Caudalie Beauty Elixir: Why Live Without It?

Just because something is frivolous doesn’t mean it’s not essential

Sure you can live without Caudalie Beauty Elixir, but why would you want to? Are the pleasures in your life so thick on the ground that you can afford to reject one?

You skin certainly doesn’t need Caudalie Beauty Elixir. For cooling you could just splash on cold water from the tap, but then you’d miss out on that famous scent: a garden’s worth of rose, orange blossom, rosemary, along with benzoin and myrrh and Caudalie’s signature grape water loaded with polysaccharides for moisture and mineral salts to calm redness.

Without it, your days, which can seem endless at the 4:00 p.m. mark, whether you are working from home or not, would be a lot greyer. “It’s the Starbucks coffee of the skin,” says Caudalie founder Mathilde Thomas, selling it rather short, frankly. It is, in fact, the “stroll-through-Paris-with-your-lover-on-a-sunny-day-and-then-have-a-tête-à-tête-in-a-sidewalk-cafe” of the skin.

This year’s limited edition bottle, with its pink ombré glass and line drawings of herbs and flowers, will easily be the nicest-looking thing in your fridge. Keep it stowed there (a work from home benefit) for regular, chilly blasts during these endlessly hot days. Or spray the air around you in a witchy ritual to banish dull air and dull thoughts and make your workspace just that much nicer. And Frencher.

Guerlain Aqua Allegoria Orange Soleia #perfumeeverydamnday

Like walking through an orange grove that is also an herb garden.

Spraying Guerlain’s new Aqua Allegoria Orange Soleia is like splitting apart an orange and breathing in that exploding arc of juice. The blood orange, bergamot and petitgrain (oil from leaves of the bitter orange tree) are an almost fizzy fortification against that wall of humidity you’ll encounter when you step outside this time of year.

Citrus fragrances have a notoriously brief life on your skin, but the addition of mint, floral-yet-biting pink peppercorn and a gently warm, woody note extend Orange Soleia’s presence well after that initial mood-altering orange burst has fled.

The scent is meant to evoke a Calabrian citrus grove in the hot sun, but imagine it’s your citrus grove with a pool at its edge. This is a fantasy after all. You walk through your citrus grove, eat an orange, jump in the pool to cool down and then dry off on your sun-warmed, wooden deck chair. There are worse ways to spend the summer.

James Read Self-Tanners for the Risk-Averse

I have to trick myself into using self-tanner. It’s a brilliant concept but the reality can be messy and fraught with all sorts of dangers. And as my clever friend and colleague Janine Falcon observes, it is all too easy to make your skin look like faux wood grain if you’re not careful. To mitigate this, London-based, tanner-to-the-stars James Read’s products are virtually idiot-proof (and I say this as a card-carrying idiot,) all in glamorous, faintly 1950s seaside hotel, retro packaging.

Just like the name says, with Click & Glow Tan Drops, you dispense a couple of drops into moisturizer or serum in the palm of your hand and smooth over your face. It’s gradual and you can ‘titrate’ the amount used (my favourite medical term meaning ‘continuously measure and readjust the balance’) incrementally increasing the amount added until you reach the desired shade of ‘glowy, but not resembling a glass of Tang. With apologies to Shakespeare, remember that “restraint is the better part of self-tanning”. Less is definitely more.

Gratifyingly, for a tanning brand owner, Read encourages a light hand to prevent one from looking overtly ‘tanned’. In fact, a single application of the Gradual Tan Sleep Mask Tan Face in Light/Medium, applied before bed, results in faint but believable colour. It’s more of a subtle enlivening with no overt tint, so if you have alabaster skin (the kind that can actually look blue) this is a great one to try. You can happily stop at ‘barely detectable glow’, or repeat nightly until you reach your desired shade.

One final, sterling bit of advice: beauty writer and Guardian columnist Sali Hughes recommends using self tanner at bedtime after a night of excessive imbibing. Naturally, you’ll wake up the next morning feeling like hell, but the (faux) healthy glow will minimize the visible signs of devastation. To me, this defines useful beauty journalism.

Calvin Klein Eternity #perfumeeverydamnday

Some people use the expression ‘laundry musk perfume’ dismissively, like it’s bad to want to smell like the sensation of sliding between freshly washed sheets at the end of a long day.

When it’s gross and sticky in the summer, and two showers a day isn't enough (didn't Tom Ford take four baths a day?) Calvin Klein Eternity, a subtly powdery, 1988 scent by star perfumer Sophia Grojsman full of white flowers, green fizz and clean musk is instant laundry day serenity and calm.

