As a teenager, I was a huge music buff. You ever see the movie, High Fidelity, and you know how all they ever do is make All Time Top 5 lists? I can relate because that is the total music geek thing to do. Sit around and make lists for everything.

So in honor of the former music geek in me, here is my All Time Top 5 Desert Island Beauty List (in no particular order):

1. Bobbi Brown Blemish Cover Stick

2. Lancome Definicils Mascara

3. Vaseline Petroleum Jelly

4. Cake Beauty Milk Made Hand Buffer

5. Manor Hall Soap Company Butter Me Better Soap

Wow, that was a hard list to make. I’m sure next week, this list will change, but for now that is my list.

I want to know what is on your All Time Top 5 Desert Island Beauty List. Share your list in the comments!

Now here’s a Valentine’s Day treat to get excited about! All of this is yours free with a minimum $28.50 purchase at the Macy’s Lancome counter.

I’m a big believer in only buying makeup counter products (i.e. Estee Lauder, Clinique, Lancome, etc.) when there is a free gift involved. After all, the cost of those free gifts are probably being billed into the regular products that you’re buying, so why not get what you’re paying for?

The gift items are a collection of Lancome’s best sellers: Tresor perfume, Definicils mascara, Bi-Facil, Renergie Microlift R.A.R.E. face and eye cream, Color Design eye shadow quad and lipstick.

The Definicils mascara is definitely a reason to get this set. I’ve yet to find such a good all-around mascara (and trust me, I’ve been trying).

The Bi-Facil, on the other hand, seems to have lots of devoted fans, but I don’t get the hype. It’s a little too oily for my taste. I’d much prefer to go with The Body Shop on eye makeup remover.

Offer ends February 24.  Happy Valentine’s Day my lovelies!

Always one to keep my eye out on what’s going on at Tarte HQ, I’m really excited about the new Ready, Set, Glow Kit. It’s an exclusive to Sephora.com and features the following items that will get your lids, lips, cheekbones and collarbones ready for any big night out:

The items are currently sold individually, and some of them I’ve already tried in the past so I can vouch that they are good ones to include in your collection (links to past reviews are noted).

This is the first time all of the items will be sold together. What is a $94 retail value is now available as one set at Sephora.com for just $45. A definite steal in my book.

Tarte is one of my favorite brands, so I was very excited to try their Lights, Camera, Lashes! Mascara.

This product promises the trinity of length, volume and curl. Carnuba and candellia wax help extend the lashes, synthetic film helps hold curl and soft esters derived from olives add volume and shine. How can a girl refuse that?

I found that this product does all three decently as promised, though there were no particular homeruns in any individual area. But hey, that’s the nature of the multi-purpose beast.

That said, I still enjoy this product because it’s great at defining and separating my lashes. So I end up with that natural, “I woke up looking this fantastic” kind of look.

A full size tube retails for $18.

Do I really need to write a review on these?

These gorgeous new Fall Fantasy eye and cheek palettes from Stila could make me look like Krusty the Clown, and I’d still go buy them for the beautiful packaging.

Happy Thursday! I’m sure you’ve been working your little tail off this week. I don’t advocate slacking off on the job, but everyone deserves a little breather now and then. So I decided to take mine and check out what’s going on at Benefit Cosmetics.

They have a new line out called Love Your Look, and I personally love this line. The concept is a makeup line that matches your lifestyle. So you can choose from three different color families depending on your preference: light neutral, medium neutral or dark neutral.

You know me, I’m all about looking like you didn’t try. This line gives you the tools to look positively effortless. And as with the rest of Benefit’s offerings, expect fun packaging, quirky names and amazing performance.

The Love Your Look line includes Creaseless Cream Shadow/Liner that is blendable, crease-proof and smudge-proof:

Silky Finish Lipstick provides sheer coverage that is buildable:

Sheer Cream Blusher is a blendable blush that dries to a powder finish for a totally natural look:

I’m impressed, and am definitely planning to check the products out further. Has anyone else tried them, and have anything to say?

Let’s take a minute now and talk about eye creams. I’ve got a doctor father-in-law who says that you’re just as well off using regular moisturizer around your eyes as you would using a special cream. I’m not at a point in my life, at least where wrinkles are concerned, where I can refute him or not. But I look at eye creams as I do environmental vigilance. If I do my part and recycle my plastic bottles and magazines, eventually something good’s gotta happen, right? So with eye creams, it’s better something than nothing, right?

So I started using Avon Anew’s Alternative Intensive Eye Cream a couple weeks ago. It’s formulated to lessen darkness around the eyes, reduce puffiness, smooth fine lines and wrinkles, and treat the factors that can intensify the appearance of dark circles.

How does this happen, you might ask? Good question. One ingredient is TDPA, a patented, pharmaceutical-inspired ingredient that has been shown to inhibit tyrosine (an enzyme that triggers pigmentation) activity. In addition, you’ve got a host of botanical extracts including azadirachta indica (try saying that ten times fast), soybean root, yeast, fennel, green tea and rosemary.

The cream is light and sinks right into my skin. I don’t suffer from dark circles or wrinkles yet, so I can’t report on whether it works or not. But I do plan on continuing use of the product so that it’s a long time before I ever get to that point. In the least, the cream has helped hydrate the area around my eyes. And hydration is always welcome in my home.

A 0.5 fl oz jar retails for $25.

