Tag: Beauty

Beauty, Britain, Health, Home, Humor, London

The Winter of My Skin’s Discontent

“She couldn’t get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn’t get away.”
― Cynthia Voigt, When She Hollers

Confession. All my adult life I’ve read the articles in women’s magazines about the perils of winter on a girl’s skin, and I always assumed I got genetically lucky. My skin was largely okay. Even living in a desert state with dry air for years, the only thing that really affected my complexion was hormonal cycles and bad eating (still occasionally guilty of the latter). Then I moved to London. After an initial breakout, my skin calmed down again (many thanks for your advice)…until winter hit.

Team, consider me a convert. The magazines were not, in fact, just lying to promote sales of various products. The desert air has nothing on your old school heater in a city flat. I’ve never experienced the flaking, cracking, and shedding of my epidermis that I have in the last couple of months. Also, as a child I had eczema that mostly cleared up, except for my scalp where it has more or less stayed for the past two decades. Annoying but manageable. Not anymore! My eczema is back with a vengeance and it has become quite painful in areas.

2014-01-24 08.39.32
I’m giving the mirror some serious side-eye here.

Sorry to the more prurient minded among you, that’s not a hickey. It’s but one of the visible patches of winter eczema currently dotting my neck, chest, and face. This one is mostly healed, after a week long battle with medication. I’ve got streaks of it just below the neckline of my supremely fashion forward alma mater hoodie, and a patch on my right temple which took a big enough hit that I’m pretty sure its going to leave some scarring. Drat.

The current arsenal.
The current arsenal, posed in front of the offending heater.

Nivea is currently managing things below the collar bone while my argan balms and are keeping things like knees, elbows, and feet intact. I’ve got my eczema specialist for spot treatment, my moisturizer with SPF for day and my eye cream and Kiehls treatment for night. Lips require their own regimen. Neosporin gets slathered on any point where the skin is punctured, fractured, or generally abused. One heavy duty cream for the nights where they won’t cut it. For the first time in my life I’ve needed the occasional slathering of hand cream after a day out in the cold!

All of this is mostly helping, but I’m wondering if it’s a bit much and if there’s an easier way to keep my skin from falling off. So I’m putting another call out for winter skin and facial care recommendations. RSVP. Before I disintegrate.

Humor

Health and Fitness

“Oh, Charles!  You do have heavenly teeth.”
– Cold Comfort Farm

Since J.’s in the country for the first time in months, I decided to drag him through the usual rounds of preventative medicine.  Monday I called for a dentist appointment only to be told the only openings they had were long after he left…except for one in half an hour.  Poor J. was on the receiving end of a bossy phone call, “Get in the shower, I’m on my way home now!”  I had a soft spot drilled out an sealed up – being from the attack-is-the-form-of-defense school of dental health – and spent the rest of the afternoon with a numb upper lip.

The beauty-is-pain rituals topped off at Rite Aid at 10pm, coming home from the gym looking a hot post-Zumba mess, and needing to buy spot treatment cream and shampoo with tea tree oil for the eczema on my scalp.

Clearly I am some kind of super attractive sex goddess.

To be perfectly honest, the zumba doesn't always help either.
Beauty, Humor

Well…Drat!

“If Botticelli were still alive, he’d be working for Vogue.”
– Peter Ustinov

Dear Fairy Who Bestows Genetic Gifts:

I’ve got curves.  I’ve got pale skin (in the lovely way, not the sickly way).  I’ve got dark hair.  I look fantastic in red.  Would it have been to much trouble to have let me turn out a little bit more like this:

A while back, J. and I got a bunch of free subscriptions to magazines.  He gets a golf magazine and The Economist, we share The Atlantic, and I got Vogue.  The Bible.

I love it.  I swallow it whole.  And, occasionally, it makes me sick.  With envy.  See above.

Beauty, Fashion, Humor, Life

Anti. Aging.

 “God has given you one face and you make yourself another.”
– Shakespeare

A little while ago Sav wrote a post about her foray into the au naturale world of skin care, and it got me thinking. 

I remember going through the usual litany of cleansers, toners, and gadgets when I was a teenager (maybe less than some girls, since I didn’t learn how to be a girl myself until about 17).  I started with Clean and Clear, moved on to Neutrogena, and then cast it ruthlessly aside for Biore, more particularly, their Pore Strips.  Amazing! 

