Friday with Dior--Long

On Friday at Nordstrom, there was a Backstage Beauty event by Dior. My Dior MUA/SA asked if I wanted to attend this event, which had two time slots--11:00 - 1:00 or 3:00 - 5:00. I signed up for the 1st session but my initial thought was that I would be surrounded by old, rich women because the rest of the women would be working at that time. Of course, I match the old woman profile but definitely not the rich woman.

I arrived at Nordstrom Dior counter before 11:00 and asked how many people have signed up for the session. It turns out that there were only 6 signed up with 5 in actual attendance. It also turns out that I was the oldest person there. I thought that this was going to be a demonstration by the Diorshow Artist but I was wrong. It turns out that it was a hands on event.

The Diorshow Artist was Thuy Pham, a gorgeous woman! I learned so much from this and I'd like to share some of the information with you. I don't think that this will be in any structured order so forgive me if I kind of skip from here to there.

How often do we hear people talking about how their pores have gotten larger as they've gotten older? Have you said it yourself? I have! Well, in reality, your pores do not get larger as you get older. Ms. Pham put it this way, your face/head doesn't grow as you get older--well at least not after you've actually stopped growing from a baby. The reason why your pores have gotten larger is because it's holding more residue and dirt. This is where cleansing your face properly will help to reduce the size of your pores because you're cleansing away the residue and dirt.

The first thing that we did was to remove our makeup by first using a makeup removing oil and then a cleansing milk. She asked how many of us feels that our skin is taut after washing our face. If it is, then we are not using the proper cleanser. Our skin shouldn't feel taut but should feel clean and yet supple.

Do you use serum? If so, what are you looking for in a serum. A lot of us answered, hydration, take care of fine lines and wrinkles, brighten, etc. Well, serum has no hydrating properties. What a serum is, it's a treatment. Serum takes care of damage unseen under the skin.

How many of us learned when growing up that when applying lotions and moisturizers from under our chin to our decolletage that we do it in an upward motion? According to Ms. Pham, that is wrong, wrong, wrong. Our glands are in our neck area and when we do that, we are pushing the liquids from our glands upward towards our face. We want to stroke with a downward motion instead, drawing the liquids away from our face.

Speaking of downward motion, our foundation should be applied the same way. The hairs on our face grow downward so we should apply our foundation in the same direction for smoother coverage.

The last bit of information that I learned that I want to share with you is probably the most important of all. It's about sunscreens and SPF formulations. We all should wear sunscreen on our face. The minimum should be SPF 30. I'm sure that we are all aware of this but I will say it anyway...the different SPFs in your skincare, sunscreen and foundation do not add up. In other words, your day moisturizer has SPF 12, your sunscreen has SPF 25 and your foundation has SPF 15. This doesn't mean that you have SPF 52 protection. Here's the really important thing that I learned: The first application of anything SPF is going to be the protection coverage you will get. That first layer is the only layer that will penetrate into your skin to give you protection. Anything applied after that will only sit on top of your skin and will not give you any protection. Since you apply your sunscreen last after your skincare routine, none of your skin care products should have any SPF in it unless you have it in SPF 30 or higher. I had to come home to make sure that my moisturizer didn't have any SPF in it.

One other important thing about sunscreen, it takes 20 minutes for your skin to absorb it and have it be protecting. If you are at the beach and already sitting in the sun, it is too late to start applying your sunscreen then. Make sure to apply your sunscreen before you even go out into the sun.

After skincare, we went into makeup and makeup application, which I will not go into. One thing that totally impressed me was that Ms. Pham just looked at us from where she was sitting and told our assigned MUA what was our foundation color. Woah! That completely blew me away!

After we were done, we were led back up front to the Dior counter and we could purchase whatever we wanted. We were given a free goodie bag which contained a cute little case with a Miss Dior perfume sample, trial-sized mascara, trial-sized Capture Totale One Essential serum, and a Dior cell charm.

I ended up buying the lip gloss that I used and the One Essential serum. This serum is actually a detox for your skin. I like the concept of it. You apply it after washing your face, before your toner.

It was a fun event and I learned a lot. I'm so glad that I took the time to go. I hope that some of the information that I shared was also informative for you.

I also spent Friday and Saturday doing more shopping than I should have. Some things that I bought: 2 UD NAKED Palettes (for gifts--yup, I lucked out in finding it in stock again), 4 pairs of shoes, some clothing, Japanese magazines, and much more.

*Kat*