Tag: Makeup

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1910 and Eyes at the Waldorf

I don’t wear makeup everyday. When the pandemic hit and life moved online, one could easily slap on a video filter and avoid the additional labor required to look professional as a woman.

I went from a life where wearing a full face of makeup was the professional default expectation to one where there was no expectations at all. People don’t like a world without rules.

That vacuum of expectations has been filled with even more intense appearance expectations. Now that “in real life” experiences have become luxuries, many social interactions have developed new norms in which cosmetics are part and parcel of expected manners and basic decorum.

Not all scenes have incorporated makeup. Technology is still relatively laid back about visible makeup but many have gone the opposite direction. Washington D.C. is a scene where professional expectations demand polish.

Maybe some of this is the Boomer expectations of television ready appearances or maybe it’s the constant Zoomer video recordings but this town likes a full face. A beat mug with a limp wrist as they say.

That means your face’s skin has multiple different layers from contour to powder, your eyes require eyeliner, eyeshadow and mascara and your lips are lined and colored.

I’ve enjoyed doing a “natural” look this week which despite its misleading name is still quite a few steps. The basics aren’t that hard though. Light brings a feature forward. Shadows move a feature back. Everything else is details.

I brought cosmetics for a few friends and one girlfriend who mentioned the cosmetic expectations asked me for some basic advice on eye makeup as she’s found it a nuisance and quite a bit of work.

I grabbed a few eyeshadow sticks and we popped into the bathroom of the Waldorf which was the home base hotel of the conference I’d been attending.

I will use brushes and powder eyeshadow palettes when I need a very specific look, but if I just need to be “done up” I like the ease of an eyeshadow stick. You smudge some depth into your crease and some light on the inner edge and you are good to go.

Two or three colors gets the job done. I use a gel twist up eyeliner just on upper line. I prefer lengthening mascara or tubing varieties as volume mascaras tend to drop fiber.

Demonstrating this process got us a small audience. The bathroom attendant was curious about the ease and speed at which this was possible. Nothing brings women together quite like the rituals and secrets of aesthetics. All eyes on my eyes and all hearts open to finding a new way to feel comfortable. That’s beauty to me.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1908 and Capital Perfection

I may have had one of the best days of my life yesterday. I want to get into a preposterous amount of detail as every single element of the day was peak Washington D.C.

I hung out with a long time friend with whom I have a shared passion (we are a special kind of economics nerd), we walked all over, toured several spaces your average citizen only sees on television. And if you are a nerd you really care where day Bretton Woods was signed.

The treaty room

It was my first time seeing some of those spaces and I felt very privileged. Nothing fires patriotism quite like seeing those who serve the nation.

I finished the day above the city watching the sunset on the Washington Monument while airplanes and helicopters ferried people of great importance than I in and out of the city.

It almost made me want to consider public service. But as my friend reminded me that it’s not all this glamorous. My Sunday was almost surely the very best the city has to offer.

Perfect weather, perfect company, perfectly cooked steak (from 6666 ranch so shoutout to my Taylor Sheridan homies), I even had on a perfect spring dress.

Thanks Jackie
Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1907 and Blurred Velvet Glove in Their Iron Fist

I’m on what appears to be family spring break in Washington D.C. I have conferences and dinners and I think it’s lovely that everyone is doing their level best to get the county through the moment to a better end.

The cherry blossoms are in bloom, the weather is warm, and I am trying those trendy serum coral blush that are apparently in style. That’s code for every brand has a version and quality varies greatly. Also no one likes the millennial dewy white bitch. She is dead. So I must carry on with the a new look says Vogue.

The last 12 months have made clear that matte is definitely back, but it’s been rebranded a bit. Dry, cakey formulas have been swapped for ones that offer hydration while diffusing the look of pores and fine lines. The result is a velvet, satin, or cashmere effect that reads softly blurred.

Thanks Vogue! I am not entirely sure of what kind of events I’ll be attending this week but more than one is the sort of where you want to look up to the moment and polite.

