"The Routine"

I’ve been very flattered lately to have been asked by a few people what my “routine” is. I hesitate to share this because it should be different for everyone – depending upon your skin’s needs – but I decided there are enough things we all should be doing (and I do have some favorite products) that it was worth a post.

The most important thing about your routine is to find out your skin type. Whatever you think your skin type is now, I'm sorry to say you are probably wrong. I know I was. I thought that since I was prone to breakouts that my skin was oily ( a common misconception), so I kept doing things to dry it out, which just made me break out more. Then, thanks to the fact that I write this blog, I was invited to a Skin Type Solutions event about a year ago and was given a set of products by Dr. Leslie Baumann tailored to my skin type. It is not an exaggeration to say that within about a week my skin transformed itself and that I can count on one hand the number of blemishes I’ve had since then. My skin has literally never looked better. So get thee to the skin type solutions website. There you will find out what type you really are.

• Once you know your skin type, CLEANSE. I used to be a department store snob, but once Dr. Baumann’s kit introduced me to CeraVe (from the Kinerase family), available at Walgreen's, I no longer turned my nose up at buying my products at drug stores.  

Creamy and moisturizing, it’s a great morning cleanser. I used to use it at night, too, but I found that it doesn’t do well at removing makeup so I had to use a washcloth, which was unnecessarily abrasive and defeated the purpose of using a gentle cleanser, so I set about finding a good moisturizing cleanser that removes makeup well. My search landed me very happily with Fresh’s Soy Face Cleanser. It foams just a little bit, smells like heaven, and - in an unexpected bonus - takes off most of my eye makeup without any burning. When I dry my face on my white towels, there is virtually no makeup left behind!

• EXFOLIATE. Do this at least a couple of times a week, particularly if you use any type of retinoid product on your skin like I do for acne, as these products speed up cell turnover and exfoliation helps this along. My favorite exfoliator is Biore Even Smoother Microderm Exfoliator (another drugstore superstar) because it’s so gentle and leaves you so glowing without over-stripping or shredding your skin. 
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  And don’t forget to exfoliate your lips, too, particularly in the winter. This will help de-flake and make your lipsticks go on more smoothly.You don’t need to waste money on a product for this. Just wet your lips with some water, rub some granulated sugar over them and rinse! Do this at night and go to bed with some Smith’s Minted Rose Lip Balm on your lips and your lips will be transformed in the morning.

• TONE. I use toner to remove the last bits of makeup from my skin, to hydrate and refresh. This is an optional step, but don’t ever, ever use products like Sea Breeze or Bonne Bell’s Ten-O-Six Lotions. You might as well just stick your head in a vat of alcohol. If you’re a dry skin type, there’s clearly no need for this and if you’re oily, you may think you’re doing your skin good, but all you’re doing is making your skin produce more oil to compensate. Gentle is the operative word here. Since my favorite toner, Kinerase Antioxidant Hydrating Mist, was taken off the market, I had to find a new toner, and, again, Fresh to the rescue with its
  
  Rose Marigold Floral Water.
• MOISTURIZE. First of all, don’t skip eye cream. I don’t care how old you are or if you have the first signs of wrinkles yet. Your undereye area is incapable of making its own moisture so you have to help it. If you don’t have visible signs of aging yet, simply use a moisturisizing product like Clarins Eye Contour Balm or Neutrogena Healthy Skin Eye Cream.  If you are older and have various issues under the eyes, there are about a zillion products out there that target each area – puffiness, dark circles, lines and wrinKles, dryness. I’ve done the legwork, though, and still my favorite (and such a bargain!) is Dr. LeWinn’s Lift and Resculpt (see my post), which targets all these issues.
• Secondly, moisturize your whole face. Even if your skin is oily, you need some kind of moisture, but follow the recommendation of your Dr. Baumann regimen.  During the day I typically use a moisturizing sunscreen (again CeraVe because it has everything I want and need: ceramides and hyaulronic acid, both crucial for water and moisture retention, is non-comedogenic and controlled-release so my skin feels moisturized all day. At night,if I’m particularly dry, I use a moisturizing oil straight out of the shower (a tip from my favorite beauty maven Jean Godfrey June).
  
  
  My pick for this is the slightly-pricey Clarins Santal Oil for Dry Skin. I follow that with the heavier CeraVe Cream (as opposed to the lighter lotion.
  
