Looking Like Your Mother

A Spot Checker for Your Spot Protector

Sunscreen site:  The Cosmetic Safety Database  I popped in my favorite sunscreens (Colorescience Sunforgettable and Biotherm Sun 50) and no surprises. Sunforgettable gets great ratings and Biotherm isn't in the database because it comes from Europe and has more Mexoryl than the FDA has so far approved.

Use the site to test your sunscreen.

Spa Reviews Silk Day and Townhouse

W Personal Shopper from the NYTimes Sunday magazine featured a hiccup reference to Silk Day Spa. This profile sounds inviting, but reviews from that page, from TripAdvisor, and from Yelp can be downright schizophrenic. Was it something about getting a good queer review that got management to be less than, well, encouraging? I'm going to trust the clueful folks at Village Voice and Daily Candy and plan on visiting.

Silk carries the Juara product line, which carries an invigorating coffee scrub.

I enjoyed the substance of the Townhouse Spa. Heavy woods but clean lines and pristine surfaces, including an onyx bar give me a sense of calm based on strength. The treatment rooms are set up so that you can be alone or with others, with two containing a Spa Oceana capsule. NY Mag describes it here. TS enjoys 6,000 square feet of space on three floors, with one for men that enjoys a flat screen TV, wide and low leather seating, as well as video and board games, along with treatment rooms. The women's floor has the Phoenix Suite, with its fireplace, large screen TV, steam room and shower.

I didn't see any of the snake venom-based, botox-ish UltraLuxe 9 on the retail shelves at ground level, but the fact that the owner Jamie Ahn - who also owns the Aqua Beauty Bar - was lining it up for special customers, well, it warmed my itty bitty heart. Townhouse mixes skin care and a chance to mingle with those who share an appreciation for occasional self-indulgence. The after-service bar scene is way cooler than its grandfather, the gym and juice bar. Here, someone does all the work for you, and then you get liquored up.

Looking Like Awards

#3. The Equalizer. 

Don't talk to me about alpha hydroxy acid serums (glycolic from sugar, lactic from milk, or malic from fruit), scrubs and masks, puhlease. Slapping an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top up against my pores really isn't going to get the job done.   Besides, past 28, what we all really need is a little more than just loosening up the dead skin. We need stimulation. Something closer to irritation, actually. Know why? that's what promotes collagen growth. Extra collagen is a very good thing. The same approach goes for lighteners.  Lemon juice on my chest isn't going to do anything but attract grass clippings. My mottled skin tone needs a real fix.

Don't believe me on skin tone? This is the image that got me started on skin care in the first place:
I took a photo of a friend and her daughter. My friend joked about me airbrushing her into a model, so I thought, what the heck. She is always taking care of others. Let me do something for her. I would surprise her by taking the time to fill in a wrinkle or two. I don't airbrush, though. I enlarge the image and practically repaint each pixel.

I had never worked a mother/daughter image before. As I was going back and forth at the 1600 magnification level, I was struck by the difference in color variations. The girl was mostly shades of pink. The mom ranged from purple to yellow to white and green. I even made sure I was looking at a part of my friend's face that was smooth and blemish-free.

The young girl's skin looks velvety to the touch in real life, and it looks that way pixelized. The more mature face, no matter how smooth to the touch it is, looks in real life like it would be way rougher than the girl's. When you see it magnified, you begin to understand why. Sometimes the darker colors on a magnified digital image are there because we are looking at a canyon that makes up a wrinkle. But sometimes, the browns and the purples and the reds and the whites are nothing more than pigment or capillary damage and the resulting discoloration, intensity, and variations play tricks on the eye, making the surface look bumpy and rough when it is not. If those colors were evened out, the skin would look smoother and softer.

