I’ll be honest, I think I wear more makeup than my genetically blessed and baby-skinned coworkers. I have rampant adult acne, y’all! It’s OK, I’m not that bitter. Not everyone can radiate sunshine out of their pores. And while I’m not over here wearing a dramatically contoured face everyday (because really who has the…
In skincare, as in life, I prefer the dramatic. Instead of taking the time and energy to actually learn what works for my skin, I always dismissed skincare as frivolous or complex, without realizing that I had been callously over-exfoliating. For the past 17-ish years of my life—starting around the time Blu Cantrell…
About ten months into dating my boyfriend, I stumbled into his apartment at 1 a.m. after an impromptu night of drinking with coworkers. Because his apartment is a 20-minute walk from my office, and because we had kept in touch throughout the night and he knew the state I was in, this wasn’t an issue.
The world has changed considerably since the last time I documented my daily product use, which was all the way back in February 2015. That’s three-plus years. Life was simpler then. Climate was changing slightly less, racism barely existed :), and a bag of Cheetos was exactly the same price as it is now. Back then, I…
This year on my mom’s birthday, I gave her and ultimately myself the best gift ever; I quit smoking cigarettes. Smoking was part of me for—gasp—almost half of my life. My grandmother smoked two packs a day, my grandfather died on a horse while smoking, my aunt, uncle and cousins smoked so much they collected enough…
When I was younger, I remember looking at women with (what I thought was) effortlessly beautiful curly hair and being perplexed at the fact that mine didn’t just naturally wake up looking like that. Little did I know, maintaining curly hair actually takes a lot of effort!
Like most have expressed in their diaries, skincare can be a calming moment of control in our wildly unpredictable news cycle. But it’s also a lot to keep up with and I’m falling behind.
I, like every other 20-something on the planet, got really into skincare over the last couple of years. It’s not like I didn’t care about my skin before then—I’ve suffered from acne and congested skin since I was a teenager, I didn’t have the luxury not to care—but now I care enough to buy overpriced serum, read 65…
Early morning. Me wake up. Knock knock knock—the pee in my bladder.
In an attempt to forget that the chances of me and my friends dying by nuclear winter followed by nuclear summer (*~nUcLeAr sUmMeR 2018 4-evR~*), I, like many women I know, have spent a little over a year performing an existential, anxiety-fueled science experiment upon my face.
Until recently, my adult life had been characterized by negligence when it came to beauty and skincare. I’d slather coconut oil all over my face and body and call it a night. In the mornings, I’d forget about SPF like a UV-irradiated degenerate. Laziness was the deciding factor — but it wasn’t without an aversion to…
A few weeks ago, I nibbled a Xanax, chugged some water, and got on a 16-hour plane ride to Taiwan. Usually I am not concerned with what my face is doing on a long plane ride. But a year spent fully immersed in the annals of beauty blogs and this post written by a woman with a skincare regime that is both aspirational…
My alarm is a nine-month-old puppy, and she goes off at 7 a.m. I take her to the dog park for an hour before work most mornings. If you can believe it, I wear sunscreen for this excursion because it’s our only weapon in the war on time, even at 7 a.m. in the winter. I put on my glasses, my beanie, my dog’s sweater (on…
The alarm goes off on my phone at 7 a.m. and I probably snooze it. I need but usually fail to get nine hours of sleep, to my daily disadvantage. The four people in our household are evenly divided between morning people and emphatically non-morning people. I am in the second group, with my younger son, so once I’ve…
I have been a freelancer for almost two years, and in that time I have transitioned from “normal, if under-groomed, office gal” to “semi-feral blog waif.” I work extremely erratic hours, which means my days are unrecognizable from one to the next; I’ll often go multiple in a row without having a conversation longer…
I used to be very excited about makeup, and grooming in general. I experimented a lot with sparkles and brightly-colored eyeliner, and once went to an 8th grade dance with blue mascara on—a bold and sensual choice because, having blonde eyelashes, I appeared to have bright blue pipe cleaners jutting out of my eye…
When I was working nights at this very website, I spent a lot of time after my shift was over watching YouTube makeup tutorials until my brain felt clear enough to finally fall asleep. That habit, which has continued even though I no longer work nights and can reset my brain in a variety of other ways, has likely led…
As much as I like makeup, I don’t feel like I put a lot of effort into my daily beauty routine. Over the past few years I’ve been adding products to my regimen as I see fit, or after coming to stupidly obvious realizations. For example: learning that I should use facial moisturizer for my face and not just my body…
Let me start off by saying I have a clutter problem. For a while I was getting both Birchbox and the Sephora Play box because I have intense FOMO and am irresponsible with money. I couldn’t decide which box to cancel for months but eventually Birchbox got the axe. Beauty samples were piling up because I didn’t want to…
As of this week I am 32. It feels old. It is not old, but things like full-day hangovers and friends having babies make it feel old. My hair has a little patch that’s starting to thin, and my forehead is creased, and my eyes have little lines at the corners when I smile. It is all downhill from here unless I fight…
