I am a self-professed lipbalm junkie – how does this lipbalm measure up?

I was given a sample of the Mentholatum Mogitate Kajitsu lipbalm to try. I received the Mogitate Orange and Mango scented one. According to product info, it contains natural fruit juice, honey and beeswax. Sounds fab already!

I am lipbalm junkie – I have dry lips that crack very easily, so I always have a tube of lipbalm with me. I have used almost every lipbalm from Mentholatum, and more from other brands including both locally available and overseas brands. I need my lipbalm to be emollient, tasteless (I abhor lipbalm made with artificial sweeteners- a common ingredient in American brand lipbalms) and lasting.

The Mentholatum juicy lipbalm has several ingredients that are good for lipbalms – beeswax, grapeseed oil and glycerin. These give it a very smooth emollient texture that glides on to the lips effortlessly. I love the scent, but it is not lasting on the lips. An added bonus is the UV protection – lips need their sunscreen too!

So does this lipbalm pass my test?

I have certainly used better lipbalms (such as the Mentholatum Lip Pure range). This lipbalm is no frills, smells good and passable. I won’t mind using it, but it is not my holy grail lipbalm. I like the UV protection, which is not common among locally available lipbalm, which makes it unique. Do check it out if you are in need of a lipbalm!

I had the opportunity to try two products from Sophie Monk – the Strawberry Bye Bye Blackhead set and Double Lifting mask. Read my review below!

The Strawberry Bye Bye Blackhead set consists of 3 steps – first a softener, then a peel-off mask, and then a pore minimizer. After massaging the skin softening for 2-3 minutes, rinse it and apply the peel off mask.

The peel off mask is pink! It smells faintly of strawberries. The mask will dry in about 20 minutes. Please apply LIBERALLY so that it will be easier to peel off. After peeling off, apply the pore minimizer.

Verdict: I do not have a lot of blackhead, but the skin softener did help to surface some of the whiteheads, which we know to be the precursor of blackheads. The peel off mask is pleasant but I suggest only using it on the t-zone because it can get quite tight after drying. Unless you have blackhead problem on your cheeks too, you can just apply at problem areas. Like other peel-off masks it serves to cleanse the surface of the skin of excess dead skin and micro hair. The pore tightener/ minimizer doesn’t seem to work; I am not sure of the mechanism behind that. Do I recommend this product? If you are in the market for a peel-off mask for your t-zone and would like something that smells pleasant, you can consider this. (RRP: $25.90)

The next product I tried is the Double Lifting Mask, also from Sophie Monk.

The full range consists of Super Moisturizing (blue), Shiny Brightening Whitening (pink), Youth V-Shape (yellow), Deep Cleansing Soothing Pore Minimizing (green) and Anti-Aging SOS (black). For the purpose of testing, I used the most potent of them all – the black one.

Verdict: The mask does not fit my face properly, quite like the Sexylook one I tried. The ear hooks are tight, so they are meant for a smaller face. The mask lifts up from the nose area, they are meant for people with flatter noses? The scent of the mask is strange; it reminds me way too much of mall toilet air freshener, if you get what I mean. That is a big difference from the nice strawberry scented products. However, I like how hydrating the mask is! It is quite SOS in the sense of erasing (most of) the signs of late nights I suppose. Is it lifting? I can’t tell the difference. (RRP: $2) At the price of $2 each, they are quite affordable if you are looking for a hydrating mask that treats the chin too!

Both of these products are available at Guardian stores islandwide. Do check them out if you are interested!

Read my review below.

Mineral Bubble Face Wash, RRP $14.90

Bubble face wash seem to be all the rage here. A couple of years back I tried one by SANA and didn’t like it – it was too drying, smelled strange and overall not a very pleasant experience. This time round, the Mineral Bubble Face Wash by Amethystory is purported to be good for skin – it contains hyaluronic acid, which all skincare addicts know as a moisturizing ingredient. It also contains Bio Energy Fluid, claimed to “provide ample mineral & trace mineral elements to nourish skin cells and effectively rejuvenate skin and keep skin hydrated”.

Similar to another brand out there, this bubble face wash doesn’t drip (at least not within the first few seconds). I used the face wash, and it’s quite pleasant. There is a faint smell to it that is nice, and it is soft on the skin. It is easy to use – pump out of the bottle and directly on to wet face. (Look out for my next post comparing bubble face wash.)

However, it doesn’t feel as moisturizing as it should be. I attribute it to the presence of sodium laureth sulphate (SLS) in the product. SLS is a surfactant that is quite harsh on skin, and it is quite drying. It is found in most face wash, shampoo and body wash because it is relatively cheaper than its “better” cousins. So those sensitive to SLS products, take note.

Nonetheless, comparing this with regular liquid and cream face wash, it is easier to use and more pleasant.

