Ads, Lies and Cheap Tricks

 

I was reading an article on how French women stay beautiful. Of course this was a thinly disguised advertisement for all the products offered up. Some of the advice seemed like a good idea, like how washing with your tap water might be exposing your skin to toxins. Then they offer up this awesome spa water! French women swear by it so it must be good. Do you want to pay $12 or more for water? I mean, I could just buy a bottle of Crystal Geyser for a couple of bucks. Heck, if I get the gallon size it is cheaper.

I guess I am so tired of all these super expensive lists of "must haves" that we need for perfect skin, great style, good health et al. I am so over it. So you say oils are great for your skin and hair? Good. I have a nice big jar of coconut oil I bought off of amazon. I got rose hip too. I stopped buying crazy expensive body lotions that did nothing and now use coupons  and buy Nivea cream. I wait for a sale even then. It smells nice too. I think you still can't beat witch hazel as a toner for oily skin.

They listed a bunch of other mumbo-jumbo products that I have no idea who would actually use. I just figure they were thrown in as filler or to pad their wallet from advertising fees. The last item on the list was to have a signature lipstick. A colour that looks good on you and you can wear all the time. Now I did like this idea. Not that I could pick a colour and stick with it out of the 50 lipsticks I own. It is an interesting thought, though.

So tell me how you might save money on your beauty products? A  girl has to afford her lipstick ;)

In An Instant-Review

You may all have heard that I was horribly seduced by a late night infomercial. I plead lack of sleep for this lapse! Well I received my package of In An Instant products in the mail and tried them out. So far I am underwhelmed by the results. The eye cream is a no go since I am allergic to it. The face wash is alright, but it does no better than the Aveeno foaming face wash for sensitive skin I was previously using. I tried the warming scrub and it was okay, but burned a bit. So far the firming serum seems to be the same as the same serum I was using from Boots. The tinted moisturizer is different though. I am not sure if I like it or not. It doesn't make my face oily and it has SPF which is really nice. But I don't know if it makes my skin too dark. Maybe I am just not used to that "sun-kissed" look. I will have to use it more to tell if I really like it. This may be a keeper. As for the "In An Instant" line remover itself, I don't think it made much of a difference. I checked out the ingredients and it is basically a "plastic" that temporarily fills the lines in so they are less noticeable. Seriously, it lists a vinyl copolymer. There is also caffeine that supposedly plumps the skin to even out furrows. Well, I still had frown creases between my brows and fine crepey lines under my eyes. I got some of it too close to my eyebrow and had a heck of a time getting it out! It looked like the scene in There's Something About Mary in my eyebrow! Ugh!
As you can see there really isn't a difference between these before and after shots of my face. On TV the models had such dramatic changes. I am not sure what they were using, but it wasn't the same thing I had!


Before


After

Well, I will give these items a couple more tries. Maybe they need to be used more than once or twice for full effect, but I am not getting my hopes up. Heidi Klum, you have disappointed me.

Pel