Ya-ay Seth Aaron!

Congratulations on your Project Runway win. I knew you would do it. And thanks for being my studio entertainment on Thursday nights (though I have to admit, I probably watched more than I sewed).

Like tonight....

Yesterday I was in one of my rare 'girly' moods, so while at the 'Gangs-R-Us' mall, I popped into Trade Secret and picked up a few of my favorite nail lacquers, including this lovely teal blue, some overpriced shampoo and conditioner (like it's actually going to change the texture of my hair), and some protectant for the flat iron, which I actually use when I've got free time. I've got some really old hair product under my sink that really should be tossed . You know, the kind you dig out and put on your freshly washed hair and find that it suddenly smells like your bare feet that came out of the cruddy old tennis shoes you wear to garden, at the end of a day out working in the yard.

Or you use the styling product and spend 30 minutes with the ion blow dryer, and then not quite satisfied, you spend another 30 minutes going over it with the flat iron, and by the time you wake up the next morning, your hair looks like it hasn't been washed in a month, it's greasy, and stringy and limp.

Old product is bad product, and using it is a huge waste of time that could be better spent painting your toenails fire engine red while sipping a glass of Merlot.Ah, but it is hard to give them up, especially since most of them were bought at the salon.. As if spending that extra $100 on the product the stylist used is actually going to give you the same look tomorrow morning. You'd be better off asking the stylist to swing by on their way to work and giving them $25 to stop by once a week for a month (it's a lot more than the commission they made off of suckering you into buying that product to begin with). Face it, you will never look like you did when you got out of that chair, on your own. Not happening. And if there was product that did this, we'd all know about it, and it would cost a lot of money and we'd all own it (and we would all look fabulous).

I think the girly thing is going to be around for at least another week because SephoraInJCPenney (not just Sephora, mind you, SephoraInJCPenney) has their grand opening next Friday. Free cosmetic bags full of samples for the first 750 'beauties' to show up at the opening. Now, for a fleeting moment I thought about going into work late that morning so I could swing by for mine, and then I remembered that a couple of years ago there was some kind of forced legal settlement involving some overpriced cosmetics and if you bought a Clarins or Estee Lauder or Lancome cosmetic in a department store in the previous five years, you could get a freebie on this particular day.

When I got to our mall after work, the line inside of Macys was UN-believable. Out of say 300 people in the line that wrapped around the store, I'd have to say that 250 of them were Hispanic gentlemen that did not speak English. The other 40 were their mothers and grandmothers, who probably have never worn makeup in their lives, and 10 were actual women who looked like they had actually bought Lancome or Clarins or something at Macys.

By the time I made it to the table and signed the paper releasing them from all responsibility for fixing prices in the past, and swearing that I would not follow the 240 people in line in front of me over to Lord and Taylor to obtain another freebie using a different name, all they had to hand out were sample sizes of products that I suspect one could have just walked up to the cosmetic counter the next day and asked for. I wound up with some little tube of fake(oh, sorry....faux) tan cream that would cover one of my legs from the knee down, which I'm saving for some Halloween that I might decide to dress up as the office brown nose.

I could never figure out what was up with that. Were all these men standing in line for their wives? Or were they working for some Central American cosmetics cartel to get freebies that could be shipped out of the US and resold by street vendors in El Salvador? Kind of like the people the ticket scalpers pay to stand in line for Springsteen tickets.

So I'll skip the SephoraInJCPenney opening. I'll swing by next time I've got a merchandising job in Penneys. I could use a new eyeliner to accentuate the new long lashes (thank you Latisse).