Of all the new social distancing hobbies popping up on Instagram, learning how to tie-dye your clothes has to be the happiest. Making sourdough bread is time-consuming (and, dare I say, a little anti-climactic), becoming a pro barista involves a lot of gadgets, and learning to knit can be a bit sedentary (albeit highly therapeutic). Sure, you could just buy a tie-dye sweatsuit or sweater, but since you’re not exactly doing anything right now, why not get yourself an at-home tie-dye kit and make your own wearable work of art?
The best tie-dye kits come with everything you need: rubber bands, disposable gloves, and a rainbow of color—just add a blank canvas. Your favorite white t-shirt, a pair of comfy denim, some squeaky clean sneakers will do. The world is your multicolored oyster. So go ahead, shop 11 tie-dye kits to add some color to your weekend.
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If your fitness, social, or grooming routine has fallen by the wayside amid the COVID-19 pandemic, you’re not alone. Self-care products that replace your standing salon appointments—like the best home waxing kits—can help you build a new personal care regimen and regain some sense of normalcy.
Unless you’re quarantined with an esthetician or a hairstylist, you’re probably wondering when your next bang trim or bikini wax will be—and while you may not be quite so adventurous as to pick up the shears yourself, you can keep unwanted body hair at bay with a quality at-home waxing kit. Plus, DIY-ing a wax can save you a lot of money over time, so whether you’re trying to nix hairs from your upper lip or are looking to take it all the way off, there’s pre-cut strips, wax pots, and wax warmers out there for your next self-care session.
Finding reliable personal grooming products can get a bit, um, hairy, so we scoured the web for the best home waxing kits reviewers are obsessed with. Because if there’s one thing you may not want to be the first to test out, it’s hot body wax. Here are 9 top-rated wax kits to shop now.
All products featured on Glamour are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
The cost of rape may be incalculable—but this wasn’t supposed to be part of it.
New York hospitals illegally billed survivors for hundreds of forensic rape examinations, a new investigation by state Attorney General Barbara Underwood finds.
In a deal first shared with Glamour, seven hospitals have signed a settlement with Underwood’s office to pay back sexual assault survivors who were charged for their rape exams and to set up new policies to keep it from happening again.
“Survivors of sexual assault have already gone through unfathomable trauma; to then subject them to illegal bills and collection calls is unconscionable,” Underwood said in a statement provided to Glamour. “Hospitals have a fundamental responsibility to comply with New York law. My office will continue to do everything in our power to protect survivors and their rights.”
The seven hospitals in the settlement, according to the attorney general: Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center, Columbia University, Montefiore Nyack Hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Richmond University Medical Center, and St. Barnabas Hospital.
Settlement documents reviewed by Glamour said the hospitals didn’t admit or deny breaking the law, but that they agreed to repay patients who were improperly billed and also to adopt written policies that make clear survivors are not to receive bills for rape exams.
PHOTO: Tetra Images
“Survivors of sexual assault have already gone through unfathomable trauma; to then subject them to illegal bills and collection calls is unconscionable,” says New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood.
New York law says hospitals that provide services to sexual assault survivors—including forensic exams, commonly called rape kits—are supposed to send bills directly to the state’s Office of Victim Services (unless a patient chooses otherwise).
That system is supposed to protect survivors’ privacy by making it less likely that a relative or employer might learn they sought medical help. The added layer of confidentiality ideally encourages more people to agree to undergo the exams—which means more physical evidence that can help police find attackers.
But the new investigation found that in the case of these hospitals, that process went awry.
Instead, at least 200 forensic rape examinations conducted by the health care providers were billed to patients or their insurance companies. Amounts ranged from approximately $46 to $3,000, an Underwood aide said. The hospitals also repeatedly failed to inform survivors about their billing options, according to the settlements. In some cases, the bills were sent to collection agencies whose job it was to chase down the outstanding balance.
PHOTO: Deborah Jaffe
Forensic rape examinations at seven hospitals got wrongly billed to patients or their insurers, Underwood’s office says.
Last year the New York attorney general’s office settled with Brooklyn Hospital after an investigation that started when a patient came forward to say she had been billed—not once, but seven times—for care associated with a sexual assault case.
Underwood is the first woman to serve as New York attorney general. She took over the state’s top law enforcement job on an interim basis earlier this year after Eric Schneiderman resigned amid a flurry of accusations of abusing women, which he publicly contested. In this year’s midterm elections, New Yorkers elected Letitia James to become the first black woman in state history to fill the role. James will take office in January.
It remains to be seen whether the New York settlement will encourage fresh investigations or changes in hospital and clinic rape-kit billing elsewhere, but the problem is not new, with past controversies reported from Arkansas to Alaska.
For now, Underwood’s office encourages anyone with questions about their New York hospital billing to contact its health care bureau at 800-428-9071.
Celeste Katz is senior political reporter for Glamour. Send news tips, questions, and comments to celeste_katz@condenast.com.
In August 2009, a group of local officials were on a routine tour of a police storage warehouse in Detroit when an assistant prosecutor noticed a mountain of boxes overwhelming the shelves. Curious, an official asked what was inside. Little did they know that the question would lead to the discovery of thousands of unprocessed rape kits.
‘Testing kits sends a fundamental and crucial message to survivors that says you matter. And not testing the kits sends a message you don’t.’—Mariska Hargitay
Years of playing Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims’ Unit inspired Hargitay to assume a second role as a real-life advocate for survivors of sexual assault and other crimes. In 2004, she founded the Joyful Heart Foundation to support survivors of sexual assault. And on April 16, she’s bringing the backlog to an even wider audience with I Am Evidence, a documentary on the crisis produced she produced, that will debut on HBO.
