Sunscreens For People Who Hate Sunscreen: City Edition

When it’s unbearably hot and humid (“air you can wear” as it’s known in the American south) the last thing you want to do is apply sunscreen to a damp and sticky face.

But apply sunscreen you must, both as protection against cellular damage that can mutate into skin cancer and for vanity’s sake, to keep your skin from mottling and wrinkling up like an old leather shoe. Sunscreen is so powerful it can even reverse the passage of time because (louder for the people in the back) wearing sunscreen allows your skin to heal from any prior damage instead of just compounding it. This from a 2016 study in the Journal for Dermatalogical Surgery.

And If you are truly sunscreen averse, especially during these dog days of summer, the three ‘best of breed’ lotions (pictured above, top to bottom) deliver on lightness with protection.

Garnier Ombrelle Ultra Light Advanced SPF 60 face lotion, $18.99, Shoppers Drug Mart, is a high SPF, broad spectrum screen (i.e. it protects against both UVA’s aging and UVB’s burning rays) that is so pleasingly lightweight, you will actually use it. And the non-sticky lotion absorbs into skin immediately so it’s perfect under makeup.

Because Shiseido Oil Free Urban Environment Oil Free sunscreen SPF 42 $45, Sephora.com, is oil-free, it’s perfect for those brutal days when your skin is unpleasantly slick. It plays the clever trick of actually hydrating your poor depleted skin while leaving a soft suède-like finish, so you can look fresh while everyone around you is melting.

Burt’s Bees SPF 30, Gentle Day Lotion, $29.99, Well.ca, is perfect for anyone whose skin reacts to temperature extremes by immediately going scarlet. This mineral, paraben-free lotion is gentle gentle gentle, and restores your moisture barrier and calms redness while protecting skin against UVA and UVB damage.

The 'I Want To Be Invited Back' Cottage Gift Guide 2022

Lake of Bays, 2022.

Bringing generous and practical gifts for your cottage-owning friends all but ensures an invitation next season. For more suggestions see the last cottage gift guide here.

Instagram’s new favourite account is @ironicboatandtote because the hive mind discovered that LL Bean will embroider whatever you like on their signature sturdy canvas carryalls ($39-$59.) A cleverly monogrammed, oversized tote to haul necessities from the car to the cottage and down to the dock is always welcome.

You can take inspiration from the irreverent folks above (our favourites include ‘ Zoloft’ and ‘Prada’) or embroider your host’s name or initials or their cottage name on a tote. The all-cream LL Bean version is very chic, especially with the same colour embroidery, for a truly monochromatic look. But if you can’t get your hands on one, the dark blue or black straps are still the classic choice.

Put the boat in the water, take the boat out of the water, haul some rusty scrap metal to the dump, clear the overgrown brush by the road.

Having a cottage is a never-ending chore list, so Awaye pain relief cream, $23.29, Amazon.ca, is a very thoughtful, if rather unexpected, gift. Not a CBD cream, it contains β-caryophyllene that blocks the pain receptors in the body’s endocacannabinoid system (ECS) like CBD creams do. Added capsaicin, (with its pain relieving properties) amplifies the effects of the β-caryophyllene making Awaye more effective than CBD alone. And because Awaye doesn’t actually contain cannabis, it isn’t subject to cannabis regulation and costs much less than CBD cream.

Endear yourself to your friends by clearing some of that afore-mentioned brush (obviously ask first.) A sandvik, aka Swedish Clearing Axe, $76, Leevalley.com, slices through unwanted saplings (I’m looking at you, poplars) and underbrush like butter.

A new Maglite flashlight for the bunkie or a guest room is always welcome, because you can literally never have too many flashlights at the cottage. A Maglite is sleek-looking, reassuringly hefty and the light it throws can illuminate a scary walk back to your cabin.

If you are borrowing a family cottage for a week and need to make a huge gifting splash and Homer Simpson donut pool floats are not the right vibe for the lake, a Yeti Tundra 35” cooler, $375, is rugged, super practical and just this side of fancy.

And if an almost $400 cooler is too rich for your blood, (remember - this is a hostess gift. I’m not suggesting you buy this for yourself!) then an oversized Yeti 1 litre water bottle is a more practical gift choice.)

Not only does this Citronella Night Jasmine candle, snapdragondesigns.ca, $59.50, contain bug-repelling citronella, it smells wonderfully of jasmine and orange flower (aka neroli) and its graphic illustration is chic and suitably cottage-y.

