Tormented? Driven witless? 99 problems but therapy bills ain't one? Welcome to "Save Your Life, Cheap!" in which we write about the dumb things that get America's uninsured through hard times. AA meetings, James Joyce, Ani di Franco, suicide hotlines…anything nonalcoholic can apply, the more embarrassing the better. Which brings me to: self-help. In our first installment, Sephora Spy's Loren Hunt reviews the $1 book that got her through the worst breakup ever.

So, it's probably safe to make the baseline assumption that self-help books are not the kind of thing that anyone reads because they think it's cool. For some reason, self-loathing became more inherently cool than trying to fix problems, which would explain the aura of lameness surrounding self-help books: the corny covers, the corny catchphrases, the corny jacket photos, and the corny titles, which are invariably presented in a corny (and really large, readable) font. There are no cool self-help books. Cool people do not write self-help books. Happy people write them. And they could give a fuck who thinks they're cool. And you know who else doesn't give a fuck who thinks they're cool? A 23-year-old stripper who just used up every last shred of self-regard finally "breaking up" with the three-timing strip club DJ she had been fucking for the past year. And that, friends, is how I came to appreciate It's Called A Breakup Because It's Broken, the second offering from Greg Berendt of He's Just Not That Into You fame.

Have you ever played yourself so badly in a relationship that even years after the fact the salient details are still enough to embarrass you? The kind of situation so inherently unfortunate that, upon its demise, you don't even want to tell your friends it has ended because they'll just snort, "good," and assume that it is so obvious that you are better off without it that there is nothing left to say on the topic? I met him because we worked together. At the strip club. He was living with his girlfriend when we first started hooking up, while sorting out the details of a divorce to a third woman. Our "relationship" only ever seemed to happen on the weekends, after work, where sometimes we engaged in what he liked to call "non-sex." Non-sex was when we did it, but then he denied doing it. I felt sleazy and dissolute, which, at the time, was novel and exciting. He was so nice when it was just us. And passionate. And caring. And secretly really awesome! I encouraged him to get secretly awesome all over me on and off and on and off for almost a year before I was ready to cut off my drama supply at the source and move on to something possibly healthier. But by then, I'd become attenuated to the bombast and obvious chord progressions of his Bon Jovi song style of lovin' and everything else just seemed... too quiet. Or subtle. Or something. Which was finally enough to scare me... strip clubs and nocturnal relationships with strip club DJs were supposed to be more of an interesting digression for me than a permanent lifestyle plan, and I felt in danger of falling through one of my own cracks. So I cut him off and stopped going to work lest he use his DJ microphone to manipulate me back into his good graces (this is the beauty of strip club jobs. You can take a week or a month or a year off and no one even notices). It was around then that I found a typo-ridden galley copy of something called It's Called a Breakup Because it's Broken: The Smart Girl's Breakup Buddy. This would have been almost five years ago. It was only a dollar and I thought maybe it would at least entertain me while I prostrated my unwashed body in front of my window unit air conditioner and flipped wildly back and forth between hating him and hating myself, murderous rage and spontaneous crying jags, fantasies in which his head exploded a la Scanners and tender reconciliation scenes that featured me in a trashy white bridal bikini.

It's Called a Breakup Because it's Broken brings the added component of Berendt's wife, Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt, to the wisdom offered up in He's Just Not That Into You, which is the guide to figuring out what's really going on with all that non-sex. (Namely, break up. Or, more commonly, wait for him to break up with you, which leads to that kind of horrible soul-crushing life-wrecking freshly-dumped angst most of us are relatively familiar with.) (I was proud not to have figured out the He's Just Not That Into You part on my own over the course of a year.) Anyway, the basic premise of this book is that the Behrendts were able to fall in love and build a happy relationship purely because both parties lived through a lot of bullshit before they met each other, namely of the breakup variety. Their co-authorship serves as sort of a built-in source of hope to people who are presumably reading the book because they have just had their heart masticated, digested, and flushed down someone else's toilet. They are, thankfully, not particularly obnoxious about this, choosing instead to stick to practical coping methods that you can use to put your breakup in the past and get on with your life.