“Behind every kit there’s a person waiting for justice,” Hargitay tells Glamour. “Testing kits sends a fundamental message and message to survivors that says you matter. What happens to you matters and your case matters—and not testing the kits sends a message you don’t.”
The award-winning film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, captures the heartbreaking scope of the problem as well as the ways it impacts both the delivery of justice and the psyches of the survivors whose cases have languished. Hargitay says she hopes the film will “spark outrage” and action on the issue.
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“People assume that when a woman goes through a four- to six-hour, often retraumatizing, examination of collecting evidence—when her body is a crime scene—that that box gets tested. That is not the case,” Hargitay says. “Justice isn’t being served,” she adds. “Everyone deserves justice.”
The failure to properly track and test the evidence can create major problems for police and prosecutors trying to get attackers off the streets. Untested kits may mean crucial DNA isn’t going into a national database that could be used to apprehend serial rapists commiting crimes across state lines. Beyond that, the treatment of the evidence—and, by extension, the cases and women and men they are tied to—can have an even bigger, sometimes chilling effect on survivors and their willingness to come forward following a violent crime: without confidence that they will be believed and their case will be investigated properly, some survivors might never report their rapes.
There may be more deeply entrenched factors behind the backlog that are harder to solve: a culture of victim blaming and a lack of understanding about how the trauma of assault impacts those who are attacked.
“I call it all the time ‘the neglected child of violent crime,’ because if we were talking about homicides—cold case homicides—we wouldn’t be having this discussion. People would throw resources at it,” Kym Worthy, a Michigan county prosecutor whose efforts to address the backlog in Detroit are featured in the film, told Glamour in an interview. “But because it’s sexual assault—because it’s a crime that happens overwhelmingly to women—people just don’t care.”
“If you look at this issue across this country you will find that most of these [untested] kits are found in communities of color…” Worthy tells Glamour. “As prosecutors we know that and we know that people look at crimes that happen of victims of color, especially women, differently and treat them differently.”
But the backlog problem is also a basic one for all survivors: police departments and crime labs often lack clear policies and sufficient resources to deal with the evidence. Some states, including Massachusetts, reportedly don’t require testing or tracking of the kits at all. To address these lapses, Hargitay and her Joyful Heart Foundation have been pushing for comprehensive rape evidence reform legislation—including mandatory testing of new and old kits, enhanced funding, and an annual audit—in all 50 states by 2020.
They’ve seen encouraging progress in recent years. In 2016, 19 states took some sort of action to address the issue. Last year, Texas became the first state to adopt the comprehensive package proposed by Joyful Hearts. And on the federal level, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen successfully pushed for passage of a Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, which codifies survivors’ rights to have their evidence kits preserved.
“As painful as all of this is, and we have so much work to do, this is fixable if we change these laws,” Hargitay says.
But it’s worth noting that there may be even more deeply entrenched factors behind the backlog that are harder to solve: a culture of victim blaming and a lack of understanding about how the trauma of assault impacts those who are attacked. Too many police officers still doubt victims if the case doesn’t fit into a neatly confined narrative. And many people, Hargitay and Worthy say, don’t fully appreciate the trauma that survivors of violent sex crimes have experienced. “We don’t really think about the pain and the endurance that each victim has,” Worthy, who has spoken about her own assault during law school, says. “It is bravery beyond measure.”
Every time someone sees this film, we’re talking about a potential juror.
While the documentary began filming back in 2014, its widespread release happens to coincide with the crescendo of the #MeToo movement that has increased awareness of how pervasive harassment and assault truly are. Hargitay and Worthy see that broader dialogue as a step in the right direction. And I Am Evidence serves as a raw and crucial contribution to that conversation: a powerful testament to the importance of the bearing witness to survivors’ experiences and the deep pain the mishandling of these cases can cause.
Two women featured in the film, one from Ohio and one from California, were attacked by the same long-distance trucker more than 2,000 miles apart. Helena, who lived in Los Angeles, waited more than a decade for her assailant to be identified because of an untested evidence kit. By the time that finally happened, the statute of limitations on prosecuting him for rape had passed. In the documentary, she says, through tears, “I can’t understand what was so unimportant about me.”
Hargitay and Worthy hope that seeing survivors tell their stories and seek justice in the documentary will leave a lasting impression a wide audience. “Every time someone sees this film we are talking about a potential juror,” Worthy says.
Beyond that, they hope the film sends a message to survivors that their experiences matter.
“I’m just so grateful that we’re turning up the volume on survivors’ voices, on women of colors’ voices, on voices that have been marginalized that, thank God, are hopefully …not being marginalized anymore,” Hargitay says. “Women’s voices need to be heard.” And projects like I Am Evidence are giving them the megaphone they need.
I AM EVIDENCE debuts MONDAY, APRIL 16 (8:00-9:30 p.m. ET/PT) on HBO. The film will also be available on HBO On Demand, HBO NOW, HBO Go and partners’ streaming platforms.
There’s no arguing Kylie Jenner broke the category of lip kits wide open—since their launch in 2015, plenty of major brands have followed suit with their own versions. Given that they make putting on lipstick fast and easy, it’s not hard to see why. Instead of stalking the aisles of Sephora for an exact liner color match or swatching gloss after gloss in search of the perfect finish, just grab a lip kit (often conveniently packaged in a cute, travel-friendly tin or pouch) like the dozen Glamour editor-tested ones below. These 12 kits run the full gamut from primer, liner, gloss duos, and trios to sets of cult favorite colors that blend into custom signature shades. Meet your match, ahead.
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