And don’t forget to spell off your host and bring all the ingredients for at least one complete meal for everyone. If your wallet allows, this is the time to blow the budget on seafood and steaks (especially appreciated if your hosts have children and their disposable income now goes towards extracurriculars and orthodontia.)

And finally — just for fun, throw in some multipacks of TP. (This idea courtesy of a lovely cottage-owning friend.) It began as a Covid-inspired idea two years ago, but given the price of everything now, this is both a practical and luxurious gift.)

Black and Tan

What happens when you wear black all year and then summer comes along? I don’t want to be the town goth, a look better left to emo teens.

The answer is to just (duh) keep wearing black but lighten up the fabric. A breezy, black linen dress is summery when paired with a natural leather cross-body bag that will only get better the more beaten up it gets. And go hard with the self-tanner to get your limbs to the tawny state of the model in the photo above. (But please get that tan through self tanner, not, you know, the actual sun.)

Upper left: top to bottom: Tan Luxe The Butter ($50, Sephora) is a twofer that moisturizes dry skin to the point of gleaming while also building natural-looking colour. Pale is beautiful but sue me - a faux tan looks good.

Summer Fridays Shade Drops, SPF 30, $47 CAN, Sephora.com, is a light mineral sunscreen lotion with a faint tint that blends in easily into all skin tones without leaving any whiteish cast at all. It’s quite amazing. And because it’s a mineral screen that doesn’t require absorption time to offer optimal protection, you can apply it and head right out the door.

The Victoria Diva hat, $68.83, from Australian brand Wallaroo (trust the Australians when it comes to sun protection) is a crushable wonder that holds its shape (so good for packing) while its weave will leave your head cool but your face still protected from UV rays.

The tortoise frame with green lens Classic RayBan Wayfarers, $207, Sunglass Hut, adds dimension to an all-black outfit. And compared to the ever-spirallaing price of designer shades ($500 for sunglasses? Really?) they are a bargain by comparison.

Tom Cruise, three years before Top Gun sealed his status as eternal movie god.

Apropos RayBan Wayfarers (well, the black ones,) can you believe that Risky Business turns forty next year?

Vachetta natural leather starts out pale pink and warms into a caramel when exposed to the sun and just looks better with age. This Leather bag $135 CAN, from Etsy, can be worn cross-body or just as a shoulder bag and is roomy without being overly large.

The black leather Carrick slide from Banana Republic, $109.97, is sleek and low profile with only a twisted leather upper for ornamentation.

This crisp A classic, ‘close but not to close’ to the body dress in black linen looks polished for city wear floaty (yes, you can have both!) number from Max Mara Leisure, is on sale at SSense.com for $123. Go get it.

Sport Sunscreens For People Who Hate Sunscreen

Is this a trend? I have friends who use mineral sunscreen on their faces and chemical protection on their bodies. It’s like the sunscreen version of being mostly vegetarian but still enjoying a barbequed hamburger in the summer.

I have no horse in this race as I am an equal opportunity sunscreen user and will go to any lengths to protect my skin from UV rays. Chemical screens are, admittedly, much easier to wash off. The tenacity of mineral sunscreen is something to behold. I use a gentle exfoliating cleanser, like Tatcha’s Rice Polish, $84, Sephora, to remove it.

This sunscreen duo, above, is a perfect summer pairing for full-on protection when you’re out being active. Vichy Idéal Soleil SPF 60 Sport sunscreen, $29.95, Shoppers Drug Mart, is sweat and water resistant for 80 minutes and the light lotion formulation absorbs virtually instantly when applied (it feels like sorcery. No lie.) It leaves a faintly satin finish on your skin which is the polar opposite of those 1980s tanning oils that sat on your skin like you’d been dunked in a deep fryer. If you basted yourself with Hawaiian Tropic or Bain de Soleil during regrettable backyard teen tanning sessions you know what I mean.

I handed the Blue Lizard Sheer Lotion Face SPF 50 Mineral sunscreen, $22, Shoppers Drug Mart, off to a friend for her to test out on the water. She swims in Lake Ontario year round (impressive, right?) and wants a high SPF face sunscreen because her olive skin freckles quite easily, so anything under 50 SPF is a no-go. Blue Lizard, from Australia, home of the world’s most discerning sunscreen consumers, is also water-resistant for 80 minutes and while it “goes on white, it does sink in after about a minute” and most importantly “doesn’t migrate into eyes” which is critically important when you are in the water or sweating on a bike or tennis court.

