Jack & Hill: A Beauty Blog - make-up, cosmetics, perfume, and the substance of style

The skin you're in

Someone asked in the comments here what I use on my skin to avoid crows' feet.

The conclusion I am coming to is that for me, specific products don't make a huge amount of difference. Cleansing well, rinsing very well (at least fifteen times), and making sure my skin is moisturized as needed seems to produce consistent results, regardless of the specific products.

(Do not consider leaving even the smallest amount of eye makeup on your face. I read recently that dermatologists are stunned at the amount of makeup residue that they see under their patients' eyes when they look at them under magnifiers. These traces contribute hugely to an old, tired look. Why spend tons of money on treatments and products if one of the easiest ways to look fresh is so cheap and easy?) 

Also, I don't smoke, I eat fairly healthfully, and I use at least SPF 15 every day, while not spending much time at all in the sun. (I also stopped drinking alcohol almost five months ago, since which time I have received lots more compliments on my skin and overall looks.) I could stand to drink more water, I'm sure.

But for what it's worth, here are some products that I use regularly.

Estée Lauder Idealist Skin Refinisher

  Without lipgloss 
  Originally uploaded by dynamist.

This is an old picture of me, but illustrates the sort of skin I deal with on a daily basis: 'dewy' at best, all-out shiny at worst. Blame my pores.

Nadine Baggott has a good piece on pores, for which she talked to Dr. Daniel Maes, head of R&D for Estée Lauder. Dr. Maes imparts the infuriating information that sebum is a very bad moisturiser and has been made redundant by evolution.

Maybe millions of years ago it had a role to play in keeping our hair waterproof, back when we had fur; now it is simply a nuisance.

You can say that again. Nadine lists some of her favorite instant pore perfectors, and I have to admit to slavish use of Estée Lauder Idealist Skin Refinisher (now in much more sleek, appealing packaging) for the last few weeks since receiving a bottle of it from Lauder PR. In the ridonkulous heat and humidity we've been suffering of late, my expectations of any mattifying product are at an all-time low. That said, I do like the way this product changes the surface of my skin once I've smoothed on a very small amount of it, and it feels like a much better base for the rest of my makeup. (You use it before your moisturizer, a product I skip in this climate.)

Estée Lauder Pleasures Delight

  Les Galeries Lafayette 
  Originally uploaded by dynamist.

I have blogged previously about the fact that my holy grail of fragrances would exactly mimic the smell that wafts through the perfume and cosmetics floor of any major department store. (At right, a photo I took last summer of the beauty department at Les Galeries Lafayette in Paris, where I always get my hair cut when I'm in Europe.)

Space NK Soulful has been the closest approximation I have found, and it's a scent I adore as much today as I did the first time I smelled it. (Many thanks to Space NK's John Prothero for keeping me in constant supply of the full range of Soulful products after he read my loving tribute to it. I had no idea he was reading, but I'm glad he was!)

On Monday, July 9, 2007, I discovered my new favorite perfume, one that really does capture that heady mix of florals, greens, and spices that has sent my senses reeling since I was a little girl: Estée Lauder Pleasures Delight.

I once bought a lotion and perfume set of the original Pleasures, but it wasn't a scent I wore all that often. When it came to Lauder, my heart always belonged to Beautiful. I was sent a gorgeous bottle of Pleasures Exotic a few months ago, and liked it more than its predecessor; I wear it about once a week. But this latest spin-off, Delight, was a total revelation to me. I wasn't expecting to be knocked for six, but that I was. You wouldn't guess from reading about its composition, which makes it sound sickly sweet, that this fragrance is so perfect:

This floral confection blends notes of juicy pomegranate, whipped strawberry meringue and tempting caramel with a sprinkling of sugared rose petals, dewy freesia, white peony and fresh greens...it is a "floral gourmand confection blending juicy fruits, tangy citrus and irresistible desserts and sweets". The notes include pomegranate, fresh greens, freesia, whipped strawberry meringue, peony, lily, muguet, heliotrope, sugared rose petals, caramel, marshmallow, vanilla, patchouli.

