I am the type of person who gets very set in her ways; I literally eat the same breakfast – oatmeal with peanut butter and dried blueberries – and lunch – greek yogurt parfait with strawberries and blueberries – every. Single. Day. I don’t get tired of it, and usually I end up eating the same dinner on most days, which is either quinoa or rice, edamame or some other type of veggie, and fake chicken (which is so delicious, let me tell you). Beauty products are no different; once I find something that I like, I tend to use it for years and never switch. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, especially since I have such sensitive skin, but it’s something that I’ve noticed lately! I mean, if it ain’t broke why fix it, right?
As I’ve been running out of a lot of my favorite products lately, I decided to keep the empty containers so I could do my first empties post and video! I’ve seen so many other bloggers and YouTubers do these, and I love watching them, so I thought it would be a lot of fun to do them for myself. I adore all of these products – except for one, which we will get into a little later in this post – so I have a lot to say about them!
Make sure and check out the video I did on this, too!
I have used this face moisturizer for a long time, we’re talking like two years. First Aid Beauty used to have just a daily face moisturizer, which I actually liked better than this ultra repair one, but they got rid of it a couple of months ago, and I don’t really know why. It was the perfect amount of moisture for my skin, and this one, I’ve found, is a little too much for my skin. Due to that, I decided to get a different face lotion since I’ve used this one forever, and also because I felt like my face needed something different.
I told you guys about this body lotion in my Keratosis Pilaris post, and I love it so much! It really helps with my KP, and it’s just generally a really great moisturizer. It doesn’t have a smell, which is also really nice for my sensitive skin. I use it right after I get out of the shower, all over my body, and I’m good to go for the rest of the day. Even though it’s meant to help KP, it’s also a really great lotion for your whole body.
This has been my go-to B.B. cream for at least a year now! It works really great with my skin, and has a very slight shimmer that gives my skin a nice glow. It also has SPF 27 which is great to have in order to protect your skin from the sun! I don’t know how much I actually buy into the whole “self-adjusting shade for all skin types” selling point, but the color does match my skin, regardless. It blends in really nicely, and provides a great base for the rest of my makeup, like concealer and bronzer.
Okay, this stuff smells amazing, to the point where I want to bottle up the scent and use it as my perfume. It’s really great for the ends of my hair, which is good since that’s what it’s actually meant to be used for haha. I use about a dime size pump of the cream and put it into the ends of my hair on the days that I wash it – which is every other day. This helps keep the ends of my hair healthy and moisturized, two things that are very important since I color my hair.
I have expressed my love for Tarte before, and this is my favorite mascara! Not only does it make my lashes look great, but it’s supposed to be good for them as well. I actually do think that it helps the general health of your lashes, and helps to condition them. My eyelashes aren’t picky at all when it comes to mascara, however, I found this one and I haven’t felt the need to try any other brands since it works so well! It’s also a huge plus that it’s from Tarte, because as I have preached before, it is a great beauty brand and doesn’t test on animals. The wooden package is also really cool, and environmentally friendly! Yay sustainability!
Usually I get the makeup removing wipes from Burt’s Bees, but this last time I didn’t have time to run to Target, and I was in desperate need for something. I knew that the little District Market on campus had these Yes to Cucumbers facial wipes, so I thought they would be fine to grab. About a week into using these, my face started to get a small rash, and these wipes slightly burned while I used them. In the end, these really messed up my skin because I had a pretty big rash on my cheek, and they just generally stung my face and were pretty abrasive. I thought they would be really nice, because they smelled so fresh, but they were truly terrible for my skin, and it took it a good week to recover from them!
I’m so glad I remembered to not recycle all of these containers after I used them, so I could do my first empties post and video! It felt oddly liberating to recycle all of them at once, and I also enjoyed reflecting back on what I like, wanted to change, and what products I didn’t like at all after using them. I really hope you guys enjoyed this post, and hopefully I’ll remember to do more in the future!
What products have you been using lately?
Thank you so much for reading, and have a wonderful day! 🙂
I hope you are all having a good week so far! We are nearly to Friday, which means we are so close to the weekend, and the weekend=sleep. These past few weeks have been so incredibly busy, and my sleep schedule has definitely been suffering. I can’t wait to just sleep in this weekend and relax a little bit!
