Most people who have read my stuff here know that I don’t DO MAKEUP. Along with that, I don’t have a ridiculous regime of lotions and anti aging magic potions. The stuff doesn’t work, there is scientific evidence to prove this, and- I don’t need, nor want to spend endless hours pampering and primping myself to look— phoney. My friends always try to get me to use makeup and they’re always trying out expensive “treatments” they read about in magazines and what not.

No thanks.

I’m a plain and simple person.

When I read this article at the NYT, I felt vindicated, at last!

DR. FRAN E. COOK-BOLDEN, a dermatologist in Manhattan, is an advocate of skin-care minimalism. When a patient recently arrived for an appointment toting 20 different products she was using regularly — including an eye cream, a vitamin C cream, a wrinkle serum, a pigmentation cream, a mask, a peel, a scrub and “some sort of special oxygen detoxifying cream” — Dr. Cook-Bolden said she confiscated all but three.

O.M.G. 20 different products? What for? Who needs, really needs, all this? No one.

“It gave me a headache just to look at all of those products,” Dr. Cook-Bolden said. “Just two products, a gentle cleanser and a good sunscreen, are enough daily skin care for most people, and you can buy those at a drugstore or a grocery store.”

No shit. Unbelievable. To be honest, I use a bar of Dove soap and sunscreen…and lip balm. I never use anything else- not lotions or creams or scrubs…hmm…I guess one could say that when I’m at the beach I do love to rub sand all over me- does that count as a scrub? AND, at certain times of the year I go four wheeling with friends and we tend to rub ourselves with mud- does that count as a mask?

Dr. Cook-Bolden is part of a back-to-basics movement among dermatologists. At a time when beauty companies are introducing an increasing number of products marketed for specific body parts —including necks, creases around the mouth and eyelids — or for apocryphal maladies like visible pores or cellulite, these doctors are putting their patients on cosmetics restriction diets.

I don’t pay any attention to these products. My daughters sometimes have those glossy magazines laying around I glance through them and see all the wonderful, latest, dermatologist tested creams and serums being put out there…and I laugh. Because I know better than to believe a word of the scripts being passed off as science. Special products for necks? Creases? Eyelids? Gimme a break.

They are prescribing simplified skin-care routines requiring at most three steps: soap; sunscreen every day, no matter the weather or the season; and, if necessary, a product tailored to specific skin needs, whether a cream for pimples or pigmented spots, or a vitamin-enriched moisturizer for aging skin. Each product, they say, can be bought at drugstores for $30 or less.

3 steps?? Not me. I wash and slap on the sun screen and GO. Let’s see…a bar of soap costs me less than $2.00 (and it lasts about a month); a bottle of sunscreen costs around $3.00 (no name brand) and that lasts about 2 months…hmm. I think I might hit $30.00 a year.

For some doctors, simplifying skin-care routines is a way to make patients follow a regimen or a means to soothe irritated skin. But some dermatologists are also suggesting patients use fewer, less expensive products because they believe there is little scientific research to justify buying an armload of pricey cosmetics, Dr. Sawyer said.

“We have good medical evidence on prescription products,” she said. “But the science is fuzzy with a lot of cosmetics.”

Unlike drugs, cosmetics are not required to prove their efficacy.

This doesn’t cause me to NOT use all the fancy crap. I know there is no science behind 99% of these foolish products out on the market. I prefer to be natural and I don’t need all this stuff. I’m not overly concerned with my looks. But many women, ok most women, are. So they read the lies and buy the expensive promises and— look the same as they would if they hadn’t wasted the cash. But you can’t tell them that because they will deny it. Women have this funny way of convincing themselves that they cannot leave their homes without doing themselves up…which includes using these potions; and of course, the makeup. Poor things. Life is much simpler when one doesn’t feel dependent upon this industry.

“You have to think of cosmetics as decorative and hygienic, not as things that are going to change your skin,” said Dr. Coleman, who is a clinical professor of dermatology at Tulane University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. “A $200 cream may have better perfume or packaging, but as far as it moisturizing your skin better than a $10 cream, it probably won’t.”

I cannot imagine wasting that kind of money on these things…even that $10.00 bucks seems stiff to me. Wow.

THE back-to-basics skin-care regimen is based on practicality rather than marketing claims. It does not rely on exotic ingredients grown on far-flung islands hand-picked by natives only under a full moon.

LOL!! Please don’t tell me there really is a product that makes this claim…cause I will have go around smacking everyone who used the moonshadow cream.

Dr. Cook-Bolden, who has been a paid consultant for several mass-market cosmetics brands, suggested a mild liquid cleanser for the face. Instead of using toners, which may strip skin, or gritty exfoliation beads and microdermabrasion systems, which may irritate skin, she recommended using a washcloth to slough off dead skin cells.

The good old fashioned wash cloth works wonders, for sure. AND it doesn’t have to made of Egyptian cotton either, folks!

There’s a lot to be said for being simple and natural…it’s my way of things.

I guess, if one has the money and time it’s ok for them to waste it all on this shit. If it makes women feel good about themselves, it can’t be that bad, right? In the end it doesn’t matter- we all grow old and wrinkled and pruned and all that. No product, no surgery- can stop this. I do feel bad for those who truly cannot live without this stuff. They don’t look any better with it’s use, and I will bluntly tell them so (if I’m asked). The “beauty” industry has really stolen what I consider this to be. Beauty isn’t packaged in a jar. It’s not sold. It comes from within and nothing is better than that.