Skincare, beauty, mental health, productivity, and hamster butts
Skin care isn’t all snake oil, but a lot of it is. Hype Watch takes a critical look at trendy buzzwords and face care fads to help you develop a resistance to meaningless marketing hype.
In the first installment of my Best of 2020 list, I mentioned how the events of 2020 forced me to learn how interconnected all of our pursuits are and how important our habits can be for keeping our heads above water, mentally. Two of the three favorites in this list are health and wellness products, [...]
If you hang around online skincare communities long enough, you'll end up seeing at least a handful of variations on the "I Tried a 10-Step Korean Beauty Routine and My Face Burst into Flames" theme. And if you're newer to skincare or K-beauty, you may at some point be tempted to try this yourself. I [...]
Let's talk ingredients! Only this time, instead of talking about all the wonderful things that our favorite ingredients can do, let's talk about some of the times when those favored ingredients fail to do the thing. Because, let's face it, no ingredient is a magic bullet that makes any skincare product great. Nope, not a [...]
I know I haven't been great about answering comments and questions here latelyand I'm super sorry and am working to catch up!, but since I manually approve every comment that comes through, I have still been reading them. Lately I've noticed one particular type of question come up more often than most. Lots of you [...]
There's a predatory side to the beauty industry, a shadowy underbelly where cosmetics marketers reinforce societal pressures and exploit consumers' personal insecurities to sell product. One way to deal with this ugly reality is to trust no one and side-eye everything...but I don't have it in me to pickle myself in the salty brine of cynicism, and I don't [...]
While I'm not the most sciencey AB blogger (not by a long shot; I'm not even the most sciencey Snailcaster!), I do try to practice ingredient awareness both as a blogger and as a regular old skincare consumer. The more we understand ingredients and our skin's responses to them, the better we become at picking the products that can [...]
I don't generally participate in team kill reviews, where shops send a specific product out to a number of bloggers to deliberately generate hype. But I recently made an exception for Wishtrend, owner of the Klairs brand, when WT got in touch to offer me a jar of the new Klairs Midnight Blue Calming Cream for review. I like Klairs products, and the [...]
Okay, where were we? When we left off, we'd covered the first three of six K-beauty myths that I'd like to see put to bed...forever. We've established that K-beauty does not require a 23-step routine, that Korean skincare is not automatically superior to Western skincare, and that the K-beauty craze isn't just skincare consumers collectively going through [...]
It's human nature to fill in the gaps in our knowledge with myth and superstition. We've been doing it since the dawn of recorded civilization, spreading and passing down stories to help us make sense of our bewildering reality. Of course, these stories often get things wrong. The Norse god Thor did turn out to be a [...]
For a Taiwanese American sheet mask lover who's been using Asian skincare almost exclusively for nearly two years now, I sure did take a long time to get into Taiwanese products. Yeah, I'd been using My Beauty Diary since nearly the beginning of my AB life, but I remained oblivious to all the other amazing products coming [...]
Fifty Shades of Snail 