.com has coupon to save extra 20% plus free shipping on any jewelry product. Henery & Junde Lingerie has a number of coupons to save extra on your lingerie shopping this month Extra 10% off coupon fromLove Scent. Extra discount coupon from FragranceNet.com

For other coupons, please refer to our MyShoppingPal.com Deals & Coupons.

How MyShoppingPal.com Finds Perfect Women Jackets/Coats?

The women jacket/coat is the most important piece of your wardrobe. A carefully chosen jacket hides your problem areas with ease and polishes your look unlike any other apparel piece. MyShoppingPal.com has incorporated knowledge that can help you find jackets that will work well for your body type and go well with your style. Here is the glimpse of the knowledge that is used to help you find your perfect jackets:

If you have curvy figure, the semi fitted style that hits at the point where hip start to curve out. Single breasted jackets styles work best and it is recommended to avoid double breasted jackets. Belted styles flatter shapely waists. Narrow lapels tapered to the waist or contour seaming creates a nice vertical. Curvy body types should avoid short, rolled lapels, flapped pockets and cropped styles of jackets.

If you are short, shorter styles and single breasted jackets with one or two buttons work best. Narrow lapels that taper below above your natural waist add to the length. Avoid long jackets, double breasted jackets, and excess detailing.

If you have narrow shoulders, opt for boxy channel type jackets or double breasted jackets with shoulder pads. Wider neck opening with a V or a sweetheart or a military style gives the illusion of greater breadth.

If you have broad shoulders, longer styles and loose, unstructured jackets help de-emphasize the shoulder.

If you have small bust, look for fitted jackets nipped at the waist. Consider double breasted or belted styles. Use draping at the shoulder and down the front, breast pockets, seaming and shirring to enhance a smaller bust-line. Shaped or Scooped necklines are flattering.

If you have tummy, choose semi fitted or straight cut styles that reach below the derriere or even longer. Keep all detailing vertical and narrow. Use a deep V-neck to elongate the torso. Avoid cropped jackets that end at the stomach, flap or patch pockets, and double breasted styles and wide collars and lapels.

If you are bottom heavy, semi fitted styles that either hit as your hips begin to curve out or just over your derriere. A care-coat style, worn over a sheath will give you a long, lean line. Always choose single breasted styles. Add vertical details above the waist such as shawl collars and contour seaming.

In addition to help you find your perfect jacket from all stores at the best price, MyShoppingPal.com has the largest selection of jackets on the internet all the way from formal jackets,  leather jackets, trench coats, and denim jackets to designer jackets for all name brands.

Popular/Designer Brands For Jackets:

• Calvin Klein Jackets Coats
• DIESEL Jackets Coats 
• Dolce & Gabbana Jackets 
• Evisu Jackets Coats 
• Hudson Jackets Coats 
• Ralph Lauren Jackets Coats
• Kenneth Cole New York Jackets Coats 

Finding Your Best Skincare

Skincare products have become our daily requirements today. Amidst our busy lives in cities where the pollution level is so high, we have to be more careful about the skin care products we use. How to find your perfect skin care products?

Paula Begoun in her book, “Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter without Me”, has exposed the cosmetics industry. She has explored the false claims of big names and discussed at length the side effects of various ingredients of skin care products.  The decision gets even tougher if you have sensive skin or skin with a particular problem, since many products might react and worsen your problem.  If you don’t want to compromise your beauty, you should be really careful and do thorough research before buying a product.  But the question remains “How”??? Who is going to give you an opinion on the suitability of each product for you? 

To solve this very dilemma for shoppers, MyShoppingPal.com has built this intelligent shopping engine to helps users find what is right for them by combining expert knowledge with user preferences. For skin care products, the expertise and knowledge of well known cosmetologists is built into this intelligent shopping engine. It uses this knowledge to perform ingredient  analysis of every skin care product to determine which products will be best for you. For skincare products, MyShoppingPal.com has also incorporated the intelligence of all top brands to help you decide what skin care product will suit you the best.

When you shop for an skin care item such as moisturizers, toners, or cleansers, MyShoppingPal.com will ask for your skin type, if it is oily, dry, sensitive or combination and your skin problems varying from breakouts, fragility, blackheads to dark circles etc. It uses this information to anlyze the suitability of all the ingredients for your skin by making sure that the product doesn't exaggerate any skin problem and meets your requirements.

MyShoppingPal.com provides a helping hand finding your best skin care item all the way from moisturizers, toners, cleansers, face masks, exfoliants, sunscreens, acne controllers, tanners to skin lighteners.  MyShoppingPal.com is also a gateway to all name brand skin care products. MyShoppingPal.com also has the largest inventory of name brand skin care brands like Clinique, Estee Lauder, Bobbi Brown, Prescriptives, Lancome, Mary Kay, Avon, Philosophy, Cetaphil, Murad, and Sephora.

