More Product Mini Reviews

Hey hey, it's time for another post of mini-reviews! I got to try a lot of products during my New York visit, thanks to L's impressive collection, and will remark on them in a succincter-than-usual fashion. I've decided to post this rather than a monthly favorites/empties (or Skincare Saturday, for that matter, though there are several skincare products here), mostly because I'm sick and don't have the energy to write a new post. Here they are, in no particular order:

Philosophy The Microdelivery Exfoliating Wash

$25 for 8 oz, available from Sephora

This is a very nice, gentle exfoliator. I only used it the one time, since I spent 4 out of 6 of my nights at Z's, but I found it to do its job without unnecessary irritation. I'm not sure I'd want to spend that much myself, especially since I have my Clarisonic which takes care of my physical exfoliation needs, but if you don't have a Clarisonic and want something mild to exfoliate, Microdelivery is definitely worth checking out!

Book Review (=Rant): "Smell: The Secret Seducer" by Piet Vroon, Anton van Amerongen and Hans de Vries

If you're interested in the content contained within this book, skip to the "read more" button. If you enjoy reading rants about the quality of the book, read and grumble with me.

image via Amazon

I read this book on the plane on my way to New York. I'd finished writing my term papers the day before, which ended up being about 40 pages (single-spaced) of extremely well-cited research paper. I read no less than 36 articles, thoroughly annotated a bibliography, and thought critically about the contents. SO, going into this book, I had high expectations of academic rigor (CITE EVERYTHING. This is something I have to tell my students all the time. If you don't say where you got it, I think it's from you, and there is no way you knew all that shit to start with, and throughout this book found myself wondering why the editors hadn't done the same for these authors). On a purely impressionistic level (not like I'm going to tally this up or anything, sheesh), only about a third of the statements in this book had footnotes giving their source. Now, I understand it was written by 3 people, and their combined knowledge would undoubtedly account for some of that. But 2/3? Doubtful. 

Also, I read this all in one go (well, okay, I took a break to switch planes, eat, and take a nap), but all the material was pretty fresh in my mind, and I noticed a lot of repetition. Like, did you know that the area in the brain responsible for smell has very few links to the language parts of the brain, which helps account for why we have such trouble describing words? Well, after reading this book, you'll never forget, because it's mentioned so. many. times. There are several other examples like that: women have a better sense of smell than men, smell is very important in the bonding of mother and baby, perfumers can't actually smell that much better than norms. If I were writing this as an actual paper, I would include citations of those, though I would be unsure of which citation to use––the first? The fifth? The last (often, like, 20th)? This should not be an issue! Agh!

More editing complaints (I'm sorry, I'm a linguist and appreciate that everyone speaks differently and those differences should be respected, but the same principle does not apply for writing. There are standards, and if you are writing a mass-market book, you had damn well better follow them! Also, when I was in high school and had to take that PLAN/Pre-ACT test that told you waht you should be when you grow up, they said funeral director or editor. I don't know what those have in common, either, and I find it very puzzling that there's a large enough market for funeral directors and editors for them to be included in a big test like that. Anyways, [this] tangent over): parentheticals (too many! it's like one of my blog posts, gawd), several of which don't have one or the other parenthesis. Do you know how irritating it is to not know when the parenthetical thought is over? Or when it was supposed to have begun? SO IRRITATING. There are certain standards that should be met in a published book, including (but not limited to) spellcheck [didn't notice anything like that in this book, fortunately], correct punctuation (this includes no floating parentheses! Or colons all over the place: it is very annoying), and clearly structured, non-reductionist information, which this book was sadly lacking at times.

New York Shopping Ramblings

I've got a ton of posts heading your way in the next few days/weeks, but I thought I'd start the deluge with this one!

