Sublime Skin (Part 2)
Are you sitting down? I hope so, because this is going to come as a complete shock: the L’Oreal Paris Body Expertise Sublime Skin Patch does not make your skin sublime. At least not if you cut the sample patch in half, spend eight hours walking around with the “Concentrated Caffeine Cx Agent” stuck to your thighs and refuse to invest in the recommended day and night creams unless the Body Smoothing Complex does its thing.
Well folks, my thighs are not smooth. In fact, they look the same as they did before. Moral of the story? There’s no quick fix to cellulite.
I should have known. I went through the same thing with stretch marks a few months ago when I was living in London. My parents decided to take me on a cruise as my graduation gift and I dropped a day’s wages on Oxford Street for the necessary accoutrements: a new bikini and my first ever bottle of fake tan. For the record, I had never done fake tan until then, but standing in the fitting room at H&M and in my new lavender two-piece, I realized I had a problem.
Two problems actually.
Firstly, summer in London had endowed me with the infamous jailhouse pallor. Secondly, the bikini showed my stretch marks (yes, I have stretch marks. And no, they’re not due to anything useful like having a baby but rather a growth spurt in seventh grade). Upon noticing the marks on my hips, my boyfriend at the time said really helpful and supportive things like, “You know, they make creams to get rid of those.” (Note: the aforementioned statement was intended to be ironic men; such statements are neither helpful nor supportive, unless they’re the answer to a question and even then you should prepare yourself for a night on the couch).
Anyway, because The Body Shop’s Cocoa Butter Everyday Summer Lotion promised to reduce the appearance of stretch marks and give me a golden, summer glow (if applied everyday for two weeks before the cruise, according to the saleswoman), I bought it. And, because you can never have too much cocoa in your life, I also bought the Cocoa Butter Body Scrub. The latter of the two was amazing— so amazing in fact that I often had to remind myself that it was a body scrub and not a dessert (and this is not as crazy as it sounds; it smelled exactly like marzipan). The former of the two did indeed give me a summer glow, and it left my hands a bit orange but that was a case of operator error so I won’t blame The Body Shop for that one (the instructions do warn you the wash the product off of your hands immediately). The Cocoa Butter Everyday Summer Lotion did nothing, however, for my stretch marks.
But back to the issue of cellulite. I’ve been reading up on various website and health and beauty message boards and it looks like there is no such thing as a quick fix. Instead, I’m supposed to buy a natural bristle body brush, douse myself with cold water after I shower and stop consuming everything that makes life worth living (the three “C”s: cheese, chocolate and coffee). And evidently if I don’t use the natural bristle body brush in a counter-clockwise motion (anti-clockwise for those of you across the pond) the world will come to an end. And, worse still, my cellulite will not disappear.
I’ve managed to go a whole day without chocolate and coffee, but I did have pizza for lunch and an enormous chai tea after strolling through the Headhouse Farmer’s Market so yesterday was a bit of a lost cause.
In the meantime, I’m not sure that blogging about beauty products is my life’s calling. In fact, now that I don’t have customers to complain about or European adventures to chronicle, I’m at a bit of a loss. I could write about being a writer but sitting in front of a computer “(Guess what! Today I wrote!”) doesn’t make for good stories, and so I’m taking a poll. That’s right: After I Quit My Day Job is going interactive! You’ll see my awesome, way cool, color-coordinated poll to the side of this post with a list of potentially embarrassing but nonetheless exciting blog topics. And you should vote, because if you don’t it’s gonna be all stretch marks and cellulite from here on out and, as I’m rapidly learning in my state of chocolate deprivation, there’s not much fun in that.
Fieldwork in Stilettos 
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