The one where she shows off her favorite cleansers

If I'm wearing anything on my face other than a non-SPF-containing moisturizer, I have to double cleanse before I go to bed. Otherwise, things go along swimmingly for a while, and then one day, I discover icky clogged pores. Or milia. NO THANK YOU.

The only thing worse than going to bed with your makeup on is going to bed with SPF residue on your face. That stuff can be the worst.

For a while I was in love with micellar water. It was so easy, and didn't involve waiting for the water in my bathroom pipes to become comfortably warm. But I found that swiping my face with a cotton pad or two of Bioderma micellar water wasn't good enough. It's the same with makeup wipes. Don't let them fool you; they are a lick and a promise and nothing more. I don't care if, like me, you think of yourself as a dry-skinned person who basically never breaks out and can skimp on cleansing. IT WILL CATCH UP WITH YOU.

So, first I melt off the makeup and/or SPF product with an oil-based cleanser. Think the Wicked Witch of the West. "I'm melting ... melting ..."

I have tried several cleansing oils, and find some very heavy. They rinse off fine, but massaging them into my skin feels like a lot of work and leaves my skin reddened. I like DHC's Gentle Touch cleansing oil very much, but it's hard to find in stores. MAC's version is fragrance-free and is available at Ulta, MAC stores, department stores, etc.

To make sure I've removed every bit of makeup, I follow with this foaming cleanser. It's a low-pH, unscented cleanser that produces a lovely, soft cushiony foam and rinses clean, leaving my skin clean but not stripped. I've found it on Amazon, eBay, and Sally Beauty. It's dirt cheap and lasts forever, because you only need a pea-sized dab of it.

Once or twice a week I use my trusty ancient Clarisonic Mia. I'm a huge fan of chemical exfoliants (which I'll discuss in another post) but nothing is easier and more cost effective than a physical exfoliator. I tend to use it in the shower so I can use it on my neck and upper chest without spraying water all over my bathroom.

That's it. I still keep a bottle of Bioderma micellar water around, mostly for freshening up my face when I get up in the morning. And I find that I don't need eye makeup removers; the cleansing oil takes care of that for me.

OMG how did I become such a minimalist????

In which Ulta enables my Korean skincare addiction hobby

Thanks to Nouveau Cheap, today I discovered that Ulta's website is offering all kinds of GWPs and deluxe samples and whatnot. As I mentioned earlier, their 21 Days of Beauty Event hadn't set off my MUST BUY MUST BUY mental car alarm noise. The one product I wanted, Cargo's OneBase concealer/foundation, wasn't on sale, and I planned to wait, in a mature and well-reasoned fashion, for a better opportunity to purchase it. My exact words were:

Sooner or later, one of those retailers will make me an offer I can't refuse ... something along the lines of a discounted price, with free shipping, free samples, and maybe a footrub. Oh, and eBates.

Until then, I will bide my time. Do you hear me, ULTA? Hmmm?

Well, Ulta has done it. With a $50 order, I could get free shipping and an embarrassingly huge number of samples.

The qualifying purchases

So what did I buy to make the $50 minimum? The Cargo OneBase plus some K-Beauty goodies.

Here's the sneaky thing about Ulta. They stock stuff you'd never expect. I mean, not only are they a source of Cargo cosmetics, if only online, they also stock Tony Moly and Hada Labo Tokyo and who knows what else, because I hit my $50 minimum and stopped looking.

I picked out a Hada Labo's Hydrating Facial Cleanser for $11.99

and then made up the difference with the four Tony Moly sheet masks that sounded the most beneficial for old ladies: Brightening Pearl

Hydrating Hyaluronic

and Red Wine

 Although, for me, red wine is less about Pore Care than a good time antioxidants.

And now for the GWPs

I include these less-than-glamorous screenshots because Ulta's website has a different approach to their freebies. They don't show up magically in your shopping cart, and you don't type in a coupon code. Instead, you have to find the items and add them to your shopping bag. A price will be attached to them until you make the minimum purchase, at which point, the price gets replaced with the word FREE. Whew!

There's a sample bag :

An Ahava deluxe sample set

and a Redken gift

And yes, you can stack these offers.

Really, Poppy? More samples???

Those Redken products are apparently designed to help me achieve texture-y beachy waves or something like that. Unfortunately, my hair starts off crunchy and wavy, and I spend a lot of time, energy, and money softening, straightening, and smoothing it out. So what am I going to do with these Redken products?

I thought about doing the world's lamest Beauty Blogger giveaway with the beachy waves products, but then inspiration struck. Next month, Jen Lancaster will be at a resort on Turks and Caicos with a bunch of incredibly lucky women, but blackbird, Susie Sunshine, and Martha McGyver and I will be getting together in Chicago. What better way of offloading samples than to lure my blogging buddies into my den of beauty inequity and keep them there until they relent and stuff dozens of samples into their suitcases?

And of course, you know I'll be blogging the whole thing.

Review: Fresh Soy Face Cleanser

This is a series in which, in an attempt to work my way through my sample overload, I spend the weekend trying out samples, then inflict capsule reviews upon the internet. 

 I'm continuing to work on my sample stash, but the review process is getting bogged down with various treatment products. To detest a lipstick or nail polish is for me, the work of a moment, but if a product comes with 15 burn-off-your-wrinkles-and-brown-spots pads, I feel duty-bound to to use all 15 before weighing in. 

However, things are simplified when skincare arrives in a single-use packet.

