A muted mood and more make up musings, including a claggy Clarins coup, and the Leaning Tower of Travel Pots

Thumbs up, and a victory sign for 'V'!

It's been a funny start to the year what with all these stars dying, like Bowie and Alan Rickman. A friend remarked that at this rate the firmament will soon be 'starless and Bible-black'. The music business seems to be particularly life-limiting, certainly. Then another friend was wondering if Donald Trump might possibly be next, as he is also 69, but if so he would only go and take Charlotte Rampling and Roy Wood with him, which would never do. The same friend actually had a 'marital exclusion' for Alan Rickman, which she is now going to have to reassign; knowing her, it will be to Kevin Spacey, who on the face of it strikes me as an unlikely tree up which to bark. I must say I am not sure I have quite taken in the fact that Bowie is dead. I can vividly remember dancing myself into a trance to Jean Genie at school discos in about 1974. He provided the vividly eclectic, insidiously liberating bass line to my adolescence, encouraging hordes of teenagers like me to 'let yourselves go'. And now, having fallen to earth, he has quietly let himself go back up again...

Top of the Pops, 1974 ~ Source: Wikimedia Commons

So between that, some yarn colour and tension issues(!), and frustrations to do with the timing of my work projects, I have been feeling a bit subdued lately. The week didn't get off to a particularly auspicious start either: the kitten has another tummy upset, and also managed to topple an eight foot palm on Monday morning, spraying earth all over a freshly hoovered pale carpet. But then a neighbour popped round and mentioned that her daughter has just had an op to stop her brain leaking out down her nose, which rather put things in perspective.

I swear I will pick up the threads of perfume presently, but there is something about the New Year that prompts me to experiment with - and organise - my make up and skincare collections, and there were a few noteworthy developments(!) recently that I thought I'd consign to screen before getting back on topic, as far as I ever do.

A claggy Clarins coup

A wonder, but far from perfect! ~ Source: eBay

For a while now I have had a make up albatross in my possession, to wit a Clarins Wonder Perfect mascara a friend gave me for my birthday - I think this year, but it could well be older. I have only used it half a dozen times, because from the off it was extremely claggy and thick, so much so that the black gunk - we could perhaps even call it 'clag', by analogy with 'slag' - actually oozed out from under the cap. Eventually, my annoyance at the poor performance of this high end cosmetics item prompted me to take the mascara back to Boots - not with any hope of replacing it, as I had no receipt and couldn't rightly recall how long I had had it - but just to draw their attention to its messy malfunctioning in a mildly irritated yet calm manner. Imagine my surprise when the SA offered to replace the wayward wand with a different model (Be Long) on the spot. So Long, Be Claggy! What excellent customer service, I thought to myself, as it would have been quite cathartic just to have vented. And the SA did so despite my blurting out the rather insensitive kicker that a £1 mascara from Poundland was better behaved.

Eking out recalcitrant serum

The other day, I finally reached the bottom of my Estee Lauder Advanced Night Repair Eye serum. Well, I unscrewed the top and saw that there was in fact a little smidge left at the bottom that the pump would not manage to extract. So, using that tried and tested 'getting the last bit of tinned tomato out of the can' technique, I filled the bottom with warm water and swilled it around to form a slightly serum-y liquid, which I used up over the course of the next three nights - rather haphazardly it must be said - tipping some into my hand and quickly slapping it on my cheeks, a bit like a facial oil but one that is prone to falling off again immediately. Ah well, I think some of the liquid may have stuck to its target, and I had that deep sense of satisfaction that nothing was wasted.

Getting the 'tail end' out of the bottle!

The Leaning Tower of Travel Pots

I have already had a good moan here about the friable nature of these stacks of travel pots used for storing creams and lotions. I buy yet another set - from Boots or Muji or whomever - and before you can say 'built-in product obsolescence' another bit of plastic rim has sheared off. It's simply going to happen, so you may as well accept that it is an endemic design flaw with this particular product. Here's my current tower, with a Clarins foundation on the top storey, and goodness only knows what elsewhere. Some combination of Liz Earle cleanser, hair texturising clay, night cream and/or Olay serum. All 'leaning' to white in colour, and hence deeply confusing.

A novel take on 'washing my eyelids'

Now you may be thinking I have been under a rock for the past twenty years - or since whenever I was first allowed to wear makeup, which is more like forty - but I have only just twigged to the whole purpose of those paler colours in eyeshadow palettes - you know, the vaguely biscuit coloured ones, or even more bizarre on the face of it, the near white shades! In this Pretty Honest book Sali Hughes says that in your Desert Island make up bag you only really need a universally flattering brown eye shadow, and a sort of ivory one, to act as a 'wash' over the lids and a bit up into the socket. I have steered completely clear historically of the paler end of the palette, thinking a) I have no discernible eye sockets and b) anything that white will make me look like a ghoul.

A bit faint, but it did look okay, really!

Then the other day I had a play with a combination of the palest colour in this HD Brows palette that Tara of A Bottled Rose kindly gave me, over the eyelid and a bit higher up as I understand you are meant to do - though it still might be stretching the truth - and the skin! - to call it a socket in my case, followed by the darkest colour (Truffle!) just on the lids bit. And it really did work rather well - not ghostly, but it softened the Truffle shade and made it more graduated on the eyelid, with less of a stark demarcation between eyeshadow and not. And I know that is going to sound an utterly ridiculous kind of discovery to any makeup aficionados out there, but it just goes to show that you can go decades in complete ignorance of a quite fundamental technique in one's beauty MO. Oh, and being on a bit of a roll I also bought my first standalone eyeshadow brush this week(!), as I had also just learnt that a brush is so much nicer than those sponge-tipped apologies for applicators I have only used all my life, hehe.

'Bare' to the left and 'Truffle' to the right!

A bath hat lightbulb moment

Speaking of washing, this next discovery is even more laughable - and reprehensible - than the one about 'washes' of pale colour on eyelids. You see for years and years I have not properly attended to my forehead. Not in terms of moisturising, for sure. And even my washing of it has been a bit haphazard, and tending to coincide with hair washing days. Which in fairness is quite often. All because of my fringe, you see, which would get either greasy or wet or both at the drop of a hat. But the other night it dawned on me that if I actually wore a hat I could have easy access to my forehead without my hair getting in the way. There's always a plastic bath hat swiped from a hotel to hand, so I promptly put it on and proceeded to involve my whole face in my skincare routine. I wouldn't sleep in a bath hat, mind, so you still have the problem of how to apply night cream or facial oil without getting it in the fringe. I guess you could wait till it had soaked in, but life's too short for that, and I am usually eager to get off to bed by that point. So there is still some figuring out to do...

Have you made any completely basic and obvious skincare or makeup discoveries late in life? 

Or do you have any ablution aberrations or other unhygienic habits to mention?

No obligation to 'fess up to either, as long as don't make me feel any more foolish and ashamed than I  already do for mine. ;)