There are a few things that can seriously make or break how your finished face turns out after you have applied the artwork that is your makeup routine.  The color of your eyeliner, how dark your bronzer is, or your blush.  Now, as you all know, I’m a huge fan of makeup that’s not terribly expensive but still an excellent product (Holla at me NYX), but blush is something that you have to spend time, effort, and a little money on.  One of my biggest pet peeves is shitty blush.  Why? Because it makes you look like one of those terrifying vintage dolls, like ​this: 

The absolute biggest pain in my ass is my skin.  My over sensitive, over reactive, emotional and unstable skin.  I have dry skin, acne-prone skin, oily skin, and reactive to everything-under-the-sun skin.  It all depends on time of the year or straight up time of day.  I break out in cystic acne if I even look at my face wrong.  It blows.  So, the ultimate question now is, what do I use to clean my skin?  Oh boy, the ultimate end all, be all question.  For realz.  I’ve been through the drug store brands, the nicer brands, the all natural DIY stuff, and I feel like I’ve finally found a combo that MOSTLY works for me.

So, let’s talk about cleansers || I had picture perfect American Girl Doll status skin until the day I turned 20.  Literally.  I had a few zits here and there, but it was basically flawless for the first two decades of my life.  You could have called me Kit Kittredge. Then I went through a reaallyyy nasty breakup, put some BareMinerals on my skin (remember I talked about BareMinerals being the devil in an earlier blog?)  and I figured out I was gay all in one year.  So, year 20 was clearly smooth sailing for this girl.  I used to use Mary Kay’s Velocity line, which was the shiiiittttt and I used it from the time I was 12 until they discontinued it, can you guess, right around the year I turned 20.  Jesus.  So then I had to figure out what to do after that.  I tried some other lines from MK, which just didn’t do it for me, and I went back and forth with some drug store stuff.  I tried Philosophy’s Purity Cleanser, which all of my friends raved about and it smelled like freakin pound cake, so you can imagine how devastating it was for me when it made me break out.  I tried Clinique, which my skin also hated and I threw in the trash two days after buying it.  

A year or so a friend gave me a bottle of Proactiv Skin Smoothing Exfoliator, which was the best thing to happen to my skin in years.  I only used the first step, I didn’t use the full system.  Historically my skin HATES skin care systems, so I stuck with just the wash.  My really gross, dry, painful acne cleared up pretty quickly, and I had the least amount of breakouts in years.  But, the flip side is that I hate putting a ton of excess chemicals on my skin. Proactiv is full of these, obvi (and also runs $30 a bottle which only lasts me about three months).  So this past fall I went on a mission to find an alternative that my skin would equally enjoy, that was more on the all natural side of things.  I do, however, use this every once in awhile if my skin is suffering a particularly crippling and disabling breakout.

Call me vain but I love my birthday. Some of my fondest memories (or at least what I can remember/what people have told me the next morning over hungover brunch)  are from past birthday adventures shared with the people I love most. ​