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Wednesday, February 25, 2004 ( 10:44 PM ) Girl Detective Trial and Errors As mentioned in my previous post, I have begun to use up my store of cosmetic swag. I also took a trip and so was able to use a whopping two products there. And in the spirit of sharing knowledge, I want to let you know what I found out. Baffling product: DuWop's Lip Venom. Seems to use acid or spice to irritate the skin on the lips to give it a red tint under the gloss. Unsurprisingly, rather unpleasant. Tries to be clever, but ends up just stupid. News flash. Most face creams are unpleasantly smelly and at best can be said to do no harm. I've tried the following, with one notable exception that I'll leave till the end. Creme de la Mer cream: thick, doesn't sink in well, mild perfume, no noticeable improvement in skin texture. Lancome Resolution D Contraxol: HEAVY perfume, good texture, and fairly good results after a few days. I wouldn't necessarily pay for it, but I might seek out another GWP (gift with purchase) that contained it. Natura Bisse Essential Shock Concentrate with isoflavones. Initial smell isn't bad, but the aftersmell is suspiciously urine-esque. No noticeable improvement in skin. La Prairie eye cream: fine, no noticeable improvement Kiehl's light eye cream: same as above La Mer eye cream: ditto La Mer face wash: suspiciously, unnaturally foamy. Mild smell. Fine cleanser. Darphin Arovita contour eye and lip gel: baffling combo, says it's for the skin around the eyes and lips, yet mine broke out when I used it on the latter. Strong perfume reminds me of college, don't know why. Same results as above as eye cream. Sisley Ecological Compound: heavy perfume, fine moisturizer. The one thing so far that's worked well? Sisley Sisleya Elixir. I got two small tubes. The directions said to use five drops, but it was a cream, so I wasn't sure what constituted a drop, so I used the entire very small package once it was open, since it was a sample. The package said to use it over a week. So either the package was for a regular amount, or I used a week's worth at once. No strong perfume, and overnight my skin begged me to start using trite ad copy: fine lines were visibly reduced, my skin looked firmer, fuller, younger. So how much is this product if purchased normally? $300 for 4 vials. I think I'll just cherish the memories of how good my skin looked, and continue trying other samples. | Thursday, February 19, 2004 ( 9:18 PM ) Girl Detective Better late than never Now, as a breastfeeding mom, I'm all for public nipples How's that for an opening? OK, so it's been weeks now since the Superbowl and Janet Jackson's nipple, and all the outrage but mine has been vented. In the meantime I've been caring for a baby, so I'm a little slow. Not quite tracking. Working on something of a time delay. I have a point. Here it is. Janet Jackson's nipple highlights all that's wrong with public breasts, or boobs as we've come to call them in our home. While some states protect breastfeeding moms, there's still a significant percentage of people out there who get in a lather over public boobs, even if they're being used in their intended, sustenance-giving purpose. And it's stupid, hyper-sexualized breasts like Janet's that fan the flames of outrage against all public boobs. Janet's pierced nipple, with decorative shield sitting atop an artificially engorged breast, has nothing to do with mothering. It's about pain, it's about artifice, it's about tacky, calculated sex for hire. And her flaunting of it makes it all the more likely that the next time I need to breastfeed my baby in public, some conservative is going to get their undies in a snit, instead of supporting me while I try to feed my baby in the way that's most healthy for him. Gah. The Jacksons. Don't you wish they'd get banished to an island of their own, and never darken the door of the rest of the world again? Let them foist their weird freakishness on each other, not us. | Friday, February 13, 2004 ( 1:24 PM ) Girl Detective Cosmetic GWPs, or Be Careful What You Wish For I've written before on my, ahem, problem with cosmetic gifts with purchase. I wait for them, I plan, I plot how to get the greatest bang for my cosmetic buck, I get the swag, I bring it home.... And it sits. In its cute, seasonal bag, gathering dust in the closet. Why? Well, there are a couple reasons. The obvious one is the thrill of the chase--the excitement of wanting and buying exceeds that of having. The urgency is gone. Another is the pack rat tendency. Oh, I WANT to use this Creme de la Mer sample, but why don't I save it for when I take my next trip? Problem with this? Last trip was a while ago, don't know when next one is, and the sample sits there, quietly growing old and likely to be forgotten even when I do take a trip. Finally, there's the uselessness factor. Oh, sure, it looks like I've got a nice handful of cool Laura Mercier samples, but I've got two--two!--tubes of foundation primer. How often do I wear foundation? Can't remember the last time I did. Solutions? I've got three. One, use 'em if I've got 'em. Two, stop acquiring the damn things. And three, which I haven't yet tried but which has begun to attain grail-like status in my head: eBay. The idea of getting paid to get rid of unwanted swag, instead of it sitting here, mocking me with its uselessness, reminding me of my cosmetic character flaws, is quite enticing. And thus also suspect. But since I'm too busy to try it, the eBay solution will probably remain a fantasy. I better stick with one and two. | Tuesday, February 10, 2004 ( 8:53 PM ) Girl Detective What's hot I was helplessly enslaved to an episode of VH1s "I Love the 80s Strikes Back" when a lucid thought pierced my crack-like-TV addled brain. The male ideal has changed a lot. Back then, hairy guys like Tom Selleck and Matt Horsley were hot, both for women and men. Same goes for Gil Gerard of Buck Rogers, and Harrison Ford in Star Wars. Go back a bit further and the ideal was the same; you've got Burt Reynolds on a bear skin rug in Cosmo, and Captain Kirk tearing up the universe. Back then, the male ideal had hair on the chest, often on the face and was in his mid-thirties at least. Now, though, what is it? It's Ashton Kutcher, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt. Hardly a group of the most masculine men--in fact they tend, oft on purpose, to the girly sometimes. They're pretty, they're less hairy, they're younger. Dan Savage, the sex writer of the column Savage Love, contends that gay males set the male ideal for both the sexes. True or not, it's interesting to see that the ideal has shifted dramatically over the last two decades--not so for females, where the ideal remains largely the same: thin, blond and pretty. The topic of metrosexuality has been flogged ad nauseum, but I think that the new trend is interesting because of how recently it's arrived, and how opposite it is to what went before. | Thursday, February 05, 2004 ( 8:57 PM ) Girl Detective Real Simple is the devil I used to subscribe to Real Simple. It was pretty and seemed to have good stuff. But then I noticed that I couldn't remember one thing from the magazine, so it was all fluff and no loss. Also, I read that one way to actually simplify ones life is to ditch all magazine subscriptions. So I did, and it helped. I read a recent issue that contained two things that made me think that it is actually harmful and not just fluff. One was an article by an author about how her mother had always sought simplicity systems, only to watch each fail and discover in the end that humor and creativity, not systems, were what brought happiness. Yet the rest of the magazine is filled with just such silly systems. The silliest of all was in a feature on unexpected uses for household objects. Milk--breakfast beverage or fish poacher? But the one that made me drop my jaw was lighbulb as ribbon de-wrinkler. Sister, if you have to de-wrinkle your ribbon, you're life ain't never gonna be simple. Give it up now. There was a lovely absurd character in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride, who had a store called Scrimpers and sold such bargain items as flower dryers and coffee roasters, so one could simplify, save money and do it oneself. And we're back where I started. The best way to simplify is to ignore Real Simple and not subscribe to anything. Yet I can't help buying Lucky. Sigh. It's a curse. | |
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