Confessions of a Product Whore, or, these Boots are made for shopping

My love for the combination of my Clarisonic Mia and Cetaphil cleanser continues. It's keeping my skin clean, clear, and soft.  My other skin products are making me happy, too.

But no matter how happy I am with my current regimen, I can't resist the lure of new beauty products. This is particularly true when I travel and see stuff I can't find in the States. Which explains the £200 I spent at Boots when I was in England last August.

That's the equivalent of $350. What can I say? Product junkies are like sharks. We must keep moving forward or we die.

So anyway, here's some of the additions I made to my batterie de toilette. Heh. To start off, I got a pot of German Nivea.


I have no idea why German Nivea is supposed to be so much better than the Nivea you get in America, which is made in Mexico. But it has become kind of cult-y. Bloggers and reviewers on Makeup Alley and Amazon are claiming it's as effective as Crème de la Mer, which costs $165/oz. All I know is that my grandmother used Nivea Skin Oil and had beautiful skin, so into the basket it went. And I love it. It's much fluffier than Eucerin, but just as wonderful for soothing super dry skin.

I also bought a bottle of Therapist's Secret Facial Oil, from the Sanctuary Spa line carried at Boots. It's a mixture of many different pure oils: sunflower seed, rosehip, wheat germ, and jojoba seed, with some essential oils of rose and frankincense, which leaves it smelling like midnight mass on Christmas Eve.

It's meant to be used a drop at a time, alone or as a first layer under your regular moisturizer. It's fantastic, especially considering how dry my skin is getting now that the weather is getting chilly.

I also bought a pot of The Secret is Out Lift Lift & Repair Night Cream by Dr. Nick Lowe:

I picked it out because I was pretty sure I couldn't get it in the States. Also, it has Sodium Hyaluronate, Hexapeptide-9, various anti-oxidant fruit ingredients--but no retinols or acids. Because I wanted a nice moisturizing cream that didn't make me peel. More on that later.

Oh, and in my States side wanderings, I picked up a bottle of DHC Mild Touch Cleansing Oil at a local branch of Mitsuwa, a big Japanese grocery store chain.

When I'm wearing RuPaul levels of spackle, I like to double cleanse--one step to dissolve the makeup and another go to get clean. This oil is great at dissolving and rinsing away makeup as a first step before I use the Clarisonic with Cetaphil.

Mindless extravagance or canny shopping? You be the judge in my next post, when I reveal my plans for these products.