Archive for July, 2006:
Burt’s Bees has long been known to make some pretty superior health and beauty products for the last several years, that are exo-friendly and are made with 100% natural ingredients. They started off in niche stores and health food stores, and now I think I see that at practically every grocery store and drug store.
While I’m not a huge fan of the original Burt’s Bees lip balm like a lot of other people are, I will say that I like their newer Lip Shimmers, which are basically a skinnier version of their lip balm with tints and even a little luminescence added to them.
I actually purchased the Rhubarb tint, which is a deeper, almost candy colored red tint. I’m not totally crazy about the color I chose, as I think I have to go pretty lightly on it or I look like a clown, but I do like the ingredients and the way it makes my lips feel. The flavor’s pretty good too.
It’s got pretty much your standard Burt’s Bees ingredients for a lip balm : sunflower oil, castor oil, beeswax, candelilla wax, lanolin, cocoa seed butter, vitamin e, carnauba wax, and rosemary oil, with a couple other extranneous, unpronouncables in there too. Oh yeah, it’s also in a container that’s partially ecofriendly, because it’s partially recycled, and the product is not tested on animals.
You know, I’ve tried a LOT of lip glosses, lip balms and lip moisturizers, and I keep coming back to my good old standy by : Cherry Chapstick. A lot of people apparently feel the same way, because Cherry is the biggest selling flavor, according to the stocking in drugstores. Did you notice they stock the most of the cherry flavor chapstick?
I’ve even tried some of the other flavors of Chapstick, to no avail. They just didn’t go on as slick or give me that nice, slightly rosy pink look to my lips that the Cherry Chapstick gives. Not only that, they didn’t come off on my lips as easily, nor did they moisturize my lips as well as the cherry flavor.
Although the price of this once el-cheapo beauty standy by has gone up a tad since my younger days – more specifically, from abotu 99 cents to 1.99, it’s still well worth it. I always keep at least one tube in my purse, one in my bathroom, and one tube of the stuff in my desk at work.
I notice I don’t have to reapply it as often as other chapsticks, and I love using it after my Lip Fusion has sunken in, to add some extra color and more moisture.
I’ll probably be using Cherry Chapstick til the day I die! Oh yeah, interesting side note, lots of stars even mention that this is their favorite cheap beauty product – and I even think Angelina Jolie has mentioned she uses it on her famous pillow lips!
So I picked up this daily vitamin body lotion at Bath and Body Works for like $5 in one of their big sales. It’s called “breathe comfort” daily vitamin body lotion in soothing vanilla milk. The particular scent that I chose, vanilla milk, is a bit of a warm, muskier fragrance, which I’m usually not a big fan of, but this one has a nice light scent to it.
It’s also a good moisturizer. Unlike a lot of the other Bath and Body Works lotions, creams and moisturizers, the Breathe Comfort actually does moisturize your skin, instead of being so laden with scent that the alcohol used to scent the cream is drying and pretty much counters any moisturizing capability of the lotion.
It’s also in a really pretty brown tinted bottle, like the other scents, which come in tinted bottles of the scent they represent – like the orange one is in a tinted clear orange bottle. It’s currently sitting at my desk at work actually and I use it every time I was my hands as a hand moisturizer.
I’m actually a fan of “stick” or “pencil” eyeshadow now, the kind that it almost feels like you’re drawing on your eyelids. The reason is, many of these creamy eyeshadow formulas come in a crease-resistant formula, and unlike many powders, they wear longer than traditional eyeshadows.
One of those eyeshadows is the Avon line of Glimmersticks eyeshadow. It basically looks like a big crayon, and it takes a little getting used to applying, but once you get used to applying these fun, vibrant colors, it actually looks a lot better than the regular ol’ eyeshadows you’re used to using.
I like this and also the cream eyeshadows in tubes that we’re seeing a little more of. You can created some very rich, vibrant and smoking hot looks with these long lasting eyeshadows. We’ll talk about them a little more soon I promise!
I just bought this new foundation yesterday from Revlon, because my Revlon age defying foundation ran out. I got the nude beige color for combination skin (they also have one for dry skin I believe, in all the same shades as the one for normal/combination skin), and I used it for the first time this morning.
All I have to say so far is WOW. This stuff really is nice feeling on my face. I liked the Revlon age defying foundation too, but I did notice that my face got oily extremely fast. Only downside is, the Soft Flex Color Stay Foundation only has an SPF 6 vs. the age defying stuff having an SPF 15 in it, but that’s ok for me because I use an SPF 15 lotion on my face every morning anyways, but it is always nice to have double protection against the sun, which is the single biggest factor in skin damage and aging according to most dermatologists.
The marketing folks behind this newer Revlon foundation say that it has a new technology, which they call “Soft Flex” a patented formula which provides extremely lightweight comfort with sheer but comprehensive coverage, making it feel like you’re not even wearing makeup.
It also says it won’t rub off and is long wearing, like the rest of it’s Colorstay line of makeup, with most of the foundations claiming to last a full 16 hours before they start to look bad.
