Modern Life

In the morning, I slather my entire body with this:

And then later, I slather my entire body with this:

Is it just me, or does this strike anyone else as mildly ridiculous?

::sigh::

Waste Not, Want Not

So here's a product I use:

I really like this stuff. It's a microbead scrub that I really feel makes a difference in my skin. It's gentle enough that I can use it every day, it has a nice smell, and it's not a terribly expensive product. As a matter of fact, it's really a bit of a bargain (you can click the photo to get some for yourself) at $5.99 a tube. But. The packaging...

Ooooooh, I really think there may be a special circle of hell just for packaging designers. We've all struggled with this kind of tube, right? It's very rigid plastic that squeezes down pretty successfully until you get to the bottom where it attaches to the nozzle thingie. At which point, you just can't smash it any smaller without mighty exertions and contortions, and when I'm standing in the shower with wet hands it becomes next to impossible. Usually I just get fed up & throw the thing away, even though I suspect there are several more applications of whatever product is in there, but I start thinking, "Oh, it's just not worth it!" and give up. What's even worse, the plastic of this particular tube is somewhat transparent, so I didn't just suspect that there was a good deal left in that tube, I could see it. Which really grated my cheese.

Now. This may seem extremely silly: fussing over a few dollops of a $6 product while my closet is stocked with shoes that in some cases cost more than my rent. But the waste of it really ticks me off. And even worse than that is the feeling that the company is trying to play me: they put 5 ounces of product in that tube, but they know I can't use all of them, so I'm going to have to buy another tube that much faster. Grrrrr...

Well, I showed them!

I marched that bad boy into the kitchen and whipped out my trusty kitchen shears, cut off the top and along the sides



And scooped all of the leftover scrub out of there with my skinniest spatula. (Be careful if you do this -- the cut edges of that plastic were sharp.)

Victory!

How much did I get? This much:


1.25 ounces. Yep. Fully 25% of the product I had purchased that I would have otherwise had to toss into the bin. I'm pretty sure this is going to get me through another two to three weeks of face scrubbin'.

While we're on the subject of product sizes & packaging, you know what else bugs me? Nail polish. I don't believe I have ever gotten through more than half a bottle of nail polish before it turned too hopelessly goopy to use, even with judiciously added drops of remover used as thinner. Why don't they make the bottles half as big and charge us half as much? (What a silly question, I know.) Honestly, even if they didn't lower the price, I'd probably feel better about it just because I didn't throw half of it away -- I'd feel that I was at least getting to use what I'd paid for.

So how about you guys? What's your pet packaging peeve?

Photos: Beauty.com, Style Spy

Slave to Goo

Every night when I perform my nocturnal ablutions, I gather up all my products in a little assembly on the bathroom counter and begin the process, working through my roster of creams, goos, potions & lotions. The other day it occurred to me to tally up all the various products I use, and I was semi-shocked to find that that number is seven.

Seven!



Does this seem like a lot? Does this make me a slave to my goo? Have I bought into the Beauty Industry Myth? Am I a product whore?

In my defense, my daytime routine is much more streamlined than this:


an all-over facial moisturizer and a sunscreen. If I'm feeling particularly crinkly, I'll use an extra dab of eye cream. And every other day in the shower I use a micro-whatsis scrub (also Garnier).

Honestly, while I'm performing my routine, it doesn't seem excessive. I wash my face with Cetaphil, use that brilliant Almay remover to get whatever eye makeup the Cetaphil missed, then I hit the vitamin C serum. I was using the Bliss Sleeping Peel Serum, which I loved, but the stuff was $60 an ounce. So now I've replaced it with the Garnier Skin Renew Serum, and I like it just as well. (Plus, it's 12 bucks for 1.7 ounces, and my math is shaky, but it's at least good enough to figure that out. I do wish Garnier would lay off the fragrance a little, though -- their products all smell like fruit baskets.) Full disclosure: I alternate the serum every other night with a version of Retin-A cream that was also much less than the Bliss product. (Ah, we love those Mexican farmacias.) When the products are less costly, I'm not so miserly in using them, and I also don't feel bad about putting them on my neck & décolletage as well as my face, which is important when you're a giraffe like me. After the serum comes the moisturizer, then the eye, lip & neck treatments. Which might seem excessive to some, but I am positively devoted to my Clarins lip treatment -- that stuff is magic. It seriously reduced the fine lines around my mouth, I swear. (I'm a Clarins devotée in general, you may notice. Their products really agree with my skin and I think that once you find a line that works for you, you should stick to it.)