Part 1: The Breakup

The first thing I couldn't figure out about my breakup was why it hurt so much. I mean, it had been a bad time for which I had for whatever reason repeatedly shown up of my own volition. I should have known better than to get involved in the first place, I knew the whole time nothing good would come of it, and it seemed to me that ending it would be a relief, like walking away from a car crash with only a few scrapes. And sometimes it did feel like that. But more often, it was the usual, "Whyyyy don't youuuu LOVE meee?" shit. Which would in turn make me really angry with myself, like I was so dumb that I had deserved the whole thing. The first section of this book does a good job of talking you down from taking full responsibility for anything other than making sure the broken relationship stays over and consequently taking care of yourself. They're always asking you what you'd want with a broken relationship. Which is the kind of simple logic I needed after spending the past year twisted into a veritable pretzel of denial and convoluted thinking. Then, just to make sure, after asking, the book repeatedly tells you that you don't want a broken relationship so many times that by the second section, it starts to stick.

Part 2: The "Breakover"
Commandment 1 — Don't See Him or Talk to Him for Sixty Days: Actually, it is that simple, it's just not that easy. If you were quitting smoking, you wouldn't buy cigarettes, hang out with people who smoked cigarettes, go to places where people were smoking cigarettes, or get drunk and call cigarettes at 4 A.M. begging them to come over for one last smoke.

I was all set to argue with this like, "this is exactly what I would do if I were quitting smoking!" Then I remembered that I was still a smoker! They, um, refer to this as "he-tox." I picked up a few phone calls I shouldn't have during this period of time, but for the most part, I stayed away. The thing about my ex was that he was super-charming and looked like an underwear model. I did not stand a chance in the same room as him and I knew it; hence the entire non-relationship. I stayed away like my life depended on it, which, looking back, it kind of did. Not that he was ever abusive or dangerous. It had more to do with the kind of life I wanted to live, a life in which my boyfriend would publicly admit he was my boyfriend and hang out with me during daylight hours. Bare minimum.

Commandment 2 — Get Yourself A Breakup Buddy 'But he was my best friend.' So was that girl who smelled like egg salad in the third grade, but you don't still need her around, do you?

The breakup buddy is like the Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor of broken hearts, dedicated to raising your morale and being on call for commiseration, all the while keeping you committed to your sixty day he-tox. Personally, I was so embarrassed by the fact that I'd allowed myself to be in a relationship so royally screwed up that my non-boyfriend habitually disappeared when the sun came up that I didn't really want to talk about it anymore by the time the breakup happened. A big part of making the break, for me, was to finally admit that the relationship had even happened, since he'd been extremely adamant about keeping it hidden at work. I cried on my friend Tiffany, a fellow stripper who knew him, a few times, and that was pretty much that.

Commandment 3 — Get Rid of His Stuff and the Things That Remind You of Him Be strict about it, but reasonable as well. Let's not pack up all the glasses because he loved orange juice, but the framed pictures of the two of you, his toothbrush and toiletries, and his CDs have to go.

The Behrendts also recommend recruiting your breakup buddy to deliver your stuff back to your ex so that you don't have to break your he-tox period and risk backsliding by doing it yourself. This was probably the most effective chapter for me, because it required absolutely no hard labor: I didn't have any of his stuff. Even after a year. This spoke volumes I was finally ready to listen to.

Commandment 4 — Get Your Ass in Motion Every Day Besides, you've got to have a life, because when you do meet the next guy and he asks you what you're into, you don't want to say, 'My ex-boyfriend.'

That is some real talk. The book predictably advocates exercise as a good way to fill your newly empty days, but it takes into account the fact that when you're truly devastated, getting out of bed counts as an achievement. Then it discusses hobbies, as well as making a list of all the things you didn't do because you were with whoever and doing them all by yourself. When I was ready to get off the couch, I walked into another, better strip club and got another job. It was so easy I suddenly understood why he'd been so clingy even while totally unwilling to behave the way a real boyfriend should: he'd known that this day would come. He'd been wondering what was taking me so long. And the bonus of working at a club that he did not also work at was turned out to be that he wasn't there to distract me. I rearranged my whole work strategy and finally started making the kind of money they tell you strippers make.

Commandment 5—Don't Wear Your Breakup Out Into the World Indulging in messy public breakup behavior only makes those around you uncomfortable and makes you seem unstable. So keep it to yourself and your dearest friends after business hours, and make a pact with yourself to try to live the vision of what you want your life to look like. Every time you step outside, you should make an effort to reflect the person you are on your way to becoming, not the shell of the shattered woman he dumped. Turn that husk into a tamale!

