Makeup

A Christmas gift guide for moms

For your perusal, I have spent a good chunk of my day surveying the moms in my life. My grandmother, my mother, my friends navigating the first throes of child-rearing. What would they delight in finding under the tree this year? “Sleep,” the new moms say. Well, I can’t help much with that. But I can recommend a bunch of excellent products. Delight the mothers in your life with a couple of items from this list (and if she’s really sleep-deprived, I’m telling you, buy the Lush pillow spray). Dyson Airwrap Styler Quite simply the item at the top of the wish list for every woman I surveyed while researching this gift guide. No extreme heat, beautiful salon-style hair in minutes.

gift

I sold my soul to a cosmetics store

If you’ve ever read a headline along the lines of “Kardashian Family Worth Combined Zillion Dollars” and wondered how a gaggle of uneducated, tawdry, plastic people with a combined vocabulary of Joe Biden manages to account for, like, 10 percent of America’s GDP, you obviously haven’t visited a cosmetics store recently. In search of something to even out my complexion, made a little too ruddy for my liking by the harsh Pennsylvania winter and the constant firing of a gigantic coal furnace, I ventured to my local Ulta Beauty store. I just wanted a little something to temper my Rumpole-of-the-Bailey-after-a-bottle-of-cheap-claret skin tone. What I got was a heaping helping of humble pie and an appreciation for Covid masks behind which to hide my hideous mug.