We're close to the same age, sweetie, but you're still looking like jailbait.
"We're close to the same age, but I'm still trying to look like jailbait. I'm reinforcing the crippling self-doubt you are probably experiencing right now just looking at my airbrushed face. Hey! We've got a product for that!"

But these days…a funny thing has started happening.  The commercials that make me sit up and pay attention, or the things I’d want to buy, are being sold by older women.  The endless parade of Disney Channel prodigies, starlets,  and pop stars that probably would have sent me scampering to the chemist’s shelves for the products they were endorsing in my youth…are children, babies!  I wouldn’t let them sell me cement, much less something to put on my face! 

Has anyone else noticed this? 

"You're obviously thinking way too hard about this one, C. Accept your ceaseless crawl towards maturity with grace. I'll be getting plastic surgery in a year or two, myself."
Humor, Shameful, Work

Get A Grip…

“‘You could always try relaxing.’
Relaxing!  She was way too hyper!”
-Marian Keyes

My arch nemesis!)
My arch nemesis!)

Long ago I discovered that I work best when I frame my life projects and goals as battles to be won (yes, I am Napolean reincarnated).  Thus my life is tiny parade of tiny crusades that I participate in valiantly and no one really cares about but me.  Case in point: blackheads.  Hate ’em!  Loathe em!  I have a mission, nay, a calling to eradicate those nasty little buggers and a whole arsenal at my disposal including cleansers, extractors, a new toy – Clean ‘n Clear Blackhead Eraser – recommended by Venice and seconded by me, and Biore Pore Strips, aka God’s Gift to Noses.  Want to seriously gross yourself out?  Slap one of those babies on and see how much gunk it pulls out of your face! 

Of course, this mentality has side effects.  Since I’m in a state of perpetual warfare with blackheads I often make the mistake of thinking other people are too.  So when I see people merrily prancing through their lives, seemingly indifferent to the noxious body waste pooling in their pores, I just want to attack them with salic acid.  The crusader aiming a sword stroke at the Turk and demanding, “Convert, heathen!” while they stare back in confused disdain, “What exactly is your problem?”

Occasionally my battles are of a more productive variety.  I’ve written several times of my Battle of the Bulge, even though I’ll be the first to admit that since buying a dress the ferocity of my attacks have put a serious dent in enemy flanks (plus my own flanks, I might add smugly).  I’ve also campaigned against landlords, laundry piles of epic proportions, work projects, more recently wedding planning, mountains during hiking trips, treadmills, and shoes that think I won’t be able to break them in (HA!). 

I am aware that this is a rather exhausting way to live life.  For example, the university does this health reward program which gives participants $25 per lifestyle even they chose to participate in.  This month it’s a goal to walk a certain amount every day.  Not a problem, I though originally, I can easily meet that quota during my gym time.  But then I looked online today…and some guy (with an unfortunately chosen Lord of the Rings nickname, I think he’s trying to be one of the characters) had already logged ten times what I had.  Just counting at the gym, was I?!  I THINK NOT!  I dashed over to the university health center and got myself one of their sad, cheap little pedometers and have been annoying people with it’s rattling sound ever since!  Competitive?  Me?

Life

Feel the Burn

“Beauty knows no pain, so what you cryin’ about, girl?”
-Frank Zappa

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Quick update: exercise hurts.  Running, which I’m used to, isn’t bad at all, but strength training should be somewhere in Dante’s hell.  As a punishment for sloth, perhaps?  I’m sure I’ll turn out toned and fabulous, but in the meantime ouch! 

Yesterday morning after lifting weights, I was putting my makeup on and was more than a little embarrassed to discover my hand was shaking.  My eyeliner was a bit dodgy and ragged around the edges, I looked like a raccoon vibrating from a caffeine high.  Today just lifting my arm high enough to apply mascara was a chore.

I need a goal to keep me going at 6am on Friday morning instead of whimpering, “Stop the treadmill I want to get off!”  Suggestions?  My fallback bribe of choice, chocolate, seems counterproductive for some reason.  And legally morphine is out.