Tamale status begins with dressing cute at all times and refraining from crying at work. Earlier in the book, they reference the Lili Taylor character from Say Anything, the one accompanying herself on guitar to a song called "Joe Lies" in the middle of a party. And here is the thing about that character: what is awesome and hilarious at a party in a a romantic comedy is pathetic and uncomfortable at an actual party, for everyone, except at the time perhaps the one too grief-stricken and wounded to care much about superficial shit like "pride" and "dignity" in the moment, but oh my god that will change. The book recommends that you abstain from this kind of behavior, and I was good at this. Few people who knew both of us even really knew we were dating, and would have been surprised at the level of involvement and how hard I was taking it if they did know. I kept doing like I'd been doing and eventually started believing that it hadn't been such a big deal. In a lot of ways, it began to seem mutually convenient that we hadn't had a "real" relationship. I realized this a few months later when I attempted to be a breakup buddy to Moe and had the distinct pleasure of watching her send a text to her ex that read "I want to shit in your eye." I laughed hysterically. I probably wasn't cut out to be a breakup buddy.

Commandment 6 — No Backsliding! Once you give in to it, you find yourself caught in the worst kind of relationship purgatory—the demotion—because you are in effect telling your ex that he can still have access to you WITHOUT the emotional responsibilities. Backsliding doesn't mean you're getting back together, it just means you've lowered your standards and accepted a demotion from ex-girlfriend with self-esteem to ex-girlfriend whom he can still get busy with if he wants to.

Ouch. The fact that my entire non-relationship was a demotion out of the gate was ample reason for me to avoid backsliding. That didn't mean I didn't want to hear his voice or turn the lights on to inspect his perfect hip ridges up close one more time. But I didn't. Okay, I did, but years later, and when I was totally over him. They really are perfect! But by then, I felt like Jennifer Connelly at the end of Labyrinth, surprising herself by realizing that it's actually true when she says to David Bowie, "you have no power over me." This day will come. You know it will come. So think of it this way; the faster you stop having unsatisfying, emotionally fraught post-breakup sex with your ex, the quicker you'll be able to have hot unattached meaningless sex with him!

Commandment 7 — It Won't Work Unless You Are Number One! You are the prize, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Not him or anyone else. You can love your friends, you can love your family, and you can love every stray dog or stray drummer that crosses your path. HOWEVER, you have to learn how to love yourself, like yourself, and put yourself first before you will ever find the healthy, loving, and lasting relationship you're looking for.

Yeah, this is the hard one. Do I love myself yet? I'm getting closer all the time! I haven't begged anyone to use me as a convenient repository for all of their bullshit quite as flagrantly as I did while dating the DJ, and my boyfriends have become increasingly realer and realer as time has passed, with none of them counting as completely brutally gnarly Bad Ideas. I'd call it progress. While I have not yet found the healthy, loving, and lasting relationship I'd like to have yet, it is also true that I've gotten infinitely better at coping with the resultant breakups and in the process, wasted a lot less of my own time. I'm still not sure that rules are necessarily as ruthlessly applicable to the human heart in the way that the Behrendts suggest they might be, but I do have faith that I will now be able to recognize which rules are made to be broken in a way that I didn't before.

It's Called A Breakup Because It's Broken [Amazon]

Q: Hi, I have a skincare question. I get spring allergies — really strong ones to tree pollen. As a result, I get itchy, watery eyes, a runny nose, and asthma. Pretty lame. And though my skin isn't directly affected, the watering of my eyes and the constant use of tissues on my face cause the areas around my eyes and nose to chap. Like your lips chap. The skin gets rough, and very irritated; after a while, toward the end of my allergies, it'll peel like really mild sunburn. In the past I've just desperately stepped up my normal routine — moisturize twice a day, with more moisturizer. I use Clinique and always have — I adore it. When it gets really irritated, I'll put rosebud salve, Vaseline, or even Chapstick on it to soothe it. Worse, the irritated skin gets really dark and red, and makeup looks hideous on top of it. Is there anything out there that would help heal this skin without waiting out the three months of hay fever? I'm willing to spend a little cash on this. Thanks!

