2010 REVIEW | Products deleted from my beauty bag in 2010

BENEFIT MASCARAS

All of them. They just dry up and flake way too quickly nowadays and they are a bastard to get off the lashes at night. How can something that feels so dry (and flake so much) when on my eyelashes, feel as sticky and sludgy as the inside of an old oil drum when I try to remove it? Did you re-formulate, Benefit, or have I just fallen victim to the lower standards of production endemic to cosmetic products made for the US market?

Fail.

NON-ORGANIC SHAMPOO

They'll give you mad suds but if you dye your hair ginger like me, those suds rinse away your expensive hair color in just a few washes, having a double whammy negative impact on both your wallet's girth and the water table. In fact, I'm just washing it less full stop, because it prolongs my hair colour, washes fewer chemicals down the drain and makes my limp mop easier to style.

PEDICURES AT ANY OLD SALON

In America, nail salons are everywhere, like banks in Paris and Tesco metro in the UK. And thusly manicures and pedicures come cheap, quick and regularly. They're almost a national right, like elastic-waist pants and an SUV.

There's a reason everyone gets them in the US.

But you know what? You get what you pay for.

In this instance? A mean case of toenail funk due to the unhygienic foot baths at one such run-of-the-mill nail farm. Not visible to the naked eye, rest assured that even the spiffiest of foot baths can harbour nasties.

It doesn't help matters that the same sodding salon that gifted me my fungal buddy also employed reusable and clearly already once reused tools on the sore-covered, scaly, purple-red-blue-green-yellow, puffy, oozing, cracked, bruised and more-words-than-I-have-in-my-vocabulary legs, feet and nails (thick, curdled yellow and far longer than the ends of her calloused toes) of a woman with a suspicious odor who came in and sat directly next to me. I actually got the dry heaves and started to feel faint when I accidentally looked down at her feet and calves.

Know what else?

I didn't see the technician sanitize the tools before or AFTER working on this woman. I pity the technician who took on the job without even donning a paper face mask, BUT I pity the next woman to occupy that seat and unwittingly befall the fung-tastic fate that awaits her while she quietly reads US Weekly and hands over a cool $25 for the pleasure.

You think it could never happen to you... until it does.

Since it's cheaper than a drink at Starbucks, it becomes a volume game. They take all comers and keep butts in the seats.

From now on, I just say no to casual pedicures and will be practicing safe pedicures from herein out. 

BLUSH

If you have cheeks like mine, it's hard not to look clownish without an expert hand applying this stuff. And by cheeks like mine, I mean puffy. My husband once -- glowing as he thought he was paying me a compliment -- told me I looked like... I can barely say it... Rene. Zellweger.

Thems fightin' words.

At least he didn't say Bridget Jones.

LIQUID EYELINER

Until the morning I wake up without a hooded eyelid sagging over my right lash line, this stuff just has to go. It smears with every blink, making me look like I'm an extra from Leaving Las Vegas, or at least my right eye is.

ELNETT HAIRSPRAY

I've been faithful to Elnett for years because it holds everything in place so well but lets the hair move, helping women the world over avoiding helmet hair. But I just. can't. take. it. anymore.

The smell is nauseating.

I get queasy every time I spray it. And, like Charlie Brown's Pig Pen, a cloud of the granny-scented stuff follows you wherever you go, once applied, no matter how many hours have lapsed. Elevators are an asphyxiated disaster. Ever time I've gotten into a car with Elnett on my hair, I have to roll down the window and pop my head out, like a dog sniffing the air.

That's no way to live.

It's odorific and horribly so. Elnett, I love you but I'm leaving.

GUILT

Us ladies are always so sorry for everything or feeling bad about everything, particularly in America. If I see one more advertisement, food network show -- WHATEVER -- that says 'eat BLANK guilt free' I will bitch slap them with my cast iron frying pan.

Why, women?? WHY?

Why would you EVER feel guilty about eating a piece of bloody chocolate?

Eat it and enjoy it. Or you'll just keep eating more because you don't enjoy it, feel guilty and then comfort eat to stop that gnawing feeling. Detect a pattern here, Watson?

Stop feeling guilty about not going to the gym enough, holding onto those last ten pounds, wearing makeup that's a bit out of the ordinary, spending money on a facial. Seriously. Enough with the puritancial guilt-ridden existence.

It's. So. Bloody. Boring.

I've done away with said guilt over the past few years (not easy), really hitting my stride in 2010, and am happy to leave that burden in my dust.

If you really must live life always feeling so guilty about everything, at least do something to deserve the guilt for chrissake.

FAVOURITE | tunes that defined my 2010

AS WITH the list of favourite sites and blogs of 2010, many of these tunes might not be new. In fact, some might be ancient (in pop culture terms). Nevertheless, they musically defined my 2010.

Somehow I found them, or they found me, and we were thick as thieves. I put a song I love on a loop until I can't bear to hear it again for years (RIP Amy Winehouse's Back To Black).

