Perfume critic Ksenia Golovanova on cosmetics and fragrances
For "Available" we study the contents of beauty cases, dressing tables and cosmetic bags of interesting characters to us - and we show all this to you.
About beauty and norm
Ray Bradbury has the story "Tomorrow's Child", he was translated into Russian as "And yet our ...". The plot is this: in the near future, an ordinary family couple is born the firstborn - a blue pyramid with three eyes and six small tentacles. The baby is warm, crying, he also needs to change diapers, only they are triangular and he himself is triangular. It turns out that the baby was born in another dimension and there is no way to bring it back to our time-space. From the rejection phase (“freak”, “monster”) parents come to acceptance and love: realizing that their son’s “normal” life cannot be pulled out, they go to his dimension, and since then all people on our side of being see them like a white top hat and a white tetrahedron. The metaphor here is obvious, but it seems to me that it is very important for our time: in a world where there are so many different people and cultures, there can not be one point of view on the normal and the beautiful. The fact that in your universe (and each has its own) seems stupid and wrong to you, in someone's microcosm - the norm and even the standard.
But the hardest thing is not to accept another person, but yourself. I reflected on this topic rather late: I had a rather calm transitional age, without acne, but with a bunch of activities and travels that distracted teenage thoughts about appearance. And it covered me during pregnancy, when stretch marks appeared on the abdomen and on the thighs - not touching white stripes, but deep, purple and painful scars, which we didn’t manage to do anything with: they brightened and lost sensibility over time, but still, Of course, very noticeable. I was terribly complex - the reflection in the mirror, which had changed almost overnight, upset me to tears, and today's popular campaigns on the Internet that help the women who have just given birth to feel more confident and beautiful, then there was no sign of it. In addition, whenever I undressed in the doctor’s office, regardless of specialization, I considered it my duty to say something like: “Wow, these are stretch marks, and of course”.
My future husband helped me to look at the situation from a different angle - from the world of the blue pyramid. When he saw me for the first time without clothes (and I, by the way, was terribly afraid of this moment), he said: "You should not be shy of your stretch marks, they are very beautiful - like stripes on a tiger's skin or ritual scars of the African Queen." He saw beauty in what I thought was ugly, and when we had a honeymoon, for the first time in a long time, I went to the beach in an open swimsuit.
A few years ago an event occurred that defined a lot in my life: my son was diagnosed with autism. It is not easy to accept such a diagnosis, as in that story about the blue pyramid, but in the end it helps you to overestimate important things, in particular, the accepted ideas about the norm. If today I read in an interview with a plastic surgeon, that my smile type — with which my gums are visible — is a defect that requires correction with Botox, is ridiculous to me. When I smile and laugh, I can see not only that the gums - the tonsils and, probably, part of the esophagus, but it's me, what's so bad about it? In general, everything that helps me to find oneself, to get closer to my inner image of myself seems beautiful: piercing, strange tattoos, blue eyebrows, pink hair, a beard up to the knees - whatever. In addition to the huge accrued "jacket" - here I am not beautiful, I can not do anything with myself.
About care
I have sensitive, prone to rosacea and rosacea skin that reacts to just about everything, and layering one remedy on another, as Korean women do, is my personal dermatological nightmare. I am a forced minimalist whose daily care comes down to several proven products: a gentle Lush cleanser, alcohol-free floral water (it replaces my tonic) and a good BB cream that moisturizes, masks redness and protects from the sun.
Most of all I probably care for my hair. I haven’t painted them for more than ten years - I like my natural natural color, especially after I had long since failed to “completely” go to blondes. Once a week I make masks, every day I put butter on the ends - now it is Oribe, before it was a simple coconut from Thailand. Once a year, I take a course of ten procedures of the pharmacopuncture of the scalp - injections with a cocktail of vitamins, microelements and other nutrients. This is the only thing that helped me to restore the hair after pregnancy, when I realized that a normal postpartum "moult" was pretty long and took on rampant proportions. In the salons I regularly offer to do something with hair, for example, keratin straightening or lamination - from the point of view of some masters, they are too fluffy and not straight, but I like everything.
Pro makeup
I started to be interested in makeup not so long ago, and this is connected with two events. The first is unpleasant: couperose aggravated and I needed a “disguise” - so in the thirtieth year I discovered BB cream. The second is the friendship with the guys from the beauty blog Fierce and Cute, the only one I regularly read. They helped me to look at makeup from an unusual point of view for me - as a way to tell a story, introduced progressive brands like NYX and in general breathed new life into my makeup bag. There, for example, green lipstick and the first make-up brush started up, and although I’m obviously not going to be a makeup artist, the process of morning gatherings has become more interesting. True, I still don’t dye my eyes at all, I only “stack” my eyebrows with a transparent MAC or Smashbox gel and adjust the shape - if I give my eyebrows their will, they will grow together on the bridge of the nose, like Frieda Kahlo, form sideburns and will most likely meet on my chin as okladyusty beard.
About smells
I have always been a “smell”: I have a good sense of smell and best of all my memory is captured not by pictures or sounds, but by smells. From my first business trip - to Shanghai - I clearly remember the smell of the embankment: the river, the braziers in the surrounding temples, carts with food - and the same story repeated on subsequent trips. Smells have become for me a way of inventory of reality, and I wanted to begin to understand them - not on the principle of "like / dislike", but systematically.
The path was a bit crooked: a few years ago I graduated from a sommelier school, and although I didn’t work for a day by profession and didn’t become a wine snob, I learned to distinguish between shades of aromas well - they seemed to have cut. Then she began to read and outline, as a student, scientific articles and books on aroma chemistry, the psychology of perception of odors and the history of perfumery. I read perfume blogs in all languages I speak. She gathered at home a huge collection of natural and synthetic substances that are used in perfumery - to learn how to recognize individual notes in complex compositions. I went to the seminars, met and tried to keep in touch with many perfumers - in short, this is a wildly fascinating process, similar to washing the gold ore: there is no special place to come and become a perfume critic. It's worth it - once my friends turned to me for perfume advice, and now more and more often strangers write to read my texts: asking to help them choose a scent for a wedding or graduation daughter, pick a gift for a husband or wife, etc. appreciative work.
