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. ;)

'Lid hydration best practice' : It's an eye opener - and grease is NOT the word!

Source: sienna-x.co.uk

Regular readers will be aware that from time to time, I go a little bonkers on Bonkers. More bonkers than usual, I mean, typically by researching a topic of interest to the absolute max. It damn near kills me every time and I still never feel satisfied that I have scoped all the options. As with the bathroom renovation project in the spring - and still ongoing in fact - I have been off down a research rabbit hole, as I am periodically wont to do...in skincare again. I delved deep below the epidermis you could say, penetrating several layers of dermis no less with the laser beam of my relentless curiosity. Or subcutaneous tissue, should that be? Yes, this time my inquiries were more extensive than ever before, as I sought to identify the optimum skincare products for my skin type in every single usage category, from cleansers and toners to exfoliators, eye creams, day and night creams, serums - the works!

You may wonder what precipitated this current flurry - nay, frenzy - of research. And actually there was a reason, though I also had to dig quite deep to figure it out. Firstly, the recent business with my finger meant I lost out on over two weeks' work, so had time to twiddle my thumbs, which luckily have full mobility. Though to be fair, doing the washing up without getting the affected finger wet is taking up a ridiculous amount of my day, and all chores are proving more tricky and time-consuming indeed. But I suddenly had a tract of time I was not expecting, and which I could devote to research.

As for why I chose to go mad on this particular topic, it was prompted by a casual comment from my local pharmacist to the effect that I may need to have a medication review with the doctor's surgery to which I recently switched, before I can be prescribed further supplies of antibiotics for my rosacea- and acne-prone skin.

Source: touregypt.net

So the mere thought that my customary safety net of 'big gun medication' might be removed - and having some sympathy for that decision, for who knows what decimation the drugs may be wreaking on the delicate ecosystem that is my gut flora ;) - I decided to investigate the very best regimes that could help me look after my skin in the absence of a more heavyweight solution.

It wasn't easy, I should say, right off the bat. I have googled and googled - deep into pages 4 or 5 on any given search term, and studied each citation with interest. I have watched endless videos by Sali Hughes and Lisa Eldridge (who are both fab);  I have read posts galore by other beauty bloggers, including the formidable Caroline Hirons. Following a tip off from Olfactoria I have browsed the highly scientific website of Paula Begoun, a veritable Oprah Winfrey of the US skincare scene. Then I also had an email exchange with Katie Puckrik, who gave me the topline on her own skincare MO, and mentioned a couple of her favourite products. I also read the famous book by Leslie Baumann, 'The Skin Type Solution', which reader AnnieA commended to me in a comment on an earlier Bonkers post. It didn't take long to establish that I am an OSPW type (Oily, Sensitive, Pigmented & Wrinkled). Arrggh!

None of which is directly related to eyes, I hear you say. Which is true, and if I ever go on to write about suitable cleansers and moisturisers for OSPWs, anyone with fundamentally different skin characteristics may wish to skip that post. Though some of the best products I found are in fact 'broad spectrum' in their benefits, to borrow an antibiotic term for a moment.  One thing led to another, basically, and the discoveries about eye care were pretty startling! To someone like me anyway, who has clearly been living under a rock.

And the most striking thing about my inquiries generally was the sheer, dizzying, hyper-segmented diversity of the skincare market. It has exploded beyond all recognition since my childhood, when an opaque tub of Nivea or Astral and the iconic green and white pot of Pond's Cold Cream were the mainstay of our mothers' beauty regimes. It is so deeply, bafflingly scientific nowadays, and the Internet is rife with conflicting information. If you are the sort of person who is likely to find inconclusive research a stressful waste of time, I would counsel you not to undertake any in the skincare sphere, for it nearly drove me over the edge....

