Just Raven

I KNEW there had to be a logical reason why I cannot STAND wearing makeup and perfume. I’ve been vindicated.

“Cochineal beetles, if you squish them, give you a beautiful carmine red that is used in some lipsticks,” she said. “Why would you want to eat that, right? It’s gross.”

Now gimme some TUMS please.

“Some perfumes use ambergris, which is a byproduct of digestion from whales,” she said. “It is whale puke basically.”

And a barf bag. Please. NOW!

And this is interesting too, and though I don’t use any form of makeup, this proves my point about costly products not always having higher value:

At a nearby table, Cornelia had cut a tiny chunk out of each of four lipsticks, using a wooden stirrer to smear them onto little white squares of paper.

Standing by a hot plate, Dr. Huang heated the papers so that each lipstick sample melted into its own blob of colored paste, surrounded by a tiny, widening oil stain. In some samples, the oily halo ran clear; in others, dye had turned the oil pink.

The test was intended as a predictor of how a lipstick, warmed by a person’s body temperature, might spread beyond the outline of one’s lips.

“The more the dye bleeds into the oil, the more likely the lipstick color will bleed into your lip lines,” Dr. Huang said.

The hot-plate test did not win over any converts to cosmetics.

“You would have these big runny lines!” Cornelia said. “You would look like Dracula!”

But the real lesson in this small experiment was that a few of the more expensive department-store lipsticks leaked their colors while a couple of 50-cent drugstore lipsticks did not.

Dr. Huang parsed the situation: “So price is not necessarily a predictor of durability,” she said.

Bugs and whale puke. Sweet.
Gross. Just gross. And utterly disgusting! How can anyone wear this crap? UUgh. Ick. Eew.