Today Only: Tarte offering 30 percent discount for Earth Day

Tarte.com is running a one-day-only discount of 30 percent with the coupon code EARTHDAY.

Well, as Joan Rivers was wont to say: Can we talk? What's the point of running a sale in celebration of Earth Day? What good does it do the earth to ramp up the average American woman's lust for consumer goods?

Let's face it; if you take advantage of this generous discount, you'll add to the Earth's problems. Trucks and airplanes and factories will create more pollution. You'll get a package in the mail that will create more solid waste. For all I know, you'll endanger the polar bears and make the baby seals cry.

In other words, I smell a sales gimmick, OK? Well, OK then.

Say you're in the market for new makeup, anyway. And say you're looking for an eyebrow product that will combine brow color, brow gel, a brow brush, a teeny tiny tweezer, and a mirror, all wrapped up in a compact that's perfect for travel. You couldn't do better than to buy yourself Tarte's the toolbox.

See how it's claiming to be a $32 value for $18? They're not making that up; I believe I actually did pay $32 for it.

But with the EARTHDAY code, you can get it for $12.60. Shipping is $5.00, although is you spend $50, you'll get free shipping.

(Just be aware that you'd have to kill a lot of baby seals to take advantage of the free shipping offer.)

Hans Solo trapped in Carbonite soap FTW!

The good news is that this is an actual bar of soap. Yes, it's Han Solo that time he got trapped in whatchamacallit in -- was it The Empire Strikes Back? Anyway. If you have a Star Wars geek in your life--and who among us can say she does not--then you need to buy him or her a cake of Luxury Lane's awesome, olive-oil-infused vegan soap. For only $6.50, this could be the Greatest Father's Day Present Of All Time.

The bad news is that the soapmaker is completely backordered, and it will take 4-6 weeks for your order to arrive.

Oh well. As they say in another famous movie: nobody's perfect.

Preppy according to Poppy

Being able to laugh at The Official Preppy Handbook was my reward for

a. having to spend six years at an all-girl school;
b. having to play field hockey;
c. having to learn Latin;
d. being Episcopalian;
e. all of the above.

If you think I picked e., you're absolutely right. However, not everyone agrees:



It's coming out in September, 2010. And you know I'll buy it. And I'll read it.

But I'll be thinking "Tsk, tsk, tsk, buying clothes from the J. Crew catalog doesn't make you a prep. You have to have suffered."

"I have nothing to declare ... except genius."

by PoppyBuxom featuring TopShop

What not to do with a TopShop haul:

1. Buy a bunch of great stuff from TopShop, like those wooden platform sandals
2. excellent "Oscar" cuban-heeled baby blue nubuck lace-up sandals
3. a squashy-soft luggage brown cross-body bag
4. a cream-and-taupe window-pane check scarf
5. and then overlook the part where they'll charge me DUTY on these these items because duh, they're imported from England
   
6. and have to shell out $50 for Customs duty when the mailman drops off the package.

Where's a harbor so I can throw some tea into it?

(Luckily I really love my new loot.)

Items in this set:
OSCAR Lace Up Mid Sandals, $100
OLLIE 2 Part Wooden Clogs, $80
Washed Two Buckle Satchel, $65
Washed Check Scarf, $32
Oscar Wilde Quotes

Urban Decay Friends and Family Sale, April 6th-19th

Visit Urban Decay to access the site, and use 1SFNSF to get the discount.

Thanks to Beauty Blogging Junkie for the head's up!

My Dior Spring 2010 picks

The past couple weeks I've gone just a wee bit crazy with the on-line shopping. First of all, Nordstrom was having a "secret" beauty event. (I wouldn't call it all that secret, but I didn't see any print advertising. I guess it's secret if you only hear about it on line.)

So I popped for some Dior makeup from the Spring 2010 collection. And you can hardly blame me. First of all, how seductive is this graphic?

And then, most of the makeup in this collection has that lovely lace-y pattern pressed into it.

