Tomorrow could be boring

Flavour fail: man gloss

I recently acquired a nifty jumbo-sized Urban Decay Primer potion (which has become a must-have beauty staple). It came packaged with various other mini-sized products, one of which was a Pocket Rocket lip gloss. It's a lovely coral pink colour and I immediately smothered some on without further inspection because coral-pink is one of my favourite lip gloss shades on the planet.

To date, the only things I've known to go wrong with lip glosses are:

1) Brush fail: the old Bobbi Brown glosses had a hairy wand that exploded to something resembling a chimney-sweep after a few applications.

2) Ageing lipline fail: the gloss creeps up where it shouldn't.

3) Lipgloss-hair fail: repeat after me - "Thou shalt not wear lipgloss on a windy day."

Whilst I'm delighted to encounter make-up novelties after over 20 years of various degrees of make-up junkedom, this new surprise wasn't a pleasant one.

The gloss tasted strangely... savoury.

I looked at the packet. Apparently it was a "Timothy" flavour. A man-flavour? Slightly worrying.

It definitely reminded me of something other than lip gloss, but what? I hadn't encountered Pocket Rocket glosses before, so I checked the Urban Decay website. I read the description and thought: "Ah; they're a pisstake of those undress-the-bikini-clad model pens that used car salesmen would buy each other for office secret santa in the 80s. How clever."

This is from the product description:

"Undress our men with the flick of your wrist! Inside the cap of our custom tube is a photo of a yummy man.

And the gloss? This formula is so slick and cushiony, you would love it even in a plain ol’ tube. Each shade varies in opacity and finish, but all have a sweet crème brûlée flavor.

Tilt the tube back-and-forth to strip them to their undies! (We've even included front and rear photos.) Whether you swoon for a future senator or a tree-hugger, one of our men is sure to please you. Our guys make awesome gifts for bachelorette parties, baby showers, or b-days."

Here's the thing. They were going for crème brûlèe, but got McCoy's Flame Grilled Steak crisps instead. Everyone who has tasted steak and the aforementioned crisps knows that these crisps taste nothing like actual steak. Instead, they're flavoured with a fairly sweet, slightly burnt, smoky, umami savoury concoction that I find quite enjoyable when served on a ridged potato product. I don't actually like steak that much. 

I don't want to have gloop tasting of it stuck to my lips. When I realised what the flavour reminded me of I laughed out loud. It amuses me that some flavourist has got away with calling this crème brûlèe.

And it tickles my inner nerd that the McCoy's marketing department has long lead with a "McCoy's - Man Crisps" -campaign.

I imagined various scenarios where this gloss might have been put through a consumer test before launch.

"How did you like it, miss?"

"My boyfriend said I tasted yummy."

Chemicals and mind-crushes

Isn't the picture Grant drew adorable? It makes more sense if you read my new column at Basenotes. This is the second in the series, entitled "A Very English Problem".

I've also got a new mind-crush in the form of Dara O'Briain. His rant about homeopathy and nutritionists is brilliant. Best quote: "Science knows it doesn't know everything or it would have stopped."

I brought back a toxic book from the library: "Toxic Beauty: How Hidden Chemicals in Cosmetics Harm You." It's written by a Reiki-healer who is convinced she knows what she's talking about, a bit like an astrologer might be convinced she knows better about heavenly bodies after talking to some people at NASA. I would despair, but luckily I've built up some resistance to this by now and my own chemistry studies are adding a whole new backbone to the way I view these scare-mongering messages nowadays. Once I finish my course I should really focus on the book I've been researching for the past few years and get it out there. It's time people stopped worrying about insignificant things and started worrying about stuff that could cause real harm instead. To themselves, to the environment and ultimately to the existence of human life itself. Trust me, whether we ingest a bit of lipstick isn't on that list.

Comfort zone

There is something deeply satisfying about what my boss calls "grunt-work" - seeing the results of your handiwork in some kind of tangible form, reaching for measurable targets, feeling physically tired after work and as though you've really done something with your body.

That's one of the sorts of things I've been getting up to recently, working in our factory and learning about yet another aspect of our business. I love it. It's like a sanctuary. But I know I'd get restless within a week if I had to work there every day.

