Beauty Addiction: One Woman's Struggle to Streamline Her Beauty Routine

I can’t find any numerical data on how many beauty products exist in the world right now, so I’m going to make a conservative estimate and say...39 bazillion. This is based on extremely scientific research: tipsy online shopping trips in which I fall headfirst into an existential crisis about whether anyone really needs brow gel and the Sephora Mensa Admission Test that is telling the difference between a lip gloss, a lip glass, and a lip glacé.

According to one recent survey, the average woman owns 40 beauty products. The headlines announcing these findings expressed delighted shock across the board, as if that number were patently ridiculous; I digested it with a shame that turned my face redder than any cheek stain I ever had, suddenly feeling like the Wilt Chamberlain of the cosmetics industry.

There is zero chance, if one were to conduct an impromptu audit of my home and/or purse, that I have ever had fewer than 40 beauty- related items in my possession since approximately Y2K. I have coveted, sampled, and subsequently discarded thousands of formulas in pursuit of a nebulous goal that falls somewhere between “looking like myself but better” and “looking like Beyoncé in front of a wind machine.”

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More on beauty addiction:

1. This Teen Freaking Out for Accidentally Buying $733 of Sephora Products Is All of Us
2. Beauty Addiction: Confessions of a Tweezing Addict
3. Beauty Addiction: Am I Addicted to Dyeing My Hair? Confessions of a Blondorexic

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It all started in 1992. Clinique had relaunched its best-selling as an Almost Lipstick a few years earlier, and every preteen worth her “Mysterious Ways” cassingle was dead set on wearing the rich, raisiny shade to the first middle-school dance. Since my seventh-grade allowance wasn’t enough to buy the real thing, I was forced to create my own “almost” formula from my mother’s off-brand burgundy lipstick and a thick layer of Carmex medicated balm. I set up a makeshift vanity in my closet, papering the walls with how-to pages torn from magazines and scenting them liberally with Love’s Fresh Lemon Body Mist before I set to work attempting to transform my 12-year-old visage—pale, freckled, thickly unibrowed—into something that I hoped would approximate Linda Evangelista. (Incidentally, I sat in the bleachers at the dance while everyone else slow-danced to “November Rain.”)

But that didn’t stop me from trying again. And again. And again. With each passing year, there have been so many more salves and glosses and concealers at my disposal, so many more paths to the transformation I craved. Just how many more, you ask? Well, Black Honey is now also available as a Sweet Pot Sugar Scrub & Lip Balm, a Pop Oil Lip & Cheek Glow, a Superbalm Moisturizing Gloss, an eyeliner, something called a Cheek Pop, and even a mascara.

Psychologists have posited the theory that having more choices actually makes us less happy, since an abundance of options suggests the possibility that a better match could always be out there. And I can get on board with that—I totally see the joy in commitment. I mean, I locked down my husband at 23, back when my benzoyl peroxide cleansers left tie-dye prints on all of his towels. So why can't I be faithful to one beauty routine, choose my perfect matches, and move on?

LIAM GOODMAN

I’m 36 now, with a child and an apartment full of clutter that would make Marie Kondo stress-vomit. What I want more than anything is to be the kind of woman who owns two or three products that will never fail to make her look like she has just gone on a brisk walk in good lighting while eating a Popsicle. A woman who can run into Rite Aid for tampons without stopping to check out at least half of the 400 tubes and jars on the skin-care shelf (that’s an actual number, by the way—the average drugstore now offers 400 different skin-care products). You know those celebrities with creamy, poreless skin who claim to wash their faces with Ivory soap once a week or who wear only some ravishing discontinued cult lipstick that they had the foresight to stockpile in the early aughts? I want to be them.

But I am me. I have the same blemish-prone complexion I had in high school (it has never been reliably tamed, sort of like the frustratingly lovable bad boy in a ’90s romantic comedy). I’m a sucker for cute nail-polish names and any anti-aging cream that promises to make my eye folds look less like Dumbo’s mom’s. I mistakenly think I can pull off things like contouring.

The fallen beauty soldiers in my wake include not only designer and drugstore brands but also tubs of pure manuka honey and coconut oil, jars of pungent vinegars, and a number of ripe avocados that would have made a nice guacamole had I not been hell-bent on using them as a face mask. And with each season’s influx of seductive new recruits, photographed in lush tableaux under clickable headlines like “75 New Beauty Products You Need to Snag This Spring,” the cycle continues.

I’m conflicted about this. On the one hand, yes, I yearn for the ascetic simplicity of a parallel world in which my makeup bag contains a handful of essentials as opposed to looking like it belongs to Mary Poppins moonlighting for Mary Kay. On the other, it’s fun to experiment and virtually risk-free—unless you factor in the slim chance of an allergic reaction and/or a terrible photo that will haunt you on Instagram. The seemingly endless array of products can feel oppressive, but so would a strict limit. I mean, you don’t have to have emotional adolescent memories tied to Guns N’ Roses ballads to recognize that “nothin’ lasts forever” and “hearts can change” are truth bombs of the highest order.

So if I never find The One—or, really, The Few—among the 39 bazillion, screw it. At the end of the day, it truly does not matter if a mascara sparks joy. An embarrassment of choices means more options for every sensitivity, skin tone, and price point. And we’re not likely to encounter a worldwide shortage of BB cream anytime soon or a vanity-based Hunger Games in which we are dropped on a threatening terrain, forced to survive using only our most essential beauty staples. Although, for the sake of argument, if we were, I would have you totally covered with my 40-plus-plus product stash. It includes a battery-operated pore-cleansing device that could prove crucial in scaring off predators.

Just a thought.

Now learn how to do a next-level braid.