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.
2010, beauty products, favourite things in Beauty Op-Ed 
