Coffee heat rising

The great mineral make-up experiment

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Okay, so after we decided I needed a retread and then we went out and bought a kit of mineral make-up from Costco (nearly removing my fingers in the process of opening the thing), I broke out the camera and conducted a few quasi-scientific experiments.

The research questions:

Does make-up do a woman any good at all, or is it just another waste of money designed to enrich gigantic corporations at the expense of the consumer’s vanity, whims, and general silliness?

If make-up does anything positive for the aged face, how does regular cream foundation compare with the new powdered mineral make-up variant?

The research method:

Stage 1: Wash face. Apply face cream. Photograph subject’s face using “macro” setting of swell new camera (lab equipment!) donated by M’hijito.

Stage 2. Wash face. Apply cream. Apply full full complement of L’Oréal’s True Match Foundation; color n5, “True Beige.” Photograph subject’s face using new lab equipment.

Stage 3. Wash face. Apply face cream. Apply coat of Kirkland Borghese Mineral Make-up, color “Light to Medium.” Photograph subject’s face using new lab equipment.

Stage 4: Compare.

Results

Stage 1, the Naked Face, is pretty alarming, even to a seasoned researcher:

BeforeRightNoMakeup

Amazingly enough, this is our subject’s “good” side. A liberal sprinkling of age spots lie along the jaw line, to the extent that one can say a jaw line is still visible through the fat and sagging jowls. When I said this face looks like the surface of Mars, I wasn’t kidding. The wrinkles in this region are less pronounced. However…

BeforeLeftNoMakeup

The left side shows the true vintage leather effect produced by a combination of genetics (my mother’s face looked just like this) and too much sun. The age-freckles and moles (I’ve always been speckled) along the jaw are joined by a prominent brown spot high on the cheekbone, one that I’ve never been able to persuade a dermatologist to remove because, of course, he knows he’s not going to be reimbursed by my insurance and he also knows I can’t afford to pay him out of pocket for any such procedure.

So, now we’ve established the reason the subject avoids mirrors and cameras. Moving on…

Stage 2, cream foundation, produces some results. What they are remains to be seen.

Here’s the right side, slathered with plenty of L’Oréal. This make-up has as its sterling quality a capacity to cover brown spots. As you can see, it does a pretty good job of smoothing out the blotchy coloring and hiding the brown speckles. Like all make-up, though, it settles into the crevasses of the aged face, thereby not only not hiding the wrinkles, but actually accentuating them.

The left side, courtesy of L’Oréal:

It covers the large brown spot to some degree. Blotchiness can be said, perhaps, not to have been elided but simply to have been moved around in new ways. As for the wrinkles: the microbial flora on this face need rock-climbing tools to get around.

Stage 3 engages the powdery new mineral make-up, co-branded with a big-box store’s warehousey name and a line of expensive department store cosmetics’ exotically Italianate name. Surely with fire-power like that, it’s gotta do some good.

The right side: fairly smooth, with neither the age spots nor the general blotchiness too pronounced. Not sure what that grayish effect is. Following the instructions given on a YouTube tutorial, I used a small amount of cover-up to help disguise the brown spots; that may be showing through here, or it may be the lighting. In later efforts, I deleted the cover-up step, since the makeup itself seems to do a fairly good job of hiding spots.

And so, to the left side…

It should be noted, too, that I added the mineral make-up’s blusher, which is very light and (seen in a mirror) hardly noticeable. I don’t use blusher with the L’Oréal, because it makes me look like something from Ringling Brothers.

Conclusions

Well, now that we’re at stage 4, I’d say something’s better than nothing. I guess. Both foundations provide some degree of cover-up, and given that the skin has suffered significant damage from the effects of weather and age, cover-up is what’s needed. Probably a veil of the sort favored by Taliban women would fill the bill.

For comparison’s sake, can we get all these photos together in one place?

Ah. Science advances. Et aussi la nausée.

I kind of like the mineral stuff, though it’s significantly more hassle to apply. However, I found that as time passes, it tends to yellow a bit. After five or six hours, it doesn’t look all that great. The L’Oréal does not do that: it retains its initial qualities even after several hours, although it does rub off over time.

What think you, fellow lab rats?