So tell me, what are your opinions on eye cream? Worth it, or waste of time?

So if you’ve been following so far, I recounted Friday’s adventures in my previous post. Now it’s on to Saturday’s.

I met up with my friend, Kelly, at Sephora to do a little shopping and browsing. I showed her the Benefit Boi-ing concealer which I had purchased for my mother-in-law for Christmas after reading many a-glowing review on various beauty blogs. Kelly and I both sampled the product on ourselves (under the eyes) and declared it a winner. The texture was light and highly blendable, and the coverage unbeatable. So we each popped one into our shopping bag.

Since I was at the Benefit stall anyway, I asked a sales rep to help me with the Benefit Benetint. I’d been reading about this product for ages and finally got up the nerve to try it. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a liquid blush. The product is watery and rose colored. The applicator is like a nail polish brush. You dab the product onto your cheeks and blend with your fingers. I thought the color was pretty good, but it just took too much effort to apply, so henceforth I am sticking to my Tarte Cheekstain. Much easier to use.

Then, Kelly asked the sales rep if she could get some help with the smoky eye look. The end result was fantastic and Kelly took home the Stila Smoky Eye Palette. THE MOST AMAZING PRODUCT EVA.

Not only does the palette have everything you need to create the smoky eye look, IT TALKS TO YOU. Yes, there’s a button that you push and the freakin’ thing starts giving you a tutorial on how to do the look! Plus, the cover of the palette is one of those hologram thingies where you tilt it and the image changes. Really, really neat and an exclusive to Sephora.

Since Kelly tried the smoky eye look, I thought I’d do the contrary and ask for an au naturale look for the eyes. I was directed to TheBalm ShadyLady Cream Eyeshadows. Apparently TheBalm is a trade industry secret and every makeup artist keeps the brand’s products in their kits.

I had my eyes dusted all over with Mysterious, a pale, pink shimmery cream shadow. Then Jinx was applied over the crease area - this was a dark brown shimmery color in the pan which was applied with a light touch for a soft look. The key here is to use a broad concealer brush with synthetic bristles. Natural hair brushes are porous and will sop up powders that are liquidy or creamy - then when you go to apply the color, it comes out blotchy and uneven. So the end result of my naked eye? A subtle, pretty look with a bit of pop thanks to the shimmer in the shadows.

Before we went to check out with our purchases, I picked up one more item. For now, I’ll have to leave you in suspense over what it was as I am still playing with it. A full report to follow!

My updates have been woeful, I admit. In fact, they’ve been so woeful that even my spam commenters are giving up on me. (FYI - I’m usually bombarded by hundreds of spam comments a day, which I weed out behind the scenes so that they don’t mar up the site.) You know it’s bad when spam commenters are giving up.

Anyway, seeing as it’s Valentine’s Day just around the corner, my thoughts have turned to all things romantic. And by romantic, I’m thinking big blooming flowers. Which is coincidental because Clinique’s Spring 2007 makeup collection is called Fresh Bloom.

The collection is a beauty indeed. Just check out the Fresh Bloom Allover Color for the face, which is a work of art in itself. It’s very reminiscent of the Yves Saint Laurent Opium Makeup Palette from this past Fall, but I prefer the Clinique version for its softness and femininity. This is neat as you can either select one color to use, or just swirl your brush through all of them for a blend.

The Color Surge Eyeshadow Trio is a limited edition palette (tell me, who isn’t doing limited edition these days?). But I love it because of the purple - my favorite color! By the way, Spring is all about the new smoky eye which you can achieve with these soft blush-based colors, deep black mascara and a stroke of black eyeliner on the top and bottom lash lines.

Finally, check out the Color Surge Butter Shine Lipstick, which is a blend between a lipstick and a gloss. As you can see, Clinique is offering lots of pretty pink shades for the upcoming season. Remember fall’s red lips? Well, pink is Spring’s take on it, and I’m breathing a sigh of relief. Pink feels tons more doable to me than those deep reds. I’ll leave that to the experts.

I hope everyone has been properly stuffed these past four days. I know I got my eats on.

So Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. Are you ready this year? I’ve been ready since October, which is quite early for me. Usually the holidays end up biting me in the ass on December 21. Yes, that is an admission. I’m a scrambler. At least these past couple of years I have been.

But this year, I’ve already begun not only brainstorming gifts to give, but gifts to get!

This weekend, while visiting my in-laws in Pennsylvania, Andy and I went to the local mall. On Saturday (couldn’t bear the thought of those crowds on Black Friday).

We promptly split up, and I made a beeline for the Macy’s beauty department. I browsed through each and every counter, but ended up lingering at the Lancome counter where I struck up a nice long conversation with the saleslady.

Total side note, but I’ve noticed that as I get older, I’ve grown chattier. Like, I’m the kind of person who starts talking to strangers on the bus about household cleaning products and skin rashes and stuff like that. Eek! I’m totally going to be that embarrassing parent that the kids are going to drag through life so that I have as little time as possible to impose public humiliation upon the family name. Yes, that’s going to be me!!!

But back to the main point. I fell in love with the Lancome Color Design Palette in Jeweled, one of their holiday eyeshadow gift sets (retails for $40). I already have one great purple eyeshadow from Stila, but after much pondering decided that six more in slightly varying shades was absolutely necessary.

So voila, it is on my wish list this year!