You need toner; you don't need toner...fragrance is pleasant and soothing; fragrance is a sneaky way to disguise shoddy ingredients...'you get what you pay for', or cheap doesn't have to mean 'cheap and nasty'...SPF50 is the gold standard sunscreen; SPF30 is better because the sun is a good source of Vitamin D...moisturisers with SPF built-in are a good idea - or a lazy, inferior choice... facial oils make oily skins oily, or oils are good for everyone......foaming gels are good for acne, or they dry the skin out unduly....splash your face with cold water; splash your face with tepid water...you need a separate eye cream; eye creams are a waste of money (see below).  If I had a quid for every flagrant contradiction I encountered in my reading, I could afford a resident dermatologist. And someone to do the washing up!

Source: wimbledonguardian.co.uk

'Orbital "eye bypass" cream'

The biggest paradox I stumbled upon was to do with eye creams. In the past I have often noticed on pots of day cream the warning 'avoid the eye area'**. For the longest time I thought that was synonymous with 'avoid contact with eyes', as in 'don't get this stuff in your eye', but it is only relatively recently that I learnt that in the case of day creams, the whole area in and around the eye should be given a wide berth, and that specially formulated eye creams were designed to be more suited to the thin and ultra-sensitive skin here. Though that premise is disputed by some beauty experts in a YDMMV (Your Dermatological Mileage May Vary) kind of a way, including by Sali Hughes herself.

"I'm not convinced that eye cream is anything more than a tiny pot of anti-ageing moisturiser (which I like, by the way), and I don't think all skins need the extra product and considerable financial outlay."

And whether you believe they are more marketing hype than not, who knew eye creams ALSO shouldn't actually be used in the eye area?! Well, most of it, anyway. This bombshell has yet to 'sink in' in fact. I had not twigged that according to 'lid hydration best practice' - which I didn't even know existed as a concept either till this week - you should never put eye serums or moisturisers on your actual eyelids, or the crepey stretchy bit just above (which some readers may know as their 'upper eyelids'). Or, for that matter, on the skin immediately below the eyelashes, but rather follow the orbital bone structure of your eye socket and bypass the eye itself completely.

Source: targetwrinkles.com

The idea is that if you dot the cream or serum on the bone well away from the eye itself the cream will migrate to where it needs to go. You need to use your weakest finger for the purpose (typically your ring finger), and blend the dots in in a clockwise motion for the right eye and an anti-clockwise one for the left. This is in order to avoid stretching the super thin skin around the eye, thereby completely negating the effects of using a restorative product in the first place. Too rough a touch, and you might even precipitate the creation of new wrinkles. Actually, the idea of blending is also hotly contested. Some people say that dotting and tapping only is the way to go.

Now I am sure that to the vast majority of readers, especially those in the US who have recourse to dermatologists - an all but unknown breed of healthcare professionals over here, outside of Harley Street, maybe - none of this is news, but it was a staggering revelation to me! For when you buy a mass or mid-market moisturiser completely unaided by a sales assistant, the information on the pack simply does not clarify this point about the correct deployment of eye cream. No indeedy. It was only in the act of buying an expensive eye serum in Boots that the Estee Lauder sales consultant happened to volunteer this nugget of information about the orbital blobbing technique - I wouldn't have had the first clue where to put the serum otherwise, and would doubtless have slapped it all over my eyelids, as I have done with pretty much everything else that looks remotely emollient. Though not SPF-containing products anymore, thanks to a recent tip off from Undina in a comment on my post about Aldi's Lacura range.

Some of my motley collection of day creams - pre-research

Yes, I gather now that if the cream gets applied directly to the eyelid and immediate vicinity, it may irritate for starters, and there was some (admittedly rather apocalyptic) talk about eye creams transferring to the eyeball, singleblobbedly forming under-eye bags and taking up permanent residence - and causing swelling - in eyelids. Plastic surgeons performing eyelift surgery were said to have discovered gunky deposits of eye cream in the course of doing their procedures.  This could be true or scaremongering by the manufacturers, fearful of claims from people who have stung their eyes on account of creams having been applied so close to the eye itself. Me, I am going to avoid the eyelids from now on and see how I go, if it is not too late to reform my ways. And eye cream in my view should be renamed: 'Orbital "eye bypass" cream'.

