Self-Care and Beauty Care, Is it De-stressing?

Thanksgiving was yesterday and for many of us several winter/summer holidays are fast approaching. For women this can be a particularly stressful time. I know I grew up in a household where my mother was the primary social calendar keeper and the social focus for our immediate family. I grew up with that as my role model so it is not surprising that I am the Chief Communications Officer of our family starship (as we geeks like to say).

Stress from trying to manage different invitations to holiday parties from work, volunteer organizations, friends, family, and neighbors.

Stress from working on our own parties and trying to figure out who we can not invite without seeming like aholes.

Stress from all the holiday greetings everyone who doesn't live in our town will expect and then stress from keeping track of what we get because we don't hear back from you for three years, we aren't sending you a holiday card (the hubby declares).

4 Kroger Spa Line Products

One way we are told to lessen stress is to delegate to others and to take care of ourselves. Taking care of ourselves can involve a lot of things but many of them are physical. I'm part of the MyMagazineSharing Network through Kroger and I was sent four of their store brand "spa line" products for free in exchange for sharing my experiences about them in a fair way. I'm not a big spa person, I've been to a spa once in my lifetime. I'm not a big make-up user and the only time I try fancy or expensive skin care products is when I'm sent them to review. Today I want to share what my experience was with these products.



I started with the Bright Under Eye Care treatment because I've been very tired from pain and then surprise! I caught a virus from someone in my household. I was concerned my eyes might look extra tired or baggy. First I thought there might be two treatments when I opened the package because the pads look large.

Brighten Under Eye Care Pads, Kroger Spa Line

Then I put them on and don't these look HUGE? I don't have either a small or large face, for my body it is average sized but look how large these pads are. They tingled a bit and were cool when I put them on for the full 20 minutes. They came off easily and I gently patted the area underneath but my skin had soaked up most of the solution on the pads. The area under my eyes looked red when I took them off so I let my skin be for half an hour and my skin and eyes were fine. If this product helped under eyes then I guess I didn't have anything wrong with mine at all the day I tried this.

Are these pads huge? Kroger Spa Line

Then I tried the facial masks and these were literally my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th facial masks I have ever used in my life. These were very different from the first mask I used. These are fully formed face shaped sheets and that is where the big problems lie. Let's look at the first one.

Note how the size and placement of the sheet does not match my face at all. It would not smooth down, it tried to cover my eyebrows (no!), and it hung too low on my chin. To top that off this Exfoliate felt burning after a few minutes but I toughed it out for the full twenty minutes. Oddly the directions said to "gently pat" in the remaining product... ah, no! Exfoliating means that  you should be removing dead skin to reveal and promote newer skin. In fact, every one of the facial sheet mask had the identical directions for every step which makes no sense when each is supposed to do something different for your face.

I could try cutting the mask into pieces and applying it that way but I'm not being paid to test these out and that would take as much if not more time than applying a mask with just a semi-liquid product. That's adding more time and more work to an already stressful time of year for many of us.

For me this Spa Line from Kroger is a failure.

Nail Fun with Friends or Lovers

I've written before about nail polish; it is my own form of cosmetics unless you count lip balm, lotion, or scent. Recently I've experimented with decals and nail decoration that goes beyond polish. I was offered a chance through the Amazon Vine Reviewer program to test a nail kit marketed toward kids from Alex Brands. I hoped this would teach me a bit more about nail decoration. I was sent this kit in exchange for an honest review on Amazon but I thought some of you might find it interesting as well. I received no other compensation for this article.

The kit box proclaims that it has 190 pieces but let's be honest -- most of these are the 135 tiny "sticky nail gems" and I mean I needed tweezers to use them tiny. There are also 49 appliques that you can color in that are very fragile but larger so be careful when you add them. There are 5 2-in-1 nail polish pens that have a brush in and a "precision tip." There is also a star-shaped nail file that is very weak even if it looks cute.

