Using it Up - Changing it Up . . .

In my ongoing effort to use things up in this house, I recalled that one of my cousins had once sent me a jar of some sort of moisturizer from Las Vegas.  I know.  It sounds crazy.  It is crazy.  It was at least a year ago.  I never opened it, but last night, as I was rootling around in the linen closet to see what I might be able to divest, I saw it in the basket with the assortment of other gels, creams, potions, and lotions. 

I pulled it out and saw that it's actually an eye mask from a company called Jouvence Eternelle, which is somewhere near Las Vegas. 

I figured I would try it out this morning because I've been trying to take little better care of myself lately - I did my nails a couple of days ago with something called Color Street nail polish strips.  They are interesting and they are staying on pretty well.  The only think is that although the color was supposed to be a coral, it looks a lot more like bubblegum pink to me which is not a color I would have chosen  :-D 

And about a week ago, I kept feeling a chin hair and figured that, even though I'm always in a mask outside the house, I should probably get the tweezers out.  I turned on my makeup mirror (which I haven't used since early March), and flipped it to the magnifying side, tweezers at the ready.

OH MY GOD. 

Tweezers were useless. I mean seriously.  This is what comes from not looking at yourself in the makeup mirror every morning!  The entire bottom half of my face was beginning to resemble a poorly kept lawn.  Gah!!!!  Of course, I didn't have any of the small lip waxing strips, so I had to use the long ones that I use on my legs - on section at a time.  I'd wax, fold that small section over, and then wax again and fold over, on through multiple full strips.  I think I waxed not only my lip, but my chin, under my chin, and halfway across each side of my face and I reminded myself never to let that go again.  I looked a lot better once it was done.  And, truth be told, I felt better, too.

Anyway, back to this morning.

Here's the eye goo.  I looked looked it up online and almost fell over when I discovered that it costs $400.00 a jar.  FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS.  For a jar that holds a little over an ounce.

JesusMaryandJoseph

AndAllOfHisCarpenterFriends

My cousin must have hit a crazy jackpot that trip. I recall the eye stuff arrived in the mail one day with no card or identifying markings.  I figured out who it was from since it had a Las Vegas postmark, and asked him about it. 

He said he thought I'd like it.   

I gotta tell you - I hope I don't, because there's no way I'm getting attached to an eye mask that costs $400 smackers a jar. 

So, I got up this morning, washed my face, and put the eye mask on.  Since it's supposed to be good for wrinkles, I figured I'd put it on my smile lines and my upper lip, as well.  I mean, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound.  The instructions were minimal:  "Apply a thick layer as a mask and leave on for 10 minutes, then remove any excess with a tissue."

No advice about what time of day to use it or where to use it in the face washing regimen.  Alrighty then.

I figured it might want a clean face, so I washed my face, put the goo on, and left it on for the advised 10 minutes.  I wiped it off what was left, rinsed my face for good measure, and put on my normal toner and moisturizer.  L-R: Pre goo; With goo; Post goo.

I don't know - It all looks about the same to me, which is my face, early in the morning with no makeup on . . .  :-D  I'll keep using it, though.  Every last bit of it.  I'm not going to waste a stupidly expensive jar of eye goo (!)

You might have noticed that my hair looks different.  That's because I managed to screw up my courage last Thursday and go and get a haircut.  My previous cut was at the end of February, right before I left the firm, so a little over four months.  I knew back in February that I wanted to attempt to embrace the grey, as well as my natural hair color.  A regular cut and color and every-other-time highlights is really spendy to maintain, and it didn't seem like a wise use of funds once I landed in the world of living on a fixed income. 

My other reason for attempting to embrace the natural look was that I felt that since I wouldn't be in the office any longer, I wouldn't have to compete on a daily basis with people who were decades younger than I. This is an unfortunate side effect of being a woman - particularly a woman of a certain age - in the business world.  My face has never reflected my true age, so for close to 40 years I've chosen to allow my hair to not reflect it either.  But since I knew I wouldn't be fighting to stay relevant in a competitive work setting any longer, I decided to go for the grey.  When she cut my hair in February, she did not do my roots; rather, she just put a few highlights in to ease the transition.  And because my hair is short, she figured it would take only a few cuts to lose all the red. 

Yes.  Although it's always had red highlights, my natural hair is not red.  Not even close.  I got my dad's very dark brown/black hair, but I also got my mom's redheaded skin, so when I made the decision to go red after my first divorce, the only people who've ever known it wasn't natural were my family, people who knew me more than 40 years ago, and my stylists over the years.  It's not that dark now - pigment fades as we age.  From what I can tell, it's sort of a gunmetal color.  I'm not sure I'm going to like it, but I'm giving it the old college try.   I went red right after my first divorce when I really needed a change.  So I told my stylist at the time to cut it all off and whatever was left to dye it red!  It's been some shade of red ever since. 

I was nervous to go, but I got the first appointment of the day and there was no one else in the salon.  I washed my hair beforehand, went in with a wet head, and skipped the blowdry.  I was in and out in 20 minutes.  We both wore masks - and I realized that my stylist was the first person to have touched me since early March.  That's one of the not-great things about living alone . . .

Anyway, I told her to cut out as much of the red as possible, and if it was right on the edge of her thinking it might be a little too short, to cut it anyway.  That made it awfully short, but it took care of everything except the areas on the top of my head that she had highlighted back in February.  If she'd cut those off I would look like I was in boot camp - so, I have a sort of a calico look going on for now, but I nearly always have a baseball hat on when I go out these days, so pretty much no one sees me anyway. It usually looks better than this, though. 

I got cleaned up to film my podcast on Saturday:

I can see that I'm probably going to eventually have to switch back to a brown eyebrow pencil instead of the auburn one. 

All in all, I do feel better for having begun to take better care of myself in these past couple of weeks.  This week I have an appointment scheduled with my trainer at the club.  We'll be outside.  In masks.  At least six feet apart.  I'll see how it goes . . .

Onward  :-D