I had a marvelous day of shopping in NYC on Sunday and managed to pick up a few products as well as sniff some perfumes, spot a makeup celebrity, and get a makeover. Herewith, some musings on the stores and my experiences:

We went to Bergdorf Goodman first, since it's home to Le Métier de Beauté and a Guerlain boutique, as well as a slew of other beauty and fragrance counters. The beauty section is on the lower-level, and the design is rather different from typical department stores, with lots of smaller rooms (connected by open archways) which made the shopping experience much more intimate. The LMdB counter is right at the base of the escalator going down, so that's where we went first; the saleswoman was nice enough, if a little distant, and I ended up picking up a couple of items: Corinthian eyeshadow, the Queen of Taupes, and a Lip Crème (Fraise!) for L, my shopping companion.

We then walked around the store and checked out some of the other counters (though not Clé de Peau, since I cannot afford anything at their counter). I made us stop by the Guerlain boutique, which supposedly has the full range of their fragrances (300 in all, though from the looks of it, they're not all displayed) and cosmetics. I sprayed the pure parfum versions of L'Heure Bleue, Mitsouko, and Nahéma on blotters just for kicks (and to see if the two former smelled noticeably different from their edp formulations; to my untrained nose, they did not, which I'm going to say means I don't have to order the parfum version from The Perfumed Court, at least not until I get really obsessed with fragrance, if that ever happens!*), though I think I should perhaps have stuck with the edt of Nahéma, since I quite disliked the parfum. I also sniffed the bottle of Vol de Nuit, though I was starting to suffer from some olfactory fatigue by that point, and also swatched a few of the Rouge Automatique lipsticks (Guet-Apens is in my future!) and tried the Kiss Kiss gloss upon L's recommendation, only to deem it, as usual, "too sticky".

Another Non-Post

Hello, lovelies! I just wanted to post and let you know that I'm not dead, I'm just having oodles of fun in New York and haven't gotten the chance to write any posts (and I forgot to bring my camera cord, so haven't been able to upload any pictures). I will have lots to share with you in the next few weeks, though, so get excited! I also wanted to remind you to enter the giveaways, if you haven't already! Be sure to check out the instructions for how to enter.

I'll be flying home tomorrow, and then hopefully working on some posts the next couple days. Things to look forward to: lots of food (including crack ice cream, yes, it's a thing), some high-end makeup, silly faces, and ramblings on the city.

Hope all is well in your life!

Sort of Skincare Saturday: Bliss Fabulips and High Intensity Hand Cream Reviews and Pictures

This Bliss Santa's Little Helpers set came out for this past holiday season; Neiman Marcus still had it in stock online when I ordered my Deborah Lippmann polish, and I figured it was worth getting to check out, since I'd heard good things about the balm, and I'm always happy to try new hand cream! The set was $11 and had 1 oz of the hand cream and a full size Fabulips. The hand cream is $8 for 1 oz ($18 for 2.5 oz), and the Fabulips balm is $16, so I got a big discount, which makes me feel somewhat better about my mixed results with the products.

Giveaways Update

Okay, a couple of clarifications in case you've entered the giveaway, or haven't because you weren't sure how:

1) In order to qualify, you must leave a comment (just do this in the normal comment box at the bottom of the post, like you would for commenting on any other post). It can be about anything at all, but I want to get to know you!

2) In order to be contacted if you win, you must include your email address, either in the comment or by sending me an email (beyondjustbeauty at gmail dot com). If I don't have a way to contact you, you can't win!

3) After leaving a comment, you must click "Enter" in the widget. That way Rafflecopter will register your entry and enter you in to the giveaway.

That's it! If there's any more confusion, please feel free to post a comment here or anywhere, or send me an email. Good luck!

Fragrance Friday: Perfumes, Revisited

Before I subject you to the opus below, have you entered the giveaway?

Regular readers of the blog are familiar with Fragrance Friday, wherein I "review" a perfume. Up until now, these posts have been entirely subjective, opinionated, and rather empty of content. I've enjoyed writing them immensely, but I'm not sure how helpful they really are to anyone except me. In the interests of becoming a better blogger (and because I needed a new topic to obsess over and thereby procrastinate with), I've started to delve into the world of perfume more intensely. 

