Even though I am a grown woman, with my own house, job and kid, I have never bought my own face cream. (In a certain way, it harkens back to my college friend who had her mother ship her tampons all the way through freshman year.) It’s not that I don’t use face cream; it’s that I can’t bear to cough up the $100 my face cream costs.
That’s right, I wait until I visit my parents house and my mother appears with an extra tub of Bio-Performance Advanced Super Revitalizer Whitening Formula (Shiseido). Or sometimes my sister gets it for me (when she feels slightly guilty about letting my mom pay for an ultra-expensive Japanese hair treatment called something like “super hair”). I have tried to wrestle this expensive habit down by trying other creams, like Oil of Olay’s Age Defying Anti-Wrinkle Replenishing Night Cream, Mary Kay’s Energie Vitale, Aesop‘s Fabulous Face Oil, and most recently I spent an entire The Bath and Beauty Shop $40 gift certificate on Patricia Wexler’s Skin Brightening Daily Moisturizer SPF 30. Everything either stinks, makes me break out, doesn’t take care of the dry patches around my mouth or some combination of all of the above. So you can’t say that I don’t try.
I am slightly panicked, because all this make-up wearing since school started is taking a toll on my skin. (I still think that wearing foundation makes you look fake, but I’m starting to realize that the professional look depends on a measure of masquarade.) Now that I am finally ready to pick up my own vanity tab, there isn’t a damn store within 50 miles that carries the product I need. My 20-year high school reunion is approaching – and I need a department store right now! I tuning into this whole freak-out about-aging-and-spend-a-lot-on-beauty-products-concept.