I have something for you! There is a product called Hydra Healer Maximum Strength Moisture Cream made by a company called Cosmedicine. The company was started by a doctor who has incredibly sensitive skin to the point where showering hurt him and he was perpetually red and flaky and gross like what you're talking about. So he made this stuff for himself, more or less. This product has 11% hyaluronic acid, which is a natural substance that bonds and binds to water. One molecule attracts something like a thousand molecules of water. So this helps you hold on to the water you have in your skin already. This is not a light cream, it's greasy as fuck, but it's probably less greasy than Vaseline or Rosebud Salve. I think you'd do very well with that. Bad news: it's $75 for an ounce. That amount should get you through an allergy season, though.

Q: I just needed to find someone that works at Sephora! If you wouldn't mind telling me a little about working there? We're opening our first Sephora here in Montreal and i just had my interview which went pretty well, the store director is new also she only started a month ago. I just wanted to know if we get reduced pay for the SOS training? Do we get paid at all? and what is training like? Is it hard to remember all the products? And how much is employee discount? And whats the uniform like? And how long do they take to call you back after an interview? The store director told me that SOS starts May 2nd so i'm expecting by next week! I always wanted to work at Sephora. How many employees are there in one store? I'm sorry for so many questions i just want to be ready!! thank you so much!

You are hilarious. So, you should be called back within a week, and if not, they don't want you. Yes, you're paid in full for training. Have you ever had a job before? Sigh. Training is like: they give you a big huge Trapper-Keeper full of information about your skin and your makeup and your eyes and all this other shit. You learn the "Sephora way" of putting on makeup and Sephora hygiene, which is basically how you handle the testers in front of the guest. Like, it's not a Q-tip. I mean, it is, but Sephora calls it a cotton-tipped swab, which is what you have to call it should you ever need to directly refer to that thingy you use to put whatever product you're helping someone test on the back of your hand. Then you throw that thingy out, never to be seen again. They will teach you, very specifically, to clean out sample jars with spray alcohol and a tissue before putting a product in them to give to guests. To put the product in the now extremely hygienic jar, you use a little spatula that you also then throw away immediately. No, it's not hard to remember the products. It all gets lodged in your brain against your will eventually. If you don't know a lot about skin care stuff, start reading all the backs of the products while you're in the store to familiarize yourself with the ingredients. Read the little Sephora catalog magazine-y thing. Or go on the website. Figure out what's up. The employee discount is 40% for Sephora brand things and 20% for everything else. The uniform looks like you got hired to work on the Starship Enterprise, but the Starship Enterprise was turned into a cruise ship and now you're a waiter. But you know what? It's very slimming. Maybe kind of like the kind of thing a female presidential bodyguard in the future would wear. I've thought about wearing it out before.

Q: I've never tried waterproof foundation before, but Sephora, break-outs, and the prospect of pool season have me tempted. Do any of Sephora's waterproof foundation/cover-up brands hold up to the pool and the beach?

Yeah, none of it is really waterproof, even if it says it is. It might be water resistant. Whatever. Your best bet is to probably wear something super heavy that will wear off more slowly. I think is good is Laura Mercier's Stick Foundation That shit stays ON. It's thicker than what you might be used to. They are not kidding when they say it is full-coverage. I tend to recommend this to older women who have a really extreme makeup look going on already. Make Up Forever's Panstick foundation might be good, too, especially if you mix it with concealer. It was made by the woman who does makeup for Cirque du Soleil, so it's going to last a lot longer than a lot of other products under adverse conditions. This range has lots of amazing shades. Alek Wek and Tilda Swanson could seriously both find something that suited them from Make Up Forever. Honestly, though? Unless you are absolutely sure that your skin is like scaring-small-children hideous and it's not just in your head, just go have fun at the pool and don't worry about foundation, especially if you're acne-prone.

Q: Now for my real beauty question. I have become a tweezing addict, I have all of my facial hair completely on lockdown without the help of lasers or chemicals. However, my under jaw and upper neck area has developed this gross pattern of dark spots. I'm African American and have a light skin tone; the only thing that I can attribute it to is how men get shaving bumps, but mine are not bumps, they are dark spots. I've never had acne and the rest of my face is great, to the point where I don't wear foundation or powder. I have oily/combo skin so i just blot and wear blush and mascara. What should I do about the spots? I'm wary of lightening creams, these seem not good for darker skin. Also, I can't NOT pluck. Letting hair grow on my neck and chin is not acceptable. Thanks for any help you can offer!

