What's so fucking special about Crème de La Mer? With dupes! (From Of Faces and Fingers)

I have a couple of longish review-type posts (remember when I used to write those regularly?) that are half finished, but real work has been preventing me from completing them. Soon that real work will be over, and I'll have time to post those in between desperate job searching.

In the meantime, check out this fantastic comparison between the exorbitantly priced Crème de La Mer and some other, rather basic, and much cheaper moisturizing creams. The upshot is that, unless you believe the plant extracts in La Mer actually do something (follow the link above to find out why they probably don't), all these products are similar. There are some decent moisturizing ingredients in La Mer, but they aren't exclusive or expensive. I've reviewed the Curel Intensive Healing Cream before, and it's a brand name version of the stuff that hospitals or pharmacies provide to diabetics in huge tubs. Effective, for sure, but very utilitarian and certainly not worth its weight in gold.

Curel Intensive Healing Cream update

So I said I'd let you know if this cream made any lasting difference to my dry cuticles and nails or my feet. Here's the photo I took after using it for 4 days straight, several times a day;

A little better, maybe? I don't really see a big difference (you can see the before photo here). Certainly not more than what you would get from regular use of any other decent hand cream. So I'm going to say no to the "healing" properties of this stuff. (I didn't notice a huge improvement on my feet either.)

It moisturizes very well and makes things look and feel better when you use it. It absorbs quickly and doesn't have any fragrance whatsoever. If those things are important to you, you could give it a shot. Personally, I'm going to stick with lotions and creams that don't come in a jar or pot, because I don't particularly like rubbing it on my feet and then stick my fingers back in there.

BzzAgent Review: Curel Intensive Healing Cream (Part I)

Disclosure: I received this product free for review from BzzAgent.

I got some little tubs of this stuff to try out recently. Let me tell you: this is some utilitarian shit. For some reason I feel like this is the kind of cream that your grandmother brings home from the hospital. I don't know where I'm getting that image from, but there it is. It's there to do a job. No frills. It's absolutely unscented, for one thing.

So usually in a review of something like this, I get into the ingredients. The ingredients here are definitely workhorses. No nonsense, tried and true. How many cliches can I fit into one post? Let's find out! Here are the ingredients:

Water, Mineral Oil, Petrolatum, Glycerin, Microcrystalline Wax, Cetyl PEG/PPG-10/1 Dimethicone, Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Glyceryl Dilaurate, Paraffin, Dimethicone, Cetyl PG Hydroxyethyl Palmitamide, Magnesium Stearate, Isopropyl Myristate, Magnesium Sulfate, Glyceryl Oleate, Ethoxydiglycol, DMDM Hydantoin, Methylparaben, Butylene Glycol, Eucalyptus Globulus Leaf Extract, Propylparaben

Those are all your basic ingredients designed to moisturize and leave your hands feeling smooth. I'm not going to analyze them one by one, but I don't see any problems here. If you don't like petroleum products for environmental reasons, then I guess that's your thing, fine, but mineral oil is a good moisturizer that rarely causes allergic reactions and is non-comedogenic. Glycerin I've talked about before. The formula for this stuff is pretty similar to this cream designed for babies, except that this Curel one includes preservatives, which I am glad for, since it's packaged in a jar/tub.

Ugh, jar packaging. Another thing I've complained about in the past. What is the point? I guess it makes it seem more medicinal? Or heavy duty? I don't know. It's definitely trying to create some psychological association for you, because it would be more stable and less prone to contamination in a squeeze tube. This cream is thick, but it's not so thick that it wouldn't dispense perfectly well from a tube.

But on to the actual test.

I've been using this stuff for a little over a week. I wouldn't say that I have "extremely dry skin" at this point in the year, but I have some dry and/or rough spots, like the bottoms of my feet and my nails and cuticles. So that's where I tested it.

I'll spare you photos of my feet, but here are my nails an hour or so after removing nail polish and then doing my usual whatever around the house. I might have washed a couple of dishes, but mostly I just fucked around on my computer.

My nails and cuticles are pretty dry and just all-around shitty. That is their normal state.