Sartorial Elegance: Thrift store edition

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Check out SDXB’s new threads, acquired earlier this week at a thrift store in Sun City:

Whether New Girlfriend’s costume came from the same source, I have no idea. But (LOL!) doubt it.

Says he:

Bought the tux for $15 at the Lutheran Thrift Store in Sun City. Bow tie, $23. Tux shirt [at the Luke AFB clothing store], $29. There were 2 other tuxes on the thrift store rack. This one is traditional cut and fits me as if it were tailored. I suspect that the tux and other fine clothing arrived at SC thrift stores following deaths. Sun City is, after all, God’s waiting room.

VOTE for Funny at March Madness!

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Hey! Funny’s post at Free Money Finance’s March Madness is up for a vote. I submitted Truth, the Highest Thing that Man May Keep. As you may know, many of the entries are top choices in the Best of Money Stories Carnival, and so the competition is august, indeed.

Would you please go to the March Madness site and vote for Funny’s post? All you have to do to vote is enter your choices in a comment.

Winners have a donation of $100 to $500 made in their name to a charity of their choice. I’ve selected my church and, especially, the choir, because of the good works they do and because of the central part the members of the music program play in the city’s cultural life. The church itself supports a soup kitchen, an ecumenical chaplaincy for the homeless, Habitat for Humanity, a nursing home, an orphanage in Honduras, and a variety of other charitable causes.

When the new pastor learned that I’d been laid off my job, he called on the phone, if you can imagine, to offer his sympathies and to say the church would do what it could to help me out. Then he talked me into making a pledge of one dollar. Would I ever love to do him five hundred better!

The contest starts Monday, January 18. I would like to ask you to support Funny about Money by going to Free Money Finance’s contest site and voting for Funny’s post.

To vote, all you have to do is go to FMF’s contest page and enter the word “Truth” in a comment. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the link to “Post a Comment.” Your privacy is secure, and you will not receive e-mails or any other intrusions from FMF.

Bingo! Loan modification scored

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Under construction

After much hassle and bureaucratic hoop-jumping, the credit union finally let us know on Friday that we got the desired loan modification on the downtown house M’hijito and I are copurchasing.

That will help a great deal. It drops the mortgage payments from something over $1400 to about $1,085 a month. This comes as M’hijito’s roommate is talking about leaving (an on-again, off-again proposition). Roommate’s rent payments have been modest, but he’s also been paying all the utility bills, which, because the house is a sieve and because Roommate is home during the day, can be very high in the summertime.

It means that if and when Roommate leaves, M’hijito should have no trouble continuing to pay his half of the mortgage. Meanwhile, as long as the rent continues to come in, we can either stash the extra $300 savings to cover repairs and upkeep on the house (which is what M’hijito is already doing with the rent income) or we can use it to pay down principal.

My part of the mortgage payments comes out of a nontaxable fund of cash retrieved from an ancient whole life policy. If we do nothing at all, it means we now have enough to cover almost 18 months’ worth of bills instead of only a year’s worth. If we manage the money intelligently, we may be able to engineer something better.

What we really needed—and what I asked for, in the nothing-ventured-nothing-gained department—was a cut in the principal on that loan. We need to have the principal reduced to something closer to the house’s actual value. If you believe the ever-reliable Zillow, the place is now worth about $52,500 less than we owe on it.

In about 11 years, the loan will spawn a balloon payment: at that time, we will have to pay off the balance, refinance, or sell.

I will be very surprised if the house is worth what we’re paying for it 11 years from now. Under the original 30/15 terms (interest is figured on a 30-year basis, but the loan comes due in 15 years), by the end of the 15-year period the principal would have dropped to about what Zillow says the place is worth today. This mortgage modification will change that: to engineer the drop in payments, the credit union not only is dropping the interest rate to 4 percent, it also is prorating the loan over 40 years. Thus in 15 years we probably will owe more than we originally calculated (because principal and interest payments are both lower), unless we use the $300 a month savings to knock down principal now.

But we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

February Budget: On target

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Well, so far, so good: We’re two months into Bumhood, all this month’s bills are paid, and the budget is still running in the black!

That’s in spite of a plumber’s bill!

