Jack & Hill: A Beauty Blog - make-up, cosmetics, perfume, and the substance of style

Meltdown Makeup

I'm referring to the much-discussed financial meltdown, a good excuse for going into bargain mode (if you needed an excuse, I never do.) On the one hand, beauty products are somewhere we can usually still afford a few treats when economising- Chanel nail varnish is always going to be cheap compared to everything else Chanel. On the other hand, it's easy to spend jillions on a make-up spree, once you've added it all up, so thrift can sometimes be of help. Anyway, whether you are a poverty-stricken ex-Lehmann's jobseeker or a happily unmarried mother of six film-star, here are my top five supercheap beauty bargains, fun at all times of the financial cycle:

1. Maybelline Pure Makeup Foundation: so light, I thought this was a tinted moisturiser for years, it doesn't give much cover but that's a far better look than excess cover, so who cares. Easy to use, works fine, available everywhere, great when you want some facial security-blanket, but are too lazy to pay attention to applying proper good stuff.
2. Vaseline Lip Therapy: lip gloss, lip salve, sexiest worn right up to and over the edge of your lips, can also be used on cheeks and eyes for highlights, apparently. And there is a new Rosy Lips version out in the UK now which I am hyperventiliating about already (going there soon).
3. Soap from the local Asian supermarket, which comes in prettier more elegant packets than any other all-purpose soap (I keep this by the kitchen sink), and has Japanese writing on top. Get over there and have a look around!
4. Target Eye Makeup Remover: easily as good as the Clinique one I used before Jackie brought this to our attention.
5. Maybelline Great Lash Mascara: in royal blue. Good for confusing your boyfriend, either on its own, especially if your eyes have any blue in them already, or with blue eyeshadow.

The whole lot added up will cost you about seventeen dollars, which is pretty amazing for five things that really do what they say on the tin. Does anyone have more treasured beauty bargain recommendations?

How Much Would You Pay to Get Rid of Cellulite?

Whatever it is, it's not enough, though Aina Hunter thought $1200 sounded about right, to rid herself of the lumps and bumps around her "waist and thighs. Plus that area just above my knee caps which has grown increasingly hateful over the past couple of years." She reports as to the treatment's efficacy in Cellulite Treatments: Do They Work?, not the sexiest title and, sadly, not the outcome we of dimpled thigh and ass would hope for, though I could have forecast that, for if a treatment of slathering, super-heating, and massaging eradicated cellulite, I would have years ago ponied up the twelve hundred smackeroos.

Did Hunter have fun while she still had hope? Not really.

I wanted the treatments to work. I felt that they should work. They were uncomfortable enough. To be fair, [masseuse] Iriana asked me several times if she was pressing too hard. I shook my head no as she dug her little hands into my screaming flesh. I covered my face with a pillow and bit into it. I wanted results, not coddling...

Expect cellulite treatment involving tissue manipulation — be it Endermologie, Vela Smooth, Syneron or some combination — to make you feel like the victim in a pre-code, post-mod Hollywood cult film. You will lie on a slab under fluorescent light in paper underwear and accept your expensive punishment. A few days later you'll return for more.

Hunter's results? "Negligible." But I did learn something interesting, which is that whether you develop cellulite is determined by the thickness of your dermis (your inner layer of skin) and, as Hunter writes, "the pattern of the connective tissue beneath it which holds your fat cells together that matters."

If you are lucky enough to have a sort of cross-hatch pattern, your fat cells are held in with double reinforcements. Regrettably, this pattern is most often seen in men. Most women have connective tissue patterned like columns... It's easier for fat cells to bulge out of columns than small openings.

I don't know about that "regrettably"; I see enough cellulite on myself so don't need to see it on my husband, thanks. Also, I cannot be the only one who's noticed that women who are slim through the hips do not tend to get cellulite. My daughter is this way, as are nearly all the women in her father's tribe. It's us curvy gals who develop it, even when we're thin. I personally like my waist and boobs, and thus, and especially when checking out Sophia, see a little orange peel as an okay trade.

Repurposing: Burt's Bees Avocado Butter Hair Treatment

I spent last Christmas at my mom's farm in upstate New York, a sprawling property with several residences, every one of which holds a dozen varieties of French mustard and not one bottle of hair conditioner. The last time I saw conditioner there, it was in fact a plastic bottle of Breck cream rinse featuring a photo of Kim Basinger, circa 1972. I had not bothered to schlep conditioner across the country, and thus was fortunate that in my stocking, my mother had placed a jar of Burt's Bees Avocado Butter Pre-Shampoo Hair Treatment, a pale olive and rather oily paste that smelled like orange peel.

Though the treatment is supposed to stay on the hair 20 minutes and then be shampooed out, I figured I could just use it as I would conditioner and simply rinse, a notion of which I was disabused when I came in to Christmas dinner.

"What did you do?" asked my daughter, surveying my hair, which looked sort of like Gene Simmons's, were he to dip it in a vat of bacon grease. I explained about the avocado butter...

"Mom!" she said, laughing at me across the rib roast. "You're supposed to wash it out!"

Thusly shamed, I did not use the avocado butter again. But I could not throw it out; my mother had given it to me, and so it sat until yesterday, when I got out of the shower and used it as a body lotion, very rich, very effective, so effective that even the next day, my legs are baby-smooth.

Which beauty products have you repurposed for the good? Or not so good.