These two are perfect for a day on the water (Lake of Bays, Ontario.)

Chanel Paris-Paris is Sunny and Dirty

As any Parisian woman worth her Isabel Marant boots will tell you, it’s imperfection - a larger nose, charmingly crooked teeth - that elevates a conventionally pretty face to truly beautiful. It’s the same in fashion. Adding something old and beat-up, or sentimental or just plain offspeed to your outfit ensures you still look like you and that you didn’t just buy your whole ensemble straight off the store mannequin.

Chanel’s latest ‘Les Eaux’ Paris-Paris abides by this unspoken rule as well. It has a quiet, unexpected edge that is ineffably, truly Parisian, because the real Paris isn’t only those endless perfect cups of coffee on marble tables that you see on Instagram. The real Paris can actually be pretty gritty - the traffic, jostling with a sea of humanity in the Metro, inhaling diesel fumes belched from trucks as you sit in a boulevard café - and it’s that contrast that Paris-Paris embodies. It’s a rose scent, but it is much more than yet another rose scent.

Paris-Paris opens like a light, summery fragrance. There’s freshness courtesy of citrus and pink pepper and damascena rose, bright but still plush. But give it a minute and there’s a surprisingly insistent patchouli rumbling away underneath, adding a whisper of (and I really hate to use this word in case it gets misconstrued) ‘dirty’ to that bright rose. It’s the perfect alluring scent for a languorous dinner — one those evenings spent around the table for hours, while the candles gutter and dessert is long finished. Paris-Paris is earthy, but it’s quietly, discreetly earthy. Not quite unwashed, but it definitely alludes to the human animal wearing it.

So whether you read Paris-Paris as light and unimpeachably daytime chic or as more of an evening fragrance, consider it your summer-in-the-city scent that will easily go into fall and beyond.

Guerlain Terracotta Bronzer: Mistake-Proof Chic

Guerlain Terracotta Light Healthy Glow is the best ‘Training Bronzer’ For Bronzing Newbies

Oh, bronzer. The fastest way to look glowy and well-rested. Even well travelled. (Did you get that tan in Bali?) But one errant sweep of your fluffy brush and you might look like you were attacked by a can of Hershey’s cocoa powder or that you are an aspiring Love Island contestant.

Guerlain Terracotta, the first and still the best compact bronzing powder (it launched back in 1984) can save you from this fate. The colours are carefully considered and natural-looking and - hooray - they have brought back their best, and my favourite, multi-hued version, Terracotta Light Healthy Glow Bronzer, $66 CAN, Sephora.com. It’s pleasingly luxe in its translucent, rosin-coloured case and the mix of bronze, tan and pink pigments creates a natural, warm tan with just enough soft shimmer to keep it from looking flat. The shade ‘Light Cool 00’ is the perfect training bronzer if you are timid, or it can be your all year round go-to if you like to keep things subtle. Level up to deeper shades as desired.

Sweep it on where the sun hits your face, building up the colour slowly. Remember that you can always add more but you can’t add less. Try the classic ‘draw a number three’ sweep: temples, under the cheek and under the jaw, or follow the example of Violette Serrat, Guerlain’s Creative Director of Makeup, in this video (starting at the 1:07 minute mark.)

In her Vogue Paris video, Jeanne Damas epitomizes effortless Parisian cool.

As you can see, casually sweeping on some Terracotta scores incredibly high on the French Cool Girl Beauty Meter. Here is further proof, via model/designer Jeanne Damas in a recent Paris Vogue video. Even if you don’t have your own French clothing line, a quick swipe of Terracotta over the high points of your face and I promise that you will sport the glow of someone who spent the morning perusing endless flats of just-picked strawberries at the farmer’s market.

Summer Whites

Axel Vervoordt’s home in Venice.

If this was your Venetian palazzo, you’d probably have assistants to help you open up for the summer and flip the closets from cold to warm weather clothing. And they would definitely have laundered all those slipcovers.

Early June is when I, on a much smaller scale, ease myself and my home into summer, swapping out everything black or grey for a more seasonally appropriate white. Here is an admittedly incomplete list of some things you can get in anticipation of the season.

Left unbuttoned as a beach coverup to throw over a bathing suit or dressed up with proper jewelry or worn casually with slides and a raffia clutch (I could go on and on), this white linen summer dress, COS.com, $150 CAN is a summer staple. And it has pockets!