This month’s regular recurring bills were quite low. One was zero: having prepaid the February COBRA premium in January, I owed nothing this month. The power bill (SRP) also was very low, because the weather has been warm enough that I haven’t had to run the central heating.

What we can see here, though, is that even if I had paid COBRA in February, I still could have afforded to pay a modest repair bill: $252 less the COBRA premium of $185 would have left $67 in this part of the monthly budget. That happened only because the plumber’s bill came in the middle of the winter. In the summertime, power and water bills run about $200 higher than the winter bills, and so those costs would have eaten up most of the budget, leaving too little to cover a household repair.

However, last month $112 remained from the budgeted amount, despite my having paid $313 to COBRA. When the January balance is added to this month’s $252 remainder, some $364 is sitting there, waiting to take up the slack in the summer.

To cover the May, June, July, and August utility bills, I’ll need at least $800 more than I’m having to pay now. The amounts budgeted, as a matter of fact, are based on the summer 2009 utility bills, and so even with the coming rate hikes, there probably will be enough to pay the highest 2010 power and water bills.

Moving on, this month’s “discretionary” spending—the cost of everything other than monthly recurring bills—also stayed under control:

With $73.91 left over at the end of the credit-card billing cycle, I’m doing better than last month, when only $43 remained of the budgeted $800. This is in spite of making a run on the very dangerous Baker’s Nursery and in spite of buying $61.97 worth of cosmetics. Too, gasoline ran significantly higher than the $60 allotment: in February I ended up spending $95 on gas!

But here again: with $74 left from this month and $43 from last month, a small, de facto cushion is slowly piling up in the “discretionary” category, too.

Now that cash is finally flowing in from Social Security and from the community colleges, there seems to be plenty of money to cover budgeted costs. Projecting all income and outflow through the end of March:

February was a little precarious, I will say… But it looks like after this things will be better, at least until the end of August, when (assuming no major emergency expenses come up) the month-end balance will drop dizzyingly: to $22. In September it starts to climb again, and by the end of November it’s back up to around $1,800.

So, in a strange way, “money happens.”

Shopping in the Commissary: Would it save anything?

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A day or so ago, SDXB clued me that Luke Air Force Base has changed its rule about bringing guests into the commissary: your sidekick no longer has to be a certifiable family member. As we were discussing the coming tax on food, which, when it goes into effect on March 1, will hike my grocery costs by 2 percent, he suggested I drive out there with him to do my major shopping trips.

Sounds like a good deal, eh? Not only would I evade the regressive food tax, I’d also weasel out of the much higher 8.3 percent gouge charged on all other purchases made inside the Phoenix city limits. On the other hand, I’d have to drive all the way out to Sun City to meet SDXB. He would drive us to the base (since his car has the AF parking sticker), so that would save some gas…but still, according to Mapquest, SDXB lives 15.91 miles from my house.

Let’s think about that.

In a recent shopping trip to Costco, purveyor of the lion’s share of my food stockpile and household goods, I spent $38.26 on groceries and $109 on household goods, dog supplies, clothing, and the like.

Tax on the $109 came to $9.05. The proposed 2 percent tax on the groceries would add 77 cents to that, for a total tax bite of $9.82.

On a good day when prices are low, gasoline costs about $2.50 a gallon around here. My car makes about 18 miles per gallon. Thus a round trip to SDXB’s house will cost, optimistically, $4.45.

So, my net savings on the tax will be $9.82 – $4.45: a grandiose $5.37.

For that munificent amount, I will have spent at least half the day driving out to Sun City, riding from there to the base, waiting around while he enjoys himself shopping in the BX, the commissary, the Class 6, store, and getting a haircut. Somewhere along the line we’ll get hungry, and so will eat either at his house or at the relatively clean Burger King on the base. This will morph a 90-minute shopping trip (during which I would normally hit Target as well as Costco and Costco’s gas pumps) into a five-hour trek.

In other words, I would “earn” about $1.07 an hour in savings on the tax bill.

LOL! Well, shopping on the base might be worth it if you lived close enough that you didn’t have to burn much gas to get there. But unless you enjoy the serenade of F-16 afterburners (amazingly, some people do!), that’s not a very practical proposition.

Pour moi, it doesn’t look like it’s worth the effort.