Dr. Roebuck's Surf Chaser Reverse Aging Serum for the Impossible to Please

Not too heavy, not too light

It’s easy to get Goldilocks-level picky about skincare: one serum is too watery, or a cream is too heavy and smells old ladyish. (But why are so many rich creams strongly fragranced? Do brands think anyone with dry skin is an elderly women who has lost her sense of smell?)

If your skin has gotten drier and lightweight serums feel like a waste of time, Dr. Roebuck’s Surf Chaser Reverse Aging Serum ($75 Can, Shoppers Drug Mart) will give you the the right amount of soothing moisture without feeling sticky, heavy, gloopy.

Surf Chaser calls itself a serum, which I don’t get at all, because it’s almost a lightweight balm, disappearing handily into skin but leaving it feeling nicely plumped and smoothed. It has what cosmetic formulators call an ‘elegant texture’ and is perfect for when you just need a little bit more but don’t want to start spackling with super-rich creams. 

And as nice as it feels, Surf Chaser also feeds your skin with peptides and amino acids to support collage production and minimize the look of wrinkles, and it contains Spilanthes Acmella Flower Extract, a natural active ingredient which mimics the effects of Botox and may even stimulate collagen production.

Dr. Roebuck’s is an Australian dermatologist brand, run by the good doctors’ (not a typo, both parents were doctors) twin daughters who exude cheer, intelligence and good health. They radiate a kind of glamorous practicality, like you’d be an idiot not to use what makes them so glowy.

Dr. Roebuck’s feels like an under-the-radar discovery, despite having been around since 2012 and having launched in Canada in 2014. (A soothing cream for reactive skin based on a 30 year old recipe was their first product.)

The line’s marketing trots out all the standard green beauty buzzwords, assuring you that it contains ‘no nasties’, but textures and cutting edge ingredients and formulas (and spare, elegant packaging) make it feel luxe, so you don’t have to sacrifice anything to stay green.

Forever Summer: Caudalie Soleil des Vignes

Caudalie Soleil des Vignes is pure beach in a bottle

Here’s a counterintuitive take: summer fragrances should be released in August to help ease you into fall and give you something to hang on to during the cold, coming months.

Whether by design or not, Caudalie’s summery Soleil des Vignes ($46 CAN) eau fraîche just launched in Canada, And while I’m wearing it now because it smells like monoï oil, I will be gripping it with ice-cold hands throughout the winter. It is pure and potent summer-in-a-bottle and I’ll need that more in January than I do now.

Monoï oil is tiare flowers (aka Tahitian gardenias, see photo below) steeped in coconut oil to create a singular, complex, vanilla-ish floral, coconut scent. And while that sounds like a lot, it’s actually ethereal, sunlit and very beachy, but in a glamorous, non-Hawaiian Tropic way. (In France, monoï is available in every pharmacy, like it was toothpaste for heaven’s sake. Lucky French.) Caudalie’s homage to monoï is spiked with bitter orange and mandarin, transforming it into an energizing but still beach-evoking eau fraîche.

There’s also a Soleil des Vignes bath gel, which I am not even cracking open now, but saving for my February box, because I am forward-thinking and I know how much I’ll need it then.

Monoï oil from Tahiti via France. (See the now-darkened gardenia floating just above the label?)

A February Box is an assortment of summery gifts you collect now to give your future self when you will be at your lowest, olfactorily and psychologically speaking.

This is not to be confused with the November box, which is stuffed with cozy treats, because in November you’ll need things that aid in creating your winter nest.)

And yes, I make it through the endless Canadian winter with a variety of targeted boxes. Sue me.

Return to Me, Vanishing Lip-Line: A Quick, Two-Product Fix

The Quickest of quick fixes is lip balm and a bit of pencil.

My lip-line vanished. What was once a crisp line, poetically called “the vermillion border”, is now blurry and threatening to disappear altogether. Mother Nature pulled a fast one and I am exasperated and ragey (futile I know). She’s already taken the colour from my hair, brows, eyes and cheeks so I permanently appear cadaverous and like a third-generation photocopy of my former self.

I do miss having a visibly defined mouth, even now while stuck at home. (You never know when you might catch your reflection in the tea kettle.) Sure, full-on red lipstick solves the problem, but most days I don’t want to haul out the whole makeup kit.

Retracing the still-faint lip line with a pinky-nude (or nudy-pink) pencil and then applying lip balm on top is the quickest of quick fixes and the effect is subtle, but sharpens everything. Because there is nothing funnier than when a man says “I like how you look with no makeup.”

(Products)

Lip pencils, from top: Charlotte Tilbury Lip Cheat in Pillow Talk ($27 CAN.) The ultimate YLBB (your lips but better) colour. It also comes in two darker shades: Pillow Talk Medium and Pillow Talk Intense so everyone can play. 19/99 Beauty Precision Colour Pencil in Neutra ($26 CAN). This new Canadian beauty line is spare and fantastic. More on them really soon. And finally, a quality drugstore find: NYX Extreme Colour Lip Liner in Bedrose ($10 CAN), the perfect almost-plum pink.

