17 Unsolved Beauty Mysteries That Will Perplex Us Forever
By Petra Guglielmetti
(Photo: Mark Leibowitz)
We ladies of Lipstick spend our days demystifying beauty. But for every makeup question we address, hair how-to we unravel, and skin conundrum we resolve, there’s a nagging beauty mystery we just can’t figure out. Example? Oh here are 17, to start.
1. Why does getting shampooed at a salon feel that amazing?
Let’s be honest: Your average salon shampoo is better than average sex. But why does it feel so great, when massaging your own scalp produces nothing close to the same sensation? I think it’s mostly because if self-shampooing felt that good, we would never have any desire to do anything in our free time but shower.
2. Why do razor refills cost six billion dollars?
Are those blades coated in platinum? You would think so, with the way some stores have a razor-refill security protocol in place. You feel like you’re purchasing illicit contraband, asking an employee to retrieve you an eight-pack of Venus Embraces from behind the plexiglas barrier and strip off the anti-theft paraphernalia.
3. Why is the inside of your makeup bag always coated in concealer?
The concealer’s cap is twisted on tight, you make sure of that. But no matter. One day soon, you’ll unzip the bag to find its lining graffitied with flesh-colored goop, even though the cap is still in place.
4. Where do all the hair elastics go?
We all know that hair elastics disappear to … somewhere … at a rate that begins rapidly accelerating a few weeks after purchase. Let’s say you grab a new 30-elastic strip of Goodies at CVS every three months. Theoretically, that would mean at the end of a year you’d have somewhere close to 120 elastics kicking around your bathroom, handbag, car, and desk. Allowing for a few falling out of your gym bag in the locker room, or whatever, you should still have, oh, 100 on hand. But you know that would never happen. No, you’re lucky if you can find one (and that one either breaks or is too stretched-out to use, so you have to bum one from a friend, who may or may not have one herself). Where do they all end up?
5. Does breaking the mirror in a blush or shadow compact count as seven years bad luck?
If it does, we have accrued at least 98 years bad luck and might as well give up on life.
6. Are lotion pumps designed to be un-empty-able?
Those handy pumps atop moisturizers and body lotions no longer seem so handy when they prove unable to reach the last several inches of product remaining in the bottle. This leaves us no choice but to yank out the pump/straw, turn the bottle over, and spank it until lotion spatters across the entire bathroom. Now, I’m no engineer, but this just doesn’t seem like a difficult design flaw to address. It’s 2015, people. Make the straw a little longer, or better yet, take inspo from those newer ketchup bottles that sit cap-side down and easily squeeze out every last drop.
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7. How does the blow dryer cord get so knotted?
Seriously, what is our blow dryer doing under the sink after we stash it away to end up such a tangled mess? And so quickly, too. The satisfaction of finally, meticulously detangling our blow dryer cord seems to only last for three styling sessions. After that, we open the cabinet door to discover that the cord has suddenly reacquired at least one dozen knots. Even though we’re certain we wound it around the handle to prevent this from happening.
8. How come manicurists don’t have to wait between coats?
She paints your ten fingers then goes right back in there for the second coat. If you tried this at home, your nails would literally never dry until the end of eternity. In fact, at home, you can use the exact same Essie shade from the salon, wait 10 to 15 tedious minutes between coats, and still get nicks because your nails can’t fully dry. Don’t try to tell us it’s the tinny circa-1992 nail fan that makes the difference at the salon. Maybe it’s that they manage to paint on coats much thinner than we can. But we’re sticking with a different answer: nail salon black magic.
9. Is there a hair on my back?
The phantom hair. Long-haired girls know it all too well. You feel that whisper of an itch on the back of your upper arm, and you know there’s a hair clinging somewhere back there. But when you glance over your shoulder, there’s no such hair to be found. Minutes later, you feel it/check again. No hair. Only after six checks do you see the end of a hair sticking out from the weave of your sweater. An even more irksome incarnation of the phantom hair: the one that sneaks into your bumcrack while you’re showering.
10. I missed that strip again?
No matter that you took the time to shave in a leisurely, meticulous fashion, coating every inch of leg in shaving cream. You’ll still miss a little strip of hair running vertically along your knee. It’s about two inches wide, usually. You won’t notice it until you’re sitting in a car wearing a short dress and the sunlight glints off the hairs. You will promise this is the last time you’ll miss it with the razor. You will be wrong.
11. Who gets excited to see a department-store perfume sprayer person?
They continue to be employed in abundant numbers, so clearly there are shoppers who enjoy getting misted down with a randomly selected fragrance en route to the mall. But everyone we know studiously navigates the makeup-department maze in order to emerge on a different aisle than where the sprayer is posted.
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12. Why does red lipstick always wear off your inner lips first …
… yet that’s the first place that red wine clings to?
13. Who’s buying the skincare products their Facebook friends are selling?
So wait. People actually believe that the reason their friend keeps posting about this one skincare brand is because it has really and truly so miraculously and dramatically changed her life? Not because she’s, you know, the brand’s latest freelance sales representative? It makes us nostalgic for the door-to-door makeup lady who came by to chat with your mom and play with samples, instead of just sitting around spamming everyone’s newsfeed four to six times a day.
14. Why does an updo hurt so much only once you take it out?
Especially wedding updos, which don’t feel as excruciating as they look until you begin sliding out 110 bobby pins one by one. Shouldn’t this part be the relief?
15. Will the shampoo and conditioner ever run out at the same time?
Or within the same week, even. Nope. No matter what size the bottles or our wash/condition ratio, it never happens. But we continue to dream that it will, so we can have the satisfaction of tossing the matching set into the recycling bin, versus having one sad widow bottle sitting there 1/3 full on our shower shelf for five months while we try to force ourselves to use it even though we have a shiny new matching shampoo/conditioner set. (And knowing if we don’t start those bottles at the same time, there’s probably even less of a chance of simultaneous run-out.)
16. And speaking of shampoo and conditioner …
Why do hotels always offer minis of these (when most women remember to bring their own), but never a mini toothpaste, which we always forget—or immediately run out of?
17. Why are there still so many tanning salons?
Hey, so guys, it turns out they’re kind of bad for you …
Do any of these beauty mysteries perplex you, too? Is there another you’d add to the list?
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