Month: August 2015

trend whore

Face oils, double-cleansing, cushion compacts, contouring, contouring and highlighting, strobing, Korean skincare, brows on fleek (shudder – I’m sorry). It used to take a solid year or two for trends to work their way from the coasts inward to middle America. It’s quite incredible how this has changed. (Get off my lawn!) We could blame the internet, but I think it’s her bratty little sister, social media, that’s truly responsible. It would suck to be a skincare and/or makeup manufacturer today. Not only do you have to watch emerging trends with an eagle eye, you’ve got to have the resources to concoct and shit out a competitive product in the blink of an eye. Then, you’ve got to make sure your production and ingredients can stand up to the inevitable dissection that will take place across multiple platforms by self-important, otherwise uneducated individuals with loud voices. Seriously, this sucks. But I digress.

This frantic pace has led to a lot of what I find really silly products and services. Take eyelash extensions. You have to go something like every two weeks, at $75 a pop. As extravagant and superfluous as I can be, even I say really? Nail art? Same deal — pricey, time consuming, will need to be redone before you get your next period. No. I realize this is probably a function of me being a) a busy professional who b) has very little tolerance for going out in public. But still! That’s crazy money and time for something that is so temporary and insignificant.

So you can imagine how I feel about face masks. Not regular old, smear-on-allow-to-dry-wash-off masks, but those sheet masks, the ones that make you look like a serial killer, require at least twenty minutes of princess style inactivity, and are sold by the individual mask for upwards of four bucks apiece. I think they’re silly. Plus, most of the ones I’ve seen lean more towards the “moisturizing” end of the spectrum, which is horrifying to someone like me who naturally generates tidal waves of grease. So when I received a Dr Jart hydrating sheet mask in this month’s Birchbox, I sort of tucked it behind a bunch of sunscreen samples in the bathroom, not being real stoked about it. However, I must admit, there’s been some recent photos of me looking more on the haggard side, and the common denominator is that my skin looked sort of flat and dull, even in areas where I didn’t diligently apply my Becca mattifying primer. So when my SO ran out to do a couple errands this weekend (read: when I could be alone for half an hour to look stupid in peace and quiet), I thought, what the hell, Dr. Jart. Let’s give you a whirl.

I hated the way it felt, in my hands and on my face, slimy and goopy. The sheet was heavy and sticky and slid all over whenever I made a facial expression or talked. The product was everywhere, getting into my hair which I had just washed, virtually seeping out of the sheet, everywhere. The eye and mouth cutouts nowhere near matched my according anatomic features, making me wonder if my face was super fucked up or something. It was claustrophobic and cold, and that’s in a marginally well air conditioned house when the outdoor ambient temperature was at least 105 degrees. It basically drove me batty and when I saw my SO pull in the driveway ten or fifteen minutes later, I was happy to yank it off even though my time wasn’t up. I gladly dropped it in the trash can, where it landed with a wet plop, and I got to business rubbing the rest of the slimy shit into my face, neck, chest, and hands. Then my SO started making margaritas, so I forgot about it and went about my business.

  
When I looked in the mirror a few hours later, though, I got served a giant steaming plate of crow. My skin looked AH-mazing. Luminous, glowing, but not greasy. I couldn’t believe it. The few fine lines I have were practically unnoticeable. I almost hated to put my nighttime crap on top of it, lest I ruin the luminescence. This morning, I did my usual a.m. wash followed by P50, and somehow, through all that, my skin still looked better than usual. Unreal!

So, just what I needed — another step to add to my already convoluted and high-maintenance skin routine. What products/services have you poo-pooed and begrudgingly tried, only to end up surprised at how much you love it? 

barney’s beauty bag sept 2015 … tick, tock

Eeeeeeee!!!! It’s almost that time again. Barney’s fall beauty event is September 8-12, when a $200 purchase gets you a big bag chock full o’ high end samples (details to follow). Anything on the cosmetics floor counts — that means candles, home fragrances, etc. are included. (Perfect, since fall is the perfect time to reload on my very favorite home scent.)

In the meantime, what are you going to get? Lots of brands have really nice step up gifts with a purchase at a certain dollar amount — I’m looking forward to the details and will share when I learn more.

how it all began

My bathroom looks like a Sephora sample refugee camp. There is just no way around this. If I don’t put a sample out where I can see it, I forget about it and it languishes for all perpetuity, a wasted existence. Needless to say, the samples tend to accumulate faster than I can go through them, and like dust bunnies or cockroaches, they appear to multiply. My SO has wisely learned to just shut his mouth and look the other way, but the other day he just stopped and looked and said, “How exactly did you get so obsessed with your skin? I don’t remember you being this way [when we first dated back in college]”.