Basically, you have hyperpigmentation. Melanin is something the skin produces to fight trauma, which is the reason that people get tan from the sun before they burn. Anyway, plucking counts as trauma. Jesus, now that I think about it, you are hardcore. I can't imagine plucking hairs out from the underside of my chin. I think I'd wake up the neighbors with my shrieks. Can't you just shave it? I might do that. Anyway, there are a few things you can do if you want to lighten hyperpigmentation gently, without resorting to hydroquinone. I mean, I love hydroquinone. I'm olive-skinned and it doesn't do anything creepy to me. But if you're not into essentially bleaching parts of your face, DDF Intensive Holistic Lightener might be up your alley. Peter Thomas Roth also makes one called Potent Skin Lightening Gel Complex. These awesome science fiction sounding names make these products sound a lot more intense than they actually are. Use a Q-Tip and put it directly on your spots. It should do some kind of something for your problem.

Q: Do you use a primer? Are primers all basically the same thing, or do different ones give different results? Which ones should I spend my tax refund on?

If you have oily skin, large pores, or acne, there's a product in the skincare section by Dr. Brandt called Pores No More. You can use it before makeup or wear it by yourself. Basically it's like putting a product on that has ingredients that will treat your skin type. One of their main ingredients is still dimethicone, which is the ingredient that is in primers, typically speaking. Then Smashbox makes a million different primers in about a million different colors that all do different things. Mostly, they are pigmented for people who are trying to correct their skin tone, which I think is often some musical theater shit and not necessarily something a woman just going to work or something needs. Some of them aren't corrective, though. I'd go for one of those, like maybe the Photo Finish. That's popular. Anyway, these are also dimethicone based.

Q: I just saw your interview on Jezebel.com today for the first time. I have to say that it was possibly one of the most entertaining things I've read on a blog. I really familiarize with you because I worked for Shiseido for a long while and I, too, am a huge product junkie. ...which leads me to my next question... I'm just about to run out of my face cream (Fresh) and my eye cream (Shiseido Bio-Performance). The face cream is.. well... "eh" The eye cream I love, but am looking into other options. I have combination skin. Any recommendations? Best, Matt

Awww, it's a BOY! So cute. Anyway, Shiseido Bio-Performance is really heavy! You're not fucking around, are you? Well, I don't know much about you, but if you're into Bio-Performance, you like stuff that a lot of other people will think is super-greasy. Primordiale Optimum is a day cream from Lancome that I think is called "Primordiale" because it is typically purchased by old ladies. Anyway, that's good and thick and oughta do something. Christian Dior has an eye cream called Capture R60/80 Wrinkle that is really emollient and it has that tech sounding name that makes me think men could get into it. People swear by this stuff. It really does kind of de-puff your eyes and smooth out the wrinkles.

Earlier: The Dumbest, Most Pore-Cloggingly Ineffective Ways To Waste Your Money At Sephora
•Mineral Makeup! Lip Plumpers! Oil Cleansers! Colonics? Sephora Spy Spills All, And More!
•How I Conquered My Cystic Acne, In (Just!) 17 Painful Steps
•I Work Here To Feed My Sick Fancy Product Addiction; The Least I Can Do Is Help You
•Meet Jasmine, Our New Sephora Undercover Agent

A short list of ingredients often connotes a certain degree of skincare integrity, and Cetaphil delivers on that, containing only "Water, Cetyl Alcohol, Propylene Glycol, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Stearyl Alcohol, Methylparaben, Propylparaben, Butylparaben" Its packaging also screams integrity, claiming that "Unlike soap, CETAPHIL is completely non-alkaline, non-comedogenic, and fragrance free. Soothes and softens as it cleanses, helping the skin retain needed moisture." Does it do all of this? In a word, yeah. Is it exciting? No. If you get the big 16 oz. size that comes in a pump (for around twelve bucks), and the pump gets slightly stopped up, does it sometimes go squirting across the bathroom and stick to the wall like a load of slightly iridescent semen from hell? Absolutely. Should you use it? If you haven't already, you have probably been stuck in a basement for some portion of your adult life.

Cetaphil Reviews [Makeupalley]

How do you use a brightening/lightening product without getting kabuki face?

