My Christmas Wish

If you've never done it, you should really watch the deleted scenes from Love Actually, you should. Karen's horrible son Bernard has to write an essay on his Christmas wish and... well, it's funny.

Anyway, my Christmas wish? Is for the following products to be brought back. I've narrowed it down to two:

1. The LUSH World PieceBath Ballistic. Seriously. It was blue and green and smelled of pine forests, but lightly--not too forest-y and manly. It smelled of girly forests. And it turned your bathwater a most wonderful shade of blueish green. It was the best bath bomb that LUSH ever made and it is no more and that makes me sad.

OOOOOOO! British LUSH is having a contest where if they get at least 50 orders for a discontinued product, they'll make a special batch! World Piece Ballistics are 2.50 GPD ($5) and I don't know how much shipping will be from the UK! But! Holy Cow! I'm ordering a bunch! Help my Christmas Wish come true here! And then you can take a really awesome girly forest blue green bath too and know the joy.

So far it's just me and one other person, so I really need your help! Help!!!!!! You'll thank me!

Sorry. Got a little excited there, but with good reason, no?

2. Body Shop's Ginger Lily anything. Spicy and sweet, it came in shower gel and lotion combo. The shower gel felt like silk on my skin and the scent, ah. It will forever remind me of China (not that it smells of China, it was just the lotion I took with me) but it rather smells of what you imagine you would smell if you wandered around Princess Jasmine's garden in the middle of a humid summer night. A touch of the exotic, and yummy enough to eat. (However, I don't recommend eating it, because it tastes like soap.)

I still have a little shower gel left, that I picked up on clearance a stupid number of years ago. I'm using it up because it's taking up space in my shower, but it's hard to say goodbye.

Baby It's Cold Outside: Response

I've been wanting to do a full-on Lotion post for quite a while, and then Jennie posted about dry skin first. There is just not enough room in the comments for what I need to say on the subject. My dry skin merits its own post, and maybe even its own post label. So, it begins.

I have had a dermatologist since I was eight years old. My skin is crazy-dry everywhere -- flaking off like snow from delicate places like my face and arms, and cracking big ugly caverns in rough parts like my heels and hands. And my lips! With the constant splitting and flaking at the same time! It's not fun.

Anyway, as a result of being dermatologically challenged, I have always been freakishly careful about my skin and its moisture content. I aim to drink twice the recommended eight glasses of water per day (hydrate from the inside!), and I am still constantly dehydrated. I have four bottles of lotion on the back of my toilet (above) -- and more in the medicine cabinet, the cabinet in the other bathroom, a bottle next to my bed, a bottle next to the couch in the den, one in my purse, one at work, one next to the kitchen sink, and more in various other locations throughout the house. These lotions are of various brands, thicknesses, and moisture levels, but they all have two things in common: (a) the a main ingredient is Dimethicone, because that's what the derm said I need, and (b) they are all unscented (I've told you that before).

I also have a little pot of Burt's Bees Hand Salve in my knitting bag, and a tube of store-brand Vitamin A&D Ointment for the really harsh days. You can find "A&D" (as we lovingly called it in my parents' household) in the diaper aisle, because its primary use is for diaper rash. I mostly just put it on my cuticles, but it also comes in handy for minor cuts and scrapes. And one tube of this stuff (approx $3?) lasted my mom twenty years. (And I inherited my skin from her. Thanks a lot, Mom.)

The other product recommendation I picked up as a result of inheriting my mom's dry skin issues is mineral oil. Slather it everywhere you can reach. It doesn't sound very glamorous, but it works better than anything else. Unfortunately, I've been living in the South for five years and have not been able to find mineral oil in the stores anywhere. I've looked. I've made special trips. I've searched various unexpected sections, like the baby section, and the automotive section, and the do-it-yourself-plumbing section, all to no avail. Apparently they don't believe in mineral oil down here.

One thing that has been nice about living in the South is that winters aren't nearly as harsh as where I come from (the Midwest) or where I'm moving next week (Vermont). It mostly just rains here in the winter, and "winter" doesn't even start until mid-January anyway. But my skin freaks out every mid-November anyway, because somehow my body just knows that it's time. I am such a Midwestern gal at heart.

This morning was the first time I'd showered in at least three days (hot water is drying! and I always smell like roses anyway). I took extra-special care to pay attention to my skin routine, so I could share it with all of you. So here you go:

Normally, I use a washcloth to exfoliate, but I forgot to grab one before I got in the shower. That's okay, because I'm trying to use up my Store Brand Apricot Scrub before I move anyway, so I scrubbed lightly with that (careful with this stuff, walnut shells can be really harsh on skin if you rub too much). After I rinsed off, I turned off the water and put on my Aveeno Shower and Bath Oil. I took the opportunity to clean the shower a little bit, then rinsed and patted dry, just like the directions say to do. I put about a fingerful of Pond's Dry Skin Cream on my face.

Then came the real moisturizing. I always begin by lotioning up my hands thoroughly, so the skin on my hands doesn't absorb all the lotion I want to put elsewhere. This time, I used Vaseline Intensive Rescue Moisture Locking Lotion. Again with the using up products before moving. I like this stuff probably better than any other moisturizer I have right now, and the ginormous bottle is so close to empty that I've taken off the pump and have to whack it against my hand to get anything out. I'm committed to this stuff.