Wear this and you’ll feel like your life is ordered and that someone has put crisp, freshly washed and ironed, blindingly white linen slipcovers on all the chairs in the house and even left a pitcher of cucumber water in the fridge for you. 

The Best Balm for Your Poor Cuticles

When you love something, always buy two.

Twice now, during lockdown, I’ve squeezed some Lanolips Golden Dry Skin Salve into a tiny pot and run it over to a friend whose cuticles were in dire need. Apparently our desire to treat friends during these tough times is called ‘caremongering’ — which is a play on ‘scare-mongering’ and I love it.

Lanolin, the heavy, natural coating on sheep’s wool makes the best occlusive protectant for cuticles that, because of repeated washing or nervous picking, are raggedy and cracked. Lanolin on its own it can be rather sticky, which is fine for lips, but rather unpleasant on fingers. This salve blends it with honey, beeswax and vitamin e, making it more lightweight but no less effective at mending what anxiety and dryness have done to your fingertips.

It also makes an excellent lip balm (I mean, c’mon. It has honey in it) and the 50 gram tube is very generous and will last you forever.

Valmont Casanova 2161 #perfumeeverydamnday

Vetiver makes an appearance in a lot of men’s fragrances because someone once decided that this resinous grass with a smoky punch smells ‘masculine’. But it’s really for anyone who appreciates a subtly mossy scent with a sharper greenish bite than patchouli.

Valmont Palazzo Nobile Casanova 2161 ($240 Can) elegantly deploys earthy vetiver to deftly lighten the powdery, violet aspect of iris, making it modern and transparent. Add the herbaceous tang of juniper berries and Casanova 2161 easily transports you to the stone patio of a grand cliffside Mediterranean hotel for drinks as the sun slowly sets. (I really want a holiday. Is it obvious?)

Shaving Face: Peach Fuzz Belongs on Fruit

Gillette Venus Extra Smooth Sensitive is the best dermaplaning tool

Some of the things that my mother didn’t warn me about turning 50:

• Thinning lips

• Increased chance of UTIs (This one strikes me as extraordinarily cruel)

• Overnight, weed-like growth of facial hair

And I don’t mean chin hairs, like the stealthy ones that you don’t see until they're an inch long and beginning to curl. So you marvel at their length, tweeze them and wonder if you’re slowly becoming a werewolf.

No. I’m talking about the all-over “peach fuzz” that can appear when menopause hits and your estrogen levels fall while androgens (primarily testosterone) rise. This ‘vellus hair’ (unlike the thicker ‘terminal’ hair of whiskers, brows, lashes and the hair on your head) may appear in a “male pattern distribution” that starts as pale, downy sideburns and soon threatens to colonize your entire face. Get enough of it and you start looking like a Muppet when the light hits it just right.

Sure, in “the before times”, you could go to a med spa for dermaplaning, where a nice woman in a white coat would go at your face with a sharp, single blade, removing that top layer of dead skin to stimulate cell turnover and enhance the penetration of your anti-aging skincare products. And as a bonus it would take all that peach fuzz along with it.

But because I am horribly lazy (and possibly cheap?) while also being high maintenance, I like to DIY and shave the fuzz off myself with a proper razor. 

I don’t trust dedicated, lady face-shaving devices (usually pink) or single-use blades with flimsy plastic handles that come in multi-packs. I want a sharp, safe razor built by the obsessives at Procter & Gamble who spend their days worrying about blade-on-skin friction ratios, say things like “we do more welding than most car manufacturers” and get excited by the fact that “the radius of the blade’s tip is 25 nanometers.” (That’s one millimetre divided by 40,000, in case you didn’t know.) 

The Venus Extra Smooth Sensitive razor ($15, drugstores) is perfect for any face-shaving newbie, and with five ‘low cutting force’ blades and a lubricant strip, designed to minimize irritation, it’s already meant for sensitive skin.

Please note that this is an off-label use, that is NOT RECOMMENDED BY THE BRAND. They would say that their Gillette blades for men are designed for faces while the women’s are meant for the straight-away real estate that is your underarms and legs. 

But unlike men who have to go under the chin and down their tender (so very tender) necks and all over uneven terrain (a skill that takes years to master), female vellus hair really just grows in that afore-mentioned sideburn pattern, so you will only be shaving flat areas anyways.