Fuck yes, I love these products. I have so many of them going and I like them all. I use them just because. They work, not fast enough, but they work. You have to be really consistent to see results, and as you get older your cellular turnover starts to slow down, so if some kind of pimple trauma happens to your skin, it might take up to a year for it to go away, so I'm constantly using something like this at night. Something funny about hydroquinone is that it turns brown if you don't use it right away. I have some shit from a derm from years ago that's all brown and nasty and I put it on anyway. My boyfriend calls me "chocolate chip" when I do that because it looks like I have them on my face. I'm shameless. From Sephora, DDF Fade Gel 4 and Post-Acne Spot Lightening Gel by Murad are my favorites. You can use them on age spots, acne scars, melasma—what you can't do is use it while you are pregnant to lighten your unborn child. Also, there's no point in smearing this stuff all over your face, it's more for spot treatment. The full-face treatment with hydroquinone is how kabuki face happens. If you're trying to get rid of freckles, for example, you'd have to decide whether a face several times lighter than your body is worse than your freckles, because there's pretty much no way to avoid smearing it all over your face in that case. If you're going for a whole kabuki face system, go to Shiseido. They have a whole line called White Lucent. Shieseido are the kabuki face masters. They've been perfecting it for like 200 years.

Have you ever achieved Zen by reading the labels on Philosophy products?

Close to it, sister, close to it. Maybe not Zen so much as nirvana. What I heard about Philosophy is that it was designed by a woman who was doing aromatherapeutic massages on cancer patients who had compromised skin from radiation therapy. So she was doing these with super natural nice products and infusing them with good vibes or something, and discovered by doing this that good vibes never hurt anyone, even when they're topical. So that's the idea behind the positive messages on Philosophy products: when you read something that makes you feel good while using a beauty product, you have an extra little moment of positivity in your day, which your face may or may not end up appreciating in the long run. Some people love it, some people just like it, and some people think its bullshit. I like it.

(Ed Note: I just looked that up and it appears to be actually true. You can read more about Philosophy in this Salon piece.. God I hate those fucking messages though. I mean, as long as I'm being forced to stare at the thoughts of some blowhard for the duration of my shower, couldn't it be someone interesting, like Hegel or Jack Handy?)

Which products are the biggest money wasters?

Exfoliating cloths or cloth pillows or whatever. Those things are a waste of everything and it seems like every product line has one. There are these stupid Shiseido The Makeup Facial Cotton things that piss me off every time I see them. Ladies, you should already know not to buy things like this. Just use a motherfucking washcloth. Also, anything that claims to grow your eyelashes or brows. Talika Eyelash Liposomes is one. Revitalash is another. They are both bullshit. Your eyelashes are not going to get longer, ever.

I have 190 Sephora points. Where my free deluxe samples at?

You need to march up to that counter and say, "where's my free shit?" They scan your Beauty Insider card at the register. The gifts are good. It's usually some kind of full-sized product. The products rotate... so if it's something crap, you can hold off on cashing your points in and wait until they're offering something you want.

How do I cope with under eye circles? Does that Hylexin crap really work?

Hylexin does and does not work, and I'll tell you why: under your eyes, there are these fat pads that keep the area really puffy and full, and as you age, these pads shrink, causing you to look like Skeletor. Underneath the fat pads are capillaries, which are full of blood, and these are what you're looking at when you see a dark circle. Hylexin stimulates the capillaries which somehow lightens their appearance. So this will work if your undereye circles are a product of aging, as opposed to something hereditary or generic or structural in your face. If you're 45 and have just noticed the dark circles over the past few years, it might work for you. If you've had them since you were ten, the only thing that is going to fix the circles is plastic surgery, and the only thing that's going to help them is a good concealer. We just got a new product in at Sephora called Eye Slept by someone named Tricia Sawyer who I've never heard of before and know nothing about. It's basically a primer that smooths the undereye area to help concealer stick and prevent it from creasing in the fine lines under your eyes. It has sort of a light greenish tint to it, and it works like crazy. Personally, I feel like fuck an undereye circle. I mean, I have them, but I also choose my battles and most of the time, they are the least of my worries. Too much undereye shit going on tends to make people's otherwise good makeup jobs look like they're going to a newscaster audition. I think the best possible solution for any kind of eye issues is a cute pair of novelty frames. They not only distract everyone else from whether or not you have undereye circles, they also distract you.

What's up with the No!No!?