Put away your heavy cotton towels and switch to lightweight linen waffle towels from Flax Home for summer. In bright white in sizes from hand- to enormous bath sheet ($38-$88) they brighten a bathroom and are much more practical than cotton. Linen is highly absorbent and dries quickly so even when it’s humid and the air is heavy, you never have to suffer the olfactory assault of damp, moldy-smelling towels (the smell of freshman dorm rooms.)

I have succumbed to the ugly shoe trend because these Oofos OOAHH slides, $74, oofos.ca, are just so comfortable (at least three of my girlfriends have this model.) They provide the arch support busted feet need and are pleasingly squishy and shock-absorbing when your foot hits the pavement. Important note: it’s critical when wearing a biomorphically blobby-looking shoe to have an immaculate pedicure. No exceptions. Ergo, this beautiful Essie colour for summery toes (below.)

Essie’s new Boatloads of Love nail polish, $11.99, Shoppers Drug Mart, is an opaque soft white with the faintest blue shimmer and just enough creamy pink that you don’t look like you painted your nails with Liquid Paper™ (There’s an ancient schoolroom reference.) It’s crisp, chic, very summery and very wearable.

Look at your bathroom with a dispassionate eye and you’ll see that in addition to replacing towels, it’s also time to clear out all the nearly-empty shampoo bottles littering the shower. Replace them with an eco-friendly, refillable, recycled-aluminum bottle of Kérastase Nutritive from their new Kérastase refillable line. (Of course I chose the white one, but Nutritive for ‘sensitized’ damaged hair is perfect for summer.) The initial purchase of a bottle with a 500 ml pouch of shampoo (twice the amount of product in a regular 250 ml. bottle) is $80, kerastase.ca and salons, and each subsequent 500 ml refill is $72.

It’s a happy day for anyone wanting a more elegant olfactory experience when cleaning the house as Diptyque has entered the home care space with their new La Droguerie line of eco-friendly household care products. There’s dish soap, leather and wood lotion, multi-surface cleaner and these white porcelain medallions ($61 CAN, Holt Renfrew) impregnated with cedar oil to hang in the closet or slide into a drawer to protect your woollens from being munched by evil moths over the summer.

A Pre-Summer Friday Five

Summer is coming (how is it almost June?) and here is the first Friday Five of the season:

When the humidity arrives, you want to be cool without leaving the house in just a bathing suit and look pulled together without feeling smothered in fabric. Athleta’s wide-leg Cabo linen trousers, $99, are structured but breezy. The black is perfect for a fancy evening out while the white, worn with a white top, caramel leather accessories and gold jewelry, would be perfect for an outdoor lunch.

Germany holds asparagus festivals (Spargelzeit!) each May into June, and I think that North American culture is poorer for not sharing this tradition. To honour the greatest green spear of all time, I urge you to make this easy, soothing summer meal of jammy eggs, toast points and asparagus (recipe at the bottom of this post.)

Insanely charismatic French actor Omar Sy stars in The Takedown (Netflix) and I can’t decide if it’s a supremely dumb movie and that you should just (re)watch him in Lupin (also Netflix) or if The Takedown is just what the buddy cop film genre needs: lots of silly action with a forceful anti-racist message. Nothing is as chilling as the terrifyingly and loudly racist little, old white lady character thrown into the mix along with the expected evil white men in suits and prison-tattooed skinheads.

Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue Italian Love, 50 ml edt, $108, Sephora, is lemon-and-green-apple-with-flowers classic Light Blue set atop a richly musky and woody base. It’s quietly cozy and warming on cooler evenings but still irrefutably light and summery for those (you know they’re coming) humid days ahead.

I am easing myself into reading giant doorstopper summer novels by rereading Utz, paperback, $17, Chapters.Indigo, Bruce Chatwin’s slender 154 page novel about a porcelain collector living in Russian occupied Prague.

Asparagus & Eggs

Steam about six or seven asparagus spears per person (after having trimmed or snapped off the woody ends) four to five minutes until softened but not mushy.

If you have your own method for creating jammy eggs, then please use it. This is mine: slide two room-temperature eggs per person into water in a small saucepan on the stove and set the dial up to high. When the water begins to boil furiously, set the timer for 4 minutes exactly, turn the dial to medium high and keep an eye on it. Drain and plunge your eggs into cold water after the four minutes to stop them cooking. Peel them as soon as you can.

Meanwhile, toast and lightly butter some generously sliced sourdough and cut into points (toast points taste better than squares and the ends get dipped into your jammy yolks.)

