Guest blogger Nancy Rommelmann writes...
At the risk of having Jack convene some sort of cosmetic intervention, you are looking at my entire cache of make-up. Oh, I have a few eyeshadows in the sorts of colors with which you'd paint a nursery, as well as a bunch of lip-glosses Hill gave me last year, but I don't really use them. Nor, I am half-sorry to report, did my lipstick idyll work out. But last week, in preparation for interviewing one of my two favorite authors, I decided that, as much as I needed to finish his latest book, I needed some tinted moisturizer.
I looked, first, at the boutiquey sort of make-up store that carries five brands only and where the clinicians are sure any one of them will work on you. None of them did, and after having a chirpy girl smear and buff and dab me with five different bases for 45 minutes, and after trying to assess them in what I can only call hideous lighting, I left feeling ratty and ugly. It was raining; my hair started to frizz. I just wanted to go home, but across the street I saw Kiehl's, a store I've always liked because the products strike me as industrial and precise.
The woman at Kiehl's handed me a bottle of Ultra Facial Tinted Moisturizer, the only kind they carry. I put it on myself, and though she told me it looked really great, I wasn't so sure, still feeling as I was a little raw and nasty. I did not buy it, though as I drove home, I looked in the rearview mirror, and thought, huh; not bad.
"Wow, mom, you look really great," said my daughter Tafv, 17 and not one to equivocate about beauty products. I told her, I'd tried on some make-up, but hadn't bought it...
"Why not?" she asked. I had no good answer.
The next afternoon, I went back and bought it. It's lovely; super-smooth, and idiotically easy to apply, as in, I squirt a little blob on my fingers and rub it on my face. Total time: 14 seconds. It gives a nice glow, and does not look like make-up at all. I wore it during the interview, which went so well, we went out for drinks afterward. Confidence in a bottle.
Also so-far great and from Kiehl's: the sample they gave me of Powerful-Strength Line-Reducing Concentrate, which makes my face feel as though it's made of baby powder.