OMG, I just got serious training on this at Sephora camp. I loved it. I Nonoed both of my arms. It's addictive. It's not really a blade. What it is is a hot coil, or wire, that sizzles the hair off... they call it crystallizing... you know how hair is coiled up like a little nugget thing under the skin? The whole idea of the No! No! is that if you apply enough heat to the hair follicle, on top of burning the hair above the skin off, the heat will also eventually alter the follicle so that it stops growing hair entirely. You'd have to keep at it. The blade coil thingy wears out probably every six shaves or so, but I think that after you went through about six of those, you'd pretty much be hairless. Anyway, using it is pretty foolproof. There's an LED light on it that stays on only when you're at the perfect 90 degree angle contact with your skin. If the light starts blinking or goes off, you're doing it wrong. It works best if you only use it on really small areas of skin at a time, maybe an inch or two, and go over the area a few times. You'll feel some heat, a slight prickle, hear a little sizzle, and you will smell the burned—sorry, crystallized—hair. It comes with a little exfoliating buff to remove the crystallized hair from your skin, but the first few times you use it you might want to even shave afterwards. It's definitely not as effective as a razor until you've been at it for awhile. I think it would be good for someone who is super hairy, used in conjunction with shaving.

Earlier: Mineral Makeup! Lip Plumpers! Oil Cleansers! Colonics? Sephora Spy Spills All, And More!
How I Conquered My Cystic Acne, In (Just!) 17 Painful Steps
I Work Here To Feed My Sick Fancy Product Addiction; The Least I Can Do Is Help You
Meet Jasmine, Our New Sephora Undercover Agent

Do lip plumpers work for anything other than keeping you entertained while you're on drugs?

They sort of work. Basically with a lip plumper like Lip Venom or Lip Injection, you're putting an irritant on your lips. Put an irritant anywhere on your skin and that part of you is going to sting, puff up, and get red. The lips are a really delicate, sensitive area, too, so something that might not irritate the rest of you will probably irritate that area. If you are not looking for entertainment while on drugs or in the middle of a photo shoot, I really don't see why you'd subject yourself to this. They don't sting that badly, although sometimes when I show people the Too Faced Lip Injection, they start freaking out and moaning and writhing in pain. These people being ridiculous. If that is what they think pain feels like, I'm glad I'm not their doctor. But the real question to ask yourself when it comes to lip plumpers is, "would I put this on my inner labia?" If the answer is no, it probably shouldn't go on your face lips either. Even so, as far as I know, there are no known cases of anyone not surviving a lip plumper. It's not really doing anything permanent or profound, don't let the nine layers of fancy packaging fool you. It just kind of tingles.

Bare Escentuals: miracle product or a gimmick?

Bare Minerals is Bare Escentual's star product. It's basically a foundation in powder form that claims to be so good for your skin that you can sleep in it. The thing I do like about it is that there are only five totally straightforward ingredients. It's mostly titanium dioxide, which is an ingredient you find in a lot of sunscreens. This is good because it provides some sun coverage, but the bad news is that lots of people are allergic to this ingredient. If you have an allergy, you'll break out in hives either right away or after prolonged use. Titanium dioxide is all well and good as far as I'm concerned, but Bare Minerals also has something called bismuth oxycloride which can trigger serious cystic acne in people who are allergic to it. Not so cool. Also not so cool is the fact that between the bismuth oxychloride and the mica, it is some disco shit. Which is awesome if you are eighteen, but for everyone else, the shimmer will accentuate large pores, wrinkles, acne, dry patches... whatever is wrong with your face, Bare Minerals will somehow manage to highlight. This stuff gets all up in my crow's feet and makes them look worse. Also embarrassing is that this was originally a QVC product. They also have really corny mall stores. I hear it works wonders for some people, but between the infomercials and the mall stores, I have to wonder if the lights in Applebee's are not maybe sort of forgiving. We sell a ton of this at Sephora. The starter kit is a really good deal and everyone usually buys that. You get two different shades of foundation, concealer, mineral veil which is basically powder even though all of it is powder, a priming lotion, and all of the brushes you need. Can you sleep in it? Why would you sleep in it when they make Rare Minerals is ridiculous. I mean, it's sort of awesome in that it is makeup that is also a night treatment. It's supposed to make you pretty while you sleep. I can see this being a lifesaver for girls who haven't gotten laid since the year 2000 because their skin is so bad that they don't want the guy to see them without their makeup on, yet are equally unwilling to go to bed without washing their face. It has decent coverage, too. It's makeup. I don't know if it works, I'm kind of scared of it. Every fiber in my being says that sleeping in makeup is wrong, and that it is even more wrong to put makeup on specifically for sleeping in.

