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april beauty favourites

april beauty favourites

1. Intro

I’m a big fan of cleaning products, but only relatively serious ones.

If I want my bathroom to smell nice and clean, I usually just use soap and shampoo. If I want my laundry to look better on the line, I go with detergents. But if I want something that will actually get rid of the dirtiest stains and grime, I turn to bareminerals.

Bareminerals are easy on the skin, effective at removing stains (just like their name suggests), and leave my clothes smelling fresh and clean too!

2. why I love bareminerals and clean beauty

I’m a huge fan of the bareminerals clean beauty haul. I’ve been using it for the past year or so, and really like the way it does what it does: provides just enough clean beauty to lift your spirits, but not too much to make you bust out crying.

In short: it’s a little bit of everything in one box. It also comes with a nice little note that says more about why they do what they do than you could ever hope to say in 140 characters (and it doesn’t have any of those pesky adverts):

It is very well done. And there is no part of this post that wouldn’t be improved by a tiny bit of polish (which we can always do at any time).

3. my favorite products from the haul

I’ve been a fan of bare minerals products for a while now, and I thought I’d share my favorite products from the haul.

This was my first ever haul, and I’m loving it! It was a bit of a challenge to find products that are affordable yet higher quality than some of the brands I’ve used in the past (like Origins or Aveda). It seems the quality gap between budget brands and high end brands is closing, as you can see.

Then again, maybe it is just me being biased because my skin has been fantastic lately.

I also have to say that I am a total believer in buying only what you need — if someone said to me that they needed only one product to cleanse their face, I would happily hand over my bank account information and spend $100 on just that one product. So like everyone else, I had to buy these products based on price and convenience.

The best part about this haul was that all of these products were under $50 (and most were under $25), which is at least half off what some brands are charging for similar products. So although all these items may not be worth $50 per product — which is still an impressive value — they do add up fast when you start using them for multiple weeks!

So without further ado:

1) Toner: This has been our go-to toner for years now (though we have since ditched our standard travel sized tube). It doesn’t smell like anything, but it does leave your face feeling clean and moisturized afterwards (which is great).

2) Cleanser: We use this every single day — it has cleansed us twice already with no irritation or dryness at all! Like every other cleansing oil we own, it also leaves your face feeling super soft after washing it off.

3) Eye Gels: These are not hydrating enough for me personally to use them on their own regularly (we use them instead of Macadamia lotion because we don’t want eye makeup smudged!). But combined with toners, they make for an incredible eye cream that moisturizes without leaving any residue behind. They also keep our eyes ultra-hydrated and bright even in the cold winter months! 4) Moisturizing Cream: This smells amazing enough to recommend by itself without having to pair with anything else. It has become our daily moistur

4. conclusion

This is a long post, but it’s important to put things in context, so here’s what I was trying to say (to be fair, some of this was published as a comment on a previous post and some of this is my own opinion):

When I started bareminerals, I had no idea what we were doing. I had no experience with persnickety marketing or with product launches.

I know now that we were lucky — but not that lucky.

So, the first thing we did was try to launch something and failed.

The second thing is that the key people involved in our launch have been incredibly supportive (although by no means has everyone been easy on us). The key person who looked at what we had done and said “this looks like it could work” is my oldest son Andrew — he still works in sprint engineering for Apple and has been since he left school 10 years ago, so he knows how to do stuff like this. The person who came up with the name Bare Minerals when we were brainstorming names because they were already being used by a very famous brand was another senior engineer from Apple, who then went on to become an investor in the company (and has now sold out). The CEO of Bare Minerals is my daughter Chloe — she got involved after her husband decided we should start a beauty company (a decision which was very clearly influenced by the fact that she loves makeup as much as I do). My brother-in-law Jim and my sister-in-law Jennifer both came up with great ideas for products too; they are both experienced entrepreneurs in their own right (Jim worked at Microsoft for 30 years before retiring), so they know how to bring together people from different backgrounds and get things done.

I don’t think any of us would want to launch something if we weren’t confident it could succeed; but there are no guarantees when you go into business ourselves. And even though the company has grown significantly since its inception and our stock valuation has soared recently due to market forces outside our control (particularly after the success of Juicy Couture), there are still challenges ahead: software bugs, bugs in external partners (e.g., an app developer who isn’t forthcoming about his or her product being used internally), financial challenges relating to manufacturing costs… But let’s put them aside for now: focus on exactly how we got where we are: