Insert Lemon Jokes Here- Lush Lemony Flutter

The best thing about Lush Lemony Flutter is the name. It sounds light and airy, and makes you think about fluffy things, like lemon meringue pie. You'll need to adjust your expectation before trying it, because this thick buttery cream smells more like a lemony shoe shine (I'm always amazed by Lush fanatics who claim the products smell "yummy". From my experience, the best I can hope for is pleasant).

It comes in a little pot you need to dip your fingers (germaphobes will shudder), and you only need very little to grease your scales. I'm unconvinced of its merit as a hand cream, because it takes too long to stop leaving prints on my keyboard (and it makes cat hair stick to my hands). It feels nice when the grease is gone, though.

I can see why you'd want to use in on calluses and anywhere that needs to be seriously buttered, so it's good to have around. It's just not a fun product and doesn't feel lush and luxirious. The small packaging is convenient, but I much prefer the travel size tubes from L'Occitane.

Lush products are available online and from their stores, the latter is where I bought mine ($13.25).

Lush Therapy Massage Bar

This chunk of solid body butter has recently become my favorite pelt softening item (for now. One doesn't become a beauty blogger without being promiscuous when it comes to products). Basically, this is cocoa butter with lavender and neroli oil, which means that the bar does a wonderful job moisturizing while smelling better than most Lush products I've ever tried.

They claim that it's good for scars and stretch marks, which is an attribute of cocoa butter, but I don't have any of the latter to test it, and my scars are still very much there after several weeks of use, so that's not why I'm so in love with this little bar. It's the way my legs and arms look and feel: like those of a normal person who has never resembled an exotic handbag in her life.

Since this is summer and a buttery feeling is not what I'm after when crossing my legs, I use a generous dose of Silky Underwear powder, which also helps with feeling smooth. I keep my bar in the little tin Lush offer (it's free if you buy two bars), so it stays clean and doesn't disintegrate prematurely. It's also very travel friendly.

I tried (in store) several of the other bars, but this is the one that smelled best, not that the scent lingers enough to matter. The one bar I'd recommend you avoid (unless you're 16 or under) is the one with the shimmer. It's just too much.

Lush products are available online and in their stores, which is where I bought my bars. The tin was a GWP.

Skin Savers: Carol's Daughter Body Products

*** Winners of the Incense Extreme drawing, go back one post ***

And for today's fun:

My ongoing battle against the cuir de crocodile has been very successful this winter. Carol's Daughter body products have been a great asset in this war, and it looks like I have another holy grail cream: their Shea Soufflé. While they offer several other good options, the soufflé is perfect in a Goldilocks way: not too thick, not too thin, just rich enough to feel satisfying and nurturing.

The regular lotion would probably work for everyone who needs good moisturizing without coating the skin too much. Be careful if you also use the hair milk: the bottles look exactly the same and I ended up with lotion in my hair on a couple of dark mornings when I was primping half asleep, not remembering that the hair products are the ones on the left side of my dresser.

The body butter in the flat tin is amazingly rich, but quite greasy. It forms an excellent protective barrier that would work great for those who spend longer periods of time outside than my regular dash from door to car. You need to be careful if you apply it before dressing up, because it would get on your clothes. This is why I prefer to use it for a quiet night at home, before putting on thick PJs. The next morning my skin feels extra soft. Another word of warning: the butters are chock full of natural ingredients, including the color of whatever fruit they are made of. The Mango Mélange has stained my sheets with its orange color. It washed off easily, but you should not use it around your white satins.

The shea soufflé was the most perfect of the three products I tested. Rich, creamy but very absorbent, feels luxurious, pampers the skin and leaves it in a very happy condition for the whole day. With 47% of natural butters and oils, no mineral oil or petroleum (two ingredients that always end up making my skin feel dry), it's fast becoming my favorite skin saver.

Laline Massage Bars

Madonna might be hooked on Laline products from Israel, but apparently she must be getting them either in London or in Israel and can no longer buy them when she's in the US, because the Santa Ana store seems to have closed in recent months. The line is available in the UK (also online) and in Norway, so looks like European customers can still get their fix of sweet smelling creams and lotions.