Mineral Aqua Whitening Enhancer, RRP $19.90

This enhancer comes after face wash, and is intended to be absorbed by the skin. Just take a couple of drops on your palm and gently pat it in. As it gets absorbed it gets a little tacky, then it dries up and leave the skin smooth and tight. For whitening effect, the active ingredient is Tranexamic Acid.

I like how it gets absorbed by the skin, reminiscent of the Hada Labo lotion. A few drops go a long way, so this bottle will last you many months!

Mineral Aqua Gel, RRP $24.90

This is the star product of the range. The mineral aqua gel is a gentle exfoliant. Like the same-brand product Marvel Gel, this gel purports to remove dead skin. This gel is very liquidy, compared to the marvel gel, which comes out of a tube. As you rub this gel into your skin, small white flakes form. I am wary about calling those dead skin cells; such products are not caustic that way to remove dead skin cells chemically. Rather, the gel is formulated to react with skin to form those white flakes and beads so that you can use those beads to massage and exfoliate the skin gently. Really, if just by pouring the gel on my hand and moving it around and dead skin fall off, I’d use it wash the toilet instead.

To me this is a no-frills exfoliating product. I expected more, but it is no different from the other gel exfoliant out there, including Ginvera’s own Marvel Gel.

Overall, my favourite product from this range is the whitening enhancer.

Want free samples? Get a free trial size sample of the Mineral Aqua Gel from Facebook! Simply click the link below!

https://www.facebook.com/amethystory?ref=ts&sk=app_213564948660624

By drawing on how search engines work through page ranks, JasmineDirectory has designed their directory for online businesses to be 100% Search Engine Optimized (SEO). In other works, the larger their directory, the higher the exposure for the listed companies. For these businesses, that is great news. Furthermore, JasmineDirectory is W3 CSS and HTML valid, and also provides automatic thumbnails for these websites, saving time and effort and also making sure consumers can easily access the products and services they seek. You can also submit up to 5 deep link URLs to provide one-click access to possibly your most representative or most popular pages. Guess what? It is free to list a business with JasmineDirectory. They have a wide array of different topics to suit any business, such as e-commerce, the arts, health and fitness, home and garden, and video games. If you are looking for a business web directory to replace paid classified ads that do not guarantee results, you can consider a business listing directory like JasmineDirectory.
As consumers, such directories also provide a shortcut to services required. No time to sift through search engine results? Want to know which small businesses are proactive in listing themselves to gain recognition? Just want to surf around looking at what the Internet has to offer these days? Such directories can provide immense fun and information. JasmineDirectory is moderated and edited; unlike some other directories that accept any links, JasmineDirectory is discerning in the kind of products and services they include in their link. For starters, links to sex-related and gambling-related sites are generally not accepted. This provides a more tasteful and sophisticated directory. In their own words – “To insure that you have dependable access to the most current and reliable information, each category is developed, organized, reviewed, and carefully maintained by individuals with research expertise in their respective fields.” Such is the quality assurance of the JasmineDirectory team.

Personally for me I am not a big fan of bookmarks in browsers. I prefer to use add-ons to handle my bookmarking. One of my favourite add-on in Firefox is ReadItLater. It is a one-click bookmarking that saves the url of the exact page I was reading to a, aptly name, Read It Later list, which I revert to when I have more time to continue reading the page I was on. After reading, I have the option of marking the page read, and remove it from the list. I find this add-on very useful. The add-on has versions for iPhone and Android phones as well.

Apart from bookmarking tools another tool I cannot function without is an RSS feeds receiver. I read many blogs and really, slowly loading each blog to check for updates is tedious, unncessary and silly. Any decent blog comes with RSS feeds, and all you need to do is subscribe to those feeds and be informed whenever something new is posted. My favourite feeds receiver is Feedly. It organizes your feeds like a magazine and it’s entirely online, which means even when I reinstall my browser or when my hard disk crashes, I won’t lose my feeds (trust me, it has happened before I started using Feedly).

Using tools like bookmarks and RSS feeds can help you organize your online life better. Not only do they help you save time and effort, they can be fun to use.

Read more articles from ArticleInput such as this one on Nicole Kidman being a brilliant actress.

1. Using keywords in your URL

That means, if your post is about how to grow a cactus flower, it makes sense to have an URL that is akin to “http://domain/growing-cactus-flower” rather than “http://domain/post5671″. This is one thing that many bloggers ignore because URLs and Permalinks are auto-generated by the blogging software. Unless someone points it out, people miss it.Very true.

2. Over usage of keywords

Don’t use keywords too often or you may get registered as spam by search engines. Scary, isn’t it?

There are more tips on the site, and frankly those are good tips for people who want to boost blog traffic. While the blog itself is also trying to boost its own popularity, let’s remember that the internet has its own ecological system – blogs fuel each other in advertising building up a network.

