I was thinking about brand loyalty recently because I noticed that while I love Bumble & bumble hair products, I tend to buy all sorts of random shampoos. I have a stack of them in my shower ranging from fancypants expensive salon varieties to good old drugstore cheapskate brands. My basic requirement on shampoo is that it needs to smell good, I guess — I’ve never really noticed that one makes a major difference over another.

Skin care’s another story, though. I am officially fussy about the stuff I use on my face, and fiercely loyal to one particular brand, who I swear is not paying me to say so: philosophy.

I’ll admit I’m kind of a sucker for their great packaging and the fragrance of their line (lots of lavender), but I also think their stuff just . . . works. Awesomely. My favorite items:
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I recently detailed my everyday makeup routine in order to recommend the various beauty products I’m addicted to, and since that writing I’ve gone and had myself a baby. As it turns out, newborns really put a cramp in a girl’s ability to primp, something about “needing to be fed and cared for all the time”. God, you’d think they were INFANTS or something.

Anyway, I thought I would post my Absolutely Must Have makeup items — the products I can slap on my face in twenty seconds if I’ve got two wailing children to attend to — and hopefully hear your own in response. I picked the three beauty products that would make the difference between feeling human and feeling like a train wreck if I were to, say, venture out in public.

(Those of you with naturally beautiful skin who never wear a stitch of makeup can watch from the sidelines, hopefully while sitting in gum. What? Come on, the universe needs to be unkind to you in SOME manner, don’t you think?)

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Okay, I am currently on a break from baby-wrangling so we can talk about a deeply important subject, people: HAIR. Specifically, how to make it look halfway decent when you don’t have the luxury of taking your sweet time with it. Like for instance when you’ve got a newborn making that constipated-sheep sound — beehhhh . . . beehhhhhhh — and a toddler saying, “Juice, Mommy? Juice? Milk? Juice? Milk?” over and over as though he were lost in the middle of the Sahara on the brink of dehydration rather than standing there with a cup full of water, which apparently is Unacceptable For Human Consumption.

I’ll tell you what works for my hair, which is an annoying combination of being curly underneath but straight on the outside. Unless it’s blow-dried and bitch-slapped into some semblance of smoothness I’ve got a head full of thick, yet limp frizziness. LAME. Here are my very favorite products for getting my hair as close to sleek and shiny as possible on a limited schedule:

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