Balm: Burts Bees Moisturizing Lip Balm in Pomegranate ($6 CAN). It’s barely red, but just red enough and is a necessity in each pocket and beside each chair in the house. (And in each purse. Remember purses?)

Dangerous Beauty: Vichy Liftactiv Specialist Peptide-C Ampoules

The French do not care about your convenience. They are not here to make your life easier. They are here to make it better. (See also: French wine, food, literature and art.)

For example, they really have a thing for glass packaging. Eau de Bouche Botot, a French, impossibly fancy, clove-flavoured, taste-bud searing mouthwash comes in glass bottles and years ago, Phyto haircare’s shampoo and conditioners came in glass bottles as well. So you’d be handling freaking glass in the shower with soapy hands, praying that you wouldn’t let go. (Phyto eventually switched to plastic bottles, but there is no gambling with your life with a plastic bottle. Very dull.)

Equally intimidating are the glass ampoules of serums, vitamins and mysterious herbal remedies found at French pharmacies. Because ampoules contain no air, their valuable contents are protected against uv, heat and oxidation. They are hermetically sealed until you snap them open.

Ampoules are a perfect vehicle for Vichy Liftactiv Specialist Peptide-C. Vitamin C is a powerful skin brightener, but it’s also notoriously unstable. Exposure to air makes it lose its potency, so cracking open a fresh dose every day means you are getting it at its peak. Add peptides that stimulate collagen synthesis to minimize the look of wrinkles and some hyaluronic acid to increase your skin’s moisture levels (hey, winter is coming, like it or not) and these ampoules are the perfect nourishing hit your skin wants.

Vichy Liftactiv Specialist Peptide-C ampoules, which come ten to a box, are also alcohol, preservative and fragrance free, each one containing a double-dose that stays fresh for 48 hours after opening. Use one ampoule morning and night on one day or on two consecutive days. 

Ampoules, although they may look unnerving, are actually easy to open. Place your fingers on either side of the white stripe at the base of the top, wrap some paper towel around the top and snap it off at the white line. Vichy’s even come with a small plastic cap to pop on top and protect it from spillage until you use it up. Because in addition to being both skincare- and beauty-ritual obsessed, French women do not like to waste money.

You Always Remember Your First Chanel

Photo: Janine Falcon

This ancient, scratched-up Chanel No 5 spray wasn’t always mine. It belonged to a girl I never met, who roomed with my best friend at college in New England in a typical, off-campus student house with mismatched furniture and an emptyish fridge. The house was owned by Kevin, a towering, affable guy who managed the town’s coat hanger factory, which is psychically as far away as you can get from the most expensive college in the US.

One time I was visiting and nosing around in the bathroom for toothpaste, I saw something that seemed completely out of place. Trying to sound casual, I said to Kevin “there’s Chanel No 5 in the medicine cabinet.”

“Oh. That must have been Charlotte’s,” he said. “She moved out. You can have it.”

Who leaves Chanel behind? My best guess is someone who already has a lot of Chanel or unfettered access to more Chanel. This was unfathomable to 20-year-old, poor student me. This abandoned bottle was almost half full and I wouldn’t have been any more surprised to find a Fabergé egg or a diamond bracelet.

I shouldn’t have been. The girls who attended this college were very fancy, but hid it under baggy sweaters and thrifted jeans. My friend explained that back home they had “long driveways” which was her oblique way of saying that their (rich) families lived in enormous houses, set so far back from the road that they weren’t visible to passersby.

I took the bottle, obviously. It was impossible to pretend I didn’t want it. Thirty-five years later I have a lot of perfume (none of it nicked from other people’s bathrooms, by the way.) And even though it’s always been rather banged up, I continued to buy refills for Charlotte’s bottle. The fact that this style and size is still available speaks volumes about the endurance of Chanel.

It now lives on my dresser, beside an even older No 5 bottle that belonged to my mother. It’s not called hoarding when it’s Chanel, right?

Eau de Givenchy #perfumeeverydamnday

Eau de Givenchy

There’s a breeze blowing through Eau de Givenchy, a 2018 reimagining of the 1980s classic. This new version gets you with its fizzy bergamot, lemon, orange and grapefruit opening, before veering into a greenish bitter almond and then resting on a featherbed of pillowy floral hedione, the synthetic jasmine note created in 1958 and reputed to drive women wild with desire (Steve McQueen allegedly wore it.)

Before you leave your house and head out into the world, spray Eau de Givenchy into the air in front of you and walk through it, so your clothes are imbued with the scent. You will feel like you hung your laundry to dry in the garden of Hubert de Givenchy’s Saint Jean de Cap Ferrat mansion, le Clos Fiorentina.

I know it’s highly unlikely that a mansion would have laundry lines near its gardens, and the staff probably wouldn’t even let us anywhere near them. But such details interfere with my fantasy, so I ignore them. And if now is not the time to construct elaborate parallel universe fantasy lives, then I don’t know when is.