Holla to my sistas who fall into the same category of song listener as I do (I'll pour a little out for all those songs we've lost over the years by playing them to death. Word).

FAVOURTE SONGS OF 2010 (AKA SONGS THAT I HAD ON REPEAT THROUGHOUT 2010)

Maps and Soft Shock by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. '80s, electro-grungy(ish) goodness. Soft Shock is not unlike Goldfrapp a la 2006. I actually prefered working out to these two songs more than any others in 2010. Strange, I know.

Intro by The XX - Oooh, if ever I were on some sort of mission in life - maybe something seriously melodramatic - THIS is the song I would have playing in the background. It's just so cool. If Clint Eastwood coulda been turned into a song when he was 26, this would be it.

Little Bit by Lykke Li - A sugary sweet voice. It's just so good and the chorus is catchy. This is the sort of song, I just know in my heart of hearts, that Japanese women (and business men) are totally after for their private Karaoke jags. 

Bulletproof by La Roux - Certainly not a 2010 hit (in fact, it might even be 2008) but one that makes me bop around wherever I am when it comes on, dignity be damned. Electro-synth pop fabulosity. Happy mornings when this comes up on Pandora.

Such Great Heights by The Section Orchestra - I'm eternally sad I didn't have the live jazz trio at our backyard wedding play this while I walked up to meet my man pond side. Me in black-embroidered white chiffon at cocktail length minus two inches topped with a Russian-netting fascinator. He, dressed not entirely unlike Tony Montoya of Scarface. First time I heard Such Great Heights was a lifetime ago, at about 2am, while playing drunken Boggle at a friend's flat on Petticoat Lane. It's been on repeat since and I would give my eyelashes to go back in time and get this magical number going for my nuptials.

Only Girl (In The World) by Rihanna - Boy oh boy, did I ever pump this up and roll down all (yep, all four) windows when tearing down a winding back road one crisp November morning in the Sonoma Mountains. En route to a client meeting, the whole time tapping the beat and bouncing in my seat while keeping an eagle eye on on the edge of the road for wily wild turkeys and indecisive deer. I didn't actually know it was Rihanna until the male (I repeat male) winemaker we were staying with handed me his iPod to DJ while he drove at some later point. He's a big. fan.

Aicha by Taha, Khaled, Faudel - It's the audial part to my memories of eating dodgy late-night kebab outside the Camden tube with fellow SSEES graduate students in 2005. The purveyor played this jam quite regularly. It's certainly not a 2010 hit but a little Aicha thrown in the mix is always good times and delighted my Algerian brother-in-law at our 2010 Christmas party.

Remind Me by Royksopp - This is our song. By our, I mean the collective song of my marital unit. My husband said it reminded him of me (he did, afterall, come visit me in England a couple times before we could even fathom that we would end up smooching one day, let alone get meh-wwwwied). 

Superstar by Lupe Fiasco - It was played at a now-divorced friend's wedding some years back, and somehow found it's way back into my heart, iPhone and party mix. It was one of the last songs to play as us stragglers still swayed, arms linked, on the wooden dance floor set up under a billowing canopy in a field that night. We were blissfully unaware of how close we were teetering to the edge of a cliff that gave way to nothing but adulthood. Married adulthood. Kids adulthood. Jobs-we-hated adulthood. Divorces adulthood. Scary stuff. And a Lupe Fiasco song defines that moment for me. Go figure. Welcome back into the fold, Lupe.

Cosmic Love by Florence And The Machine - Florence is my doppelganger (or I hers, I suppose). Ginger, fringed and forever in brilliant red lipstick. Our similarities stop there, though, as I don't often wear black lace dresses, nor have I such a voice, talent or kitchen drawer rammed full of awards. She came to Chicago early in 2010 and played the House of Blues, a small venue and testament to the observation that Americans really don't hear most non-American music until it's about as new as your grandmother's dentures. She played to a packed house. It's the best live show I've seen in years.

Avalon by Juliet - Yes, yes, more nostalgia. Walking by open air bars in Hvar in 2008, warm sea breezes carried this club tune my way, somehow making it feel like summer the way it use to feel like summer when you were a kid -- a tangible, humid, languorous beast that we stalked all school year. I cling to this tune when I want to shut my eyes and pretend I'm sunbathing on the rocky shore of the Adriatic without a care in the world (like on horribly cold winter days). It helped with my weepy feelings on moving back to Chicago during the hellish month of February in the Midwest.

Something Good Can Work by Two Door Cinema - Sounds a bit like we should be dancing the conga line with a bunch of sunburned, paunchy holiday goers at a Sandals resort, but just enough to make it totally awesome. I can't help but to bust out the air maracas everytime I hear it and watch my husband wince as I dance around with 'em.

GRAB THIS PLAYLIST (or just listen to it instantly) ON GROOVESHARK HERE. No account required.

Sadly no have access to Spotify here =0(

What were your favourite tunes of 2010? Do share!

Won't you stay tuned for more of our favourite lists from 2010?