Karen

No (knock on wood!), I haven’t, but I’ve come dangerously close a few times…

The worst time by far was a couple years ago. I was applying false lashes using a pair of very sharp, pointy tweezers to place them on top of my natural lashes.

I don’t know what happened, but I misjudged the distance between the tweezers and my eyeball, and it was like one of those scary scenes from a movie where you see the shiny drill or the alien probe coming at the person’s eye in slow motion, gah!

I blinked my eye shut right in the nick of time.

Needless to say, I never did that again. Now I just use my fingers or this really handy tool I found at Sephora called the Bulls Eye Lash Applicator. It’s plastic and slightly rounded, so I can place my false lashes without the whole poking-my-eye-out thing. It’s also only $12. I use it all the time. If you wear false lashes often, I highly recommend it!

Which leads me to ask, have you ever poked your eye with a makeup brush or liner (or with any makeup accoutrement)?

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Yup, I have, but out here where I live it’s usually a subtle cajoling and not a hard sell. I’m at my most vulnerable when I’m on the fence about something, too, and the salesperson will sense it. Then when they say the magic words, “If you don’t like it, you can just return it!” — sometimes it’ll nudge me into making the purchase.

If it’s something that I really don’t want and can’t ever see myself using, though, I have no problem saying no, and I’ll try to do it politely, like by saying, “It’s a very different color than I usually wear, so I’ll pass for now,” or “It’s not really something I can see myself wearing, so I need some time think about it.”

How about you? Have you ever felt pressured to buy something at a beauty counter (something that you didn’t want)?

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Driest parts of my skin? Oy! I don’t even know where to start.

On my face, usually my cheeks, and this is consistent all year ’round, even summer. And then around the middle of winter I start getting dry patches around my mouth and my nostrils, and sometimes they’re so dry that they turn red and flaky. Weirdly, however, this wasn’t always the case. Up until my early 30s, I had straight-up oily skin and dryness was never an issue. Sometimes I’d even skip moisturizer, GASP! Now, though, that is no longer an option. When I don’t use lotion on my face, my skin feels really tight. Sometimes it hurts.

Oh, the woes of a dry-cheeked girl…

On my body, the dryness is pretty much spread all over the place. It’s equal opportunity dryness! — although there are places, like my shins, my feet and especially my hands, that do get noticeably drier in the winter.

I literally never leave the house without a tube of hand cream in my purse.

And I’ve definitely noticed that the dryness depends on the climate and the humidity. When I leave the Bay Area, like when I go to Redding to see my in-laws up north, where it’s inland and there’s much lower humidity, the dryness kicks up several notches. Same thing when I go to Las Vegas or Arizona or other parts of the Southwest.

I think if I lived in those areas I’d have to start bathing in heavy-duty cream moisturizer, LOL!
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