Don’t let people tell you your 30s will be the best time of your life in a tone that suggests your looks will fade so you better find inner peace. Vicki’s Pick is a weekly beauty column that features Vicki’s all-time favourite beauty products and latest discoveries for women in their 30s who plan on staying pretty on the outside for a long, long time. Inner peace is optional.
Once upon a time last fall, someone (the very thoughtful Nicki from View the Vibe) gave me a gift I actually wanted: semi-permanent eyelash extensions. Imagine that… something I’d been dying to try instead of some sentimental piece of garbage masquerading as a “priceless” memento. Look, chances are your iPhone auto-correct knows you better than any of your friends and family actually do, and all you need is Facebook’s “Year in Review” to feel understood, right? True friends will get you something from your actual wish list (next up… for my birthday: a pygmy marmoset, please!).
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For about six weeks after my eyelash extensions, I rolled out of bed looking as fresh and feminine as a Disney princess with my long, curled lashes. At the time, I was dating this total babe of a single dad with emotional issues, and I had decided to use my semi-permanent lashes as a makeshift hourglass – when the last ones were about to fall out, it was time to make like Cinderella and bust a move before my true identity was revealed.
I’ve pined for my perfect lashes ever since. While I relied, for about three months, on a strange ritual of using three different mascaras in a specific order to achieve a similar amount of volume and length as my falsies, the effort started to get to me. Hey, I love products, but if it takes longer than five minutes to do your makeup and you’re not Liza Minnelli then you’re wasting valuable “being alive” time. Enter Lancome Hypnose Star. When I was younger, I was all about the now classic Lancome Hypnose mascara because it only took two coats to get me out the door looking like I had eight hours of sleep after an all-nighter. These days, two coats of Lancome Hypnose Star give my 30-something tired eyes an added Broadway-worthy oomph – thanks to the double-sided brush, as the flat side of the brush adds volume and the round side of the brush separates lashes and adds extension-esque length. I might not have Celine Dion’s multi-million dollar Caesars Palace contract, but you might just catch me and my stage-ready eyes performing “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” at karaoke night at the Fox & Fiddle.