Anyway, I bought two items from the Dior spring collection, the Dentelles eye shadow quint

Dior 'Dentelle' Iridescent Eyeshadow Palette Pearl Glow 059

and the silver nailpolish

Dior Vernis Nail Enamel, Silver Pearl 604

which is really gorgeous. I thought a fun metallic twist on a gray would be an interesting change from the vampy purples I've been wearing lately.

Verdict? Well, the eye shadow palette was an absolute revelation. I've been reading rave reviews of Dior eyeshadow for years, and finally see what all the noise is about. The shades are gorgeous and the finish is incredibly soft. They blend so beautifully.

That being said, the shades are lighter in person than they looked on the computer screen. Lovely for spring summer, but they probably wouldn't show up as anything more than a pearly shimmer on darker complexions.

I haven't tried the polish, but I will this afternoon. I'm really looking forward to having gorgeous superstar toenails. And I need to have them before sandal season starts, or people will wonder whether I have delusions of glamor.

EQUMEN shapewear, for when your husband needs a girdle

Nothing says I love you more than lingerie, right? So how about buying something to boost your man's spirits? Not to mention his butt. And just in time for Valentine's Day.

EQUMEN is offering various undershirts and underpants, all purported to improve posture, reduce back pain and provide core support (i.e., make your keg look more like a six-pack). The guy modeling them is pretty eye-popping, isn't he?


Unfortunately, so are the prices.

The Equmen Core Precision Undershirt retails for $89.00 (for the wife-beater), $99.00 (for the v-neck), $109.00 (for the long-sleeved shirt), while the Equmen Precision Underwear retails for $59.00 - $65.00 (for long trunks), $52.00 - $59.00 (for trunks), and $49.00 - $55.00 (Speedo).

Thank your lucky stars if your husband doesn't require upper thigh control, because it'll save you ten bucks.

For more information about EQUMEN's "core-compression" technology and information on where to buy a mirdle, click here.

It's like they have little signs hanging off them that say "BUY ME."

Urban Decay and OPI--two of my favorite cosmetics companies--have brought out new products to celebrate Tim Burton's new Alice in Wonderland movie.



OPI has four new polishes: Off with her Red! (coral-ly red), Mad as a Hatter (clear with multi-colored glitter,) Absolutely Alice (teal/blue glitter suspended in a clear base,) and Thanks so Muchness (cool red metalic with a bit of red micro-glitter). Retail is $8.50.



Urban Decay's Alice in Wonderland shadow box has 16 shades.



None is new except Mushroom, a soft taupe. The rest of the shades are UD regulars like Polyester Bride, Chopper, and Oil Slick. They've been renamed to go with the movie.

The set contains 16 eyeshadows (left to right, top to bottom):
-Underland (Flash)
-Alice (Painkiller)
-Oraculum (Baked)
-Queen (Last Call)
-Cheshire (Chopper)
-White Rabbit (Polyester Bride)
-Wonderland (Maui Wowie)
-Curiouser (Grifter)
-Muchness (X)
-Mushroom (Mushroom)
-Midnight Tea Party (Midnight Cowboy Rides Again)
-Vorpal (S&M)
-Absolem (Homegrown)
-Drink Me Eat Me (Sin)
-Mad Hatter (Twice Baked)
-Jabberwocky (Oil Slick)

There are also two travel-size 24/7 Glide-On Eye Pencils in Zero (black) and Flipside (teal), and a trial-size Eyeshadow Primer Potion in Sin (champagne shimmer). Retail is $52, and they're flying out of the store.

You see my dilemma. I just bought a bottle of Primer Potion in Sin. I also just bought UD's Book of Shadows II. And really, the amount of glittery eye shadow I need or would be likely to wear would fit on the head of a pin.

It's just that ... I love the Alice books. So of course I love this stuff. Last summer I visited the Alice shop in Oxford and pored over everything in the store. I mean, I covet the OPI display, let alone the polishes. And what about that adorable pop-up packaging on the eye shadow box? Is that cute or what?

And you just know that if I don't pounce, they'll sell out and then the collection will only be available on eBay. For $200.

Luckily, I have a 13-year-old daughter, so I can buy these items and pretend I'm doing it for her.



(You'll never guess what her name is.)