This is just an incredibly long way of getting back to the best skin care combination I have found to date, and the winner of the next Looking Like Award - the Obagi-NuDerm Blender Skin Lightener with 4% hydroquionone mixed with Retin-A. Both products are prescription strength, both are easy to get, and both will save you tons of money in the long run over all that drug and department store nonsense. Oh, and here is a chart from Obagi's website. It seems to say that when Retin-A (tretinoin) and the Blender (hydroquionone) are used together (light blue line), it beats the pants off of all other wrinkle and lightening creams available.

I am not always so trusting of pie charts and testimonials. I am also a little concerned about how photo-sensitive this is going to make my skin during the summer. But I used it all winter long and I am so ready for my x1600 close-up.   

Well, It's Not Quite Seaweed . . .

LLYF found a great skin care sight, full of naked scientists and everything. See? I knew that this kind of attire has a much keener attraction level than the Lilly Pulitzer clothing. 

My Favorite Shade: Loose Lips

"We just got a new spa director," my aesthetician confided in me. She changed our product line. We used to carry Phytomer. What we have now is ok, but oh, I would die to get Phytomer back. I've been doing this for 25 years. I am practically in withdrawal. Contact them yourself. Maybe they will let you come to their training facility in Utah and get a bunch of treatments."

Then the aesthetician slathered seaweed all over my body, wrapped me in tin foil and heated blankets, and told me my liver was going to go into overdrive detoxifying me over the next few days.

I don't know if the company will take me in. I guess I can ask. But she reminded me that I really need to get on the internet and get some seaweed product in bulk quantities. I am going to do that right now. I spent three hours in a bathing suit for the first time this season, and I'm going to need help from every possible angle. 

Spot Removal

From Dermatology News:

"A new survey from the American Academy of Dermatology (Academy) found that while four out of five survey respondents (80%) are concerned about skin cancer and feel it is important to protect themselves, more than half (54%) have never been screened for skin cancer by a health care provider and nearly one-quarter (23%) never examine their own skin for changes to moles and other blemishes."

The solution is simple. 1. Appeal to your inner vanity and 2. think "insurance"

Every one of us has a dark spot or mole that seems to have changed shape or size in the past year or two. No, it's not our imagination. We just ignore it. Get to a fee skin cancer screening or visit your family doctor and report it, no matter how insignificant you think it is. I've had hardly a whisper of that phrase be enough to get me a ticket to a dermatologist on my insurance card. The skin doc will, in turn, be kind enough to remove a few and have them biopsied for safety's sake. All this, btw, is a covered event. Do some homework beforehand on which doc you want a referral to. It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

If the removal of the moles threatens to leave a scar, don't let that stop you. Deep peels and filler treatments can resolve those issues. Although normally that treatment is considered cosmetic, maybe you can fight hard enough to have your residual scars covered by insurance. Even if not, at least you got a break for a major portion of your skin clarifying treatment.

And in the process it could save your life, but let's not spoil the fun of it all. 

The Tan

"Beware the Afterglow...Bronzed skin is still the ideal, reinforced by a boom in self-tanners. Do they also promote risky behavior in the sun?" NYTimes, May 3, 2007.

For all those who put on self tanners or bronzers and think that now their skin is protected from UVA and UVB rays, let's just say the gene pool might be a tad better off without you.

The article continues with Nina Jablonski's questioning why anyone - black or white - would want to change their skin tone in the first instance.

I'm not going to try to figure out why, but bronze is in. Maybe it is a product of racial blending. Or maybe it's because pale, white skin can look so sickly. I don't mind embracing the pale. I did a celebrity age test a few weeks ago at People.com. It put a photo of two stars up against each other and I had to guess which star was younger. Every single pale actress looked younger, but was in fact older. So, the buried underground look has it's benefits. 

But so does looking like you had enough of a pulse to want let the sun heat up your g-spot. So get your bod outside. Just wear screen, and then put the bronzer on later. Or better yet, have someone else put it on you.

