Tone Up With Arcona Triad Pads

Let's start out with a little math:

Toner already in a pad > Toner in a bottle that you have to apply to a pad.

ARCONA Triad Pads are soaked with hydrating, toning, cleansing, and excellent-smelling Cranberry Toner. Just pull one out of the jar to remove excess makeup, tone and hydrate after cleansing, or refresh your face after a workout or a good night's sleep.

And why use a toner, you ask?

Thymes Essentials Face Polish

Sorry for the late start today, friends! Had a little bit of a mishap yesterday; two of the wires inside my laptop power cord somehow shredded themselves and broke. What's a girl to do? Well, when your dad is an electrician and your boyfriend's an engineer, you whip out a steak knife, some pliers, and a soldering iron, and get to work! (Thanks to John for the soldering skills, and my dad for the

That Old (Boscia) Black Magic

OMG, can we talk peel-off masks? Seriously, just thinking about them reduces me to tweenspeak. During my formative years I LOVED a good peel-off mask; I used to raid my mom's skincare stash on the regular, looking for something I could slap on my skin and then slowly peel away. It may have something to with the fact that I obsessively peel and pick scabs, lips, stickers on fruit, ANYTHING--and

CoverGirl & Olay Simply Ageless Serum Primer

I have to admit that CoverGirl isn't a brand I seek out frequently. But the brand's latest, a primer collaboration with Olay, is definitely worth a hunt in your drugstore's beauty aisle.

CoverGirl & Olay Simply Ageless Serum Primer combines a foundation primer with Olay anti-aging serum, and the result is a moisturizing, "grabby" undercoat that keeps your makeup fresh and natural all day. I've

Clarisonic Skincare Brush: Review, Tips & Tricks

I've mentioned Clarisonic in passing several times on this blog, but I've never really given it the full review it deserves. Well, that time has come. The Clarisonic Skincare Brush was a Christmas present from my parents in 2008 and I've been in love with it ever since. There are times I stray from it, cheat on it with plain face washes and scrubs, but I always come crawling back when my skin

Five for Friday: Lavender-Scented Beauty Products

If there's any scent that helps me de-stress after a long work week, it's lavender. In fact, I may get a jump on things and start running a Waving Not Drowning bath right this minute. Below, check out five of my favorite lavender-scented beauty goodies. What are your favorites?

C.O. Bigelow Lavender Peppermint Shampoo. I first tried this most excellent shampoo two years ago at the Soho Grand.

More Scrublet Action: L'Oreal Go 360 Clean Deep Cream Cleanser

On the heels of my recent escapades (and love affair) with L'Oreal Go 360 Clean Deep Exfoliating Scrub, I grabbed another cleanser from the line to try out. This one is the Deep Cream Cleanser, the opaque white one with the pink scrublet.

And unfortunately, my results with this one just weren't as good. The cleanser feels great on skin at first, but I got just a touch too close to my eye, and...

L'Oreal Go 360 Clean Deep Exfoliating Scrub

Scrublet. It sounds...cute, doesn't it? Like niblet, or capelet, or tartlet. I like it, and I think it was a stroke of genius on L'Oreal's part, coining the word scrublet for its built-in face scrubbing tool.

I've been testing out L'Oreal Skin Expertise Go 360 Clean Deep Exfoliating Scrub. It comes with a scrublet, which has given me ample opportunity to use the word with unnecessary frequency.

Soak Up Just a Touch of Sun With Olay

Tanning the face is always such a tricky task. If you're like me, you're super-careful with exposing your facial skin to the sun, so it's always a touch lighter than your body (even if you're normally uber-pale). And if you self-tan your bod, the contrast is even worse Darker foundation and oodles of bronzer can only do so much, and usually ending up doing more harm than help (tan horizon at your

Five for Friday: Multitasking Beauty Superheroes

Everyone already knows that conditioner can double as shaving cream (another tip: mix with water in a spray bottle to keep crazy beach hair in check). Here are five more multitasking miracles that do everything from taming cowlicks to banishing nasty odors. What are your favorite beauty multitaskers?1. Anastasia Brow Gel. I cannot live without this! Beauty experts have proclaimed clear mascara as

