If you secretly sashay across your living room when you're home alone or long to cha-cha with your significant other, you're in luck. Not only is dancing an exceptional way to let loose and have fun, but it also provides some terrific benefits for your health.

In fact, Mayo Clinic researchers reported that social dancing helps to:

• Reduce stress
• Increase energy
• Improve strength
• Increase muscle tone and coordination

Lips tend to dry out the fastest at this time of year. Be sure to keep them covered with a good lip balm applied several times during the day. Warm sesame oil will also soothe your lips .

Avoid licking your lips and don't bite the skin on the surface of your lips. The skin will never have a chance to heal if you chew on it. This is a hard habit to break but well worth the effort. Lip balms are nowadays commonly available and some with a SPF factor as well to protect them from the harmful rays.

Luxurious rich fabrics and antique brocade fabrics, metallic lustre and rich satins and the plushest of velvets bring a new opulence to winter. Rich colours are often interpreted with dyed materials like velvets that move through related colours. Imagine burnt orange merging with reds through to claret in Ombre dyed velvet. Such a velvet is then over printed in toning colours or textured with embroidery. Velvet as well as being plush and deeply rich can also have texture and is generally gorgeous this winter with an antique vintage feel.

Old news, but interesting. Harry Potter author JK Rowling has found an unlikely ally in rock chick Pink in her attack against stick-thin models. The mother-of-three has attacked modern women's obsession with weight, brandishing models as "empty headed, self-obsessed, emancipated clones."

The writer, who has sold more than 300 million copies of her books worldwide, also admits she fears for her two daughters, Jessica, 12, and 15-month-old Mackenzie, growing up in a "skinny obsessed world."

Her attacks came after the multi-millionaire read an interview with a young model. She wrote on her website: "She can talk about eating absolutely loads, being terribly busy and having the world's fastest metabolism until her tongue drops off (Hooray! Another couple of ounces gone!)." "But her concave stomach, protruding ribs and stick-like arms tell a different story. This girl needs help but the world being what it is they're sticking her on magazine covers." Speaking about her daughters, she added: "I'd rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny - a thousand things before thin."