I had the opportunity to try Laline massage bars, that also multitask as rich body butter. Unlike many other Laline body products, the bars don't contain mineral oil and do more than just coat the skin. The ingredients are sweet almond oil, beeswax, shea butter, coconut oil and fragrance. It's all good and very nourishing, even for extra dry limbs.

You break a small piece from the bar and let it melt in your hands before slathering it on the skin. The rich butter feels nice, but takes a lot of time to absorb and leaves a thin coat behind: great for protection against harsh weather, but a bit too sticky at first, so it's not a "slather, get dressed and go" product. It's much better for use after a relaxing bath before bed, when you don't worry about getting your clothes greasy.

The fragrances used here are very strong, so you need to be careful if you plan to wear a perfume. My favorite of the bunch is the addictive Vanilla Cocoa. It's a guilty pleasure kind of scent, as foody as they come. It's sweet, far from sophisticated and would make you crave chocolate, but some nights it's not a bad thing at all.

In which I go to sephora...

...and save you the trouble.

I'll start with the non-perfume findings, because those are way more positive. And also because it's my turn to add a cent or two of my thoughts to the much talked about Wall Street Journal article. Since it relates nicely to my Sephora visit, I'll get to it shortly.

Bath and Body
There are more and more Korres products. I've been a fan for years, while the line was still a bit obscure and hard to find (now it seems to be everywhere) around here, and the only product was the Guava body butter, which was superb once you figured that it's best to use it right after the shower, while the bathroom is still steamy and your skin absorbs it right away.
The line has grown, adding more scents and more products. I was very eager to try the newish fig scent, but while the products' texture is as great as always, it doesn't smell all that figgy and rich as I hoped. I'm not sure exactly what it smells like. Something herbal but sweet, maybe. I wasn't all too impressed with the Quince, either.

The good news is that there are more products in the Korres Yogurt range, and just like the famous cooling gel, they feel great on the skin. There's a yogurt buddy butter and I couldn't be happier. The very delicate scent might be my favorite of them all.

I was very interested in the Ren line. It sounds promising, the packaging is modern and unisex, and most of all they declare "clean, plant-based ingredients—and free of all unfriendly ones like petrochemicals, synthetic dyes, and parabens" and claim to be eco-friendly and socially conscious. Looking at the ingredient lists of the products, it seems they actually deliver on the promise. I only quickly sampled a few creams and lotions, and while the textures seem nice, the scents are off-putting. Very surprising to get such an unpleasant "pharmacy" whiff from something that is made of plant extracts and oils.

Makeup
The Union Square store now has a Guerlain stand. This is a great improvement considering the increasing floor space that is given to brands that cater to the glitter-loving demographic. You'll find the Terracotta line and all the gorgeous lip and face products.

I mostly skip the holiday collections because they tend to suck almost as bad as the spring ones (too much glitter in the former and a pink orgy in the latter). But there are a couple of notable limited edition items that are available right now that are quite interesting, holiday or not and it is worth checking them out:

Smashbox has a new Sephora exclusive limited edition kit, Platinum Surge, a $110 value for $39. It's not part of the official Beyond Beauty Holiday 2007 collection, but with the super-shiny glosses it might as well be. The two lip products are the weak part of this kit, if you ask me. I was far more impressed by the eyeshadow quad and the SoftLights compact, both are quite classy and elegant.

Dior's Detective Chic Eye Palette is a gorgeous collection of six eyeshadows, most are dark, deep but muted and wearable colors, all are very pigmented and fine-textured. The quality is superior, as always with this brand. The case is stylish and as Dior as it can get.

Perfume
Insert deep sigh.
It wasn't that long ago that Sephora's perfume section had quite a few interesting brands and larger selection within each of them. It also wasn't always cotton candy central.

