Traveling puts you outside of your normal routine, which for me has meant struggling with breakouts and stressed skin on the road. My instinct is to bring my entire medicine cabinet with me “just in case” and at times I’ve needed it.
Instead of spending a fortune on new skincare and makeup products, I’ve simplified my routine and made it travel-friendly as a bonus. I’ve put together a list of what’s in my cosmetic bag, as well as a list of some of my favorites that are staying home…
Yea, you read that right: DIY deodorant. Come along with me on this journey, folks. I dare you.
What got me on the natural deodorant path was actually my laundry. I was tired of trying to purge my tops and shirts of my industrial-strength deodorant. If you’re curious, I was using a combination of baking soda and white vinegar, forming a paste and then using a toothbrush to rub the mixture into the antiperspirant stain. It’s obviously a pain in the ass and even more so during the summer.
Previously, I had tried a couple of natural deodorants and they didn’t work, even in the slightest. I realize now that I had to go through a sort of antiperspirant detox. It took about a week but the results are:
So the DIY option was just for fun since I had all the ingredients and it seemed like an interesting experiment. Chances are you have the ingredients in your house already, but if not they’re pretty cheap. The recipe was derived from this one but I cut it in half so I can try different scents and play with the ingredients until I get the consistency I like.
When I was moving into our new home back in September, I had a chance to paw through a large box filled with beauty products. Some of them were items I use every day that happen to be on sale so I stocked up. There were a few lotions and body washes I picked up when Victoria’s Secret/Bath and Body Works/Drugstore.com was having a clearance and I thought, “well, one can’t have too much body wash” which is a lie, of course. The whole collection was getting out of control.
I have very finicky skin. It’s delicate AND acne prone AND rosacea prone. All I have to do is scratch my eyebrow and the skin turns pink. Keeping my skin happy has been a lot of trial and error and for a while I had a whole beauty ritual with several products in the morning and several more at night. And almost none of them were drugstore brands but expensive department store brands carrying the names of hot-shot dermatologists. Again, this was out of control.
But deviating from the ritual was scary. Where do I start? I’ve never been a fan of multi-tasking products (tinted moisturizers are a joke). But that’s what I needed: a couple of products that do their job really well. So I’ve compiled a list of my must-haves.
Somehow this post is home-related… oh yes! Our water heater broke! And it didn’t just break, it overflowed. And it didn’t just overflow, it overflowed into the unit below our own. So that was super. Since we’re getting ready to renovate in a little over two weeks, it doesn’t make sense to buy a water heater. We are planning to get a tankless water heater and that involves quite a bit of demolition, so we’re just holding off.
The upside is I get to go to the Korean Spas of Los Angeles and take a shower (I don’t belong to a gym so that option is out). Yea, it’s a tough job but The L.A. Lady is up to it! Let’s get down to business…