So I’ve been playing with new foundations and lipsticks and putting on spring dresses. It’s a lovely way to spend time the first weekend of spring.

I do see a way forward if we can focus on the ingenuity of American people. We are the end beneficiaries of a host of technological innovations that we paid to produce. I see new kinds of ways we could use that compute in clever and intermediate ways. Maybe I’m an old cyberpunk but banks are now with us.

So I try to remember the changing of trends are are also changing realities of how we must remember the coalition to take compute and speech from Americans is doing everything it can by making you afraid.

It comes from a patrician sense and you want to question if it passes your shit test. I don’t think anything good comes from believing scare tactics. We’ve had a good example of long forecast expert doom being completely wrong.

Which is probably why there are still magazines at all, if life were changing so sharply maybe we would still have a Vogue to tell tell us that it’s nice to have a smart sharp gloss that blurs to matte.

And it’s nice to have a Sunday with blousy colorful dress with the perfect handbag. It’s just a nice spring day in any city. This one is just right on time. Montana might take a little longer to get to spring dresses.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups Travel

Day 1905 and Run of Show

I have very particular traveling habits. I like things to be packed in cubes, labeled with contents and in a cascade of backpack, carry on and checked bags should something go awry.

As I’m heading to our nation’s capital soon I am taking extra care with my “run of show“ as I’ll have more varieties of events to account for over my stay. I expect humidity and rain so that should be fun for hair and makeup. All men need to worry about is sunscreen and maybe a bit of hair gel.

Now my travel wardrobe must account for visits to historical sites, nice dinners, late night parties, internet friend meetups (see you at the Polymarket’s Monitoring the Situation bar?) and a conference that is somewhere between startup event and defense contractor conference.

If you are a woman, you are probably nodding your head and thinking well that’s at least 4 different pairs of shoes and two purses. Then there is evening wear, day blazers and skirt suits, sweaters and other mix and match separates, and heaven forbid I find time to exercise so sweats and all the undergarments.

All that packing must work with the additional run rate risks of TSA slow downs (can Congress pass a budget) while presumably needing additional care and attention to security. Given we are embroiled in a war with Israel in Iran it’s hard to count on smooth sailing. So I pack as if I will encounter unexpected difficulties. Hopefully none more irksome than long lines.

As a woman who mostly spends her time in Montana or otherwise in the middle of nowhere, you can imagine that my makeup these days has a bit more in common with tinted sunscreen than it does with a smoky eye with a cut crease let alone a full powdered contoured beat fit for television. However I’ve heard polished full makeup is the preferred look on the hill including eye makeup basics.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to rely on my skills without additional practice, but I won’t lie I did a couple dry runs on new palettes I’d picked up and a few new colors. Very little new made the cut. When traveling, rely on what is reliable.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1894 and The Middle Market Sales Reinforcement Dilemma at Sephora

Psychologists can argue until they are blue in the face about the appeal of Veblen Goods or that value can be demonstrated by price point, but veteran retailers know that everyone likes a good deal.

Rich or poor, young or old, oligarch or peasant, the shopkeeper knows the mind of the buyer requires we feel like we are getting more than we paid. This has some downstream consequences.

Retailers try to avoid degrading their price points and brand reputation with tactics like percentage off sales. And they can be clever about it. There are seemingly innumerable shopping holidays now where you can play with merchandising, special collections, loot boxes and creative value presentation.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Single’s Day, Christmas in July, Prime Day, Fukubukuro (福袋) Lucky Bags, and Lunar New Years are just some of “tentpole” shopping holidays around the world that provide merchandising opportunities and encourage taking a look at what is on offer.

Yet somehow the middle market of mass retailing is still struggling with how to manage sales. If you train your customers to expect a deal, and worse if they expect it at a regular time and frequency, what will make them shop in between those opportunities? Mall brands regularly get trapped by sale training behaviors

I’ve been watching Sephora go from a twice a year sale brand to trying their hand at daily drops. It seems as if they are going the Ulta route in the hopes of driving more purchasing at lower price points. Drive repeat purchasing at higher frequency and it might work.