I went through several new and newish releases, most I've already tried once or twice and dismissed, but wanted to give everything another chance. I used every piece of skin I could expose without getting arrested, with a couple of cleansing breaks in between. Here are the highlights:

L.A.M.B by Gwen Stefani- It's not the worst I've come across, which is a lot for a fruity floral. The combination of greens and a non-candied pear is pleasant. It's girly, inoffensive and unoriginal (notice how many negatives in one short paragraph? That's exactly the problem: a scent that's defined by what it isn't instead by what it is).

Fendi Palazzo- Why bother? The top notes are almost interesting with a sweet and peppery touch, but every time I tried it on hoping for the best because of my love for the house of Fendi, it dried down to a musky nothing with a hint of cheap smelling woods. And we know it won't last: In a year it'll be available from all the discounters and then discontinued and replaced with another nondescript scent and a big marketing blitz. Bring Theorema back.

At the recommendation of Dain, I gave a good try to Givenchy Hot Couture. It's quite different than most other Givenchy offerings (all those Very Irresistible flankers). It's sweet, girly and much more pleasing than most fruity florals, despite the raspberry note. From what I can gather, there has been a reformulation somewhere along the lines, and the old EdP is superior to the current EdP. What else is new?

Maitresse from Agent Provocateur is far less provocative and daring than the original. Instead of a saffron-laced chypre, here we get a musky floral. Easier on the nose? Maybe. Also boring as hell.

Midnight Poison (Dior)- Good intentions and a synthetic ambery rose do not a good perfume make.

My Insolence (Guerlain)- What's a Guerlain perfume without the Guerlinade base? Yes, I get that they're trying to reach a young audience whose biggest fear is to smell like an old lady and biggest desire is to smell like fruit. I don't have to like it, though.


It's sad, really. Sniffing and looking at all these perfumes you just know that most of them will not survive five years on the market. Even sadder to me is remembering that most of these come from houses that stand for luxury, but there's nothing even remotely upscale and special in these products (I'm reading Deluxe by Dana Thomas and it's worth discussing here soon, for this very reason).

We didn't need the WSJ article to tell us that the designer market is in trouble. We can smell it. The best perfumes Sephora has to offer right now may be the Chanel and Hermes scents, but all of them are cheapened reformulated EdTs, far inferior to the original extraits, bottled and boxed to sell many and quickly at the expense of quality and integrity.

Ayala Sender in her SmellyBlog is saddened and appalled to learn that there's no artistic vision even behind the exclusive ranges some of these big houses are launching. Only a cold calculation from a marketing point of view. I'd still take those, as long as they truly are made to be of better quality and with an actual intent to create an excellent perfume, but I do know what Ayala is talking about: Why should we even bother with Armani Privé , Tom Ford Private blend or Chanel Les Exclusifs when we can get the real thing, made by real artists and visionaries? Serge Lutens, Andy Tauer, Frederic Malle, Pierre Guillaume and many others (including Ayala herself) still love what they do and are putting everything they can into their bottles. The article doesn't mention the niche market at all, probably because it's such a small one that it doesn't really count in an $18 billion market. But there is an alternative to those ladies who spray us at the department stores, and I hope more and more perfume lovers realize it and go niche.

The Crocodile Files: Quench Shea Body Products

It's cold outside, which means we're in danger of getting in touch with our inner crocodile and letting it take over our skin. For me, this means time to bring out the big guns and big butters. And shea. Lots of shea.

Quench Bath and Body have several shea products, and I got to try both the oil and the body whip. Out of the two, my favorite is the oil, mostly because the ease of use. It spreads evenly and is immediately absorbed, leaving no oily residue while fully moisturizing and making the skin feel comfortable even when it's bitter cold and snowing outside. It's quick, easy and effective, and as an added benefit it also extends the wear of my perfume of the day. This oil is unscented and has a faint smell of a nutty vegetable oil that fades as soon as it's absorbed.

