This will be quick, much like my time with Sunday Riley’s Auto Correct Brightening and Depuffing Eye Contour Cream. One week after starting this product, I’m throwing in the towel. Auto Correct is nearly unbearable for me to use, and my experience has made me so churlish that I need to share my reasons why. (more…)
Fifty Shades of Snail
Finding the best skin care products since 2014. Started with a focus on Korean skincare and grew from there. Skincare tips and beauty tips that work, maybe some hamster butts too
recent posts
- Protected: Fluorescent bulbs and SPF
- How I Grew My Thinning Hair Back Thicker and Stronger Than Ever Before (with no drugs or medical treatments)
- Sponsored: The Best of Skin1004
- How to Ask for Skincare Advice Online, Part Two: What Questions to Ask to Get Helpful Answers
- How to Ask for Skincare Advice Online, Part 1: What Not to Ask
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It’s the middle of winter in the northern hemisphere, but that doesn’t mean the quest for a good sunscreen can stop. If you’re trying to minimize visible skin aging, fight hyperpigmentation, and/or prevent skin cancer, then the sunscreen quest never stops. UV radiation (particularly the deeply damaging UVA radiation) is present whenever the sun is, even if it’s playing coy and hiding behind clouds or fog.
Luckily for us UV avoiders, there’s always another sunscreen to try, like the Skin Aqua UV Super Moisture Milk SPF 50+ PA++++ sunscreen I picked up during a San Gabriel Valley Asian skincare shopping trip with Angela and Renee from the Beauty and the Cat beauty blog. (more…)
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Q: When is it a good time to give your boss one of your only two remaining $24 sheet masks?
A: When she makes you.
HA. Just kidding.
Real answer: When she compliments your skin and asks what you used the night before, and you’re in need of a guinea pig to validate your own experience anyway. (more…)
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Product testing is a crapshoot no matter how long you’ve been doing it. Some products you’ll like, but not so much that you want to commit. Some you’ll love and never want to let go. Some are no good. And some will make you want to claw your face off after just a little exposure, if they haven’t already clawed your face off for you. My adventures in Amazon skincare shopping over the past few months have landed me one product for each of these categories. Yay?
In this post: Reviews of Hada Labo Gokujyun cleansing oil, Earth’s Recipe Energy Boosting Toner, Biore UV Aqua Rich Watery Gel (2017 version), and Shiseido Senka Mineral Water UV Gel. -
Today has been a horribly sad day, for reasons that I won’t go into because I almost never feel it is my place to do publicly. What I will go into is what I’ve been thinking all day, which is that more than anything else, our world needs positive forces in it to counteract the darkness around us–even positive forces that are fairly minor, like the positive force a mere beauty blogger might be.
So I’ll talk about something I’ve noticed a lot in the last few years. And that is that so many of us are so hard on ourselves about our skin, causing so much needless pain. (more…)
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Just about everyone has at least one beauty sore spot, a constant cause of self-consciousness that resists nearly all attempts at eradication. Mine is my upper lip hair. I hated it when I was 17 and I hate it today. The hairs are dark, they grow fast, and since my skin these days has gotten relatively light and somewhat translucent thanks to years of diligent skincare, they show. Rationally, I know it can’t be anywhere near as noticeable to others as it is to me. In my mind, though, I look like this:
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It’s funny thinking about it now, but I actually didn’t get into skincare at all until I was 33. Before then, I typically washed my face with whatever decently priced and usually scrubby facial cleanser was on sale at the drugstore. I thought the dry, tight, desperate-for-moisturizer feeling I got after every wash meant my cleanser was working. Then I learned about the effect a cleanser’s pH can have on skin. Now I have nightmares about Shiseido Perfect Whip cleanser.
Switching to neutral pH or mildly acidic cleansers made a huge difference to the health and appearance of my skin. Soon after committing to the low-pH life, I started breaking out less. My skin no longer screamed for moisture immediately after cleansing. And even before I fine-tuned the rest of my routine, my complexion gained a new suppleness and healthier appearance. That was enough to reel me in for life.
Problem was, I found the drugstore low-pH cleansers I started out with (CeraVe’s and Neutrogena’s) about as exciting as unseasoned boiled potatoes, and acidic cleansers weren’t much of A Thing in K-beauty a few years ago. The debut of COSRX’s low pH cleanser was a big deal. It took a few years for low pH cleansers to catch on.
Four years later, my bathroom and empties shelf (okay, shelves) have accumulated more bottles of low pH Asian cleansers than 2013 me could ever have imagined existing, let alone owning at once. I wouldn’t say they grow on trees at this point, but the orchard is looking mighty fertile.
This Low pH Cleanser Tree will one day be a forest. This list is a rundown of just the cleansers I’ve liked in the past year or so–basically, the ones I still have hanging around. (more…)
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Over the past couple of years, I have gotten a ton of questions about skincare during pregnancy. Questions that I’ve never been comfortable with answering, since I chose to follow the Way of Parental Disappointment and not become a doctor. But today I bring you…pregnancy skincare tips from a doctor!
Our guest poster, Dr. Joyce, is a dermatology resident in NYC. She went to college and medical school at Stanford and is currently finishing her last year of dermatology training at NYU, and she’s graciously sharing her expertise with us on skincare during pregnancy.
Image courtesy of Tea with MD -
People often ask me how I can possibly get through the piles of products that my (very appreciated) mail carrier and UPS carrier bring to my door. It’s a fair question, I’ve just now decided, as I gaze into my overflowing beauty closet and then down the long aisle of boxes that lines the wall on my side of my bedroom.
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Listen up, guys. I don’t know what the heck you all have been doing to your faces, but judging from the number of questions about overexfoliation that have hit my inbox and Instagram DMs in the last few weeks, some of you really need to step away from the acids and scrubs. So uh…step away from the acids and scrubs. And settle down so we can talk about overexfoliation!
Fifty Shades of Snail 