To use the polish pen's brush or tip, you remove the top in different ways that took us a few minutes to figure out. These pens are sealed tight and the polish inside varied in thickness. We discovered that the tips flowed smoothly once you got them going but you needed to scrap off the brush part before trying to apply it because if the nail polish is too thick it won't dry evenly or quickly. There are these taped pins on the flat, black bottom of the pens if the tip doesn't work but we didn't have to use them at all so I left them attached as you could see.

The supplies came in an over-sized plastic box inside the cardboard box. Given all of the small pieces such as the pins and the gems and appliques, I wish this had a storage case instead of the plastic that you can see in this photo.

I applied nail polish to my partner's hands along with some of the "sticky nail gems" as you can see here. He loves getting peacocked up but he feel conscious about doing it in our culture so we can only do it on weekends. Personally I think this is sexist in a bizarre way. In much of the animal kingdom, male animals are more colorful. Even pickup artists, as much as I loath their sexist philosophies and fuck at all costs attitudes, seem to understand that dressing up nice and being colorful is a good way for men to attract attention. I like his nails, what do you think? He has nice large surface areas to work with, we could have easily put 1-2 more of the gems on each one. We didn't use a clear top coat, none came in the kit and the instructions do not mention them; the gems fell off in less than 24 hours with normal daily activity but the turquoise polish remained.

We used the color-in appliques on my nails and my partner used the "precision tip" to color them in. What do you think? We did use a clear top coat because these were more fragile to begin with and I wanted mine to last; he used polish remover Sunday night on his for work the next day. The polish dries very quickly if you do not apply it too thickly. If you use tweezers you can get the stickers or appliques on fairly well. The appliques are less thick and I loved the coloring in aspect of it. Frankly get rid of the "sticky nail gems" and give me more of these with more colors to use.

One final photo for you. These are my nails a week later. I've used basic polish remover but look at what has been removed -- the top coat and the polish. The only damage you see to the appliques are what happened while using my hands for the week I had these on. I'm not sure at this point how to remove them except by working at the edges and peeling them off but that is taking a bit of time. At least it isn't as stinky as polish remover, right? How many of you have done the stickers, decals, and multiple colors to your nails? Tell me about it in the comments please.

My One Make-Up Item

I used to use a lot of make-up... back during my first year of high school when I went from trying to become a lesbian (more on that in a later post) to super feminine. Neither worked well for me so even before I knew the Radical Feminism idea of gender as both learned and personal, potentially harmful, I knew that some things just did not work for me.  Makeup felt like it was suffocating me, weighing me down, choking me up and that might have had something to do with the very intense sensitivity of my skin and high number of things I'm allergic to.

Makeup also made me feel like a fake yet the social pressure to wear it was so strong that I kept wearing some of it.  I used some lipstick for dates or special events and even did up my eyes.  If perfume counts, I also used that but only in the winter because I had enough bugs attracted to me, thank you very much. The last time I wore a lot of makeup was at my wedding when I had a professional do it.  I really dislike my wedding photo close-ups now because I think I look like a whore and definitely not at all like myself. I kept the lipstick and the eye shadows for role-playing after that, using them to enhance a character I was playing.

But every time I used any type of makeup on my face that used a color or a scent that wasn't just a perfume, I broke out, I developed rashes, I felt sick. Several years ago I tossed all of that stuff out keeping only the perfumes, the lip balms, and one more item which is really the only thing I consider make-up.

Nail polish!

I've always been a nail chewer, not biter, chewer, when I got stressed and I'm a high-stressed, easily stressed, woman.  The one thing that helps curb that is putting nail polish on.  It tastes yuck but it looks really pretty, doesn't cause an allergic reaction, and so I don't want to damage it.  I use a base coat and a ridge filler first to help protect my nails when I use it.  I don't always use nail polish, my mood for it comes and goes. Right now I'm in a mood for it so I'm doing about two colors a week since even my best polish seems to only last 3-5 days before it looks ratty.

I do have me some nail polish.  Let me show you.

I keep it in two tins and they aren't well organized though writing this post to share has let me organize a bit more. I went out with two of the other butt-kicking women in May and got a few more bottle so these tins are pretty much full now as you saw above.

My favorite polish are in the browns range

But I also like a lot of greens since I wear greens a lot.

