Creme de la Creme

  well, my head is just spinning!

See, I spent the weekend in the LEAST glam place on Planet Musette:  Britt, IA.  Labor Day, as the Posse knows, is my yearly pilgrimage to the Draft Horse Hitch Show. Five Hour Drive to The Back of Beyond.   Most of the people who attend this show are no-nonsense, sunbaked working farmers and horse people.  I spend the weekend in horse muck, with folks whose beauty regimen is definitely horse-centric.

But now I’m back to thinking about glamazon BEAUTY CREAMS,  Human Variety.

So…there’s been a lot of loose talk about beauty and body creams lately – perfume groups are yakking body butters like nobody’s business – maybe in preparation for winter’s drying weather?    On the lower end of the spectrum my Pacificas and Perliers are in the bathroom and they seem just fine.   But with all the talk of Carnal Flower and Jubliation 25 and Epic and MFK and Chanel (pant!pant!pant!)…I was curious:  where do folks keep that stuff?  I’m a body buttah HO, as you all know – and the heavier the deposit of perfume, the mo’ bettah, bay-bee!    But that poses a bit of a problem because at some point I think the heavy-perfume creams become more like perfume, which creates storage issues.  None of us would leave a bottle of Epic extrait in a steamy bathroom, right? ..so what about that crystal jar?  I  love slathering cream on still-damp/warm skin so I tend to drag the jar (and a little plastic spoon because YOU KNOW YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO PUT YOUR FINGERS IN THE JAR…right?) into the bathroom.  Which is a pain.  But what else can a cream-lovin’ perfumista do?   I asked one of my favorite SAs what he thought and he snapped at me “oh, just put it in the bathroom linen closet!  Most of them are in opaque jars .  What? you’re gonna go halfway across the house to the Joan Crawford Refrigerator!??? You should be using that stuff up pretty quickly anyway – it’s body cream.”  Well..yeah!  But he’s a guy!   And he’s laboring under the assumption that we are like Normal People who have, at best, 2 body butters.  Not 12.  Or 22 (ooooh!  twenty twoooo.  I would kill myself stone-dead with delight).  Another ‘guy’, Carlos Powell of Goodsmellas, said he doesn’t use heavy perfume body butters but if he did he would keep them in the same cool, dark places he keeps his perfumes.  I asked El O.  Yeah.  Moving on….  Our Posse Queen, Patty White (StC has a lot of body cream samples, btw, if you want to try some of the high-end stuff), she keeps hers in a bathroom – but not in the ‘shower’ bathroom, where it gets hot and steamy.  And they’re in a cool, dark closet.  In ANOTHER bathroom (for which I would kill everybody in this town).   Or else on her nightstand.    A lot of nightstand action, btw.  I confess to having no fewer than 4 creams, at any given time, on mine, including this incredible unscented cream from Soyphisticated Candles.  I would keep a little Joan Crawford Refrigerator in our bedroom, stocked with Amouage and Malle creams and a bottle of Bolly – but El O is on the brink as it is.  So I sneak my high-end  creams into this perpetually cool, dark little space next to his gun cabinet, behind his recurve  and quiver.  I would sneak them into the gun cab proper – but he won’t let me have a key.  Sigh.   If I get busted on the creams I will never hear the end of it.  I have got to get my own closet.   Maybe my own suite?   I have used La Mer cream (the original) as eye cream for the past 200 years – it works better for me than all other specialized eye creams. I keep it in the refrigerator crisper and dispense a week or two’s worth into a smaller container that sits in the bathroom vanity drawer (you’d think, with all this caretaking of Product, that I would look waaay better! ).  If I look too raccoonish, I take some Witch Hazel (which I also keep in the refrigerator) and  do the ol’ “cotton pads on the eyelids’ maneuver.  Then the ‘pat pat pat’ with the cream (apparently it’s the ‘pat pat pat’ that reduces the puffiness, more than the cream.  That’s what my dermatologist says, anyway.  Of course, he doesn’t use any of these creams.  He uses Dial soap.  And he looks fabulous.  sigh. guys.  I tellya. )

Curious how the retail Pros do it, I went to  Mindy Yang, proprietress of MiN NY (one of the fab destinations in the new NYC ‘perfume district’).  Mindy takes her cream storage SERIOUSLY!  Check out how she parses each type of product to its respective storage area.  Le Sigh.  No gun cabinet for her!!!  I want EVERYTHING in her arsenal – it just sounds so cool.   You can find all of the stuff she touts on her shop’s website:

The following is from Mindy:

Premium high perfume content body creams are delicate in nature. The same goes for skin care products with lots of active ingredients. It is most important to store yours in a cool spot, out of light (about 10 degrees lower than normal room temperature). Close your jar tightly closed to avoid bacteria contamination. Do not use if you notice changes in your moisturizer’s smell or texture.