Tag: rose

Posted on

on the lips: …more lip balm

Remember how I don’t need any more lip balm?

Well…I got some more lip balm.

IMG_6586

1. Jurlique Rose Love Balm – brilliant product from the Australian biodynamic* brand Jurlique. This is essentially olive oil fixed with beeswax, so it melts on contact, like putting coconut oil on your lips (which is also nice)…or olive oil. I love rose. This is a multi-purpose balm (though I suppose you could consider most lip balms a multi-purpose balm – it’s all marketing), but on the lips it feels especially like a nourishing treatment.

2. Dr. Hauschka Lip Balm –  officially my favorite lip balm right now, especially at night, and prominently placed on my dressing table. And from another biodynamic brand. This has a peculiar texture I haven’t quite come across before. It’s another blend of oils (a lot of them) mixed with various herbal extracts and fixed with beeswax, but the oil content is high, and the texture is incredibly soft and yielding. It is blended in such a way that the effect is not oily (as with the Jurlique balm), but creamy. This has to be in a pot because the texture could never survive in stick form. Smells to me vaguely and pleasantly herbal/medicinal. Melts into the lips beautifully and not in an oily way, it maintains presence of friction, isn’t slick…obviously I am an obsessive case and whether or not I am willing to spend $17 on a lip balm maybe doesn’t help you much, but I will say that I have spent more on products I liked much less. This is the kind of product I plan to begin giving indiscriminately as a gift.

3. Nuxe Rêve de Miel Lip Moisturizing Stick – a great blend of shea butter, honey, and luxurious (argan, macadamia) oils in convenient stick form. I happen to prefer the softer formulations that tend to come in pots but sticks are convenient to carry around, and this is a beautiful one. Not as bizarre as the ultra-nourishing version, texture-wise. This is more a luxe version of your standard non-wax based (actually nourishing, not just protective) balm stick.

Yes, I think about lip balm a lot.

*Worth investigating the basics of biodynamics, I think. There is a fair amount of what I consider empty ceremony built into the structure of biodynamics but what the process is able to achieve, and the extent to which it is in harmony with the environment, can’t be refuted.

Posted on

smell this: Chanel Coco Mademoiselle

IMG_6115Well, it doesn’t smell as good on me as it did on the guy who made me want to buy it, though I was drunk at the time I decided I would buy, and he must have bathed in it. Lesson learned in testing on self [Always test on self!]. And inebriated scent assessment.

Pleasant vanilla, citruses and rose florals anchored with patchouli –  not too sweet, esp in the drydown, so it smells good (definitely good…not quite inspiring but solidly good, I can see why it sells so well) but rather boring to my nose. Would be a fitting scent for a particularly charming baby or nursery was my initial thought [though you aren’t meant to put perfume on babies, I know]. Can layer to sweeten or temper a masculine, is how I’ve been consoling myself about it. I find that it plays very well with others, after a couple of years of experimenting with it now and then. Especially like it over something musky, like the C.O. Bigelow musk oil. This also keeps it from being so recognizable, and helps with that ideal of having a unique scent for oneself.

Though it is not my favorite I often reach for it (alone or somehow layered) when I don’t want to think too hard about smelling nice–not only nice, but ‘pretty’, nice in a sense with feminine mass appeal–and I want to speak, inconspicuously, effortlessly, to a broad range of tastes. Perhaps if I know I will be meeting new people, for example, and I’m in a rush. I almost always get positive comments.