Which I do. I make a point of shaving the fuzzy outer portion of my face in the shower whenever I change blade cartridges. That way I'm using the sharpest blades possible, which means an easier and closer shave. And don't worry about the hair growing back thicker if you shave it off. Hair is dead when you cut it, so that’s a myth. It might feel spikier because you razored the ends which makes them pointier. That’s it.

And do remember that peach fuzz and dead skin cell removal will leave your skin receptive to the brightening properties of Vitamin C. (I always encourage the use of vitamin C.)

So shave, and then apply some vitamin C serum and consider that a morning well spent.

Putting Soap on Your Brows Is Smart Not Strange

Glycerin soap in a liquorice tin

Why yes, that is a slice of glycerin soap in an Italian liquorice tin. It’s my DIY version of Soap Brow, an expensive (yes, I bought it) brow fix from the UK that is essentially just glycerin soap in a small tin. You run a dampened mascara spoolie through the soap and brush it up through your brows and it keeps them in place far better than brow gel or hair spray. Plus, the sheer bulk of the soap makes your brows look thicker in addition to keeping them in place. Brows that point up (or up-ish, you can fiddle and gently smooth the tops down a bit so they don’t look all 80s spikey) give your eyes a bit of lift in the same way that curling your lashes does. And seeing that we’ll be focusing on eye makeup if we are going to wear masks for the foreseeable future, DIY soap brow is a cheap new addition to your beauty rota.

The OG

Now for this to work you do need to have some eyebrows left. So if your brows are sparse, due to age-related thinning or overly enthusiastic youthful tweezing (no shame. We all did it), then bite the bullet and get some brow serum. It’s horribly expensive, but its peptide formula really does work. I like Neubrow Brow Enhancing Serum. And besides, you can then save the money you’d be spending on brows gels by crafting your own soap brow tin. But please, use the prettiest tin you can find.

Revlon Glass Shine is a drugstore Chanel dupe

Revlon’s new Super Lustrous Glass Shine Lipstick in Glazed Mauve, #007, is the perfect ‘your lips but better’ shade that subtly amplifies lip colour, like someone fiddled with your own personal contrast button. It brings your whole face into focus and makes you look more ‘there’. This is especially good if your lips are doing that discouraging fading thing that they do as you get older. And did I mention it’s only $13.50?

That’s an insanely good price for a virtual doppelgänger of Chanel’s beloved yet sadly discontinued Rouge Coco Shine in the shade ‘Boy.’ Sure, Chanel launched Rouge Coco Flash ‘Boy’ in its stead, but it’s not the same. Having the right ‘your lips but better’ lipstick is a little bit of security that you can carry around with you. Big mistake getting rid of it. Big. Huge.

So let’s thank the makeup gods for Revlon Glass Shine Glazed Mauve. A true high point during these weird weeks.

Christy Turlington Doesn’t Need Your Photoshop

Unretouched Christy Turlington Quietly Subverts the Norm

As an impatient tween, I wanted to be all grown up, so I read Seventeen magazine at age 12.

That inverted as I got older. I’m 55 now, and I flatter/delude myself into viewing 51-year-old model Christy Turlington as my contemporary. (Gales of derisive laughter.)

This photo, seen on store displays of Maybelline’s new Dream Radiant Liquid foundation, quietly exudes the elegance that Christy can conjure on demand. It declares that, sure, she has faint lines criss-crossing her forehead and a wee pockmark on her right cheek, but she is still the queen.

Here’s proof: when Christy appeared, several years ago, on our local cable channel, TVOntario, to discuss global maternal health, she looked so lovely that she remains, to this day, the only person ever to look beautiful under vicious TVO lighting. Not only did she found the charity Every Mother Counts, that works to improve outcomes for pregnant women everywhere and make an accompanying documentary, No Woman, No Cry, but she can also bend light to her will.

And Maybelline’s Dream Radiant Liquid hydrating foundation? It’s a medium-coverage foundation with hyaluronic acid and collagen for plumping, and enough coverage to smooth out any unevenness without looking too heavy. Perfect for older skin. (I disapprove of matte foundation when you are our age. Really really disapprove.)

I’m also grateful for Maybelline’s low-key way of talking to a 50+ crowd without a lot of ‘you’re not getting older, you’re getting better’ eye-roll inducing pandering. They just put a photo of Christy and her gentle crow’s feet out there and that’s it.

I’m also thinking they must have an exasperated older women working in product development right now because Maybelline has bestowed a further gift to older women in their new Cheek Heat gel blush. (Powder blush being just as bad as matte foundation for anyone 50+.) Someone there is definitely looking out for us.