However the average order volume has to be going down. I wonder if they have no choice having re-oriented the brand down market to attract younger buyers during the Sephora Teen pandemic era. But we are no longer in stimulus spend era and I imagine this is alienating to their older upper market customers. I’ll be watching it.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1821 and All Stages of Water

I finished a seven hour drive through weather so moody and inconsistent I felt it’s changing by the hour. 

The day began sunny and bright but as I climbed into higher elevations, I quickly encountered what felt like every state and format of water in quick succession. 

Fog turned to drizzle which began to pour as rain which froze to the trees in sparkling ice till finally snow began falling. 

My intention had been to reach a remote nature preserve in the mountains known for its views but also the switch backs and hairpin turns required to make it up (and down) the elevation climb. 

I left as early as I could muster given the 4pm sunset that comes this close to solstice. I didn’t want my last climb up the hill to be in the dark. I barely made it by sunset.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1793 and Shopping Around

Black Friday is somewhere between a global celebration of shopping and an affirmation of consumerism as a shared cultural value.

It’s easier and much cooler to denounce consumerism. There is more cultural criticism material of shopping in the genre of commodity aesthetics than there are laudatory treatises on say the bourgeois virtues of shopping well.

Most religions, and many flavors of political governance, focus on dangers of consumer markets and the dangers of overweighting and overvaluation of material things.

It’s just that if we look at the subject from a different direction, it’s quite clear that humans love to make things. Sure we focus first on shelter, food and water but we quickly use our excess capacity to produce. Climbing up Maslow’s hierarchy we look for ways to make things for ourselves and others. If we make surely we must use?

So much of our lives are dedicated to the making of things. We have children. We make tools that make the making of our needs easier and faster. We make art and music. We adorn ourselves with decorative objects.

So why is it that the consumption of the things we make as humans have such a bad reputation? If we didn’t consume adequate food we wouldn’t be able to reproduce. If we didn’t make and use shelter those offspring wouldn’t live to adulthood.

It seems to me that as in all things we make we do so as part of our commitment to being in a community with each other. A Buy Nothing Day may seem necessary when the balance tilts too far from making to consuming but each and every one of us is enabled to make wonderful things for each other. So go shopping if you like.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1756 and Oops I Did It Again

Oh baby baby! So it seems as if, in my infinite wisdom, I did not pay enough attention to the early warning signs from my Whoop biometrics and I did indeed need to worry about the fun and games of a subcutaneous tissue infection.

I swear that this IL-17 inhibitor drives me nuts. Despite its impressive effect on my inflammatory biomarkers, it leaves me very susceptible to skin infections. And I have to be constantly vigilant to the first signs of an issue.

I’ll be fine. I did in fact catch it before it turned into anything serious. Where I am at it’s easily treatable with a short antibiotic course that may formerly be prophylactic. My wound area had not shown any signs of spreading nor was I running a fever or otherwise exhibiting other signs of serious infection.

I just had crappy HRV numbers and high resting heart rate three days in a row and it’s not worth risking it. I threw back some basic antibiotics last night and woke up with a normal heart rate again. My HRV is coming up just a little more slowly. Glad I didn’t wait as this isn’t worth any amount of risk to me.

I comforted myself by working on my beauty blog where I’ve got routines coming along for founding subscribers and a fresh post about Shrinkflation at Sephora and a minimalist men’s routine on sale at Amazon.

Retailers are a bit twitchy and everyone needs to be shopping early is the message we are getting everywhere. It’s a weird time. Or at least the retailers need to encourage the top 10%. So if that is interesting to you go subscribe as I’d love to have you in my strange beauty shopping blog meets the business of appearance.

Or if you are feeling adventurous for an honestly embarrassingly low fee I’ll put together a custom routine for you from my sample library or go full autistic and decant you the perfect mix of potions and lotions to meet you precise lifestyle and budget. My autistic obsession is your gain. It’s so much for me for and your skin will look amazing.

