Is there a girl alive who doesn’t obsess about the size of her pores? (Okay; I imagine there’re prolly girls in Ireland who don’t, but outside of Ireland, the rest of us do.) I can remember steaming my face until I broke capillaries, making little red circles all over my face with extractors, using scrubs until my face was raw, applying salicylic acid preparations until my face peeled like an onion … and then a few years ago, I read that scientists were working on a way to pull sebum plugs from pores using cyanoacrylates (Superglue!) and having some luck with it, and they hoped to have a product on the market within a couple of years. I hoped they did, too, but all too often, these great promises never result in a product on the shelf. When the Bioré pore strip showed up, I knew the scientists had succeeded at something, and I couldn’t wait to get home to see whether, at last, there’d be a happy ending in my fight to have invisible pores! Read the rest of this entry »

When I was first on my own, making my own money and buying my own clothes, I was easily hypnotized at the cosmetics counter. I’d see bright colors and shiny cases and hear the come-ons from the sales girls and then arrive home larded down with all manner of products, many of which went into my junk drawer, never to be used again (or else given to friends and sisters), because they weren’t very practical (or else the colors were hilariously wrong for me). One category of item that simply has never proven useful to me is palettes combining different types of cosmetics. Oh, they seem great in theory, but in practice, they can’t work unless you carry them around with you. After all, if they have lipstick or lipgloss in them, what good will they do you sitting home on your vanity table? You’re gonna need to reapply your lipstick or gloss at some point. And unless you’re one of those girls who lugs around one of those ginormous handbags orthopedists warn against (I’m not), then you can’t take it with you. (When you do, you risk banging the palette against something and breaking the powders inside and ruining the whole kit.) And who needs to keep reapplying shadow and blush and day and night anyway? (There is an answer to that question, but those girls most likely don’t read blogs.) (Or anything else. It’s hard to read on your back.) Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t very well review cosmetics and ignore the elephant in the room, now can I? So let’s get it over with: NARS Powder Blush in Orgasm is on every stylish girl’s vanity (and face) (although my friend Jackie prefers the even more appallingly named “Deep Throat,” I often wear the less glimmery “Oasis,” which is more pink than the peachy “Orgasm”). The name hasta be a marketing gimmick (one which has worked amazingly well; even my mother knows what NARS Orgasm is, and she lives out in Northern Pig’s Ear, Vermont), as no one I know glows a shimmery golden peach after, uh, you-know-what, but let’s face facts: when you’re in a lounge lit with red, pink, or orange lamps and you’re wearing this blush, YOU. LOOK. INCREDIBLE. No matter who you are, what you’re wearing, what you drank, who you’re with, or even what dive or neighborhood you’re in, you glow as if you’re lit from within. Thanks, NARS, for giving us an afterglow beforehand so there might, in fact, be a real afterglow later on! The only drawback: if you don’t thoroughly spank your brush before applying, you can end up too pearly-faced, and trying to tissue it off merely seems to polish the pearlyishness and make it worse. What I do when I “over-Orgasm”: I reapply some foundation to my cheeks with a damp sponge. Voilá! Now I look as if I’m lit from within, instead of looking as if I had an accident at the Esteé Lauder factory. $25.00

Welcome to Lipstick Face! I’m going to kick this off with one of my all-time favorite products, and that’s Urban Decay’s Surreal Skin Liquid Foundation. While Urban Decay markets to club kids and twenty-somethings closer to twenty, they have some terrific offerings if you can get past some of the more outrageous, glitterfied nonsense, and their foundation and eyeshadows are two of them. (More on the eye shadows in a later review.) Surreal Skin doesn’t exactly give you skin I’d call “surreal,” but it is a great matte foundation. It used to come in a more useful, less embarrassing “I Dream of Jeannie” container (a nice tube which stood on end), but if you overlook the bottle designed for teenagers, transvestites, and hookers, you’ll find a medium-coverage, lighweight foundation containing antioxidants (A, C, and E) (and the vitamin C takes the form of magnesium ascorbyl phosphate, the most stable form of that vitamin). It’s neither chalky nor heavy, so you don’t end up with that “pancake face” look. And finally, it’s oil-free (though it contains several silicones, hence the non-pancakey-look), so it isn’t greasy and doesn’t turn orange even if you have oily areas on your face. You may feel kinda silly pushing past goth types at the Urban Decay display to get at it, but it’s worth it for a foundation this nice. So long as Urban Decay keeps making this, I’m gonna keep wearing it; I love it, and at this price point, it’s a steal! Tip: when the foundation thickens and gloops up around the cap (it does sometimes), use the gloop with a small brush to cover blemishes. $24.00