Well, no, in college I drove a Jeep with its top off for most of the year and mastered the art of driving a stick shift, maneuvering a beverage, and smoking at the same time. I had grown up rather isolated where my sole feminine role model was my mother, whose idea of skincare was a good tan, O.G. Oil of Olay, and regular enthusiastic use of a Buf Puf. She never wore much makeup to speak of and believed all hair issues could be solved with braids and/or a bandana. (Okay, I still subscribe to this.) I didn’t have sisters or cousins or girlfriends to teach me the art of makeup growing up, so I had catching up to do in college. (The catching up extended into medical school, wherein I had an extended phase of turquoise glitter eyeliner, something most women outgrow at age 17, not 27.) I learned a good deal of makeup skills in college from a girl from Texas, who espoused “the higher the hair, the closer to God” as she teased her ash-blond bob into frothy perfection. I could never tell if she was kidding about the God part. We would throw things (bras, eggs) off her 7th floor balcony at passersby and then go do our makeup. We even did one of our guy friends, just half his face, all blue eyeshadow and glossy red lips, and then took a ton of shitty pictures with a disposable camera after he agreed to the clip on earrings and feathered hat, making kissy duck faces 20 years before we had a name for it. Ah, the 90s.

The fun and games continued into medical school and even slightly beyond. The glitter eyeliner, the rockabilly red lips, the swinging pendulum of hair color from blonde to red, red to blonde. It literally never occurred to me that these sorts of shenanigans might be not entirely appropriate for the professional workplace, OR that they might look silly on someone pushing 30. Hashtag arrested development, okay? I know. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I continued tanning through the first part of medical school. I KNOW! My first inkling that Father Time was not on my side was in a MAC store somewhere in LA, when I was an intern, so age 28, 29? I needed face wash, and asked for my usual green gel cleanser, which was supposed to be best for my oily, shiny, acne-prone skin. The salesgirl looked me up and down and said, maybe you’d be better off with something a little less drying and handed me a bottle of some creme cleanser. Of course this happened in LA, right? I was a little put off and a little offended, and remotely, a little concerned.

Around this time, my BFF and I were going to do an autopsy, and had the morgue camera out in case anything significant needed documentation. Mind you, this was before cell phones had cameras, and so it seemed perfectly novel and kitschy to take a morgue selfie all gowned and gloved before we got started. It looked really cute on the tiny digital camera screen and it made a super cute MySpace (!) profile pic. That is, until I saw it blown up on my computer screen. Warning!

M&C autopsy

PUMP. THE. BRAKES. What in the hell was going on? And I’m not even talking about the utterly tragic eyebrow situation that was happening*. The little swath of exposed skin that I had was…. spotty. Mottled. Wrinkles!? Dare I say… leathery. Seeing the forehead situation on my big computer screen was a giant slap across that hyperpigmented face. I was mortified. It was the first time when I realized all the total lack of concern for my skin was beginning to catch up to me.

Soon thereafter, I came across some ad for a Botox special in the freebie weekly newspaper where they advertise happy ending massages on the back page. It was something like $125, an unfathomable sum at that time. Seeing as I was still thoroughly traumatized by the morgue selfie (and outcome of a rudimentary photoshopping attempt), I was D-E-S-P-E-R-A-T-E. I was scared shitless, but I did it. The doctor was a bit of a jerk and didn’t have the best grasp of the English language, but I did it. The results with Botox, as we know, are impressive and quick. And so it began. Somewhere during this time, my dermatologist first tag teamed me with prescription retinol and hydroquinone. Knowing that the dermatology residents virtually slathered their entire bodies in retinol kept me using it, even though its results were less than dramatic.

I piddled around with that for a few years when the new, friendly, normal provider I’d began seeing for injections started raving about this crazy cream made of foreskins. She wouldn’t shut up about it. I think I eventually bought it hoping she would stop talking about it, even though it was stupidly, horrifyingly expensive. I wasn’t even through my first tube of it before shit got real. My skin changed. People I knew and people I didn’t know would comment on my skin and demand to know what products I used. (Wanting to just have a link to give people, as opposed to having to think and write shit down, was the main reason I wanted to have a TopShelfie on ITG: pure laziness.)

And then before I knew it, my bathroom looked like Sephora’s and Barney’s stockroom just vomited all over it.

And now it’s your turn: what was your gateway drug?