Can somebody please smell this and tell me what that musky note is? It doesn't strike me as patchouli. Whatever it is, it's had me sniffing at my forearms so deeply and frequently that I have to remind myself to be more discreet about it in public.

I am in love.

Do you powder your nose?

  London Bar 
  Originally uploaded by steedoggydogg.

As you can see from this photo, taken in March when Stee was visiting London, I do not powder my nose anymore. I'll carry around my beautiful Estée Lauder gold compact (a freebie from EL's PR department) if it's made its way into the right handbag, but I gave up on the fantasy of perfectly matte-yet-natural skin at least a year ago. I decided that life was too short. I am 99.9% sure I am right.

But this piece in today's Sunday Times is making me have a rethink. In the past, I would have run right out and bought the Becca powder that Hannah Betts is gushing about, then realized I'd just flushed away a huge chunk of cash just to delay the onset of shininess by about five minutes. Now, I might head to a Becca counter and try the stuff out, with no expectations whatsoever, yet secretly hoping for a miracle. In fact, that's exactly what I'm going to do when I get to London next week.

Do you powder your nose?

Summer Fun Beautiful by Estée Lauder

  Summer Fun Beautiful by Estée Lauder 
  Originally uploaded by dynamist.

Here's a sneak preview of the elegant, limited edition version of Beautiful for the summer. It's not yet available in stores or online, but check esteelauder.com from March 1, when pretty summer bottles of Beautiful and other EL fragrances will be released to the public.

Many thanks to the Estée Lauder PR team for knowing me well enough to know that Beautiful is one of my favourite perfumes. My beloved grandmother and best friend both wore it, and I've always felt I was sort of 'borrowing' from them when I did. (Just before my best friend's wedding last month, I asked her what perfume she'd be wearing. "I don't know, " she said, "I've got so many other things to stress about, I hadn't even thought about it." I was outraged. "You HAVE to wear Beautiful!" I cried. "Yeah, I guess it is my signature fragrance, isn't it?" she replied. Duh! So that's what she wore, and she went on to have the best wedding ever. Coincidence? I think not.)

Estee Lauder Advanced Night Repair Concentrate

I've been using this every morning, and it's great.  Me, I want to do my damage at night, my repair in the AM.  Great stuff.  Just don't ever visit their product-specific website, which is a total come-on.  Someone decided it was worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to annoy customers.  So they made the big, fat flash site that is impossible to load, impossible to see, and treats viewers like chattel. 

Estee Lauder had the opportunity, with the URL "www.littlebrownbottle.com" to create a branded event.  Instead they created a bland nowhere.

Both Jack and I are lifelong Estee Lauder fans.  The products continue to meet our expectations.  The marketing, well, it sucks. 

Estée Lauder and blogs

Cosmetics are pure brand: smoke for the mirrors, advertising in a bottle. They bought slick, fashionable magazines because they wanted to be slick and fashionable. But now even they are realizing, I think, that their brands live not on pages but with people.

That's media man Jeff Jarvis, commenting on the news that Estée Lauder is buying ads on blogs.

You know...I'm underwhelmed by this. Buying ads? Big whoop. I don't know anybody - much less any enthusiastic, passionate, evangelistic customer of cosmetics - who truly engages with companies through their ads. As it happens, I don't know anybody who will admit to clicking on those ads more than once in a blue moon, or of buying based on having their eyeballs blasted with a logo. I'd be much more impressed if Estée Lauder took the considerable expertise and passion of their employees and let them blog away, actually conversing with customers and potential customers about make-up and skin care.

I'm a big Lauder fan, and I know they can do better than throwing money at the electronic equivalent of the print ads that we all page through as fast as we can to get to the good stuff in a magazine. Why not just cut the interruptive, intrusive bull and give us your own good stuff, Lauder?

Estée Lauder High Gloss Lip Gloss

Like Hillary, I'm loving the Estée Lauder High Gloss Lip Gloss. I say this as someone who stopped wearing lip gloss some months ago, because the irritation of having strands of my hair sticking to my lips just got to be far too much to handle. While High Gloss can stick to your lips, it is much less tacky than any other lip gloss I've tried, and doesn't tend to do so very much.

