Too good to waste?
A friend of mine has a premium lipstick they use for serious socialising, and a cheaper workaday one that is good enough for when they are seeing less important people like me. She hit on a whizzo wheeze of melting the small amount left in the bottom of the pricey one and pouring it onto the other one to get the full value out of it. Continue reading
Sheep spend a lot of time in fields
I wrote recently about hypoallergenic products and and pointed out that one of the few ingredients that we have any data on the incidence of allergic reactions is lanolin. This isn’t a coincidence. Lanolin was really the original cosmetic ingredient scare story. Let’s have a quick look at how it happened. Continue reading
Since at least the nineties and arguably even before that, the trend has been towards making personal care products that are as natural as possible. The cosmetics business has gone green, both metaphorically and in the case of the labels often literally too. In fact at one point all the labels in the Body Shop were green. ‘Natural’ has become the marketers’ adjective of choice. The Body Shop was of course a pathfinder and pioneer in the world of natural cosmetics in the seventies, but the mainstream was close on its heels. You only needed to turn the television on to see this. Timotei ran adverts that were designed to suggest that their raw materials included wicker baskets full of wild flowers gathered by a blond woman in her nightdress. Continue reading