Now I know what to wear to the Blissdom pajama party

Poppy print pajamas from Neiman Marcus:



With pajamas like this, who needs business cards?

You know things have gotten weird when the GWP is a ball gag ...

Has anyone else noticed how bondage-y the average store's shoe department is looking? No? Well, check out these images from the Neiman Marcus website.


Bettie

Page

is

alive

and

well

and

shopping

for

shoes

at

Neiman

Marcus.

Or if she isn't, she could be.

It's snowing Christmas tree ornaments

I know a few of you out there put up more than one Christmas tree. You have one for the main living area, and a less glamorous tree for the family room/dining room/kitchen. Some of you even put up trees in your bathrooms.

I'm not here to judge. (Except bathroom trees? ::cough::getalife::cough::) No, I'm here to confess that I'm a lazy lump who can barely manage to get one (admittedly eight-foot) artificial, already-light-bedecked Christmas tree up and decorated every year. I love Christmas trees, but it's become an enormous ordeal.

This year I decided to cut back. I would only use the ornaments I actually liked. As it turns out, I actually only really like about a third of the ornaments I own.

I cut out all the child-oriented ornaments that I used to put all over the place. No Ninja Turtles, no Babar, no Cookie Monsters. I cut out all the commercial stuff: no M&M guys on skis, no Hersey elves, no Disney or Hallmark. No seven-year-old lovingly-produced kindergarten ornaments with missing parts.

This is what was left:

1. Things that are the right color--red, green, white, gold and silver.

2. Things with religious/seasonal significance--angels, stars, Father Christmas/Santa Claus.

3. Things that are natural--snowflakes, icicles, pine cones, acorns, birds, fruit.

I thought I was putting up a minimalist Christmas tree. When you bring up three boxes of ornaments and bring two of them back downstairs, still filled with ornaments, it certainly feels minimalist.

But the tree turned out prettier than ever. In fact, I liked it a lot, and I decided to head further in this direction. I would only buy new ornaments if they fit into those three categories.

Enter an email from the Metropolitan Museum. Ten dollars off a purchase of $50.

Well, their clearance section and sale sections brought me a veritable blizzard of new snowflake ornaments! Some of them are obviously chi-chi-poo-poo collectibles, way out of my price range. But others are way marked down, and with code K697, I saved an extra $10.

The truly pathetic, I'm a lazy lump part of this? My tree is still up. Which means that if the package shows up quickly, I might be hanging January clearance ornaments on the December tree.

Why you should put this blog down right now and go buy something at Sephora

(cross-posted from my main blog.)

Hey everybody! Jen Lancaster sent me a Sephora gift card for my birthday! That is so amazing and cool that you're imploding with sheer envy, right? I got a gift card from Jen, and YOU did not. Probably. Unless she likes you, too.

So anyway, what with one thing and another, Christmas and condo fires and such, I didn't get around to actually spending it until today. I already knew what I wanted: the Sephora-only Philosophy Winter Escape gift set, consisting of a bottle of Peppermint Hot Cocoa bath gel, Melting Marshmallow body cream, and a tube of Marshmallow lip gloss.

That would be $25, and with the rest, I could get a bottle of Urban Decay Eye Shadow Primer Potion.

I don't know whether you're any kind of makeup maven, but if you check even one Youtube makeup guru, you'll find they all use this stuff before applying their eye shadow. So I wanted some. Even though I can't usually be bothered to wear eye shadow. I just wanted it, OK?

OK. So I head to Sephora.com, and discover that my Philosophy Gift Sets are marked down from $25 to $19. So I ordered two of them. And then I put the Urban Decay potion into my shopping basket. Oh, and since it was my birthday month, I got my choice of some cute freebies, so I picked out a trio of lip glosses. As well as the usual samples they like to add. Sephora was also offering free shipping. That's pretty cool, right? Two of my items were marked down, free birthday gift, free samples, free shipping.

I was all ready to check out when I remembered to google "Sephora coupon code." Sure enough, retailmenot.com had a code for an extra 20 percent off any sale item. Which knocked down the price of the Philosophy gift sets yet again.