Clos Fiorentina, Saint Jean Cap Ferrat

Kérastase Fresh Affair Dry Shampoo Smells Like You Moved Into a Higher Tax Bracket

Inside this can lies your better self

On the days that you are hanging by a thread and dry shampoo is your lifeline, you do not need to be reminded that everything has gone pear-shaped. And the last thing you want is some boring, mass-market-smelling, ‘good enough’ dry shampoo. What you need is someone kind who says “hey, it happens to the best of us,” and maybe also a dry shampoo that smells as if (for the brief moment that you are spraying) your life is actually perfect, not just merely ok.

Kérastase Fresh Affair Refreshing Dry Shampoo is scented with neroli, the blossom from the bitter orange tree, so it smells like the very best, most expensive eau de cologne. And it contains rice starch to efficiently absorb the (sorry to use this ugly word) ‘grease’ that has flattened your hair. But it also has vitamin E, so that same hair won’t becomes dried out and brittle. And the neroli scent gently lingers, giving you blissful little whiffs of your expensive-smelling self for hours after you spray.

There’s even a small travel size available, so when we return to the gym (I really miss the gym) you will be the fanciest lady at the communal mirror, hands down.

Neutrogena Sunscreen Mist Makes It Easy To Stay Protected

Keep this by your side for the remainder of the summer

Of course you’re diligent with sunscreen in the morning, after you shower. That’s the easy part. It’s when the sun is at its highest and it’s time for your lunchtime sunscreen re-up when it all falls apart. Who wants to get their hands all sticky adding a layer of goo to an already heat-dampened face?

Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Face Sunscreen is a fine mist, so it’s easy to apply as your critical midday top-up, no face-touching required. Reapplying sunscreen throughout the day will protect you from dark spots and expensive IPL (intense pulsed laser) spot-removing treatments down the road, so why wouldn’t you?

At 100 mls, it can go in your carry-on (I’m not, but some of us are flying) and it’s small enough to slide into your straw summer tote. And arguably not that important, but very important to me, the delicate fragrance is nicely ‘chi-chi beach club with white chaise longues’, so you get an olfactory reward for using your sunscreen.

Clarins Eau Dynamisante #perfumeeverydamnday

I swear I’m not making this up. Years ago, in February, I saw a staffer at Toronto’s Clarins spa mopping the floor with the contents of a giant bottle of Eau Dynamisante, so even in the dead of winter the whole place smelled of citrus and summer. 

An extravagant hand with an energizing scent is the approach we need in the midst of swampy July. At $60CAN for the 100 ml spray, Eau Dynamisante encourages liberal spritzing. 

Its mix of petitgrain (bitter orange oil) and Amalfi lemon with rosemary, thyme and cardamom is eau de cologne with herbal energy for a lift when the hot weather has laid you flat. 

Or if you’re feeling extra louche, use it as fancy room spray, when the thought of lighting a scented candle in July seems wrong.

Feed Your Face: Borage Oil for Glowing Skin

Take four capsules of borage oil a day for glowing skin.

In the ‘what is happening to my aging body now?’ saga, dry skin is not nearly the worst thing. But my skin always feels desiccated and tight now, as if I accidently shrank it in the wash. 

So I eat more salmon, snack on walnuts instead of Doritos and take fish oil capsules daily – all to get those precious omega 3 fatty acids. And not just for their ability to reduce inflammation and inhibit the formation of clots in the bloodstream. Omega 3s even help strengthen our skin’s barrier function and improve its texture. 

But apparently we need to be thinking about omega 6 fatty acids as well. The less popular sibling to omega 3s, omega 6 fatty acids play a significant role in brain function, they stimulate hair growth and maintain bone health and one omega 6 fatty acid in particular, gamma linoleic acid (GLA), is really, really good for your skin. 

It all began when I met Lorna Vanderhaeghe. It was a bleak and cold winter’s day and I stared (rather rudely, I fear) at her skin, which was glowing in a way that one does not see in Toronto in February. She may be 60, but her skin is barely into its 40s.

Vanderhaeghe, a formulator with a background in nutrition and biochemistry, is the founder of Smart Solutions supplements. She takes borage oil, which is rich in gamma linoleic acid, also known as GLA (an omega 6 fatty acid) every single day and has for years.

GLA is essential for skin. it’s used topically on infants suffering from sebbhoreic dermatitis, and can help combat eczema. “Deficencies in fatty acids can spur on wrinkles and rosacea,” says Vanderhaege. “Literally all of the high end cosmetics have GLA in them.”

There are trace amounts of GLA in leafy greens and nuts, but, unlike omega 3 fatty acids, you can’t source it from fish and flax. We get GLA from breast milk, but we know that’s a short ride. Evening primrose is 8% GLA, but has a hard shell which inhibits extraction whereas borage (which is 24% GLA) has a soft shelled seed, so the oil can be cold pressed. Unlike the omega 6s found in vegetable oils, which can be unhealthy if consumed in excess, GLA is a powerful anti inflammatory. (And these are only two of many studies.)

If your skin is really tight and mad at you for whatever reason, you can even use GLA topically, like a souped up face oil. Just pop a capsule and apply the contents directly your face at bedtime and wake up feeling much happier when you face the mirror.