I seem to be on top form and in the zone on a fairly narrow lane between what most hard workers and multitaskers would consider a normal level of pressure and some kind of fast lane where you're constantly a bit scared that the next task you undertake will be the undoing of you and you'll fail in some sort of spectacular way.

My comfort zone. It's pushing just beyond what I think I can actually do; looking at a challenge and thinking "shit, there is no way I can do this" and then, reflecting on it, digesting the information, learning - and doing it anyway.

Again, the above is probably fairly common. Most people seem to produce their best work when they're pushed just beyond what they think they can do.

But there's a risk of over-doing it (and for me in particular, there's a risk of over-committing myself to too many projects because I need a variety of things in order to be happy) and then the pleasurable pressure turns into unhealthy stress.

I'm super-sensitive to stress, much more so now I'm older. I'm very slowly beginning to learn when to stop before I drop. I did accidentally over-do it a few weeks ago and that was a bit humiliating. I should know better. Anyway, I've had a holiday since then and have landed rather softly back at work this time, which is quite different from when I worked in retail.

I've finally absorbed the meaning of my new job role as a trainee perfumer. I say finally, because since this April when I made the change, I've had only a level of patchy acceptance of my good fortune, not to mention the scope and responsibility of the job at hand.

The factory work has helped. The physical act of rolling up your sleeves and getting on with it was like the final piece of the puzzle.

Droplets

1. Turns out Topiramate was a double-edged sword: it stopped daily headaches and significantly lessened the severity of migraine(s) of which I had two since starting the meds, but it also made me forgetful, dopey, sleepy and all the other 7 fucking dwarfs. Reviewing with doctor and trying others. Taking a weekend break from being human guinea pig.

2. I don't think it's just me being a fragrance snob - in fact, I have gone in reverse-snobbery direction in many ways since starting the perfumery course - but lately, all the new mainstream perfume releases have been dull at best or an offensively poor effort at worst. One recent "prestigeous" line-up smells like a cast of Lynx/Axe/Impulse rejects from the pile that the evaluators thought too thin, crass and synthetic for a body spray.

3. Tuulia, my gorgeous wonderful Finnish loooooooooong-time friend had a baby girl on 11th of September. I am very happy for the whole family. It seems so unreal. She's the first of our group of 3 Uni-friends to become a mother. Not the first from the extended group, it has to be said - we do keep in touch with others too. Timo and I are going to meet the new person and take a much-needed mini holiday to Finland in a couple of weeks.

4. I'm finally fully on the perfumery course-horse. The secret to this one seems to be that I must do some of it every single day, even if it's just a little bit. I was trying to schedule in half-days, afternoons, evenings and even whole days of "course time" and they didn't work out. But since I've been fitting in 1-3 study sessions per day I've finally found my rhythm.

5. Flat hasn't sold yet. I wish it did. Want to move before next year. Ideally before winter.

Living out of bags

I once read somewhere that Bobbi Brown keeps pre-packed bags ready for all occasions. That sounds so wonderful to me right now; I want to do that when we have enough room to keep pre-packed bags in. The flat is officially on the market and we've got the first person coming to view it this Friday. Half our posessions are already sitting in Timo's mum's garage, waiting for us to find a proper home to settle down in.

Recently I've been travelling a little bit more again; back and forth between Surrey and Poole, London and Leeds, mostly. Just came back from Leeds this evening. I'm tired, but over-tired so that it's difficult to stop thinking.

When I was younger (a phrase that immediately conjures up an image of a wrinkled old prune, which, I hasten to add, I am not, though occasionally feel like), I travelled with a much less conscious awareness of the little discomforts and nuisances one encounters. The wonderful child-like way of experiencing the nasty stuff as it happens rather than worrying about it in advance or getting unduly stressed out about it afterwards. Although I did get my first ever migraine on a trip to France when I was 18. It was such a frightening experience and then I had a very long train journey to La Rochelle the next day, which felt like torture. I was scared because I'd never felt so ill (but as a true testament to how laissez-faire I was about that sort of stuff back then, I didn't actually go to the doctor until back home in Finland some weeks later!).