  

If all this has been too much information, feel free to ignore everything I’ve said except this: DO NOT LEAVE YOUR HOME WITHOUT SUNSCREEN ON YOUR FACE AND HANDS. The brand is not important (although I like CeraVe for the quality, ingredients and the price), but the SPF (at least 30, preferably higher) and the stability of the ingredients is. This step alone will save you from premature aging, skin cancer and age spots. It will, unfortunately, also prevent you from getting enough Vitamin D, so make sure you are not deficient in this (see my previous post about this for details).

Here's to better skin for all in the new year!

At Prada, You're Never Fully Dressed Without Smile #151

Uniform. The word does not ususally inspire…well, much of anything. But what if the uniform was dictated to you by Miuccia Prada? Then it wouldn't be so bad, would it? But this brilliant arbiter of style - or at least her company - didn't stop at clothes for this particular uniform. She went all the way to the sexy red lips. 

I discovered this quite by accident while browsing the Prada boutique for Things I Cannot Afford in the Temple of Happiness (Bloomingdale’s), where I was chatting with a lovely young woman (Danielle, pictured) with fantastic red lips and asked her if she happened to know what color it was she was wearing. I do this all the time with total strangers, but her answer surprised me. “Lancome #151,”’ she said definitively. I couldn’t believe she knew the number so I probed further. You know the number?? “Yes," she said. "It’s the same one we all wear,” at which point I glanced around the boutique and noticed that everyone, irrespective of age, haircolor or ethnicity, had the same red lips. All the salesgirls are handed a tube when they are hired along with their Prada patent bow belts. 


I had never heard of such a thing! I had heard of wearing uniforms to work, of course, but never of dictating the makeup of one's employees, particularly something that is such a statement as red lipstick. What if it didn't look good on everyone? But this one did! Here was a diverse group of women, and yet #151 (Avant Garde Red, by the way) looked great on all of them. How could there be a universal red I had not yet stumbled upon? 

After asking Danielle if I could take her photo and write about her, I immediately searched online to try and find something about this fascinating phenomenon of making lipstick part of a uniform - or about Prada doing it first - and found virtually nothing. Why not, I wondered? Red lipstick is strong, powerful and makes a statement. Why not make something like that part of the image you are projecting for women's clothing, accessories and fragrance? 


Anyone who reads this blog (or who even knows me, for that matter) knows that I think red lipstick is appropriate for everything from a night on the town to taking out the trash, so it should absolutely be part of a day at work at a fashion house. And to make it a required part of the uniform? Well, that just ensures that everyone looks equally fabulous. 

When You're Faithful to Your Lipstick and Your Lipstick Doesn't Return the Favor...

Monogamy: the condition or practice of having a single mate during a period of time

This implies an agreement between two parties, yes? So, what happens when one party is monogamous and the other party is not? Well, many of us are unfortunately familiar with this, right?

But what if your monogamous relationship is with your lipstick? That is to say, you have used none other than this one lipstick for years. Then one day, just like in any other relationship, you notice little things…like it’s not so easy to find anymore. It’s not on the front display shelf anymore. Maybe you have to ask for it specially, or “it’s in the back.” Maybe it’s just constantly out of stock. So you do the thing you know you’re never supposed to do for fear of getting the answer you don’t want to get: you ask what's going on. And what you find out is that it’s being discontinued. Like any betrayal, you never know the real reason it’s being discontinued, and if you ask, you probably will not be told the truth; all you know is that someday soon you will not be able to get it anymore, and you go into a panic.

This is happening to my friend Maggie, except that it’s not just any lipstick. It’s the only lipstick she wears, and, more than that, it’s the only makeup she wears. Period. When I found out about this, quite by accident one night by complimenting her on how great her lipstick looked (because I pay attention to these things), she told me of her challenge and her mission to find every last tube of MAC Lip Gelee in Moistly (terrible name) left in the New York City area or online. I understand her devotion. An already gorgeous girl with perfect skin, this not-quite-a-gloss, not-quite-a-lipstick with just a subtle punch of berry stain totally lights up her face.

I told her of my own journey, having survived a betrayal many years ago when Aveda pulled its Redwood Cerise lipstick for no apparent reason and I made my husband drive me around Manhattan to every Aveda store one Saturday, Visa card in hand, buying them all. I still have two tubes left. Of course it’s worth noting that my backlash to that betrayal was nothing like Maggie's: I did not pledge undying allegiance to my color. Instead, I turned into a lipstick whore, abandoning my color and wearing anything that came along, to the point where I now carry around at least 10 lipsticks in different shades to suit my mood and clothing. I even had to buy a bigger makeup bag to suit my loose lips.