Five for Friday: Multitasking Miracles in a Jar (or Tube)

Ever ask someone about a classic moisturizer and get this answer? "Oh! I use ________ for EVERYTHING! Face, hands, cuticles, lips, eczema, elbows, feet, bug bites, windburn, sunburn, steam burns, even flyaway hairs!" The list of uses seems to go on and on, doesn't it?Well, maybe they're on to something. And these five classic formulations seem to be the most popular answers. For the record, my

Sorry TLC, I DO Want Scrubs

One of my favorite recent innovations in the skincare is the "instant facial" - a scrub that combines both chemical and physical exfoliants in a single tube, to deliver double-whammy smoothing power.

The first one I tried - and still my favorite - was Prescriptives Instant Gratifaction Skin Renewal Peel. Its combination of beta hydroxy acids and finely-milled exfoliating pumice delivered

Five for Friday: Arrive in Style

Nearly four years ago, I penned a post on the products essential to surviving air travel. Ah, how times have changed! The TSA liquids guidelines have made it quite a bit difficult to travel with our creature comforts, so you may no longer have the luxury of fitting a hand cream AND a face cream in your little baggie - the horror!But even in our over-regulated world, there are still occasions when

Lava Rocks Redux: MAC Volcanic Ash Exfoliator Returns

Last summer I fell head over heels in love with a MAC face scrub, the Volcanic Ash Exfoliator. Unfortunately, it disappeared from stores in a flash, leaving beauty junkies everywhere to wonder - will we ever see the likes of this again?Once I finally finished tearing my hair out, rending my garments, throwing myself on the floor in agony -- you get the idea -- this miracle exfoliator reappeared!

Out, Damned Spot: The Battle of the Freckle

Can we talk about freckles for a sec, my dears?Seems that these little tan speckles have an uncanny ability to stir up debate. Some love 'em, saying they're quirky, cute, and youthful, while some hate 'em -- the whole "red hair and freckles" stereotype is one that's always made me cringe. Thanks a lot, Pippi Longstocking.And for those who actually possess freckles, the debate is often this: cover

Shu Uemura Cleansing Oil for Commitment-Phobes

If you've been curious about Shu Uemura's famed Cleansing Beauty Oils, but have been unwilling to fork over the $32-72 required to get your hands on a bottle, look no further. Sephora is now stocking mini sizes of the #1 selling Skin Purifier Premium A/O Cleansing Beauty Oil, for the far more palatable price tag of $12.I'd been hemming and hawing over these cleansing oils for quite some time;

Holiday Gift Guide: Hair, Skin and Tools

Sedu Ultrasilent Dryer ($125) When we were little we asked Santa for Barbies, and now that we're grown-up beauty addicts we want...expensive hairdryers! I LOVE the Sedu Ultrasilent; it's lightweight, quiet, and dries hair amazingly fast. Major upgrade from regular old drugstore brand dryers; worth the investment.MAC Adoring Carmine 5 Basic Brushes ($35) It's hard to go wrong with this set of 5

Peter Thomas Roth Un-Wrinkle Lip: Better Lippies Through Chemistry

I never had better proof that lip plumpers work, until I stopped using them. Once I ran out of Lip Fusion, Lip Fusion XL, and forgot about my stash of MAC Plushglass and other plumping glosses, I just sort of moved on from the plumper genre.And after a while I looked at my lips and realized they were looking rather unimpressive and thin. Guess those plumpers really do work better over time...and

The Foam Party

OK, here's a bizarre travel dilemma (incidentally, the title of this post goes out to anyone who's ever been on Spring Break). I LOVE liquid-to-foam cleansers, but they're impossible to sneak past the TSA unless you can score them in a mini size (which is almost never). The problem is that the foaming mechanism keeps you from transferring them into a travel-size container...if you tried to pour

Lava Rocks: MAC Volcanic Ash Exfoliator

I must be the last blogger on earth to be talking about the MAC Volcanic Ash Exfoliator -- it launched a while back along with the Solar Field and Future Earth collections.The reason I hadn't tried it yet? Well, when they say Volcanic Ash, they're not joking. This stuff is black, gritty and goopy. And my living room, where I first opened the package, has quite a bit of white in it, including an