*Life lessons: any eyebrow worth Instagramming now is going to look STUPID in five years, and laughable in ten. So don’t. Just don’t.

there’s a fungus among us : biologique recherche masque vivant

Okay. I so badly wanted to find an image of the devil or some monster covered in snot or slime to start this post. While I am amused by the fact that Googling “Satan” returns images of Obama in a red robe, I am dismayed by the lack of realistic yet gory devil pictures. I then Googled “mucus”, but was inundated with colonoscopy photos of mucus-y poop riding in a colon. My last shot was “fungus ball”, which is a highly unfortunate medical condition in which an aggregate of mold grows within a body cavity. The resulting goopy mix of fungus and mucus is said to resemble, appetizingly, peanut butter. (Doctors, and especially pathologists, are notorious for ruining appetites with creative terms such as “chocolate cysts”, “nutmeg liver”, and “cottage cheese discharge”. Add peanut butter to the list. Go, team!) The fungus ball images are so vile I can’t even begin to comprehend using one in a blog post voluntarily. (If you’re feeling masochistic or need to kill your appetite, be my guest.)

So why the need to find said image? Because today I want to talk about Biologique Recherché Masque Vivant, the “balancing mask par excellence”, which purportedly “Purifies, Brightens, Tones, and Refreshes the complexion”, benefiting those unfortunate souls with “oily, combination, dull and/or less toned skin”. The Internet is bursting forth with love and appreciation for this product as well as its sidekick P50 1970. So if the P50 1970 smells like pickled biology class frogs, this smells (and looks) like a fungus ball. How ironic, SINCE IT’S GOT YEAST SHIT IN IT.

I’d read the descriptions online. Someone thinks it smells like that funky spread Vegemite that I avoided all over Europe. It certainly looks just like it. Someone else said it smells like trash. Here I was, innocently thinking yeast? So, it smells like bread dough? Like a brewery? How bad can it be?

Bad.

BAD.

Hence my need to locate an image of the devil covered in snot. Because if Satan himself had a horrible fungus ball removed from his maxillary paranasal sinus, THIS IS WHAT IT WOULD LOOK AND SMELL LIKE.

It’s thick, viscous, and sticky, close to the color of poop or bloody mucus. The odor has a disturbing peanut butter side to it, but otherwise smells rank and organic and fascinating in the most vile way. Not in a farmer’s market way, but in a compost-heap-in-summer way. Have you ever smelled something decomposing? That scent hits you in the most primitive part of your brain that is on high alert and screams GET AWAY NOW because the instinct to avoid things that you make you sick is why you’re alive today. I’m not going to go so far as to say this product smells like a rotting corpse, but it does make those primitive instincts twinge just a tiny bit. When I put it on, I literally cannot wait to wash it off, until I remember that getting it wet reinvigorates the odor — it mercifully diminishes as the mask dries. I let the cats smell it, thinking they’d be skeeved out; one of them ignored me and the other one tried to lick it right off my face. I, bravely, let my SO smell it. He has a shitty sense of smell so it was no surprise when he sniffed and said, “Mmmmmm…… Chocolate?”

So, yeah. I consider this purchase as taking one for the team. I’ve tried it straight up, I’ve tried it mixed with a little baking soda as some suggest. Adding the baking soda adds a new dimension, because now you have not just a smelly sticky disgusting product, you have a FROTHING smelly sticky disgusting product. I actually prefer it with the baking soda and just a couple drops of water — it thins the whole mess out. This is preferable because a) it is expensive; anything to make it go further helps; and b) I would probably pass out if I gooped it on full strength. (My SO now can look at me through the window as he gets home from work and recognize instantly if I have it on based on my facial expression.)

The stoic face of a brave soldier.

By now you’re all wondering why the fuck I’m not talking about its effects, and here I am worried that I’ll need to turn in my skincare whore card if I admit anything less than elation. To be fair, I’ve only been using it for a couple weeks since I got my BR haul in from Rescue Spa. I’ve been using it at night, after removing makeup with the Lait VIP O2 cleanser and a nice burning swipe of P50. Its immediate effects (besides total relief from being able to wash it off) are similar to the Sunday Riley mask made of Good Genes + Ceramic Slip. You do get glowy, smooth, and radiant skin, minus the skin-burning-off sensation and tears of pain, with a few more dollars left over in your wallet (at $64, Masque Vivant is a bargain, comparatively) and a nice dose of the smug satisfaction that typically accompanies the use of cult products.

 said BR haul

The “good” news is that, thankfully, the smell is less of a punch in the face over time. It still doesn’t smell good, but now after a few weeks I can use it without being overtly grossed out. I’m going to commit to using this 3-4 times a week until that entire 3.4 oz of sticky poop is gone; updates to follow.