Skin is the New Black

There seems to be little doubt about it. Skin is the new black. I have always said that nothing ever could really be the new black, that all other colors are simply black wannabes, but this is more hip than apparel and a lot cooler than simply giving a "best dressed" award to the person who most impressively carries off wardrobe malfunction or could handle a skin flick. This is people finally - finally - looking at a surface once considered only as thrilling as empty space or a blank canvas or a hanger. Hello reality, and welcome.  Skin is, or certainly can be, incredibly sexy and communicative and vibrant, and that everything we put on it, even a black turtleneck in the middle of winter, needs to be kept in its place as the status of adornment and nothing more.

Maybe then, people will learn to take care of it. Their skin, that is.

Travel Skin

As much as I can be a crab about temporary product fixes and money drains, I am still a sucker for spas and hydrating body wraps and find that they can feel the most needed during travel. I couldn't always find a body treatment on the road, so early on I got in the habit of throwing some kind of oil-based scrub in my carry on pack. Now, of course, everything has to go in my checked luggage, so I won't dare. Instead, I have learned to take advantage of hotel spa purchases. On the last trip, I tried Sodashi revitalizing salt therapy.

It's a nice compromise. Pick up one of the spas luxury brands, scrub your own wondrous self down in the hotel shower you don't have to clean, and leave behind whatever product you don't finish. (Also leave a tip for the hotel maid. Be gracious.)

I'll try just about anything, but as a rule, I still stay away from patchouli or any cream that promises to firm my bust. You don't have to go along with me on those two, but it wouldn't be the worst decision you ever made. 

Chanel

I am such a sucker for packaging.

I know better than to get buy anti-cellulite anything.

Or to think that using a lotion that contains 1/100000000 of a particle of a flower from a far away island is going to make me look like I belong in a Matisse painting. I got confused as to whether this ingredient, the Planifolia - "engineered" from a fruit in Madagascar - was actually in the Precision cellulite cream or only the Sublimage, the complete anti-aging cream in a lusciously heavy glass jar.

The saleswoman explained the magical flowers and how the natives drink a juice made from the petals and that of course it could be just their diet in general but that these women don't have any cellulite.  What? They don't have donuts in Madagascar? No soda, no pizza, no ice cream loaded with artificial everything, already popped popped corn and Cocoa-Puffs?

"Do you sell it as a tea? I would take the fruit as a tea," is all I actually say.

"Oh, no, no, no, no," she laughs.

But I bought the Precision stuff anyway. Why? I don't know. It came in the best looking lotion dispenser bottle I have seen in forever and it does have caffeine in it, so there is some fluid drainage properties to it, I suppose. Plus the saleswoman was a doll.

Fifteen minutes earlier I had been at another cosmetic counter asking about skin exfoliating products. The woman, who had a vague resemblance to Andrea Martin, felt the need to explain how she uses a straight edge to shave her legs every morning. I was feeling the need to back away.

"How old do you think I am? I bet you'd never guess that I am . . ."

60, I thought.

". . . 59. Yep. People all the time ask me if I have had something done."

What, I wondered. The odd yellow skin under your eyes, the hanging neck flesh, the way her eyes looked so fabulously open only when you raise your eyebrows to your hairline?  I felt squeamish and cloistered, and the worst started entering my head. I kept seeing the edge of a knife against my shin. When I finally escaped to the Chanel counter, I met a woman who looked like she could have been my older sister. She was so delightfully soft and pleasant, that I became putty. Sell me anything, my body English was saying. Just keep me away from that scary lady.

I also bought a self tanner. Then I leaned over the counter. "I'm not from home office or anything and I know this is kind of an odd request, but I want to do a comparison. If I were to pick one other company's self tanner to try, which would you recommend."

She gave me the puzzled, hesitant look that I am quite used to getting, before dropping her concern and telling me, "Clarins." Then she loaded me up with samples of perfume and lotions and everything but Madagascar flowers.

On the way out the door, I stopped at the Clarins counter. Chanel lady was right. They seem to have taken self-tanning options to a new level. I'm going back. I feel the need right now to be loyal to my Chanel lady, at least until I max out my credit card.