First, some general websites to keep in mind/check out: OsMoz, which has fragrance pyramids and family classifications (see below for more on those topics!); Basenotes, where people post fragrance reviews (I like going there to check out the general consensus on a scent); Fragrantica, which has both snapshot love/like/hate ratings and more in-depth reviews (you have to register to access all the content, but you can do that either with a Facebook account or an email; I used my BJB email account, since I don't care if that gets spammed, though I haven't had any trouble with it yet); and the MakeupAlley Fragrance Board, which I haven't actually explored yet, but which I've heard is an excellent resource (for swapping, fragrance reviews, recommendations, etc.), and I will definitely get into it soon.

I read Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin (a God in the perfume reviewing world, apparently, and very funny) and Tania Sanchez, which has ~2000 perfume reviews. It served as a very nice introduction to the field and to make me aware of some of the heavy-hitters in the perfume world. I don't agree with some of their reviews (they called Chance eau fraîche, one of my favoritest scents, "chemical floral" and "utterly banal"), but it's an entertaining read, and their negative reviews are often hilariously condemnatory. It was published in 2008, and there have been many perfumes released since then, so I advise checking out the website for a spreadsheet with all of the perfumes from the book, as well as some newer perfumes. It's a fantastic resource, and made it much easier for me to build my own spreadsheet wishlist!

Giveaways!

Well, dearest readers, I am currently en route to New York for an awesome visit (with some of you reading this, in fact!). I've got some posts scheduled, and I'll have lots of posts (both beauty-related and personal) once I get back, but while I'm gone I'll probably be pretty absent. In recompense, though, I offer you: 2 giveaways!

Many bloggers hold their first giveaway when they hit 100 followers. I, however, have no such patience (not least because GFC has been giving so many bloggers so much angst since being pulled from non-Blogger blogs, and I suspect that it will soon disappear from Blogger, too)! And, because I want to spread the love around as much as possible, I'm going to do two smaller giveaways. I really want this to be a present to my actual readers, not a way to get more followers, so I'm not asking you to tweet or blog about it, and as long as this isn't the first BJB post you've read, you're welcome to enter!

I have slayed (that is *fine*, spellcheck, stop trying to make "slain/slew" happen!) the dragon...

And am done with finals! I'm headed to New York today, and cannot wait to see everyone! Now, if I could just get out of the whole flying there process, that'd be great...

Today (okay, technically, yesterday; using deictic temporal adverbs is very challenging when writing after midnight but before one has gone to bed) it snowed 8 inches of wet, heavy snow. This is extremely weird. Eugene rarely gets that much snow, and never this late in the year. It really screwed up the finals schedule at the university, since the roads were a mess (not just because we don't know how to handle snowstorms, but also because it was icy and slick, and oh right a bunch of trees fell, see the picture below) and campus was closed until 1:00. I don't envy those who had to venture in to take a final, or those who had to rearrange the finals schedule!

I took this with my phone at 8 this morning when I was mostly asleep. That's my parrot. I've had it ever since I can remember. It's wooden, just in case that doesn't show. Don't worry, I wouldn't hide a pet parrot from you. There'd be pictures of him/her (a real pet would be worthy of gendered pronouns) all over this blog.

A different angle. See that tree in the background? That's fallen all over the place? Yeah, that was loud. Mom says it was rotten which is what made it split like that.

China Glaze Magnetix at Sally's PSA

Alright, so, I haven't gotten the chance to swatch these or play around with them at all, so I have no idea if we'll get along better than Rite Aid's Pretty Woman Magnetix and I did (not), but Scrangie loved them, and I love her, so by some law, it should work out. I'm posting this now, though, because I got them for cheap and I wanted to share with y'all in case you didn't already know!

My local Sally's had most (maybe all?) the colors in stock, and through the end of March with a Sally's Card (if you don't have one, why not?! Yes, it costs $5, but then you get a $5 coupon off a future purchase, so it's actually free. And the discounts! Are amazing!) if you buy 2 CG Magnetix polishes ($5.99 each), you get the magnet (which has 3 designs) for free! So I walked away with two lovely full (0.50 oz) size magnetic polishes and 3 magnets for less than $12. (You can find them for cheaper online, but then you have to pay exorbitant shipping, which ends up costing more, plus I am morally opposed to paying lots for shipping.)

That's all. Have a lovely day!