Click this for more SEO tips.

Hada Labo is launching its products in Singapore in June exclusively at Watsons stores. There are three main ranges of products as seen below:

On the left in white packaging is the Moisturizing SHA range that consists of a makeup remover, face wash, lotion, milk (moisturizer), sheet mask and serum. In the middle is the AHA/BHA face wash range consisting of a self foaming wash and a creamy wash. The self-foaming wash was really interesting when we tried it out. On the right is the Whitening SHA range, which is essentially SHA range + arbutin, a whitening complex derived from plants. The whitening range consist of lotion, milk, serum and mask. Ideally, you should use the AHA range to exfoliate before using the whitening range for maximal effect.

Upon query with the staff, the products will be sold at an affordable price range of $20-$40.

This is a picture of Niwa-san from Japan explaining how SHA works.

Hada Labo is developed by Rhoto- Mentholatum. Rhoto is a pharmaceutical company that specialises in eye medication. Contact lens users might have used Rhoto C-cube eyedrops before – the one that comes in a square bottle. Mentholatum is also a medicinal brand that produces useful things such as Deep Heat (I love), and lipbalms. At press conference they showed pictures of the production line that’s sanitised and sterilized, so we can use the products with ease.

Demonstrating how powder SHA absorbs water and swells

At the media session we took part in a skin hydration test. They first measured the hydration level of the skin on the back of our hands, and then applied the lotion, and measured again. Somehow I didn’t see a huge increase in my hydration level, but some of the other attendees reported as much as a doubling of hydration.

(Someone else's arm)

My card

An increase of 13.7%. Interesting.

At the session they also employed young girls to demonstrate how to apply the skincare effectively. It’s more than just spreading it all over the face; optimally we should pat it in.

Hada Labo girls

At the end of the media session we were each given a full set of the SHA range (without the makeup remover) to try out at home.

I will report back in a week or two with my review of the products. I used the lotion last night, and it was divine. But the review will come later.

I enjoyed myself at the media session! Thanks for the invite. All these launch session are spoiling me. Heh.

I have always been interested in Greek mythology, and with the coming movie, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, my interest in the myths has been renewed. Those who know, I have been reading the 5 Percy Jackson books these few days and I must say, the intertexuality in those books challenge my knowledge of Greek mythology. I found the need to search on the internet at times for more information or clarification of what I read in the books.

In a nutshell, Percy Jackson is a half-blood (mixed breed) son of Poseidon and a human female. According to this article (http://www.web-articles.info/e/a/title/Poseidon-and-the-sea-monsters/), Poseidon loves women, goddesses and demi-goddesses. Poseidon has got to be one of my favourite Greek gods, followed by perhaps Aphrodites. Anyway, this article was interesting because it presents different views from the different sources (like Homer). This almost makes up for my deficit classical knowledge. Alongside this article about Poseidon there are also many other articles about Greek mythological characters like Zeus and Athena. This ought to come in handy when I read the Percy Jackson series. Heck, there’s an entire section at that website dedicated to user-created articles on Greek Mythology. Altough the articles are somewhat long, I think it’s good reference material.

Speaking about the movie, have you see the trailer yet? Sometimes when I look at a trailer like this I wonder if the actors ever leave the blue screen. Or green screen. Movies nowadays rely so much on digital and 3D effects that I don’t even though actors run around in forests and dirt paths anymore. I’m not sure how this works for production crews and production costs. Is it cheaper to get your actor to run through set with prop bombs going off or have them run around the blue screen and have post-production add in the bomb? I should read up about this, that ought to answer my question.

link: http://www.webworldarticles.com/e/a/title/Digital-cinema-covers-the-entire-movie-production/

I’m sure we’ve all seen some of these Adsense adverts and subsequently learn it ignore it. I am guilty of ignoring Adsense, that is why I did not install it on my blog. The article made it sound special and workable, but ignores important details like how blog readers learn to disregard those advertisements. We all know how Google Adsense ads look like; they always feel like spam or fake hyperlinks in my opinion. For example, I go to a blog to read about WordPress themes, and then I see a banner that tells me “oh, this website has FREE premium themes for download”, or something to that effect. Somehow it just feels really iffy when I see such a banner. The more I see such things, the more I reject it.

Another reason why I didn’t install Adsense is that it’s ugly and I don’t know where to hide it. I could hide it at the bottom, but then that will fail to generate any impressions or clicks since no one really pays attention to it. I read in another article on advertising on blogs, placement of Adsense is important. They suggested placing it under the header so that it will possibly blend in with the text or something. Frankly, I still find Adsense jarring. What’s worst? Bloggers, and website owners who like to stick it in the middle of posts. Does that help in making people click on those links? I’m not too sure myself.

These are things the articles could have mentioned, and not just paint a one-sided view of the benefits of Adsense.