MyShoppingPal.com Adds Personalized Comparison Shopping For Many New Product Categories

MyShoppingPal.com announced it has added support for watches, toys, music, video games, and movies in its personalized search engine. The addition of these new category makes MyShoppingPal.com the only website that allows the personalized comparisons for all life style product categories. Similar to its support for the previous categories such as clothing, shoes, bags, jewelry, and health & beauty items, MyShoppingPal.com helps users find their perfect items for new categories using expert knowledge, customer ratings, and user preferences.

The traditional websites allow the comparison along price and customer ratings.  This type of comparison works well for technical items such as electronics and computers. But when it comes to life style goods such as clothing, shoes, jewelry, beauty, toys, music, and movies, the comparison based on the price and ratings is not sufficient. For many categories such as clothing and jewelry, most merchants sell unique products, so price comaprison is useless. For this reason, the tradional comparison shopping websites such as Shopzilla.com and Shopping.com have not done well for these product categories. MyShoppingPal.com learns about user preferences and applies expert knowledge, and user ratings on it to find the items users will like from all stores and all brands.

For dress watches and prestige watches, MyShoppingPal.com has added intelligence about 400 premium brands into its personalized shopping search. This intelligence is combined with customer ratings and trends to help users find their prefect watches. MyShoppingPal.com also has the largest inventory of dress, prestige, and chronograph watches on the Internet. It gets products from all premium merchants. MyShoppingPal.com recommendations along with the best price comparison for watches on the Internet makes MyShoppingPal.com a must visit place for online watch shoppers.

For toys and games, MyShoppingPal.com matches the interest of the child with the toy theme, and incorporates toy popularity, safety analysis, and educational value analysis in its recommendations to help find toys that kids will love and parent will be happy with.  MyShoppingPal.com classifies toys into a number product types such as dolls, action figures, blocks, educational toys, and art & craft.

For music, movies, and video games, MyShoppingPal.com uses a an enahanced version of colloborative filtering to help customers find items they will love. Given the users interests, it find items that other users with the similar interests have bought. A popularity and customer rating criteria is applied on these items to shortlist items. This method works better than the traditional collaborative filtering used by many websites such as Amazon and Netflix for personalization. For computer and console video games, MyShoppingPal.com also looks at ESRB ratings of the games.

Top Deals Of The Week

In this holiday shopping season, almost all merchants have free shipping coupons. So don't forget to get coupon code from MyShoppingPal.com before you purchase any item online. Here are few deals paying attention to: 12% of any order over $120 at  Sierra Trading Post. Free shipping at  Macys's with the purchase over $99 Save additional 40% off on select items at Children's place.com  Buy 1 Get 1 Free at Fahsion Bug. 60% of brand name shoes at Shoes.com

How Does MyShoppingPal.com Find Perfect Women Shoes?

MyShoppingPal.com helps you find name brand shoes that will make you feel comfortable, go well with your body type and clothes, and the one that will make you feel special. The comfort factor depends on the fitting and the quality of the material of the shoes. The looking good factor for women shoes depends on your body type and the clothes that you will be wearing with. 

The section below discuss some of the factors that go into helping you find your perfect dress shoes, designer shoes, bridal shoes, or work shoes.  The analysis presented here gives you glimpse of what type of knowledge has been embedded in the system. It is not meant to be comprehensive. MyShoppingPal.com also has all premium brands such as Gucci, Prada, Fendi, UGG, Heelys, and Nine West and inventory from all online shoes merchants such as Zappos, Nordstorom, Shoes.com, Amazon, Endless, etc.

Trendy Shoe Styles

The most flattering shoe heels are the slim. While slim all around is best, you can have some width when looking at it from the back and still achieve leg-lengthening effect.  A tapered toe gives the slimmest look. If pointed toes are too uncomfortable, look for an oval or squared off shape.Thin sole creates the most slimming shoe. When looked at from the side, the sole should be thin no more than an eighth of an inch.

Body Type and Your Shoes

When you select shoes a few things depend on your body type and let’s discuss it first. For short women, the 2-3 inche heel shoes work best. Very high heels can make you look off balance. Use the rest of the outfit to elongate, by toning shoes to stockings and skirt or to socks and trousers. Match the tone of top to bottom for even more height. If you thick ankles and heavy calves, sling backs are the most flattering style. Knee high boots are also nice choice. Shoes that are too chunky or too delicate will make your legs look heavier. Avoid square toes, stiletto heels, wedges and platforms. If you have thick calves, avoid mid calf boots. If you long feet, the pointy shoes will make your legs look longer. An oval or squared toe works best for such shoes. Shape of the heels should match the shape of your body. If you are heavy, a skinny stiletto will exaggerate your weight. Thicker heel style is better option.