For today’s post, I’m going to be talking about Keratosis Pilaris, or chicken skin (not my favorite term), which are those pesky little bumps on arms, and sometimes thighs. I often get a couple on my cheeks in the winter when my skin is dry, and I have always had them on my arms. When I was younger, I was extremely self-conscious of them, because they can be very unsightly at times. As you already know, I didn’t have great confidence when I was younger, and my arms were a huge part of that. I hated wearing short sleeve shirts because they showed my arms and Keratosis Pilaris, so in turn, I hated my arms. This was problamatic because I was always in dance and swim while growing up, but I actually never really thought too much about it, because I was too focused on the activity at hand. My teammates were like family, anyway, so I felt comfortable enough around them to show my arms.
These bumps are usually white or red, and itch sometimes, but are otherwise not physically bothersome, other than not looking very nice. They are the results of the buildup of keratin in hair follicles, which blocks their growth and forms these bumps. The cause for this extra keratin is unknown, but has been linked to a couple of different things, like gluten intolerance. Funnily enough, when I stopped eating gluten because of my allergy, my bumps improved greatly. I can’t say with certainty that these two things are linked, but other people have noticed this as well. According to doctors, KP is supposed to go away by the time you are 30. My mom has KP as well, but once she was around my age (19), hers started improving greatly, and they were essentially gone when she reached her twenties. My KP did improve a lot once I got to high school, which was really nice. Today, I don’t have nearly as much as I did when I was younger, but I also know how to manage it a lot better now.
My mom and I tried most everything to get rid of my KP since it bothered me so much. We asked my doctor about it, who prescribed a couple of creams that didn’t really help, and I couldn’t use them continuously anyway since my skin is so sensitive (we’re talking extremely sensitive here, so much so that I have to use baby sunscreen). Then we heard of KP Duty from Derma Doctor, which you can get from Sephora, and the product seemed very promising. We excitedly bought it, hoping for the miracle results it promised. I gave the lotion a couple of months, and I didn’t notice a difference at all. It was a good moisturizer, yes, but for that price, it was not worth it at all.
After that, we decided to try all-natural products, so I started using a Burt’s Bee’s honey body butter. I absolutely loved it because it smelled really nice, and did improve my bumps a little bit. It wasn’t expensive, so I stuck with it for a couple of years, since there wan’t really an alternative that worked better. In conjunction with this, I read that coconut oil could help improve the bumps, so I made a coconut sugar scrub to use in the shower. It really helps to moisturize my skin, and also gently exfoliate it a bit. I don’t use it that often anymore, simply because it’s a little messy to use in the shower, and I don’t really have the time to keep up with making it in college.
I also tried the Lush Buffy Body Butter, which was a really good lotion bar, but didn’t do much in the way of improving my KP. It was a nice replacement for the coconut oil sugar scrub since I didn’t have to actually make anything, however, it wasn’t worth it for me to keep buying it. Plus, it was a little too abrasive for my sensitive skin.
Last year, I saw a commercial for a lotion from Gold Bond called “Rough and Bumpy Skin,” and was really eager to try it. I read reviews of it online, and they were all really positive, so I decided to give it a try. I again gave it a couple of months to really start working, since it takes a while for any treatment of KP to have an effect, and I was pleasantly surprised! No, not all of my bumps are gone, but they are greatly improved. I still have them, but I wasn’t expecting for this to be the cure-all bump-slayer, because these little suckers are incurable. I’m not sure if they are going away simply because I am getting older, or if this body lotion is really doing its job. Either way, this lotion is really moisturizing, and comes in a huge tub that lasts me for a couple of months. It doesn’t have a smell which is really important for my skin, because it typically does not tolerate scented products. I slather it on all over my body right after the shower (which is the most important time to moisturize!), and my skin is nice and moisturized for the rest of the day! This product is also really great for the winter when my skin is especially dry.
As far as how I manage my KP, I have found a routine that really works for me. I exfoliate my arms (gently!) once or twice a week with the Simple Smoothing Face Scrub, and use the Rough and Bumpy lotion everyday as soon as I get out of the shower. This works for me, and I have been through many different products to get here! Different things work for different people, so make sure you find out what helps you the most, and stick with it! My mom always told me my KP would get better as I got older, and it really has been true for me. However, waiting until you’re 30 for your KP to improve is really frustrating when you are young and unhappy with the way your skin looks, so try out a couple of different ways to see what helps!
I also made a video about this, which you can check out here!
I hope these tips helped, and that you find a way to manage your KP! Thank you so much for reading, and have a wonderful day! 🙂
This is NOT a sponsored post, and all opinions are mine.