My Beauty Space

I went and visited the ElizabethArdenInc. website today and noticed that the company seems to be using quite a quite a wide range of celebrity in their cosmetic and perfume campaigns, presumably to reach a broader target audience of women wanting to be beautiful, just in different ways. 

For example, a new campaign is for a new Hilary Duff perfume (not sure if there’s a cosmetic line yet).  It shows Hilary in a classically beautiful Hollywood style dress, with natural looking makeup, brown hair and sitting in a classy pose.  This might start to appeal to the “tweeners” that grew up worshipping the Duff and are now coming into a more sophisticated sense of style and appearance. 

They also have a Britney Spears cosmetic and perfume line, which you would think would be to appeal to the same age group, but lately I’m not sure who Britney is appealing to with the somewhat negative publicity surrounding her and her family life and the perception that Britney is not a celebrity of the highest “class” shall we say. 

Then, they have the mother of all campaigns, excellent in it’s design because of it’s recognizeability and fame status of it’s celebrity spokeswoman.  That is, of course, the lovely Ms. Catherine Zeta Jones, who carries herself almost as an old style Hollywood celebrity, with her exotic, classy and sophisticated, sultry good looks, as well as her classic sense of Hollywood style. 

And, the fact that she’s married to an older, distinguished man, Michael Douglas in her life, only carries her celebrity status further and appeals to maturing women with a sense of grace and style, and usually women who tend to come from or have a little more financial means. 

So you see, Elizabeth Arden Inc. is using a broad range of female celebrity to capture their female audience, and it seems like this strategy is working well for the successful cosmetics subsidiary, and they’re not going anywhere for quite a while!

Clinique has always been one of my favorite “cosmetic counter” brands at department stores, but somehow over the past few years with all my beauty experimentation I got away from buying their products . Also, I think because I am more of an online shopper now, I don’t go the department stores to buy my cosmetics any more, I would rather just buy them online. 

Well, Clinique now has their new colors out for the season, and it looks like “Pink Chocolates” are all the rage now.  They are Clinique’s new holiday colors, and they are very warm looking, but not exactly what I’d call “festive”, they are more of an earthy color pallette, which I actually love.

The shades are warm, muted browns, and warm and muted pinks as well, like I said they are very earthy to me.  I think these shades would probably go well as day colors for most skin tones, but they might be even better for those of us (myself included) who are pretty pale in the winter months unless we self tan. 

The limited edition color palette of Pink Chocolates comes complete with a chocolatey mascara color, a color palette of muted pinks for the cheeks, a quad color palette of eyeshadows that may be warn together to complement one another, a cream liner for the eyes, and a lipstick and lipliner in pink chocolate (all this chocolate talk is making me WANT chocolate!). 

The prices range from $13.50 to $25.00 for each individual component of the Pink Chocolates colour set, and only the lip set can be purchased as an actual set as far as I can see, for $41.00.  Not bad for high quality cosmetics I suppose….. hopefully the trend will last a while if you buy it though.

Ok, now onto my absolute (well one of my) favorite subjects.  Lips and lip plumping.  Well, more so about how we can plump our lips for a cheaper rate than many of the high priced alternatives to things like lip injections. 

I reported to you guys a couple weeks ago that I had purchased a Sally Hansen Collagen enhancing lip treatment, that I was not extremely impressed with due to it’s gritty texture and somewhat drying effects, although I think I did notice some sort of plumping. 

Well, lo and behold, I was in the CVS pharmacy the other day and it looks like Ms. Hansen has come out with a whole darn line of lip plumping products. So, naturally although my all time favorite lip plumper will be Lip Fusion by Fusion Beauty, I had to try this cheaper altenrative at just $6 a pop.

Well, here’s what it is.  It’s in a generously sized tube.  It’s a gel based product, and is light pink in color with tiny little refelective particles all throughout, although I would not classify it as overly “glittery”.  It’s got a bit of a grapefruity flavor to it, presumably modeled after the famous grapefruity flavor of Lip Fusion.  

The product does not say how it inflates the lips, but it does seem to do somewhat of a trick when you apply it, although I’m not sure if it’s just the reflective particles that “make” your lips look bigger, or if there is actually an ingredient in it that does inflate the lips slightly. 

I like the product, and will continue to use it, although the one downside and comparison to Lip Fusion I will make is that it does not keep the lips well moisturized for as long as Lip Fusion, which  actually think is a key part of lip plumping, since the lips tend to look smaller when they are dried out, and need rehydrating. I like it, and I might just buy it again, heck for six bucks I’m not gonna hem and haw. 

Back in the day when I actually had time to paint my finger nails all of the time, or go “get my nails done” at the salon, I paid a lot of attention to what was good and bad for my nails. Now, I’m lucky to just get a clear coat of polish on my fingers a couple times a year it seems.

Well, I’m happy to say my lypossage cellulite treatments are coming along very well.  They were pretty painful at first, but I had my 7th appointment tonight, and I don’t think I winced one time. 

I’m noticing a smoothing out now, my boyfriend even noticed it when I was in my underwear tonight.  I do have some very light bruising from the pressure points, but nothing too bad - at least nothing like I thought, since I’m an easy bruiser!

The other thing I’m noticing is that my pants are fitting a bit easier.  Could this be simply because I lost a few ounces or something or a pound or two?  Sure, but I’d like to think it’s because I’m getting these treatments done !

I do like the herbal supplement that the lypossage people put out.  It’s got two ingredients that stand out to me, I won’t bother listing all of them - the two are amylase and lypase.  The ingredients in the herbal supplement are supposed to help curb sugar cravings as well as help you rid your body of the toxins that inevitably come out when someone is breaking up numerous adhesions under your skin’s surface that have been there for years - make that decades. 

I feel good too.  Not sure if it’s because of the supplements or because I’m over the initial detox stage, but I feel pretty energetic, and I sleep really well.  Could this all be psychosomatic?  Oh sure, but I’d like to think not!

You will be getting a full update on this every once in a while throughout my six week treatment, and at the end I’m going to do a short interview with Holly Charwenske, who is the lypossage licensed professional massotherapist that is doing my treatments where I live in the greater Cleveland area.