Fresh Soy Face Cleanser, 1.7 oz., $15.00; picture courtesy of Nordstrom

This product has been reviewed hundreds of times on MakeupAlley and thousands of times on Sephora. Mind you, I didn't actually read these reviews before I tried the product, because it wasn't necessary. This wasn't a cloth mask imbued with eau de unicorn tears accompanied by instructions written in Korean. It was a water-soluble cleanser in a single-use packet.

There are ups and downs to these packets, which I feel pressed to bloggersplain to you. It can be hard to tell how much product to use, even when common sense tells you, duh, it's a single-use packet. With things like hair conditioner, the amount you use depends on the amount and condition of your hair. And sometimes the product you're sampling is incredibly expensive, and you're trying your utmost to avoid wasting even a drop, because you can dimly sense the shades of your Puritan ancestors judging you for your spendthrift-y wastefulness.

But with a tiny packet of facial cleanser, even an over-thinker can guess the amount required, so I ripped open the packet and rubbed its contents over my face.

The Good

This is a lotion-y, non-foaming cleanser, a lot like Cetaphil, except with fancier ingredients.

Ingredient list courtesy of Nordstrom's helpful website.

As you can see, the ingredients feature a lot of bland, inoffensive stuff, as well as small amounts of plant oils and extracts.

This product is sulfate- and paraben-free.

It feels like a lotion on the skin. In fact, it shares an okra-water-like slimy lotion texture with Cetaphil, its much cheaper, less allergenic,  more widely available comrade in cleansing.

Like Cetaphil, it doesn't strip the skin.

It worked fine as a wake-up-the-face morning shower cleanser.

The Bad

The product's claims are unconvincing. Fresh touts its use of soy, but as always, in a cleanser, the ingredients are on your face for an extremely short time, so whatever miracles soy is supposed to perform probably won't have time to occur.

It has limited cleansing abilities. It won't remove heavy makeup or sunscreen unless you also use some kind of mechanical exfoliation, either by washcloth or Clarisonic.

It's expensive.

It has fragrance. A strong cucumber fragrance

which I hated.

Poppy's Epiphany 

I like cucumbers, and I don't, in general, mind the smell of cucumber in my skincare (RIP Caswell Massey Cucumber cold cream) but this stuff just flat out reeked. Some reviewers pick up notes of rose, etc., which makes sense, given the ingredient list. All I smelled was a composting heap of cucumber skin.

And I realized something. Life's too short to use beauty products that make me gag bug me.

First of all, taking care of yourself should be one of life's great sensual pleasures. Your creams and lotions should look, smell, and fell wonderful—to you, not a random bunch of reviewers. If you adore the scent of Fresh Soy Cleanser, that's great; use and enjoy. But I'd be kicking myself if I'd popped for a full-size tube based on the reviews, because I would have never reached for it.

Which leads me to the second half of my epiphany. Bought-but-not-used products make me feel bad. They don't spark joy; they spark guilt. If I had purchased a tube of this cleanser, it would get shoved aside and neglected. And then the shades of my Puritan ancestors would gang up on me and make me feel terrible.

TLDR

This shit smells terrible, and it was with an overwhelming sense of joy that I threw the empty packet into the bin.

Recent discoveries

Being the last by whom the new is tried, I'm sure my savvier readers will roll their eyes and think "Seriously? She's just gotten around to trying it?"

But here's the thing: the fashion/beauty press is an ever-moving stream of information. When the hot new thing is new, everyone is blathering away about it. You can't get away from people nattering on about Creme de la Mer or Tory Burch flats or Sevens jeans and then, all of a sudden, the chatter dries up.

(Except for Maybelline's Great Lash mascara, which still gets press. I don't know how Maybelline does it, because it sucks. But mark my words, that smeary, goopy crap in a pink-and-green tube is on somebody's Best of list even as we speak.)

Anyway, here are some things I've been liking:

Bioderma Cráline H2O Solution Micellaire 

I mostly don't watch the beauty gurus on YouTube. I mean, I like conspicuous consumption as much as the next girl, but those teenagers with their haul videos sicken even me.

I also find them almost maddeningly inefficient. I mean, if I tell you that this stuff is a cleanser that you use on cotton pads like a toner, and it's cool, soothing, and gets your face beautifully clean without stripping or irritating your skin, you know everything you need to know, and I didn't just waste eight minutes of your life.

And yet, I have to give the YouTube gurus credit: they know their stuff. This particular video was about French drug store products, and being the world's biggest Francophile, as well as someone who delights in discovering great drug store products, I sat up and took notice. Unfortunately, I can't remember which video taught me this. Sorry, beauty guru, whoever you are. (The 250 ml size is available for $25.00 on Amazon.com--here's a link to all their Bioderma products)

Embryalisse Lait-Creme Concentré

The same beauty guru also turned me on to Embryalisse Lait-Creme Concentré, which is a very plain, very gentle, slightly fluffy-feeling moisturizer. It's like a fluffier, less greasy version of Eucerin. It's great when my skin feels super dry or when I've been testing its patience with too many retinols and acids. A good-sized tube goes for $25.00 on Amazon; here's a link.)

Benefit Dandelion

See what I mean about my lag time? This stuff came out a decade ago! My friend Wendy turned me on to it. She said she'd used up three of them. I love it. It's blusher for the blusher-challenged--at least if they're pale. It's such a pale shade of pink, it probably wouldn't show on medium or darker complexions. But porcelain types can sweep it on lavishly with the big white brush and never be afraid of developing 80s disco cheeks. It's $28.00 at Sephora. Thanks, Wendy!