Category: skin care

Dr. Baumann’s The Skin Type Solution

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Here comes dermatologist Leslie Baumann, MD, with her own system for determining skin type: The Skin Type Solution. According to the publisher’s website

Four dominant factors determine your Skin Type. These factors are: oily vs. dry, sensitive vs. resistant, pigmented vs. non-pigmented, and wrinkled vs. tight.

Thus, there are 16 different skin types, according to Dr. Baumann, each with its 4-letter abbreviation. With these 16 skin type combinations, Dr. Baumann’s system is less like than the seasonal color typing popularized by Carole Jackson (author of Color Me Beautiful and Color Me Beautiful Makeup Book) in the 1980s and more like the 4-dimension Myers-Briggs Type Indicator!

Has anyone tried Dr. Baumann’s system? Is it merely a gimmick or does it really help you care for your skin? Dr. Baumann has an online skin care store BaumannStore.com, which features both luxury and mass-market brands for all the 16 skin types. She has not (at least not yet!) rolled out her own skin care line. More information about her book The Skin Type Solution is found at www.skintypesolution.com (an alias for the publisher’s web pages on her book.

Pai skin care

Cold Cream 'n' Roses
Chamomile & Rosehip Sensitive Skin Cream

Pai is a new skin care brand from the UK (via New Zealand) that uses natural ingredients such as chamomile and rosehip in this lotion. Other faves from Pai include the Bergamot Lip Balm.

Pai was developed by Sarah Brown, who had suffered from skin rashes and itching and decided to create her own plant-based skin care line.

Pai is available only in UK, but plans to expand internationally later this year. For more information about Pai and its products, visit Pai’s web site at www.paiskincare.com.

UPDATE 11:36 PM
Sarah writes, “I’ve had a few enquiries from the US over the past month or so, so am planning to get my an international orders function set-up on the site over the next few weeks.”

Beauty from Kohl’s Department Stores

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The marketing of cosmetics is a strange business. Sears rolled out its Circle of Beauty concept comprising fragrance, skin care, and color cosmetics with much fanfare, and then decided to exit the beauty business only a few years later. JC Penney announced it too was getting out of the beauty business and stopped carrying Iman, Color Me Beautiful, and Ultima II at its stores. The decisions of Sears and JC Penney to get out of selling cosmetics was a blow to Avon, which expected to market its beComing line through these retail outlets. Avon therefore had to rely on its traditional means of selling (sales representatives, carts at the mall) to market beComing.

Discount stores have sought to distinguish themselves by selling products its competitors don’t have. Wal-Mart sells Coty’s Rimmel, while Target sells a cosmetics line from makeup artist Sonia Kashuk. The beleaguered KMart Corporation is not selling an exclusive line of cosmetics, but given the energy it’s put into advertising its new clothing lines (including ads in Vogue), I wouldn’t be surprised if KMart rolled out its own line of cosmetics.

I have already written about Walgreen’s selling IsaDora cosmetics from Sweden and CVS’s selling Lumene Cosmetics .

Mid-priced stores such as Caldor and Upton’s have gone out of business altogether, and the market leader in this category is clearly Kohl’s. Kohl’s has entered into marketing cosmetics in a most audacious way. It has partnered with the Beauty Bank division of Estee Lauder Companies to establish three cosmetics lines in its stores. The three lines are good skin, American Beauty, and Flirt!

good skin offers skin care products, of course. The packages are color-coded according to complexion. Good skin care also offers foundation and concealers.

American Beauty features a real American beauty – Ashley Judd – as its “face.” I have been in love with Ashley Judd ever since seeing her in the movie Simon Birch and linger over magazines on which she’s featured on the cover, but even she can’t excite me in this cosmetics line.

Flirt! is the most captivating of the three cosmetics lines. It’s targeted to younger consumers and features a wide range of colors (and of course, shimmer). The Style Page judges a cosmetics line by its selection of eye shadows, and Flirt! offers a wide variety of both matte and shimmery colors. The boxes are color-coded and the eye shadow container slides open and a mirror pop ups (great packaging, but needless). The Style Page bought Dreamy Eyes Eyeshadow ($10) in Mellowtini, a shimmery olive that would be appropriate for the crease or the wedge (the outer third of the eyelid).