As you can see I have quite a few of those but also a fairly large collection of reds. I believe my Daddy got me my first red nail polish, said every woman needed a red nail polish... my daddy was a bit strange.

I wish I had more yellows frankly, I'll need to keep that in mind if I get more.

Then I have some sparkly or neutral colors.  Some of my other polishes also sparkle but these are more sparkle than a specific color.  I should wear one of these to my convention next weekend -- which one?

Finally a few in the black, blue, grays range... which I primarily put on  my part or if I'm playing a goth character. Just last week I gave a very turquoise polish I had just receive to review to a friend because it was too blue for me.

So are nail polishes makeup?  What's your opinion?

The Feminism of Hair Color?

Recently at our face-to-face meeting for the group of women that co-author this site I mentioned that I was looking to start making my hair darker, to bring back the red that I used to love about it.

Everyone looked surprised.

For most of my 44 years I've never entertained the idea of dyeing or coloring my hair, not even for a costume party.  There were many reasons for this stance.

Disgust with the idea that women must be beautiful and that beauty = youth.

A sister who when training as a stylist shared horror stories of the damage done to her and other's hair by the harsh chemical used to perm and dye hair.  I loved my curly, auburn hair (not always but 95% of my life) and was afraid it might be damaged by such treatments.

Feeling that it is an expense that is unnecessary and thus as long as I'm not the primary income earner not really something we need to waste our resource upon.

My mother used to dye her hair as a way to hide her illnesses from us all. When I figured out what was happening this turned into one of our most intense fights of the entire time I lived with her.  How many times did her health get worse because she was hiding things and refusing to see the doctors?  How dare she lie to us this way on top of all the other lies she was telling us and herself?

I recently talked about this in therapy just a bit so if discussion of dead mommy issues distresses you, stop reading now.

One of the factors contributing to my auburn hair was the fact that my mother had strawberry blonde hair (my dad's was black).  In four of their five kids, four of us had auburn hair.  Natural auburn hair isn't common and I grew up feeling like it was a gift I'd been given.  While I never knew what my body should look like and was often told it was fat and ugly or too skinny and ugly, I was always told I had beautiful red hair.

My hair is the one thing I loved about my physical self.

Then it started to go white.

White not gray.  There is nothing in my hair to turn gray. It turns into a golden red, then a blonde, and finally a perfect white.  At first it was only on my bangs and I thought "Cool I can look like Rogue!"  Who wouldn't want to be her?  This image is the one I grew up seeing on TV shows by the way so you can see I was hoping the entire top layer of my hair would go white but not the rest... unrealistic I know but hey, it was a fantasy like the show right?

The whiteness increased as my stress from graduate school increased and then when I couldn't even get a job because none existed in my field right after I finished... don't get me started on that... I felt like it was all for nothing.

Still I didn't dye my hair.

Yet when I saw my friend who is a stylist we talked about dying my hair.  Oh, I asked all about damage and he looked at it and heard what I wanted -- natural, little to no difference from the current red parts of my hair -- but suddenly I was ok with dying it.

I'm not dying it however.  I have too much white now and it simply is unlikely to take but he did recommend this product:


I couldn't find that where he suggested but the good ladies at the shop he recommended suggested this and I am very happy with the results even just after three days!


So what's changed?  As I thought it about it therapy and today I realized what changed is that my mother is dead.

She can't tell me what I should look like anymore.

But more importantly I don't have that strong association of hair coloring = lying to your family.

While I'm not saying that my concerns about beauty and youth are invalid, indeed I think those are very important feminist and humanist concerns. But part of feminism is the idea that women should be able to choose free from pressures that only focus on their biology and attempt to shove them into tiny little boxes that dictate their lives. Now freed from the association between lying to martyr your health I have been empowered to choose and that is very feminist if I do for myself not simply because I feel I should or I must do it to fit into someone else's model of beauty.

So I'm trying it.  I'm using this shampoo and conditioner and I'll see what happens.  After all two days of it my family and therapist said I seemed younger, more vibrant... I think they may mean riveting, huh?