Beauty tips
I hate laptops. I almost finished an entry when I accidentally hit that landmine button in the middle and erased everything. And the uber-crappy rich text editor on LJ ostensibly has an autosave, but did it give me back my entry when I returned to this page? Of course not.
Anyway. I was writing about how pleased I am, because my skin has been behaving very nicely lately, ever since I switched from lotion moisturizers to vitamin E oil. I didn't think I'd like using oil on my face at first. After all, I had plenty of face oil through my teens, and I spent a lot of effort attempting to remove that oil. The summer before I started college, I took Accutane, which will totally fuck you up (as I found out later, though the warning labels about avoiding pregnancy, including black silhouettes of pregnant women with big red Xs through them and line drawings of the deformed babies you were sure to have if you conceived while taking Accutane, or even within 5 months of taking Accutane--those should have tipped me off). Whether the Accutane mutated my pores or I coincidentally exited adolescence just as I finished the drug, I have lived my life with dry skin ever more.
You don't have to use much of the oil. I usually take a drop the size of a Q-Tip top, rub it between my hands, and spread it on my face. It feels very natural--not weird, like I expected.
Sweet, sweet vitamin E oil. You are so excellent for making my face so happy, and for being so cheap, and for being paraben-free!
I've been meaning to make my pitch about parabens here. I've been avoiding them since Jennifer told me how all of us have been rubbing and washing and smearing and powdering certain death into our skin for all of our girlie lives. Grab your nearest bottle of Cotton Blossom lotion from Bath and Body Works or that yellow moisturizer from Clinique, and observe the words ending in -paraben at the end of the ingredients list.
Parabens are chemical preservatives that previously were considered nontoxic, but recently, traces of these chemicals have been found in breast tumors. How did they get there? How long have they been there? What are they doing there?
Manufacturers of natural beauty products are scrambling to produce paraben-free versions of their most beloved items, and companies whose products were already paraben-free are singing a song from the rooftops. Meanwhile, the study that discovered this possible link between shampoo and deodorant and breast cancer is still very disputed among scientists.
This article from breastcancer.org says none of this means it's time to throw out your deodorant, but to me, it was too easy to jump from "maybe these chemical preservatives need to be studied more closely to see if they can cause harm in the amounts used by consumers" to "Bath and Body Works killed my mom!!!!" (Sorry, Jennifer; not your fault.) So I quarantined everything I had containing parabens. I'd already been attempting to use deodorants without cancer-causing aluminum, so now I made sure those also were free of parabens. I went to Trader Joe's and found a bunch of stuff with happy "paraben free!" labels.
If I really want not to get cancer, I should also quit smoking and drinking Diet Coke and alcohol, and I should wash my clothes with baking soda and grow all my own food, but only after I move to some pristine mountain in, like, Greenland.
Maybe avoiding parabens is useless as far as cancer is concerned. I would encourage everyone to do a little research on parabens anyway. But if nothing else, avoiding parabens brought me to vitamin E oil and happy pores.
Ain't nothin' wrong with that.