Balancing the beauty budget

Beauty products have got to be one of the most confusing purchases around.

Which products do you actually need to look good?

And does anything ever work as well as the ads promise?

Here’s how I get my beauty budget to balance: the products I spend more on, the cheap products I love, and most importantly, the mistakes I will never make again!

Why are beauty products so confusing?

If you’ve ever felt bewildered by beauty products, join the club. There’s a lot to be confused about!

Firstly, there’s such a range or products. There’s something available to fix every possible ‘problem’ with your looks — real or imaginary — and it can be difficult to tell what you actually need.

Secondly, prices range from a few dollars to a few thousand, and it’s hard to tell whether spending more gets a better product. Rumour has it that when you buy from a cosmetics counter, you’re just getting a supermarket product in prettier packaging, from a pushy sales assistant in prime retail space. Is it true? I don’t really know; I’ve never worked in the beauty industry so I’m not sure who to believe.

Thirdly, the sales pitch is really emotive, which makes it harder to choose your products rationally. A lot of cosmetics advertising suggests that you must buy products to stop the signs of aging before they appear, lest you end up looking like a prune. If I was guaranteed to look like old boot leather in a few years if I didn’t spend thousands of dollars on skincare today, of course I’d spend the money… and that’s what the ads tap into.

Lastly, you need a PhD (or at least a medical degree) to really understand what works and what doesn’t. I’ve heard that sunscreen is the only thing that’s scientifically proven to stop your skin from aging, but there are a lot of doctors endorsing products that make other claims. Short of using the products on only one side of your face, you’ll probably never know whether the products you use actually work.

Beauty products I splurge on

I’ve made some disastrous beauty purchases over the years, which I’ll tell you about below.

When I’m deciding where to spend my beauty budget, I now have a simple rule: I’ll buy a more expensive product if it spends all day, every day, on my face, hair or body. Otherwise, cheap will do.

If you’re interested in what’s hiding in my makeup bag and bathroom cabinet, here’s what you’ll find:

Sunscreen: Clinique Super City Block

If I could have only one beauty product, I’d pick Clinique Super City Block. I have pale skin and live in Sydney, Australia so sun protection is the first priority. But if sun cream feels icky on my skin or makes me look like a ghost, I quickly stop wearing it and get sunburned instead. So, a good tinted sunscreen like this one is really important. Plus it evens my skin out enough that I don’t need to wear foundation every day… not that I’d bother, anyway.

The other items that I think are worth the extra money are:

Lip balm: MAC tinted lip conditioner

MAC tinted lip conditioner lasts forever (my half-finished tub is over a year old and has been used everyday) and feels much nicer on the lips than anything else I’ve tried. It keeps them really soft and gives enough colour for every day, so it’s basically two-in-one.

Perfume: Clinique Simply

I HATE cheap perfume. After using beautiful essential oils from France, everything synthetic smells a bit like cat pee. Clinique Simply is quite nice though, and saves the world from my own disastrous experiments in amateur perfumery. This is a good thing.

MAC brow set

This is quite a new purchase, and like most things I use regularly, it’s dual purpose. It evens out the colour of my bushy, unruly blonde eyebrows and keeps them in place at the same time. Brilliant!

Concealer: Clinique Quick Corrector

I hardly ever bother with concealer, but when I do it’s Clinique Quick Corrector. It goes on very smoothly, unlike any of the cheapies I’ve tried, plus it’s pale enough to match my skin without looking sickly.

Hair product: Kusco Murphy Bedroom Hair

This Kusco Murphy styling product is the only product I normally wear in my hair and I love it.

So that’s the products that make it onto my ’splurge’ list. Everything except the concealer is used almost every day and on average each of these products lasts a year, so on a cost-per-use basis, they’re super-cheap.

Cheap beauty products I love

If I only use a product occasionally (say, gold eyeshadow), I keep it cheap. There is no point paying a stack of money for something that only comes out of the drawer three times a year.

I’m also very skeptical about expensive skincare products and mostly stick to the cheapies. After a few allergic reactions to high-end products, I’m not willing to risk much money on a moisturiser I might have to give away. Plus, if dermatologists say that fancy ingredients can’t penetrate into the skin, how are they supposed to actually do all that stuff they promise in the ads?

But enough about the things I won’t spend much money on. Here’s my favourite low-end beauty products:

My favourite cheap mascara: Maybelline Great Lash

I love Maybelline Great Lash (which all the beauty editors recommend). These get thrown away as soon as they start clumping (about every three months) so it seems pointless to pay more.

UPDATE: My new favourite cheap mascara is Rimmel Extra Super Lash.

My favourite cheap eye shadows: Rimmel

I’m an amateur when it comes to eyeshadow application, so all the fancy stuff is lost on me. My preferred technique is to find a pretty colour and smudge it over my eyelids with my fingers, which would probably make most makeup artists apoplectic. It works great with these, and if it looks nice, who cares if I did it the ‘wrong’ way?

Dove soap

Everyone’s favourite, it cleans and moisturises at the same time. This plus a loofah keeps my skin looking and feeling nice.

Johnson’s skincare

The Johnson & Johnson ‘gentle’ products in the supermarket actually live up to their name, so they’re my current favourite.

My favourite cheap haircare: Klorane haircare

Gentle, herbal products available in Australian chemists (kind of like American drugstores), they smell lovely and do a great job on hair.

My biggest beauty product mistakes

Now that I’ve shown you what I do buy, I’ll share the things I’ll never buy again.

The biggest beauty product mistakes I’ve ever made are Stila eyeshadow and an Armani eyeliner pencil. While there’s probably nothing wrong with the products, they cost a bomb and have never looked good on me. In both cases, the sales girls said they were perfect for my colouring and really easy to use, but neither of these statements turned out to be true.

I now prefer to buy four cheap eye-shadows to find one that looks great, than pay cosmetics salesgirls to tell me what they think I want to hear.

I also bought MAC foundation a while back, because every beauty editor says you must buy good foundation. It looks really nice in photographs but it’s way too much for everyday, so the jury’s still out on whether it was a good buy. If I became a paparazzi-stalked celebrity tomorrow I’d probably swear by it, but in real life it’s not especially useful.