Another good thing is that the Soft Flex foundation comes in 20 shades, so you should definitely find something that suits your skin tone.
I wanted to also review another self tanner (yes, to answer your question, I have tried them all), called Toma’s Self Tanning Lotion. This is another one that I happened upon at Sally’s Beauty Supply, but that I’m sure you can also buy online if you wanted to. It came in a fairly small bottle, which I was a little disappointed in for the $15 price tag. I usually like a bigger bottle of self tanner, so it lasts – it’s not the price was bad, I just like a little more than 5 oz.
The good thing about Toma’s self tanner is that it actually is pretty thick, so it does happen to go quite a long way, but the extreme thickness may also be a bit of a drawback in application, since it tends to “glom” in one spot and be kind of hard to rub in, plus it tends to be hard to completely blend well, so I did end up with a few weird looking areas.
I did like that Toma’s self tanner had a dark color to it, so I could tell where I had applied and hadn’t applied it. The product boasts that it lasts about 40% longer than other self tanners, but I don’t buy that, because I was reapplying in the same 3-4 days as I do with most other self tanners.
I recently read an article where Revlon, one of the largest cosmetics companies here in the US, is currently forecasting some big financial losses for this coming business quarter. They are the maker of some of my favorite cosmetics, namely the Skinlights collection, and some really great foundations.
One of the big reasons for the financial loss is the much lower than expected performance of one of their new lines for women aged 55 and older called “Vital Radiance”. So, is Revlon going to still be around in the next few years? Sure, heads of the company are just saying this is a major slump, but they’ll get over it, and they still have many popular lines that aren’t going anywhere. Phew….
I have to say, the Matrix Sleek Look hair straightening and shining products are one of my favorites when I’m going through a “straight” phase with my hair. I used the Matrix Sleek Look hair product line for a while actually, and found that when I used all of them together, it did make a difference in the overall moisture retention of my hair, as well as the straightness and a slight change in the resistence to humidity.
Although I will say, unfortunately I’ve never found any magic bullet against humidity, and it’s been really hard to keep my hair frizz free this summer, even after I got my cold smoothing done, which seems to have worn off already after about three months.
I especially liked the Extreme styling creme because it did seem to make a big difference in the smooth finish of my hair after I blew it dry, and it also was very easy to tell if I didn’t use it. Dead giveaway that a product works – try not using it and see if you notice any real difference! Overall, I’d say they’re a good shot if you’re looking for a reasonable hair care system and you’re going for a straighter smoother look.
I wanted to review my latest self tanning product that I actually just purchased two days ago, and I’m fairly happy with. It’s called Whipped Chocolate Self Tanning Mousse, and it’s by “Skin Drench”. It comes in a fairly generously sized container that goes a little further than it normally would, because it is a compressed, “mousse” like consistency and goes a little further than traditional self tanners.
Only drawback is that if you don’t shake it enough, just like hair mousse, it goes to liquid really fast, and spreads all weird so you can’t really control the level or depth of color correctly.
It’s got a chocolatey smell to it, and does sort of remind me of chocolate or cocoa butter at the least. Of course, it does give somewhat of an instant fake tan, because it is pigmented fairly deeply. I did notice a tad bit of streaking on my arms, but I think this may be due to me getting a little water on my arms less than an hour after I applied the stuff.
Overall, it’s a good price (about $9 for the bottle), and it seems to be working fairly well. The color is fairly natural, although I can’t say it’s as natural as some of the other self tanners I’ve used!
I don’t think I know one single one of my girlfriends right now who doesn’t have stretch marks. Stretch marks are those annoying, marring white or purplish looking marks in your skin that occur usually after you’ve gained and/or lost a lot of weight. Below I will review a stretch mark cream that has gotten some really positive feedback and gained some notoriety for working well.
Ask any woman who’s ever been pregnant and she can tell you exactly what stretch marks are. I’ve seen them on men too, mostly guys who grew a lot in a short period of time in their teens or early twenties get them too on their thighs or where there side thigh meets their buttocks.
Lots of people have remedies and products that they swear by to help them prevent stretch marks or dramatically reduce their appearance. Some of the more notable products used for stretch mark creams have been Strivectin (the stretch mark cream turned wrinkle cream), and various products that rely on shea butter, which is a very emollient natural cream that can be bought in combination with other ingredients or by itself, although it can be fairly expensive in it’s pure form.
Some of these products are reviewed very well by the people that use them, and some are not reviewed so well. There is one product that I do recommend for the treatment of stretch marks which is a very rich cream that is applied a certain way (usually they will have you massage a certain way to help the product absorb as well as to manipulate the stretch marks and allow the cream to work on evening them out and making them blend with the rest of your skin).
This product is by a special line of advanced anti aging creams called Revitol, and I actually recommend their entire line, since they use top notch cosmeceutical grade ingredients like concentrated vitamins and other compounds that have been shown through studies to be highly effective and therapeutics for the skin. You can read a full review of the Revitol Stretch mark cream here.
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