But I digress...this is not Maggie’s style, so I pledged to help her find what was left in New York of what is rightfully hers. Her three solid months of work has yielded a total of 13 tubes, procured from online scores, back rooms at MAC counters at Macy’s, and as far afield as a Neiman Marcus or two. Now her friends know of her plight and when they find a tube, she gets them as gifts.

With this cushion of time, I have advised her to refrigerate all of them and when she gets down to her last tube and a half, she is to keep the full tube for herself to use, and bring the half to one of the great miracles of modern makeup, Three Custom Color, handily located in Manhattan on 22nd Street. In addition to their own roster of their own extraordinary products – blushes that make you look like you just came in off the ski slopes and lipsticks named after New York dance clubs from the ‘80s – they will literally replicate for you your long-lost anything…not just lipstick but blush, foundation, powder, brow gel, you name it. Even my very own Redwood Cerise is already in their database.

Are they a miracle? Kind of...or maybe they're just the nice, solid relationship you've been looking for all this time.

Holiday Lips: No Time to Be Shy

The holidays are no time to be shy about lip color, and to me they mean it’s time to break out the reds and berries. If you are a neutral-gloss-wearing type who never wears a strong color on your mouth, now’s the time to upgrade to muted red or a berry stain. If, on the other hand, your makeup bag is already bursting with saturated these colors, now is the time of year to go full-on, especially at night and especially for parties, or to even deepen your shades with a bit of black.

My all-time favorite red, as I've said here before, is Giorgio Armani Rouge d’Armani #400 (not 401 as inexplicably recommended by Lucky in their September 2010 red lipstick piece – it’s way too orange). A close second and quite an unsung hero among reds is NARS’s Red Lizard. While everyone is falling all over themselves over Lancome’s Absolute Rouge, NARS’s Jungle Red and MAC’s Russian Red, Red Lizard is an incredibly flattering shade and a much truer, richer red than these, although its texture is just a tad dry. Further along the glossy spectrum, one product stands alone (please forgive me, I've said this before, too): Chanel’s Dragon Satin Lip Lacquer. Applied generously with the wand, it’s rich, saturated and striking. Patted down with your finger or a tissue it’s muted more like a stain. A more recent addition to my makeup bag is a lifesaver for on-the-subway-on-the-way-to-the-party touchups: NARS’s Cruella Velvet Matte Lip Pencil. So quick and so easy, I often wear it during the day, but I have long extolled the virtues of wearing red lips all the time so if you're not up for this don't despair. If you have a darker complexion or are a woman of color, MAC’s Ruby Woo will be a knockout on you. For fairer-skinned among us, this color looks clownish, but I have literally stopped Asian and African American women on the street and asked them what they are wearing and often this is the color.

In the berry family, the home run in my opinion is Chanel’s Lune Rousse. As a member of the Rouge Coco line, its texture couldn’t be more perfect, it feels like a dream going on and lasts seemingly forever. Despite all the press about Ballet Russe (it has seemed to show up in every magazine lately), I find it too severe. Other lovely berry shades are MAC’s old standby Diva and Lancome’s Le Rouge Absolu in Merlot.

If you’ve already ventured into red and berry territory and want to turn it up a notch, add a dab of MAC Lipmix in Black to your lipcolor. Lipmix is the next generation following Mattene lipstick in Midnight Media from a couple of years ago that sold out so fast everyone’s heads were spinning.

If all this is still too much for you and you still have the urge to leave your lips neutral, I’ll leave you with one idea that I stumbled upon last New Year’s: swipe a bit of sheer orange gloss over your usual lipstick for a festive pop of color that will go with just about anything but will help your look stand out. My personal favorite – because it’s not too orange-y – is Smashbox’s Alluring. Use it over a neutral pencil, on top of your usual neutral color, or even combined with a stronger color (I use it in the center of my top and bottom lips even over red when I’m going out at night).

Happy holidays!

Tarte Knew What We Needed Before We Knew We Needed It

It's always nice when a cosmetics line anticipates what you need next, like a partner in a healthy relationship. So it was with Tarte this year.  Amid the frenzy of lip stains that came out last spring, ranging from the horrendous felt tip pens of Cover Girl Outlast Lip Stain and Revlon Just Bitten (even more work than CG with its annoying two-step process of covering the gross, dry felt tip pen with balm), all the way to goopy glosses by the major cosmetic houses that could hardly call themselves stains at all, came a parting of the clouds known as Tarte's Lipsurgence.

