No sneakers allowed.
People who visit me at my house must think there is something wrong with me because I keep a pile of trash in a Selfrigdes cloth bag for months without emptying it out. The thing is, I hold off on writing empties posts for far too long and end up accumulating way too many empty containers, yet I’m not bothered enough to explain to them that I’m not nuts, just lazy.
Very seldomly do I review just one skincare product at a time – I usually have a few products from the same brand and write brand reviews – but this Aurelia cleanser felt like it deserved its dedicated review because it comes in a format I haven’t seen in a cleanser before. I’ve tried balms, I’ve tried oils, I’ve tried soaps and gels and even lotions. But never a cleansing cream. You know, one that looks and feels like a moisturizer.
Junoco is a Californian cosmetics brand that started in 2018 and has made sustainability and simplicity their main missions. They would fall into the spectrum of “clean beauty” brands, and I haven’t been shy about what I think of that term (usually just a marketing expression profiting off of fear mongering) but I have been proven wrong in the past with brands that market themselves as being “clean” while still caring about scientifically proven efficacy and ingredients being beneficial rather than just “natural”.
So when I was contacted by Junoco about trying a few of their products, and did a little research on the brand to learn what they were about and mostly, about their formulas, I got excited.
After La Mer, La Prairie, and other nicely smelling and heavily user-experience focused brands, there is a new type of luxury skincare in town: the one created by doctors. But the question remains: are they more effective? Scientific? Justified in being more expensive?… and are they made by doctors at all?
If you know about Avant, you’re probably a subscriber of a monthly beauty box. I don’t know anyone who has purchased directly from Avant, mainly due to the absurd price, but in case you’re considering getting a beauty box with an Avant product in it and you’re wondering if t’s any good, this post is for you. Avant: the luxury skincare brand that nobody ever paid full price for.
U Beauty’s philosophy revolves around streamlining and reducing the amount of skincare products one has to use day to day. It’s meant to reduce a 12 step routine into a 2 step one, I guess, because they only make 2 products for the face so far, and the price for both of those is enough to purchase a 12 step routine, two times over. At least.
Being a beauty box subscriber and a GWP enthusiast, I end up with a lot of masks. Mini masks, full size masks, sample masks, sheet masks. And sometimes I struggle to find enough to say to dedicate a full post to a singular mask. So it makes sense to me to group 5 masks of the same type for a quick round of short reviews.
The theme today are hydrating, calming face sheet masks, from 5 different brands.
This post is really, really overdue. The plastic of these empty containers is about to deteriorate, that’s how long overdue this post is. I keep holding on to all of these empty containers until I write this damn post, and I’m already a shopaholic, I don’t need to keep trash around to make me feel even more of a hoarder.
Ecooking is a Danish brand created by an Tina Søgaard, who was already working in the beauty industry before she started creating these products in her kitchen, bringing in raw ingredients from the laboratories she worked on (hence the name). These products have developed into an environmentally conscious, “clean” skincare brand. Uh oh.
StarSkin is a brand that focuses a lot on sheet masks. They also have other products but the masks are by far the most popular. It’s a relatively young brand (2015) and it’s a regular appearance on beauty boxes and advent calendars, which is where I got everything I ever had from them.
The brand claims to be inspired by South Korean skincare. They also claim to be 100% natural and clean beauty, which is usually a bad sign. Although “natural” and “clean” claims have no scientific foundation nor are they regulated terms, meaning any brand can claim to be natural and clean regardless of the ingredients they use, it usually is a sign that there will be a lot of essential oils in the formulations of that skincare brand, in detriment of actually good ingredients. Essential oils are mainly perfuming ingredients that commonly have the potential to irritate the skin.
So the first thing I did was focus on the ingredients list. And saying I was surprised is a f*cking understatement.