So I dunno. Is the industry (the Cosmetic-Beauty Industrial Complex, as it were) pulling a fast one on me? Or am I hallucinating that I actually look not-too-shabby for a 42-year old person? It helps, I'm sure, that my mother drilled the necessity for sunscreen into me when I was just a whipper (and a few spectacular and excruciating sunburns when I was a kid really drove the point home). I never, EVER leave the house (especially living where I live) without an application of the Clarins UV Plus -- that stuff is brilliant and I don't care how much it costs, I'll never stop using it. So I wonder -- are all these products really doing what I think they're doing, or am I a victim of marketing and magical thinking? What do you think?

Tell ya what: tell me how many products you use every night & morning in the comments box. I'll draw a name randomly from the comments Tuesday morning and whomever wins will get a little package from Style Spy with a buncha fun product samples I've accumulated to try out. Also, let us know your holy grail skincare product -- the one thing they would have to pry from your cold dead cream-applying fingers before you'd give it up.

Have a good weekend, everyone! Wear your sunscreen!!

Photos: Style Spy

LOOT!

Well, I didn't have the best day yesterday, but it was considerably brightened by a FedEx box that was waiting at my front door and contained this:


Excellent schwag from Max Factor! This teaches us that A) the power of the Interweb (that magical series of tubes) is pretty darned awesome and B) Karma extends to cosmetics!

The day after my (wholly unsolicited, I promise) rave review of Max Factor Lash Perfection mascara I received a nice e-mail from a young woman at the firm who handles their public relations thanking me for my kind words and offering to send me some other new products to try. Well, I'm no fool -- I said sure. So this post is less unsolicited, but don't worry, I'm not in the pocket of Big Mascara quite yet.

There's all kinds of fun stuff in here and a few things I'm really looking forward to trying, including two tubes of their Lash Perfection Volume Couture Mascara.




I'm not exactly sure yet how this differs from the straight-up Lash Perfection that I already have, but I'm looking forward to finding out. It has the same kind of brush that the original has, which is a big part of the appeal for me. Thing is, I just bought a brand new tube of the other stuff this weekend, and I don't want to open the new one just yet (mascara starts to degrade the moment you expose it to air). So I'm going to make the extra tube available here. Just leave me a comment (with your name -- ahem!!) saying you want to be eligible and I'll do a drawing Saturday morning. If I pick your name, I'll send you the mascara, but you have to promise to write & let me know what you think of it. (The color, by the way, is Soft Black.) I'm also thrilled to find out they have this in Auburn, which is a wonderful everyday color for redheads like myself.)

The thing I am trying out presently is the MAXWear Lipcolor. It's one of those double-ended tubey glosses with a sponge app -- one end is a long-wearing color and the other is a gloss. I'd given up on the long-wearing lip colors quite a while ago, because they made my mouth feel as though I'd painted it with the same latex-based stuff that's on my bathroom cabinets, but this actually feels okay. I'm testing it in a color called Cinnamon & Sugar, which is a lovely light brownie-pink (sort of a my-lips-but-better color) that has a sparkly clear gloss. So far, I'm through my second cup of coffee and the color is still there, although the gloss is long gone. Bonus -- the gloss tastes like marshmallows! The real test will be if it survives my lunch of leftover palak paneer. Stay tuned!


And now -- my next unsolicited (I swear) rave, for this stuff:


Bliss Sleeping Peel Serum. Oy, vey, I love this goo. A friend got a bottle in some schwag and handed it over to me to try and baby, I am hooked on the junk. I really wish it didn't cost 60 damn dollars an ounce, but I'm here to to tell you that I am going to pony up. It's one of those antioxidant exfoliator thingies and it really did make a difference in my skin. No one is mistaking me for a young Catherine Deneuve or anything, but to me it was noticeable.

(Unnecessarily beautiful. Unreasonably so, even.)

So is this a not-very-opaque attempt to get the folks at Bliss to send me more juice? Hell, yes! After squirting this stuff on me every day for a few weeks I'll happily put pretty much anything they squish into a bottle, tub, or tube on myself. So there! My crass commercialism knows no bounds, because unfortunately my bank account does.

Oooooh, so much to do before I leave on Monday. Posting may get spotty for a bit, friends, as I race around trying to line up my travel ducks. Bear with me.


Photos: Style Spy, MaxFactor.com, Blissworld.com, Geocities