brunobaby

Yesterday morning as I was getting ready for work, NY1 news had a feature on exchanging cosmetics online. You know, the practice of selling your (hopefully slightly) used make-up on sites like eBay and Makeup Alley.

My husband was appalled.

"That's not sanitary! You should only buy make-up that's sealed."

"That defeats the whole purpose of the site! The idea is you've used it first and then found out it's not right for you. Under what circumstances would it still be sealed?"

"If...you got it as a gift from somebody," he offered, negotiating the precarious waters of Chickland.

"That would only apply about ten percent of the time, like if it's something my mother bought during Clinique Bonus Time." Most of the time, it's more like:

• You tried it on in the store and it looked good there, but magically made you look like a mime when you got it home;
• You were having a really good hair day but then decided to push it and walked into Sephora;
• You slowed down by the make-up counter in Macy's or Bloomingdale's and the salesgirl said, "Would you like to try our new Really Reds?"
• It's a great product, but completely impractical for your real life.

DuWop Lip Venom's "Venom Gloss" would be a great example of that for me. It's this lip gloss that's infused with some kind of cinnamon oil that makes your lips swell up like a temporary collagen treatment. I sampled some in "Snowberry" one afternoon at Sephora. The stuff makes your lips tingle, like wiping them with Red Hots candy. A few minutes later I chanced to look at myself in a mirror, and I had this great, pouty look that reminded me of the girls in the "Slicker" ads when I was a kid. I shelled out the $16 bucks and brought a tube home.

I ended up wearing it exactly twice. I found that either the color clashed with whatever I was wearing, or I was going to work and it was inappropriate to have bee-stung lips, or I would walk down the street on a windy day and end up with fifteen flyers and a discarded copy of the New York Metro stuck to my face. Plus, even though I'm meticulously neat and I would screw the cap on tight after using the product, somehow it leaked all over my make-up bag, and everything I would touch would end up "Snowberry."

I pitched it out, but now I think it would have been a good idea to have posted an ad for it on one of those sites. I would probably have asked about five dollars plus shipping. I could have seen a little of my money back. Plus, the next customer could have used it twice and passed it on to yet another customer, and then she would pass it on to yet another customer, and I would have started some tribal custom going.

And if it's a tube, you're probably not getting a lot of cooties on it. You wash off the opening, the person who gets it maybe squirts a tiny bit of it out and washes it away before putting the rest on her face. Unless there are "air cooties" that get sucked back into the tube after you squeeze it.

So under the right circumstances, used cosmetics are not the worst idea.

Used mascara, however...no way.