Already a perennial favorite of mine starting with its Flush cheek and lip stain many years ago, Tarte introduced Lipsurgence this spring claiming that it would increase my lips' moisture content by 6000% in 28 days. Really? Well, I don't care and I really have no idea how I would even figure out if this were true. All I know is that I totally fell in love with this product, and the timing could not have been more perfect. Spring turned into one of the hottest and driest summers on record, a summer when it was hard to be bothered with makeup at all (or what we all had on melted right off) and here was this lovely-textured lip color and balm, sheer enough to put on without a mirror but pretty enough to be noticeable, with its jojoba oil, its peppermint for awesome taste and smell, and vitamins C and E.

But now this wretched summer is over and, as if on cue, my Lipsurgence is running out. It didn't seem right to replace it with more of the same - Tarte seemed to have made this product just for summer.  So imagine my glee when I walked into Sephora for my usual survey of new products, only to find a whole new line of Lipsurgence natural matte lip stains, custom-made for fall in matte colors! The colors are similar to the original line-up, but more muted and subtle, more...well...fall-like. The texture is, as expected, drier (although they're holding to that 6000%!) but the colors are lovely and the matte finish is just what the season needs when you don't really want to go all lipstick-y but you want more than a lip balm or your ChapStick. My favorite is Lively.

 

Thank you, Tarte, for knowing what we needed, when we needed it!

The Red Lipstick Hall of Fame: Part I

I know for a fact that I am not the only woman who has long wandered the vast desert of red lipsticks, searching for "the one" - the one that isn't too orange, isn't too blue, isn't too pink, the one that looks glamorous enough for a night out on the town with a date or for a special party but could also be worn straight out the door for no other reason than it just makes you look great.

I also know that I am not the only woman who has bought, sometimes at ridiculous prices, the red lipstick that, in the store, appeared to be "the one," only to come home and find out that I was dreadfully, horribly wrong. I know now (as should you) that most department stores will take back these bad decisions - even if used - particularly if you are willing to exchange it for something else. The best advice for anyone searching for a red lipstick is to do it during the day, try one on and then step outside and look at yourself in natural light. SMILE. If you like what you see, you're in business. That said, several years of research has led me to develop what I will affectionately refer to, going forward, as The Red Lipstick Hall of Fame.

My current favorite, which has sent all the other reds rattling around in my makeup bag to the Makeup Purgatory of my bathroom drawer, is Giorgio Armani Rouge d'Armani #400. It's a true red with just enough blue, just enough pink and no orange whatsoever. The texture is a dream and it lasts, while maybe not the advertised six hours, longer than most products with this texture. Availability on this is pretty good now, although when it came out a few months ago I was waitlisted along with a lot of other people. It should be available on their website, if not at your nearest department store.

If this red doesn't strike your fancy, runners up that I've tested, purchased and used during the past couple of years that are also worth mentioning are:

• Chanel's New York Red, a gorgeous color although its texture is a bit on the dry side. I used this faithfully, day and night, until Armani #400 came out. Also by Chanel is Rouge Allure Lacque #75 in Dragon, a notable exception to my no-lip-gloss rule. The color is divine, and you can glob it on if you are a fan of the I-just-ate-some-greasy-fries look, or you can blot it so it comes up more as a stain (my personal preference). 
• Nars Red Lizard is quite cherry and quite matte...a lovely, lovely color all the way around though some may find it a bit dry.
• At the drugstore, you can find Max Factor's #44, an inexpensive alternative and quite a nice red with a good texture. Revlon's In the Red, also available at drugstores, and Mattese's Approachable, available at Ricky's, are both brick reds that I would highly recommend. In fact, I mentioned Approachable on Facebook the day I found it, and at least three friends are still using it!
• If you have a darker complexion, you can skip all of the above advice and go straight to MAC's Ruby Woo. I have long wished I could wear this color, but alas it looks terrible on me, as I am fair-skinned and light-eyed; however, on darker complexions this shade is a knockout. I have literally stopped Asian and African-American women on the street or in stores and asked them what lipstick they are wearing, and in many cases this has been the answer. 

While we're on the topic of MAC, you may be wondering why more of them are not in my Hall of Fame. Much has been written about MAC's reds (Russian Red, MAC Red, Brave Red, etc.). Women everywhere, Madonna and Gwen Stefani included, have sung the praises of Russian Red in particular. If it works for you, that's great, I've just never found that they've worked for my complexion or coloring.  

Let me know what your votes are for your personal Red Lipstick Halls of Fame, and in the meantime, I hope you're wearing them during the day! Red lips are not just for evening...they are for any strong, sexy, confident woman, and if you think you are none of these things, I swear, red lips will turn you into one!