Posts Tagged ‘deodorant’

A post about perfumes and a review

November 8th, 2009

Ever since I interviewed Eleanor Laban (the aromatologist entrepreneur) I am more aware of fragrance and perfume. Nice smells are a pleasure, and walking around a perfumery is akin to walking around a candy store (unless you’re allergic to either).

So this is a post about a bunch of perfume-related topics I’ve been meaning to share…

ralfFirst up a review of Stitch deodorants. These are body sprays that smell like popular perfumes (like Red Door, Chanel No.5, etc) but cost only a few dollars ($3.90 from Radius Pharmacy and the like).

Me and my friend bought one each – I chose Angel and she chose Ralf. Both of us own the real fragrance too, so we were able to compare Stitch to the original fragrance.

In the picture, we blind-tested Ralf, the Stitch version, and a ‘control’ fragrance on a few of colleagues. Most of our colleagues (4 out 6) could confidently match Ralf with Stitch. Personally, I thought they do smell very much alike, with the Stitch version being much weaker.

And the Stitch version of Angel is fairly close too.

Even though I hate referring you guys to The NZ Herald, I have read a couple of interesting articles about perfumes recently. First up is this article about perfume regulation, preferences, World Beauty stores, and more.

And second, this article about ‘the language of perfume’. I think I’m a floral/oceanic kind of gal. How about you?

Ingredients to avoid

May 3rd, 2009

skull

totalbeauty.com has an easy to follow, researched list of ingredients to avoid when buying beauty products. I know you’ve read these likeĀ  a thousand times, and when you look at the ingredients list on a bottle of shampoo at the supermarket you can’t remember the bad ones.

Below, I’ve listed the bad ingredients by name, and attempted to make a memory devices to help us remember them. For example, I have Sodium Laureth down-pat now, because it bubbles like soda and laureth rhymes with death – Sodium Laureth – soda of death).

  • Sodium Laureth (aka 1,4-Dioxane) found in your bubbling products. Remember, ’soda of death’
  • Phthalates found in deodorants. Remember, it rhymes with ‘pilates’ where you’re likely to use deodorant.

OK, so to be honest, I only came up with memory devices for those two. Here are the others. Can you help me out here?

Thimerosal in your mascara

Dibutyl Phthalate or DBP, Toulene, Formaldehyde in nail poilsh

Quaternium-15, DMDM Hydantoin, Imidazolidinyl Urea and Diazolidinyl Urea

Image from http://www.magentastudios.com