July Box Hair and Scent

The July box actually got here last week, but it's taken Sephora this long to update the page with all the links I need. I mean, I could have gone and looked them up myself. I could have, but let's face it there is no way I was going to do that. Too involved. The theme this month was Beauty Staycation.

I'm starting with the only hair care product this month, Briogeo Rosarco Milk™ Reparative Leave-In Conditioning Spray. Normally this conditioner costs around 20$ for a 5 oz bottle. I had a talk with my roommate, who knows a lot about hair, and we both agreed the basic idea of this was bogus. You really can't repair hair that is damaged. You can restore the health of a scalp. You can protect hair from more damage. However, there isn't something you put on your hair and it just goes back to being healed and unbroken.

Now, even though 'reparative' is in the name of the product when I researched it a little, it didn't actually claim to repair anything. The spray only claims to bring moisture, protect from UV rays, make things shine, and do all of that without weighing the hair down. I honestly think it would have been better to push these aspects instead of the 'repair' thing. Anything that makes your hair sleek and manageable while keeping it safe during the heat is a great product.

I like the product. It smells nice but it's hard to go wrong with something that has rosehip as its main ingredient. My only problem with it is the fact that it's a spray. Sprays are hard to gauge when you're putting something directly on your hair. Having too little goes to having too much in like one spray. My roommate suggested I just spray it into my hand. I'll do that next time because it left things a little crunchy.

The scent this month was Atelier Cologne Orange Sanguine Cologne Absolue Pure Perfume and normally you pay 130$ for the 3.3 oz bottle. I feel like this scent hit the mark better than the one from last month in terms of the theme. A citrus scent during the summer makes a lot of sense. This has lots of zestiness and freshness to it. It has bloom oranges, bitter oranges, sandalwood, amber wood, jasmine, geranium, and tonka beans.

Did it work for me? No. And I find that interesting. Not because I'm challenging the fact that it didn't work for me, but just how amazingly wrong a citrus can be for you when another one can be so right. I love fresh limes. I think there is nothing that works as well with my body chemistry as fresh lime. A close second to this is regular oranges. I don't like it quite as much as lime, but almost. I had assumed the same would work with blood oranges but I was very, very much mistaken.

The whole blood orange/other stuff mix just clashed horribly with me. It did not work at all. But that's the nature of perfumes. Some work for you and others just seriously don't.  This isn't to say I hated the scent. I thought it was nice in abstraction. It just didn't work for me.

June Box: Hair Care Items

Okay, this is an interesting side note to me getting these to hair care items. On Tuesday, I got my hair cut into a short little Beth Ditto-ish punk pixie. I love it a lot, but even if I didn't, I wouldn't care because my hair was making me so hot before. Not hot in a sexy way, hot in a sweaty, I want to die because it's summer kind of way. The shortness and health of my hair is making it look amazing on all accounts so the two products I have for hair care didn't really impress me overly much.

The problem is, I'm not sure they would have impressed me before either. My hair is either completely great due to having a good cut or a pain in the ass that does nothing right because it's too long. During the summer, there is no good hair day if my hair is long. It's just impossible.

The first product isn't just a hair product. Ouai Rose Hair & Body Oil retails for 32$ and is mainly made from sunflower and shea oil. It also contains rose and apricot, and while one might think the rose scent would make it too old lady-ish, it's really mild. From what I understand, as a hair product, this is mainly used as a defrizzer. Right now, frizz isn't a problem for me. I used it to touch up some of the dry patches on my skin and it worked pretty well. This is probably what I'll use it for.

As you know, Sephora sends out sample sizes of the products so I don't know if this would be an issue with the actual full-sized version, but I'm having difficulties with the same size of this product. It's constantly oily and slick. It leaks and I'm sure it will soon attract dust and other nastiness to make it into just this godawful mess. A product that does that kind of thing is eventually going to get on my last nerve unless it is supremely great.

The last item was IGK Rich Kid Coconut Oil Gel.  This product costs 27$ and was created by a group of in-demand stylists from across the US. It's difficult for me not to like something that smells like coconut. This smells nice and it goes on okay. In the video over the product, they talked about how this was best for fine hair because it isn't heavy. In the reviews, however, a lot of people with curly and thicker hair were saying they liked it.

The basic problem for me is that I'm not really all that into the sort of look this aims to create. Well, okay, technically I am, but I can achieve the same thing by just not washing my hair. This product is mostly used to achieve what they call a 'lived in' look, which is, from what I've been able to tell, the look people have when they get off a plane after having drunken sleep for the last eight hours. It's a little more separated and mismanaged than what I would want to pay a product to do. My hair will look that way all on its own.

At the end of the day, I was least interested in these two products. Neither was truly offensive, but they just weren't my cup of tea. I will admit, part of that is just my complicated and constantly annoyed situation with my hair. The other part is just not really finding them that impressive. However, I would encourage anyone to read the other reviews of them before making up their mind. Hair is very subjective and my flyaway, thin as hell hair should never make up anyone's mind about hair products at all.

This one goes out to the one I love

I was inspired by this contest. I hope everyone does this as well. I'm posting this through tears. It's been a beautiful experience. Thank you, Iman.

Dear Lil,

I want to talk about that day. You know the one. Your mother was recently dead. Your grandmother was ill.  You were laying on a broken down, single bed in a cold, nasty trailer.  You were unemployed, so heavy you were perhaps unemployable, hopeless, depressed, and broken.

You couldn't breath.

For three days, you'd been struggling for air. All breathing was shallow, grasping, gasping, and never enough.  Your heart would race in terrifying ways, and then slow to almost nothing.  You were blacking out, fading out, falling into fits of unsatisfying sleep. You were starving for oxygen.

In your hand, you held your phone.  You needed to call for help. You needed medical assistance in the most serious of ways.  It was so easy to dial and you knew you still could.

Before you dialed though, before you reached out to ask for breath, there was a deeper question that you asked yourself.

Did you really wish to continue to live?

You asked yourself this, knowing full well you had total control over the situation.  It was quite clear that if you didn't do something about your lack of oxygen, you would die.  It would be easy to do so. Painful, surely. Scary, certainly. But easy. Perhaps easier than living.

You felt hyper real in that moment. You felt so much control, so much rationality. Life or death. All in your hands. There were so many good reasons to let the phone slide away. So few reasons you could think of to dial.  Only one reason really, the main, most important reason that suddenly grabbed hold of you and shook you with its intensity.

I love you.

I love you and I always have. Even when no one else was there for you, I was.  Even when all the world seemed out of sorts, I was there. Maybe I couldn't always come up with the best way through things. Maybe sometimes my plans were lacking, my motives lazy, my protection shoddy, but even then, I gave you what I could.

I love you, and for that reason, you decided to live.  You dialed your doctor and within 24 hours, you had oxygen, you had tests and results and new plans for making things better.  And all the while you were getting better, I was there, completely loving you, and so happy you would continue.

We've never talked much about that day. It happened and it's always in the back of the mind that it happened, but we don't discuss it.  Maybe we haven't needed to. Maybe the silent, but binding commitment made between us was enough. Sometimes hitting a moment of such deep passion is too hard to put into words.

I hope you're not upset that I decided to talk about it.  It's been almost three years now, and I felt it was time. I wanted you to know how proud I am of you.  When you decided to call your doctor, when you decided to live, it wasn't about continuing to live the life you had. We both knew you deserved better. It was time to take steps, to move forward. Or, at least, it was time to choose a path.

I look at you today and I marvel at what you have become, how your definitions are changing. You are letting go of reactive in favor of reflective, you are letting go of indulgent in favor of independent. You are letting go of defeatist in favor of planner.  You share more of yourself, your life, your thoughts.  You give shelter.  You give smiles to those in need.  You are a bringer of joy, hoping that others can find the love you have found, the love that was always there for you.

You mean everything to me. You amuse me. You entertain me.  You keep me awake at night telling me stories. I wouldn't trade you for the world and I'm so glad I didn't have to. And now every time we take a breath, I am reminded of how precious that is, how deep the fear can be at the thought of it now happening. I'm so thankful for the breathing, even if it involves tubing sometimes.

I'm thankful you choose to live your life with me, every second, every day. It makes me the luckiest person in the world.

Love,
Lil

Eye of the Beholder

Played with the look of the blog some today. I wanted my image in it, just all big and bold and snarky. It somewhat sets the tone for everything that follows.

I'm not sure I like the new colors, but I'm really too lazy tired and cold to take it any farther than I did.  As I said, the important thing was I put the image on it.

This doesn't look like me, not really.  I'm no where near this pretty or even this thinnish, though I allude to not being thin, even in the pic. You'll notice it has not clear chin.

However, I think in my head this is how I look. And, weirdly, I think this is how I look in most people's heads as well.  Hey, this is true. You know how perception goes. Just because you rationally know what someone looks like, that doesn't mean it's how you really see them.

If you love someone, you always concentrate on their better features. If you dislike someone, you focus on flaws.  It's so, so true.

For instance, check out this list that Sid Vicious made about his wife Nancy. Most people probably laughed at this, especially considering he probably killed her.  I didn't though. Even though when most people thought Nancy was fairly nasty, Sid didn't. He loved her. And like I said, when you love someone, you mostly see the good stuff.