Bisect your eggs lengthwise and arrange with the steamed asparagus spears in shallow pasta bowls, surround with buttered toast points, shave some parmesan into generous curls with a vegetable peeler and arrange on top. Finally, drizzle each dish with some peppery olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt crystals and a grinding of fresh pepper and that’s it. Early summer in a bowl.

Deciem is Discontinuing ‘Shop’ Room Spray

Last month, Deciem announced it was shuttering four of their smaller lines: Hylamide, HIF, Skin Chemistry and Abnomaly, to focus on their star skincare brand the Ordinary. This means that their wonderful ‘could win an MMA fight against Diptyque but only costs $23’ room spray, Shop, will be discontinued once they sell off the existing stock. I immediately bought three. As of this writing, it is still available. Maybe the Estée Lauder company will relaunch it as a Le Labo scent? I think it’s just too beautiful to be killed completely so hopefully it will live on under a new name. But for now, get it while you still can.

***

In my dreams, an invisible fairy places fresh flowers in every room of my house twice a week. That’s most likely not going to happen, so finding a great room spray seemed like the best alternative.

For the longest time, I would walk into Deciem stores and practically swoon at the smell: elegant, woody, leathery, but still light - like commingled, very expensive men’s colognes. But whenever I asked, the cheery salesperson would always tell me ‘Yeah. It’s something that Brandon created exclusively for the stores. We might start selling it eventually…” This went on for years.

Then, sadly, Deciem founder Brandon Truaxe died suddenly in 2019 and I remember thinking that the room fragrance would never see the light of day. But now Deciem’s new owner, the Estée Lauder companies, have released it under Deciem’s newish Abnomaly brand. It’s called Shop and it is brilliant.

Shop is fancy, like actual perfume and its list of notes reads like the afore-mentioned pricy men’s scents: sequoia and cedar wood, resinous labdanum, musk and patchouli. There’s even ‘Iso E super’ a perfumer favourite ingredient that brings a transparent woody and earthy aspect to a scent- like a forest shot through with light and air and sun.

Angela Tsementzis’ Concrete House in Toronto

The result is a scent that is woody, leathery and resinous, creating the sensation that you’ve entered a deceptively simple and restrained, light-filled modernist house with an enormous picture window overlooking a thickly treed valley. And Shop is only $23 CAN which is a bargain for something of this quality. It could easily go head to head with Aesop or Diptyque’s interior fragrances.

I have been repeatedly spraying my semi-chaotic office in the hopes that I will be inspired to finally wrestle the space under control. The room is untidy, but if you close your eyes, it smells like everything is perfectly arranged on uniform shelves or hidden away in custom walnut built-ins. Such is the power of Shop.

Menopausal Skin Heroes: Vichy Mineral 89 Probiotic Fractions, Biossance Squalane + Copper Peptides

Vichy and Biossance weren’t necessarily thinking of women with dry, ‘mature’ skin when they created these two serums, but I would like to thank them both from the bottom of my desiccated little heart.

Just adding moisture to dry skin always struck me as a wasted opportunity, so thank god for serums in general for their high water content plus skincare ingredients. But thank god for these two specifically, for boosting my skin’s defences for the long-term, while keeping me from looking like a wrinkly sphynx cat in the short term.

Vichy Mineral 89 Probiotic Fractions Regenerating and Repairing Booster, $49.95, Shoppers Drug Mart, is a Six Million Dollar Man (better, stronger, faster) version of Vichy’s classic Mineral 89 hyaluronic acid and thermal-water-loaded skin booster. Vichy Mineral 89 Probiotic Fractions adds 4% niacinamide to help even out skin tone and juice up your skin’s defences to protect against moisture loss while probiotic fractions optimize the good bacteria on your skin and strengthen its barrier function. All this in the original, cooling, jellified water formulation. It’s great straight out of the shower.

Because the entire Biossance line is built around squalane (a sugarcane-derived version of squalene, a component of our skin’s sebum that sadly diminishes as we age) it’s perfect for menopausal women. Squalane is a truly lightweight oil that absorbs easily to lock in moisture and its anti-inflammatory properties help reduce redness. Biossance Squalane and Copper Peptide Rapid Plumping Serum ($88, Sephora) gives menopause-dried skin elasticity, softness and moisture while the copper peptides stimulate the growth of skin-firming collagen and elastin to plump skin and soften fine lines.