(**So I just reread the instructions on some of the many day creams I have accumulated in recent years. Two say 'avoiding the eye area', while a further three say 'avoid contact with eyes', which as I have established above, is not the same thing at all. One was more explicit, with 'avoid direct application into the eye'. FOUR just say 'apply to face and neck'. Well, hey - are eyes not part of one's face? They were the last time I looked in the mirror. One - Astral (which appears to have missed the photo shoot) - calls itself an 'all over moisturiser' and claims to provide 'all the intense moisturing care your skin needs'. So just based on that small straw poll, you can see why I might have been confused.)

My shameful stash of facial wipes

Wiping wipes off the face of the earth

And here is the other area of skin maintenance where I have been going wrong all my life - using wipes to remove make up from the delicate eye area. Wipes - with their often harsh formulae, rough textures, resultant pulling and incomplete cleansing action - are the abomination of make up artists and beauty experts, for all but emergency and in-flight scenarios. Yup, I am afraid that my own chronic use of wipes to take off eye makeup has been so cavalier and rufty tufty as to be tantamount to dragging my face through a hedge backwards. Moreover I have stockpiled a load of packets of wipes that were on offer - probably at least 3-4 months' worth! They are mostly by the brand Simple, whose products are generally well regarded in the budget category, but they remain wipes and hence are still off-limits. I do also possess a Liz Earle Cleanse & Polish set, and should be using that for makeup removal as well as my morning cleanse it seems. At least I was doing something right! The watchword generally on the beauty blogs is to use a gentle product - even for oily skins - and to take makeup / dirt off with a hot muslin cloth or impregnated cotton wool pads. And to do so in such as way as to minimize tugging of any kind...

Liz Earle Cleanse & Polish

Now I haven't tried all the products for eyes which my research threw up, but here is a tiny(!) list of products I have ordered or am already using, plus a few promising-sounding things to investigate. Though I must use up some of those wipes first!

Eye serum (day / night) - Estee Lauder Advanced Night Repair Eye Serum Synchronized Complex II (currently using).

Eye cream (day / night) - at the moment I only possess sundry Crème de la Mer samples Blacknall kindly gave me in a swap package (eg Baume de la Mer, Emulsion de la Mer), so I will carry on using these all up. Additionally I do have my eye on Boots Botanics 80% Organic Hydrating Eye Cream - which Lisa Eldridge cites as a cheaper alternative to Kiehl's Eye Treatment with Avocado - and I have also come across multiple recommendations for Eucerin Hyaluron Filler Eye Treatment and Eyes It's Potent! by Benefit. I would be very open to further suggestions here, as I haven't properly eyeballed this category by any means. ;)

Cleansers suitable for the eye area (also to take off makeup) - Liz Earle Cleanse & Polish, Bioderma Sensibio (a Lisa Eldridge recommendation which I have ordered), Clinique Take The Day Off Balm Cleanser (recommended by a friend, and also well rated on blogs).

There is one eye-related procedural conundrum I haven't cracked yet. Short of wearing prescription sunglasses - as Katie Puckrik favours - I don't know how to go about applying SPF protection to the eye area without provoking another stinging episode. And I am also not sure I would be brave enough to use a retinol cream near the eye without medical supervision!

My hotchpotch collection of skincare samples

Yes, this post has been more about my methodological epiphany than about recommending the perfect skincare products for eyes, not least because everyone is different. And I may in fact be the only person in the world who didn't know that you should put dots of cream around your eye and give wipes a miss. But if anyone would like to share their favourite eyecare finds, that would actually advance the cause of skincare wisdom - or eye lore...a bit further. That's 'eye lore' as opposed to 'Eyelure', which, as everyone knows, is the world's favourite eyelash brand.

Oh, and the picture at the top of this post reminds me that I also learnt you shouldn't stand with your head under the shower, not even in the interests of hydration - the skin around the eyes isn't robust enough to withstand powerful jets of hot water. So there you go.