You know how when you use a gift card, you always go over because of sales taxes or shipping? And you think, "hey, this gift card is costing me a lot of money." Well, when it was time to check out, I needed to put a total of thirty-six cents on my credit card. Score!

So then I went to twitter to brag to the internet about my super-fun Sephora shopping spree. And discovered that in a repeat of Maytaggate, dooce might be about to take on Sephora for some unspecified-but-cryptically-alluded-to crime. And I trembled, because I had just publicly sided with dooce's enemy, Sephora. The Goliath to dooce's David.

But then I realized that Sephora is the puny little weakling here. Because I checked their twitter pages, and dooce has 1,558,511 twitter followers, whereas Sephora only has 39,522. Which makes dooce the Goliath, and Sephora the David.

Well, I'm always glad to root for the underdog. After all, I'm a Red Sox fan. I'm glad I tweeted about today's sale (which is good until December 31.) I'm glad I'm providing Sephora with free PR in this blog post. If dooce is going after them, Sephora needs all the help it can get.

But I'd like to take this further. I'm going to make this my new cause. You can't be a serious blogger until you have a cause. You write an impassioned post (i.e., this one.) Then one of your blogging buddies designs a widget, and your other blogging buddies put your widget in their sidebars, and you feel that you've made the world a better place, oh lord, kumbaya.

But your cause has to be something specific. You can't just be green or recycle or against poverty. I mean, I am, I do, and hey, who isn't?

No, a blogging cause needs to be something you feel passionate about. And I do. I am extremely passionate about makeup. And so, I want--no, I need lots of people to shop at Sephora. Please, if you have any spare money at all, spend it at Sephora. Do it for the children, and if you don't like children or can't see what they have to do with a luxury makeup chain store, do it for me. I need Sephora to stay in business so I can continue to put my uncanny internet shopping skills to work during their sales. I need to continue to take advantage of their special offers. I need to keep on raking in free birthday lip glosses.

So remember. Do the right thing. Shop at Sephora.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless America.

In which I become the Dominotrix

Internet, you'll never guess what foolishness I'm indulging in at the moment. It's insane.

Remember Domino magazine? Of course you do. It was Lucky for interior decorating.

I was never in love with Domino the way some of you were. Like Lucky, it frequently went off the deep end of quirky. And sometimes an entire issue would leave me cold.

But, as with Lucky, one magazine gave me instant access to super-cool secret insider sources. All of a sudden it was easy to find out how to get my mitts on great stuff. I didn't have to climb into a time machine, become 23 years old, move to New York, and get a magazine internship to do it. I could make all those underpaid 23 year old interns do it for me.

So when Domino stopped publishing, I mourned a little bit. And bought the Domino decorating book. But that just frustrated me. After all, a book can't provide the same kind of source information that a magazine can.

So I did what I always do in these cases; I went mental. I bought the entire run of Domino, from the Spring/Summer 2005 to March, 2009.



Right now, I plan to read through every issue and bask in the quirkiness. I'm also going to go through it methodically, and when I see something that looks great, I'll check out the website.

And then ... well, I haven't figured out what comes next. I plan to do something about what I find out, like post the link, or write up a separate entry for each source--I haven't figured it out yet. But for the time being, I'd like this blog to become one-stop shopping for Domino-flavored interiors ... as filtered through my admittedly preppy, traditional aesthetic.

Review: that Olay Professional Prox Pro-X crappe

I posted a review of the sunscreen pictured above on BlogHer's Beauty Hacks, so this will be the stripped down, factory-settings version.

Olay's Professionals (or ProX or Pro-X) (and it does seem pretty stupid to me to come up with a whole new line of products and give them such a lame name) is by far the most expensive drugstore line. I mean, the starter kit sells for $67. So whatever you call them ("the Olay stuff in the red containers" works for me) the point is, are they actually worth that much money?

Now, I'm assuming you aren't the kind of skin-care fanatic who haunts makeupalley.com's skin care board, haunts Ulta and Sephora, and drops $250 a month on the latest, greatest dermatologist-developed/organic/imported products, because if you are, you have no business reading me. I have a passing acquaintance with all of that, but I have a life. And pretty good skin. And I don't expect miracles. Or need them.