Clothes and Your Shoes

Here are the few pointers on how to match clothes with shoes:

1. Very long and very short skirts look better with lower heels.

2. Narrow pants look best with lower heels.

3. The heavier the shoe, the more casual it becomes.

4. When worn with a skirt, a high cut shoe can make the leg appear heavier and shorter. Wear high cut shoes with pants.

5. Usually a shoe should be the same color family as your outfit, but not an exact match.

6. Black is too heavy for lighter tones outfit and cut the leg length

7. White shoes are very stark and create break in the line of your leg. Try cream or ivory.

7. You can elongate the appearance of your legs by matching the tone of the hose to shoes. Matching hose to a brightly colored shoe is too much color and opt for skin colored hose.

Comfortable Shoes

Shoes comfort depends on three primary factors: the fitting, design, and material.

Fitting: When you buy a few pair of shoes, we know what size fits us well for different shoes brands. I would suggest to pay attention to both the size and the width of the shoes. For example, try 7B versus the 7 1/2 A.

Design: Depending on your height, the recommenced heel height that will make you feel comfortable is different. In general shorter and heavier the person, it becomes difficult to wear heels above two inches. If you want to wear heels more than two inches, do it in moderation. The kitten heels and Louis heels are good options for high heels shoes.

Material :Shoes chose made of breathable material so your feet gets the oxygen it needs, soft and flexible fabrics and leather to allow it greater freedom of movement, and a flexible and cushioned sole.

Shoes comfort is important for all types of shoes. MyShoppingPal.com gives extra weight on comfort, quality, and performance for sports shoes as an inappropriate shoes can cause injury.

Find Your Perfect Apparel with MyShoppingPal.com’s Smart Tools

According to study "The State of Retailing Online 2007" conducted by Forrester Research, the apparel category reached $18.3 billion in 2006 and it is first time it surpassed the money spent on Computers or Electronics. Even though the online sales of clothing, shoes and bags have increased significantly, these sales are just 2% of the total sales, and return rates are twice compared to other product categories.  Even today most people are averse to buying online,  because it is difficult for people to figure out whether an item is right or not. The reason behind high return rate is that consumers end up buying items which don’t suit them. So where is the solution?

To address this very problem of suitability, MyShoppingPal.com recently started public beta for a personalized shopping engine which helps users find what works well for them. This personalized shopping search engine is able to find the right product for you with the help of experts’ knowledge and by taking care of your style and preferences. Its ability to find suitable products works wonderfully in all apparel sub categories clothing, shoes, bags, jewelry and watches, giving you a feeling of an expert walking along with you to help you find your perfect items. MyShoppingpal.com also has incorporated the brand intelligence for a number of products such women jeans to further enhance its recommendation engine. We all are unique in our own ways, be it body type or style personality. So things that look good on someone else may not look good on you. And this is where MyShoppingPal.com helps you to find the product which works for you from body type, personal style and your personal preferences point of view. All this is done with the help of experts who have knowledge of “how each and every attribute of a product can affect its suitability for you”. On the basis of this knowledge, each and every product is rated for its suitability for you. This rating can help you to find the “right” product from zillions of choices made possible by the Internet.

For example, if you are buying a formal dress, evening dress, or a designer dress,  MyShoppingPal will use experts’ knowledge to rate each and every dress for you. The attributes of the dress like its sleeve type, neckline, color, fabric, and fitting contribute to the score of the product for you. Similarly for men shirt, MyShoppingPal will analyze its attributes like collar type, color, fabric, pattenrs, and sleeve length in measuring its score.

Along with following the experts’ recommendations, you can express your own preferences by indicating your likes or dislikes for a particular product based on its attributes. This continuous expression of your interest will train the shopping engine to show results as per your choice and taste. For example, if you don’t like black black dresses, you can indicate it so that the site will not show you black dresses again.

While other traditional shopping sites not only fail to help you in finding the “right” product but they rather confuse you with thousands of products and no way to find the better ones. Out of this confusion, MyShoppingPal.com lends a helping hand  to make shopping much faster and easier.

MyShoppingPal is also a gateway to all name brands for apparel such as Nocole Miller, Jones, New York, Donna Ricck, Gap, Calvin Klein, Diesel, Ralph Lauren, Alezander Mc Queen, Diane Von Furstenberg, Dolce & Gabbana. Guess, etc.