Can Little Rock, Arkansas please have a Sephora store?

Well, way back right after they hired me, there was this big meeting when they asked all of the $11 an hour sales assistants (but not the lowly $9 an hour sales assistants) what we, personally, thought about the terrible conundrum of Little Rock. I tried to fight for you guys, really I did, but eventually the president told us that he felt that Little Rock was "beyond our services" in the beauty department. I had a free panini in one hand and the spigot on a box of Franzia pushed down with two of my other fingers. Who was I to make an issue?

I'm getting married soon and I'm so not a "makeup" chick. What kind of foundation looks the best in pictures taken outside?

Cargo cosmetics carries a product called Blu-Ray High Definition that is specifically meant for people whose pictures are being taken. I think the clever concept behind that name it is that it'll make you look good enough for high definition TV, which obviously magnifies every little imperfection and flaw and can sometimes be less than pretty for that reason. This product is a little kit for $59 that includes powder, blush/highlighter stuff, lip gloss, a mattifying primer, and mascara. Now, how mascara can be considered "high definition" in a sense beyond it separating your eyelashes is beyond me, but yeah, it's in there. The lip gloss is whatever. But the face products make a little more sense to me. They come in one color that supposedly works on everyone. The idea is that you use your own foundation between the primer and powder, and the blush is something that works for everyone. The fact that it's a whole kit is good for non-makeup-people, and also people who are buying makeup for a specific event during which they'll be photographed. As far as foundation goes, if you use this stuff along with your usual foundation, it should be fine. This stuff is pretty heavy-duty.

I'm Black, and I have what I guess is considered "typical" skin for Black people: oily, with blackheads and large pores. What should I use? How often should I wash my skin? Should I use moisturizer?

If you walked into Sephora, I'd try to sell you on the Shu Uemura Skin Purifier High Performance Balancing Cleansing Oil. Five ounces for $28. Basically the idea is that oil repels oil, so if you're oily and wash your face with more oil, it encourages your skin to find a balance. A lot of oily skinned people try to dry their skin out, which kind of makes their face think that it needs to produce more oil to compensate. Using an oil cleanser is one of way of making sure that doesn't happen. This alone could have a really dramatically good effect. Also, cleansing oils are good because they require you to massage it in, something that's really good for your face. Of course, since I'm not on the clock at the moment, I can tell you that you can do the same thing on the cheap with products you can find in the drugstore. Check out this website for the Oil Cleansing Method. The site recommends that you only do it once, at night, and since it involves oils anyway, there's no need for a moisturizer. Bare Minerals actually has an SPF 15, and it's great for oilier skin, so if you wear makeup during the day, that's a good way of killing two birds with one stone.

What other techniques have you thought about trying in your quest to achieve perfect skin?

I'm really interested in high colonics right now. I spent a whole day last week calling places up and asking them questions until they were about to hang up on me. A high colonic is when they pump your ass full of water, or water mixed with other substances, in order to clean your colon out. Apparently sometimes they find things you swallowed as a child, like pennies, rings, buttons, things like that. So what I wanted to know was, if you find a ring, can I keep it? Can I just keep my old poop if I feel like it? Cause you don't have to go digging through it if you don't want to, I'll do that part, but if I swallowed a ring as a child I probably want that back. Also I asked what I should eat first, and they said no meat or dairy for 24 hours beforehand. And I wanted to know if it hurts. Like fifty times, I asked that, and every single place assured me that it didn't. The one place said that all the poopy stuff goes through this tube and you can watch it come out, like poop TV. I asked them if I could do it every week, or if I should wait for something to build up, because, you know, they like to do a series of them. I'm not sure if that's a rip-off tactic or not but that's what all of them tell you. Anyway, it's supposed to be really good for detoxing your skin. If you are suddenly able to digest better, your liver isn't working so hard and your epithelial system isn't bearing the brunt of your bad habits. I can see how that works. Mostly, though, it's just something to do and I want to see what happens. A technician stands there and massages your stomach and whispers sweet nothings in your ear as your colon is irrigated. Do you think they get tipped? If anyone knows a precedent for that, please tell me. I would seriously hate to stiff a colon irrigation technician for a tip. It's poop. If they generally get tipped, I want to tip well.

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