Today I started the moisturizing process with my legs (I usually do, but not always). I squeezed a generous dollop (about the size of a Pocahontas Dollar, maybe a little bigger) of Jergens natural glow Daily Moisturizer (for Fair Skin) into my hand, and slathered it all over my right leg. Then I took another generous dollop of lotion for my left leg. By the time I finished my left leg, my right was completely dry again. So I repeated the process, right leg, left leg, generous dollops for each one.

Then it was time for arms and torso. Four full pumps of Jergens Skin Smoothing Cellular Renewal Moisturizer each. About four more pumps for my front torso. Three for my back (since I can't reach the whole thing anyway). Two more for each arm, and a extra one just for my shoulders and neck... and by then my legs were bone-dry again, so two more full pumps for each leg. And three more for my front torso again; two more for my lower back.

I'm not kidding. I am that dry.

I put about one and a half pumps of Aveeno Positively Radiant Daily Moisturizer with SPF 15 all over my face, ears, and neck.

I sat down on the bed and did my feet: one nickel-sized blob of Curel Fragrance Free Moisture Lotion for each foot, twice (because by the time I finished my left foot, my right foot was dry again, of course).

Finally, I washed my hands (they'd been footified) and relotioned them, using Aveeno Daily Moisturizing Lotion. And drank a glass of water (hydrate from the inside!).

I'd say the entire process took about 40 minutes. And people wonder why I'm late to everything. They don't believe me when I say "I was putting on lotion." So yeah, I get my own label for that.

L'OCCITANE--a love/hate thing

Every day the people of Provence celebrate their pleasant lifestyle and abundant soil.

Dear L'Occitane,

Your store seems to bottle something... classy and classic and then try to sell it to me for $20 for 8.4 oz. and, well frankly, I'm a little sick of it. Every time I allow myself to splurge and buy stupidly priced bubble bath, or lotion, I'm sorely disappointed, and yet, I keep coming back for more. Your milk bath is not moisturizing, needs a stupidly large amount to get enough bubble, and, worse yet, smells vaguely of chlorine when I'm bathing in it. Your shea lotion is sadly under moisturizing. Your shea butter ultra rich conditioner? Meh.

Then, some of your perfumes smell good at first whiff, but then start to scarily remind me of what Tinkerbell perfume smelled like back when I was 8.

But yet, I keep going back for more. Why is that?

I Did It All for the Nookie

image from Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North

Let me just clear something up for the entire world: Everybody wants to have sex. Everybody. Including you.

Okay, not everybody -- there are people who are asexual, or who find sex to be painful or traumatic or gross or wrong, or who have taken a vow of celibacy, or who haven't yet reached puberty. But, generally speaking, if you walk into a bar, most of the people there probably want to have sex with someone at some point.

Just probably not right this moment, and probably not with you.

The question, then, is: how can you tell? We can talk more freely about sex than generations past, but it's still not polite to walk up to a stranger and say, "Hey, I feel like having sex. Would you like to have sex with me?" It might even get you maced .

After all, sex is still something good girls aren't supposed to want and nice guys aren't supposed to be after. So, instead of coming out into the open and saying it, we're supposed to lure and trick each other into bed. So we have The Rules and The Game and, for the remedial class, The Axe Effect. The goal is to appear indifferent while members of the opposite gender fling themselves at you, drawn to you by a mysterious power.

And -- this is a beauty-product blog, after all -- we have pheromones. Nature's pick-up artist. Trust in a bottle. Ten years ago, pheromones were relegated to the black and white ads at the back of the magazines. Today, you can find them in hair gel.

Do they work? About as well as a baggie tied around the genitals.

In the interest of journalism, of course, I decided to conduct an experiment of my own, forgoing the baggie and instead opting for a sample of Booty Parlor Flirty Little Secret Firming Cream from Victoria's Secret. It is a bit comforting, I'll admit, to realize that not everyone who shops at Victoria's Secret is an already-firm model who has no trouble attracting the boys. The plan of action was to slather this lotion all over, head to my boyfriend's house, and see if I noticed a difference. (Sorry for not telling you earlier, dude. Journalistic integrity and all.)

The lotion smelled generic but pleasant, light and fruity. It had gold shimmer, of the variety and degree that shimmer lotions had back when I was in high school: obvious individual glittery flecks that collect on your hands and turn them obnoxiously sparkly. I had a ton of that stuff in high school! Peach-scented and sparkling, but not noticeably firmer, I headed out the door, expecting great things.

So what happened?

Two dogs started growling at me and would have probably tried to maul me had their owner not held them back. A cat hissed at me. And my boyfriend? In bed with the flu. Even if he could have detected the fruity whiff of sex appeal on me, he certainly didn't have the energy to do anything about it.

It's not enough evidence for any medical journals to accept my abstract, but it's certainly enough to make me think this stuff doesn't work. And would you want to live in a world where it did?



Aw, dang, indeed.