A slam dunk gunkfest: snap-prone stack pots

Travel pots going nowhere with offending sliver

It's been a while since I last wrote a beauty-related post...As you can see in the side bar, I have a(n) (wholly) involuntary Ebuzzing beauty blog ranking to maintain(!), so I thought I would take this opportunity to vent my frustration at a recent beauty product malfunction - one that has happened several times in fact, and to products from different retailers - to wit, stack pots made of such flimsy plastic that bits shear off at the drop of a hat.  Or rather they break off if you attempt to screw the pots together, which is rather the point of a 'stack', I would have thought.

The trouble started with a set of stack pots from Superdrug which I was using to decant travel-sized portions of various lotions: typically foundation, night cream and texturising 'product' for my hair (my beloved Label M to be specific).  In no time at all a sliver of plastic had sheared off the pot containing foundation, with dual consequences: air gets in and dries out the foundation to a useless crud, and a messily coated - and sharp - shard of pot drops into one's sponge bag or (God forbid) handbag, gaily smearing foundation on everything it touches.

I was irritated, but put it down to experience.  Perhaps I should spend a bit more and invest in more robust pots, which is the argument I always use when I persist in buying cheap Tupperwares from Poundland with flaps that detach from the lid with the ease of a wiggly tooth hanging by a thread.  Maybe if I put the broken flaps under my pillow the Poundland fairy would give me my pound back?  (On the premise that there must have been some inflationary effect since the sixpences of my youth.)

Congealing, not concealing...

So anyway, I toddled along to Boots and bought another set of stack pots that cost a little bit more - though it isn't exactly a premium item to be fair- and proceeded to fill them with more unguents of one sort or another.  Several days later, the same thing happened - at multiple points in the stack.  More splinter shrapnel - 'you could put your eye out with that', I can just hear my mother intone - more wandering gunk syndrome, more desiccated residue in the broken pot.

And now I feel stuck...I go away quite a bit, and would balk at the prospect of having to take full-sized containers of all my various items of beauty gubbins.  But these so-called travel pots clearly can't be trusted to travel - or not even not to travel - merely to behave as orderly receptacles on my dressing table seems to be a big ask.

Has anyone else experienced this particular travel aid malfunction or any other one involving a beauty product which they would like to get off their chest?  A claggy mascara, perhaps, or a lipstick with an ill-fitting cap?  I must say I get quite cross with bottles of shampoo and suchlike whose nozzles clog up when they are only half used.  I invariably have to take the flippy lid of the pump dispenser off and try to squeeze the stuff out through the inner tube below.  'Used by professionals' it says on the label of my Tresemme conditioner, to which I would add: 'but only once'.

Or perhaps some reader could have a crack at topping this alliterative description of the problem:

'Shockingly snap-prone stack pots shed sharply sheared-off shards'.

Oh, and my google image searches of 'stack pots beauty products' - just to check I was calling them by the correct term, you understand - threw up this unexpected image in the first row...  These giraffes from Anthropologie are undoubtedly cute and arguably more robust than small plastic containers, but conspicuously lack a reclosable lid.

Oh, and I know it is nothing to do with beauty products, but have you noticed how the walls of cheap PET bottles of drinking water are getting thinner?  Take a single swig and they contract in the middle like a wasp-waisted Victorian in an unforgiving corset.  This phenomenon is called 'panelling', I do remember from my time as a fruit juice product manager in the 80s.  But knowing its name doesn't make the imploding trick any less annoying.