That said, my enjoyment of the various colours of High Gloss (here, I'm wearing Ivory, which at first looks pale on lips but soon settles into a your lips, only fuller and shinier look) has brought me to the point where I am considering cutting my hair short enough that it won't fly in my face. You know a product is good when it has you re-thinking your approach to a completely separate part of your self.

I think my bone structure is far too severe - massive jaw and chin, with a very fleshy face - for shorter hair to work, but I do think about it daily. Maybe something jaw-skimming and breezy for summer, with lots of volume and movement...

Lauding Lauder again

Like Jackie, I both have a longstanding affection for certain Estee Lauder products. My favorites are a now discontinued all-purpose eyeshadow duo called Storm, in a shade that's neither gray nor brown nor mauve, but has the best qualities of each, and an iconic shade of lipstick called Perfect Silent Red, also discontinued, that I seldom have the nerve to wear anymore but that I pulled off frequently with aplomb in my early 30s (and wrote about in Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge). I have stockpiles of both.

In appreciation of our, er, appreciation of their products, Estee's minions sent us some new releases for review, among them a new High Gloss Lip Gloss that I am growing attached to, not for any spectacular visual qualities (medium shine, consiervative color range), but for a couple of, shall we say, structural issues:

An applicator tip that actually works.  I hate those sponge wands that never distribute the product evenly but shovel it around your lips, until you resort to getting your fingers tacky to straighten things out. I was wearing MAC lip glass the other day, and it's like getting pine pitch on your fingers.  The slanted Lauder tip is bare plastic, and with a bit of practice, it works, even passing my quite unreasonable test of being applicable sans mirror.

The gloss lasts.  One reason I seldom wear gloss instead of lipstick is that it never lasts more than an hour.  This product lasts for several hours.  I don't know why, it just does.

I broke my beloved Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX7 last week and can't take a picture, so here is one of Estee in her prime.

Estée Lauder Pure White Linen

The reason I love Estée Lauder's Beautiful fragrance so much is because it's more than just a perfume to me.

Beautiful is standing at my grandmother's dressing table, surveying the many perfumes resting on mirrored trays and knowing exactly which one I was going to pick - the one that smelled just like Gramma Danicki.

Beautiful is walking into my grandparents' house and being washed over with a wave of comfort imbued by care and routine (red Jell-O with fruit cocktail and Cool Whip for dessert, milk bottles full of Tang to drink, and no slouching on the 'Davenport').

Beautiful is meeting my best friend for the first time, at age 13, and immediately clocking that she was sharing our scent, without our permission. I didn't mind.

Like the very best fragrances, Beautiful is a million memories and a lifetime in one inhalation of breath. That may sound like the kind of thing an overpriced, under-creative ad agency might come up with, but for me it is 100 per cent true.

What I'm saying is: I am pretty devoted to Beautiful; it's a fragrance for life. Other perfumes come and go, but Beautiful has been with me since I was a baby.

So I wasn't sure what to expect when, included in a big box of free goodies from the cosmetics giant, there was a bottle of Pure White Linen, the modernised version of one of Estée Lauder's many classics (Youth Dew, anyone?). I couldn't even remember what the older version smelled like. But I'm wearing it now, and all I can say is that it's the kind of thing my grandmother would have worn if she had been alive today, in an age where 60 years old doesn't mean housecoats and old lady perfumes. (Sorry, but every time I try to love Chanel No 5 - there's a big bottle of it on my bedroom mantle - I can't help but get a whiff of mothballs and hard tack candy with the florals.)

Updated versions of classic fragrances seem to be a growing trend. I've never smelled Beautiful Sheer (I'm not even sure I was aware it existed, but I'll seek it out and have a spray the next time I'm in a department store), or the new version of Youth Dew. No offense to anyone who wears it - because it probably smells much different on you - but I'm more intrigued by the prospect of an AARP-free version of Chanel No 5.