Skincare | BeautyStat.com - Part 131
 

Skincare

If you want more fun than you've had going out with your gal pals to a nightclub and dancing to ‘80s music, you should try Bliss Triple Oxygen Instant Energizing Mask. The mask is a clear gel, and once you spread it all over your damp...

Ah, the White Room at Kate Somerville's plush pad in Hollywood. If I had a room like this I'd never leave it. It would be my bed, breakfast and beauty boudoir, where I would entertain notables and turn down the shabbily dressed at the doorstep. Vogue...

I've been asking the cosmetics companies for years, "For the love of God, when can I get my hands on Snake Venom Skin Cream?" Friends, Romans, countrymen, that moment has arrived. If you've overheard people comparing your face to an old catcher's mitt, or perhaps a...

Fab news! I attended my first Total Beauty event last week in New York, and met a skincare guru that has taken Beverly Hills and the nation by storm (we’re talking at least a hurricane Dolly level alert here). Zein Obagi is a no nonsense skincare guru who’s been practicing dermatology for decades. He just turned 65 but I'm sure his genes must have been dipped in some anti-aging potion because he didn’t look a day over forty. Obagi spoke about how so many brands lead you to over moisturize the skin. His latest “Fight Aging, Fight Hard” ZO Skin Health line gives us no skin-deep promises. He is determined to spread the word that over moisturizing does more harm than good (and yes, I almost tumbled off my chair when he said this…I actually thought he was losing it for a minute). So you’ll see that the ZO Skin Health line does not include any moisturizers. “Moisturizers are a quick fix,” he says. “They give skin a smooth and silky feeling, but with repeated use skin becomes addicted to them.” Obagi wants skin to fight and work hard, and his products aim to “wake up” the dormant cells that have been so pampered that they can’t even take care of themselves. ZO Skin Health uses pure retinol (the highest OTC dosage) and no moisturizers -- to combat aging, wrinkles, fine lines, discolorations and other major skin problems without resorting to Five Star Spa Quality Skin Pampering.
I'm not the only person who loves bright skin. Hailing from India, where they use coconut milk to religiously whiten their face, I learned from kindergarten that having flawless white skin was the most beautiful thing you could have apart from possessing polished, uninterrupted nails. So when I came to the United States and saw everyone frying their faces out on Jones Beach to get brown, I thought they were off their rocker. I wrote dozens of letters to my mom (not too e-mail savvy back then): Do you know what these people are doing? I can't believe you put me through that coconut milk regimen each day... So, in the spirit of writing about all things white, I stumbled upon my latest love, skyn Iceland's Arctic Brightening Serum.
There are better ways to protect your skin than wearing long-sleeved tees and full-length skirts like the Amish during the summer. When temperatures rise so high that even your slurpee starts to boil before you can drink it, it's time to jump into a pool of sunscreen. No one makes a better organic spray than Dr. Hauschka (even his name sounds all erudite, as though he received a PhD at birth and started doing R&D before he got to grade school). His new organic SPF 15 Sunscreen Spray is my current object d'amour. It's made with ice plant, rose hip and quince seed extracts to nurture sensitive skin, and natural mineral titanium dioxide to protect you from the UVA and UVB rays.
Beautiful eyes can make your significant others melt when they stare into those liquid pools of blue. But remember Kenny Rogers' horrific eyelid surgery that made him look like a Mattel creation seriously gone wrong? The eyes are also the first areas to make cringe. Since the age of 19, I have tried a more lotions and potions for my eye zone than I would care to legally disclose to my boyfriend. My skin has gone through trench warfare from the constant use of dermatological acids, injections and laser treatments. So when I discovered the incredibly potent quartet of products from Emerge Labs called the "i" line, I felt St. Peter had kicked me through the pearly gates of heaven.
The green movement has brought us cool things like Goji berry, acai, green tea, coffeeberry… the list goes on and on. But now nature’s dark underbelly is yielding up a whole new generation of skincare products with ingredients that boggle the imagination. Cow’s colostrum, anyone? In a crowded field, beauty companies are doing anything to break away from the pack. Now that every fruit, nut, berry and mineral has been spoken for, they’re raiding the animal kingdom to come up with The Next Big Thing. This is called a “unique selling proposition.” Unique? That’s putting it mildly. Consider Syence Skon Care Laboratories’ Skin Venom Memory Cream. (Why would anyone want to remember a thing like that?) It boasts something called Synake, which is a snake venom peptide that supposedly mimics Botox. Our faces are already frozen in horror. Then there’s Profael Specialty Skins Nourishment, which fights wrinkles with natural bee mucus extract. Thanks, but we’d rather keep our crow’s feet. (Actually, we’re just waiting for crow’s feet to pop up in one of these formulations.)