After nearly 20 years of migraines, I'd never really considered that they could be treated because nothing I'd ever been given had worked. And there could be a huge gap, even 6 months when I wouldn't get a full-blown migraine, so I'd slowly start to think "pff, it's not so bad, maybe I won't get one again" until the next one would hit and I wanted to head back to France, but via time-travel, back to the guillotine days and have them chop my head off. The pain and nausea is indescribable and half of my face sort of paralyses, a bit like in a stroke. Then, providing all goes well, I pass out and wake up feeling groggy, sore, disoriented and craving something sweet. If all doesn't go well, you don't want to know.

Anyway, as an almost incidental aside into investigating why since last summer I've had benign, but annoying vertigo, my consultant sent me to a neurologist.

The neurologist turned out to be a lovely chap who'd been to Finland (I always find that a good sign, haha, only half-joking) and prescribed topiramate, one small dose to be taken daily. Possibly for the rest of my life. Depends if it works and depends if I get side-effects.

Now the trouble about side-effects is that technically you should read them to be aware of them, but in reality, it's sort of better not to, because you could accidentally create the side-effects by having suggested to yourself that they could occur.

But I'm pretty sure that before topiramate I would not have lost my return ticket from Leeds, accidentally packed the remote control from the hotel room I stayed in (!), or spent a whole half an hour on the phone to a colleague last week, convinced it was one weekday when it was in fact, another. One of the side-effects has to do with short-term memory. I don't think there is anything wrong with my memory, but something has made me even more scatter-brained than normal. This should be entertaining. As if travelling wasn't stressful enough.

Or it could be the stress of selling this property. I don't feel it on a conscious level. I just feel this diluted sense of "home". As though the concept of a core safe-haven is eroding from underneath me without a replacement in sight. One of the things I really need to stay healthy is a private, secure, cosy nest. Now this has turned into a show home - to a place people will be coming to "view" and evaluate, somewhere that isn't our home any more and we must begin to say our goodbyes to. And I have no idea how long this process will take and when we'll be moving and where to. At least we have a rough idea of the general area, but that's it.

I've toyed with the idea of getting a caravan for a few months. It would certainly solve the bag problem.

The trouble with being a science student

I read a lot and I think a lot.

I don't want to live forever, but I'd like a way of knowing what happens to the world, the human race, the Universe and everything.

There are days when I wonder what the point of living is, given that it's likely we'll [the Universe] either crunch or expand out of existence anyway, so even if we somehow [rather improbably at this point] manage to colonise space, there will be precisely zero left of all of our weighty human efforts at the end of it all.

Of course if there's a crunch, there will hopefully be a new Big Bang as a result of it (which makes one wonder how many Universes there have been before ours), but that'll be like shaking the celestial Etch-a-Sketch and starting again, with no trace of our "achievements"; just the building blocks everything is made up of.

Have a nice day!

Study Notes - a column about perfume studies

Basenotes, the family-owned and run perfume shrine with over 13.000 listed fragrances, industry news and a lively community has a new columnist. I'm hoping to make it a monthly series about being an adult distance-learner of perfumery and a trainee perfumer. For those of you who have been wondering who I work for, wonder no longer. The article contains the answer.

I still can't quite believe any of this is happening. It has been a bizarre journey. And this is only the beginning! I might still manage to somehow spectacularly cock it up. That'd make entertaining reading, but please cross your fingers for more of a positive outcome.

(Illustration by Grant Osborne)

iGoogle dragon theme!

Last week, I downloaded a trial version of Corel Painter 11. It's a little buggy, but I am still lusting after it. I was on holiday, so had a few days to mess around. I ended up designing a dragon theme for iGoogle. You can add it to your Google home page from here (and please do add your comments and ratings! I believe they might help improve the ranking of the theme, which in turn would get it in front of more people).

I'm still using the same old Wacom tablet I've had for years and it's doing fine. With Painter, I found that the pencil tools were convincing enough within the programme so I didn't need to do what I normally do (which is to draw with pencils first, scan the result and continue digitally).

There is no way I can afford (or even properly run) Painter just now, but I will budget for it once I upgrade my desktop PC. Maybe next year. My desktop PC is also getting on a bit and unlike the Wacom tablet, this is starting to be a problem.

(Cross-posted from the portfolio blog).