Top Tips for Girls: Real advice from real women for real Life »

KATE REARDON is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and has worked for Vogue and Tatler. Visit her website at toptips.com.

REAL LIFE MADE EASIER

In today’s lifestyle guru–obsessed world, where we all turn to magazines and TV personalities to teach us how to organize our lives, cook, look, and live better, it’s refreshing to hear clever, who-would’ve-thunk-it suggestions from regular women.

In Top Tips for Girls, today’s primer for women in the know, Kate Reardon has collected just that—literally hundreds of tips on all areas of our lives, be it raising kids, staying fit, dressing well, planning a wedding, gardening, dating, dieting, traveling, or working. Far from garden variety, the tips you’ll find here are surprising—the sort that women used to get word-of-mouth from their own moms, grandmothers, aunts, and best friends. Some of the many helpful, and even hilarious, tips you’ll read here include:

•To avoid blisters from new shoes, coat your feet with Vaseline.
•Invest in a certain number of “nice” hangers. When you start having to use the metal ones from the dry cleaner, it’s time to clean out your closet.
•Impress guests with homemade-tasting mayonnaise by adding fresh lemon juice and capers or thyme to ordinary mayo.
•Perk up wilted ferns by spraying them once a month with weak tea.
•To find your car in an unfamiliar area, use the camera on your cell phone to take a picture of the nearest street sign.
•Tone up your butt by squeezing it in quick reps of fifty while watching TV.
•To safely dispose of receipts and bank statements without buying a shredder, simply keep a container of water to pop them in and let them dissolve.

And many more!