I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s trying to cut back on superfluous spending lately—cramped budgets! Looming holidays! Insane daycare costs! Medical co-payments! Babysitters! Pants for my son who keeps getting taller but not wider so nothing ever fits, ever!—so I thought it would be fun, and possibly even useful, to share a few of the things we’ve bought lately that have been worth every penny and then some. Caveat: these have to be things we’ve bought for ourselves, not for our kids, okay?

I’ll go first:
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Can we talk about hair-care products? You know, AGAIN? It’s one of my favorite subjects, really, second only to zombies. If only there was a magical juxtaposition of the living dead and a really wonderful styling lotion . . . it could be called Straaaaaaiiiiiiggght and maybe the packaging could feature this awesome photo.

Anyway! Here is a list of my top favorite hair products, in no particular order:
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I have way too many vanity products. I know this, okay? It’s an addiction. I have drawers that are overflowing with tubes and containers I rarely use, and more shamefully, my bathroom counter is a disorganized mess of the millions of items I DO use. You’d think with all this beauty arsenal at my disposal I would be a constant vision of dewy-skinned gorgeousness, but let’s be real: there’s really only so much modern cosmetics can do.

I have powders, brushes, hairsprays, lotions, perfumes, and lipsticks littering every surface of my counter, not to mention the flatiron, hairdryer, and various hairbrushes. It’s time to clean house, by god, and while I’m sure I can get rid of a few expired items here and there, the key will be to figure out storage for all of the crap I like to at least have the option of using. Sure, I only curl my eyelashes maybe twice a year, but that doesn’t mean I want to throw out the little metal tool! I just need a HOME for it.

I started poking around for makeup/vanity product storage solutions, and here are a few good ideas I found:
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I seem to be on a roll recently with disappointing purchases.  One person’s bad purchase can be another person’s good purchase, especially when the problem is with a purely subjective things such as scent or flavor, but it can still be helpful to know what someone else wouldn’t buy again.  I’ll tell you mine, and then you tell me yours and maybe I can get off this roll.

This one was totally my own fault:  I KNOW I don’t like fruit scents.  But I love Consumer Reports, and they rated the Gain Joyful Expressions fabric softener very highly, and Target only had it in Apple Mango Tango scent.  In the washing machine, it smells like apple cider.  After the clothes are dry, the scent reminds me of a faint lingering mildew smell.  It’s a great fabric softener, though, and someone who likes apple-scented stuff would probably love it.  Er, perhaps not after I’ve said it smells like mildew.
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I was thinking about brand loyalty recently because I noticed that while I love Bumble & bumble hair products, I tend to buy all sorts of random shampoos. I have a stack of them in my shower ranging from fancypants expensive salon varieties to good old drugstore cheapskate brands. My basic requirement on shampoo is that it needs to smell good, I guess — I’ve never really noticed that one makes a major difference over another.

Skin care’s another story, though. I am officially fussy about the stuff I use on my face, and fiercely loyal to one particular brand, who I swear is not paying me to say so: philosophy.

I’ll admit I’m kind of a sucker for their great packaging and the fragrance of their line (lots of lavender), but I also think their stuff just . . . works. Awesomely. My favorite items:

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I recently detailed my everyday makeup routine in order to recommend the various beauty products I’m addicted to, and since that writing I’ve gone and had myself a baby. As it turns out, newborns really put a cramp in a girl’s ability to primp, something about “needing to be fed and cared for all the time”. God, you’d think they were INFANTS or something.

Anyway, I thought I would post my Absolutely Must Have makeup items — the products I can slap on my face in twenty seconds if I’ve got two wailing children to attend to — and hopefully hear your own in response. I picked the three beauty products that would make the difference between feeling human and feeling like a train wreck if I were to, say, venture out in public.

(Those of you with naturally beautiful skin who never wear a stitch of makeup can watch from the sidelines, hopefully while sitting in gum. What? Come on, the universe needs to be unkind to you in SOME manner, don’t you think?)

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Okay, I am currently on a break from baby-wrangling so we can talk about a deeply important subject, people: HAIR. Specifically, how to make it look halfway decent when you don’t have the luxury of taking your sweet time with it. Like for instance when you’ve got a newborn making that constipated-sheep sound — beehhhh . . . beehhhhhhh — and a toddler saying, “Juice, Mommy? Juice? Milk? Juice? Milk?” over and over as though he were lost in the middle of the Sahara on the brink of dehydration rather than standing there with a cup full of water, which apparently is Unacceptable For Human Consumption.

I’ll tell you what works for my hair, which is an annoying combination of being curly underneath but straight on the outside. Unless it’s blow-dried and bitch-slapped into some semblance of smoothness I’ve got a head full of thick, yet limp frizziness. LAME. Here are my very favorite products for getting my hair as close to sleek and shiny as possible on a limited schedule:

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