That being said, if you're over 40, have dry skin, or can't tolerate titanium dioxide, I think you might like these products. They have niacinamide, (a vitamin B3 derivative) to shore up your stratum corneum, pro-retinol to aid in exfoliation and cellular turnover, glucosamine, and a cocktail of chemical sunscreens, all wrapped up in a light-reflective, unscented lotion that doesn't make me break out, leaves me with a matte finish, and a very slightly opalescent glow. There's a slight sunscreen reek when I first apply it, but it dissipates almost immediately.

I also got the Wrinkle Smoothing Cream ($47) and love it because it's rich, sinks right in, and has no fragrance. Maybe there's a masking fragrance, but I don't detect it. Thank goodness, because the last night cream I bought had ylang-ylang in it, and it drove me crazy.

No break-outs, no milia, no stink, and right now, Olay is offering a $25 rebate off any $50 purchase from the line, which makes the three-piece starter kit a real bargain.

I feel like Mikey in the Life cereal ad--I like it!

An open letter to the PR flaks out there

Dear Idiot:

You recently sent me an email suggesting I might want to post about the Easter dresses available on a website you're representing. It's a slow news day, so I checked out the pictures.


Now, I don't know what universe you live in, but the last time I checked, Easter is the only major celebration that takes place during the day. Sure, Halloween, New Year's Eve, and Fourth of July celebrations take place at night, but Easter celebrations are pretty much limited to church services, Easter egg hunts, and Easter brunches. As a result, Easter celebrations tend to be over by the middle of the afternoon.


Now, there are times where looking frisky and sexy is perfectly appropriate--for example, when offering strange gentlemen sexual favors in exchange for money. Or at a summer cocktail party.


Or at the Ascot races, where you can be as much of an exhibitionist as you like, as long as you're also wearing a huge, preposterous hat. But--just so you know--very tight, low-cut strapless mini-dresses are not usually worn to church at any time. Even if you're going to brunch afterward.

So let me give you a hint about daytime events that include religious services, like weddings, Christenings, and Bar Mitzvahs. The idea is to look "ladylike." Please acquaint yourself with the concept before sending me another email.


To sum up: the Easter bunny should never be confused with the Playboy bunny.


You're welcome,

Poppy

Can you celebrate St. Patrick's Day with style?

My latest post at BlogHer Beauty Hacks--featuring sale items from Cut + Paste, J. Crew, Old Navy, and unique crafty items from Etsy and Bondi Forest says yes, yes, yes!

Erin go braless!

This just in: Martha Stewart is on Twitter

Honestly, there's no place to hide from that woman.

Follow her @marthastewart. If you must.

My moment of glory, frugally speaking

I've mentioned before how I was trying to get up to speed with the (amazingly complicated) CVS ExtraCare Bucks program.

Well, I've been working at it pretty assiduously over the past couple of months, and I've gotten pretty good with it.

And over the Christmas holiday, I had the opportunity to show off for my entire family. We went to one of those Japanese restaurants where they cook on the table right in front of you ... a crowd-pleaser if there ever was one, especially when you have kids with you.

Dear Lord, please keep those chopsticks out of her nose ...

Also they had silly rum drinks, which pleased me.

Want to feel no pain? Have a Suffering Bastard!

But these places are not so big on dessert (which, duh, they should offer Bananas Foster, or some other flaming dessert. But nobody asks me.)


So we decided to leave and buy dessert and take it home. And there was a CVS in the same strip mall.

So we went in and picked out dessert. Edy's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream. It was $6.99.

I said I'd pay. First I had the cashier swipe my ExtraCare card.

Then I used $5.00 in ExtraCare bucks to pay for the ice cream. So it was $1.99.

Then my ExtraCare bucks for my fall spending printed up. So I got $8.50 in ExtraCare bucks.

So basically, CVS paid me to buy ice cream! And my whole family witnessed it! Woot!

(Next time I'll make sure to have a coupon, too.)