Categories
Biohacking Medical Startups

Day 1753 and Vibe Coding for Your Skin Health

Many moons ago, when I was first attempting to get a diagnosis for why I was always in pain and exhausted, I got a battery of allergy tests. I did the “gold standard of allergy testing” called patch testing which is a form of pin prick testing designed to pick up responses that may be delayed.

It was an awful experience. I barely made it through the 5 day trial between the 100 allergen pin pricks and final measurements.

I remember begging the doctor for a way to measure early. I asked if I could take some Benadryl to take the edge off. Alas the only way it would be accurate and covered by my insurance is if I gutted it out.

You are not allowed to shower, sweat, be exposed to UV rays (no going outside) or take immune suppressants that might subdue your body’s response.

I was struggling to breathe, my entire body itched and ached, and I had a migraine so bad I couldn’t see for the stars & dizziness. It’s possible I wasn’t stable enough to have adequately consented to the test but I did get my final results.

Out of 100 common allergens tested it was confirmed I was extremely allergic to 10 of them with another moderate sensitivity set of twenty or so that I should merely try to avoid as opposed to my firm “no go” list.

The dermatologist gave me a sheet with 75 different chemical names and formats that I might encounter in the wild from these core allergens:

Budesonide
Ammonium Persulfate
Benzisothiazolinone
Limonene
Oleamidopropyl Dimethylamine
Formaldehyde
Lauryl Glucoside
Methylisothiazolinone
Propolis
Thimerosal

I instructed to search ingredient lists for these names any time I purchased a household product, personal care item, cosmetic or other item which might include these ingredients which ranged from nail care to vaccines.

It was honestly quite overwhelming. And some of the above ingredients are in basically everything. I dare you to avoid Limonene for a month.

So my husband and one of our best friends did what any practical minded engineer would do and they made me simple Google sheet where all 75 varietals could be checked if I plugged in the ingredients from any item.

I used it for years. I’d plug in the INCI from every brand I encountered into the sheet no matter what. I gave away a lot of products to friends.

Today it occurred to Alex that we should probably vibe code the thing into a proper web application using Replit so other people could check ingredient lists for their own allergies.

Within two hours, most of which was waiting on the kindly AIs to do their thing, we had a fully functional web application.

You can set your own allergens or click a few buttons for common allergens and “clean ingredient standards” and run a check for an all clear.

It isn’t super fancy but it doesn’t need to be. It just needed to keep your data safe, be easy to log into so you can securely check and access your personal list and generally functional enough to change and set allergens. We’ve put it on our own little domain just to see how much this will cost to run (and we’ve set up alerts so it doesn’t go bonkers) but we figured this should be accessible and simple.

And while there are other options on the market, most are bloated, overly paranoid and designed for scaring California moms rather than quickly helping people with clear preferences for avoidance and actual tested allergies. So hopefully our pain can help you breathe easier.

Some options for chemicals and irritants you can select on our app.
My own settings of allergies and sensitivities
Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1752 and Too Much Protestant Work Ethic

I am pouring far too much autistic enthusiasm into my pet beauty shopping column that has a roughly half and half ration “theory of appearance culture in Protestantism” and half “specific routines at different price points” but I am enjoying it.

The heavier lift is going to be the work I am putting into the individual routines for the founding subscribers who have paid good money for help and I intend to give them my absolute all. I admit I’ve put way more thought than is probably necessary into each one but it’s a joy to track down specific products and geographic needs. It’s a shame that market editor was never a well paid enough job at a fashion magazine as I am pretty good at it.

Like, of course, I have opinions on the German drugstore market and its cost effective actives lines versus the old school naturals brands and where to acquire them. I don’t have quite as extensive a sample library of the market staples on hand but you know I spent hours browsing the grocery and retail shops when I was living in Frankfurt.

And on that note I’m going to bed early as I’m healing from my various biohacking experiments and I’m exhausted even with all the effort I’m putting into wound healing it still takes a certain about of rest to actually knit things together no matter how much time I spend with HBOT or what peptide stack I’m taking (it’s a spicy boy on the way in I’ll say that much).