All that doesn't mean that the body whip isn't a good product. It's made of 20% shea butter, which is quite rich. But the buttery texture demands more time and elbow grease in order to work it fully into the skin. The result is great, but considering my favorite body cream from L'Occitane, Shea Butter Ultra Rich Body Cream, has 25% shea butter and a softer texture that makes it easier to apply, I'm not swept off my feet.

Quench Shea Body Products are available from the company's website. I got mine as a PR freebie.

Slathering Season

A couple of months late, but winter has finally arrived to the NY Metro area, which means slathering myself, head-to-toe with the richest, creamiest, butteriest goop I can find. Not long ago, my sister introduced me to Laline, a body care line originally from Israel that is now opening stores in Europe: Several stores already in England, one coming soon in Oslo. In America they have only one location at the moment, in Santa Ana, California.

I tested two products so far. Their Body Souffle (in Vanilla) and the Butter Cream in Nut. Despite its name, the souffle has a texture that is more like whipped butter than an airy mousse. It's smooth and goes on pleasantly. The vanilla scent, despite its claim of including patchouli, is very foody. It's quite strong, which needs to be taken into account before applying perfume, though it disappears within an hour or so.

I did have issues with its moisturizing qualities. As I said, it feels nice when put on, but the long term effect and the level of real skin nourishing is less than I expected. A look at the ingredient list (on the product itself, there's no info on the web site) reveals that among good stuff like rosewood oil and aloe vera gel it also contains mineral oil, sodium lauryl sulfate, methylparaben and Dead Sea salt. My guess is that the SLS is for texture, but I'm not sure I'm happy about it staying on my skin. Same goes for salt, Dead Sea or not.


As a reader of the BeautyBrains I know that mineral oil doesn't harm the skin at all, and it actually creates a very good barrier that prevents moisture loss. However, and this is something I've experienced with every product that contains mineral oil, from baby oil and Nivea up, is that in the dead of winter, when the skin of my legs is threatening to just die and leave me flayed, mineral oil based products just don't cut it. I need tons of moisture and mineral oil simply doesn't provide me with it, while shea butter based creams do work wonderfully.

Not surprisngly, The butter cream was more satisfying. It does contain mineral oil, but also shea butter that makes my skin happy. This goes on thicker, like most body butters, and requires more effort in working it into the skin. The hazelnut scent is divine, even for someone who usually doesn't go for foody smells. It's rich and nutty as expected, but not too sweet. Very comforting without going to the cloying side. The scent isn't as strong as the vanilla and doesn't last as long on my skin. The cream works as well as can be expected from a shea butter product and doesn't require re-applying for at least 12 hours.

Online buying at the moment is only in the UK.  The Santa Ana store is in Main place mall, their number 714-547-1014.
For the upcoming Oslo store, the details are: Karenslyst Allé 9, 0287 Oslo
Tel:+47 22 54 66 06 / +47 411 41 039
helen@lalinenorge.no

Berries, Butter and a Giveaway

The good news is that Maryam's hand made shea monoi whipped body butter is an exceptional treat. And that's an understatement. It is far superior to other, way more expensive products. I can't believe that I'm writing this, but my beloved Korres body butter doesn't measure up and neither do Bliss or Fresh products. The texture is phenomenal. It sinks right into the skin, nourishing and softening it. My super dry winter skin has never felt so soft.

The all-natural ingredients include: shea butter, monoi de tahiti oil (that's the stuff in Nars' Monoi body oil), cocoa butter, sweet almond oil, goat milk, vitamin E and silk fibers. No wonder that the results are so good.

The bad news is that the tub I have is in the pomegranate and wildberries scent. I'm not a fan of red fruit scents, and this one is very berry, and the scent is so strong that it refused to leave my skin the next day and clung to my jeans. A berry lover would rejoice with something like this. I don't. I'll have to get myself a tub of one of the more delicate fragrances. And probably also the unscented one. And I'd go straight for the large size (16 oz), because it's that good. But I can't deal with this fruitiness.

However, my loss is your gain. I'll do a giveaway. Leave a comment if you're berry-friendly and want to be part of the drawing. Next week one of you will get this 8 oz tub of body butter.