Despite all the recent-ish drama surrounding the future of The Ordinary, DECIEM is taking the world by storm. Here in NYC, there are now seven locations—I still remember there were only two stores around a half year ago (~March or April), when I first visited the location in SoHo. Here’s a drive-by picture of the new Upper West Side location:

Legally Blonde was on TV this weekend. I happened to catch the part where Elle visits Brooke in jail and brings her a gift basket that includes the full line of Clinique skincare products. It turns out that Clinique has been quite successful at product placement in movies and television. That comes as no surprise—the brand has highly recognizable packaging, including the signature pale yellow color of its Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion (and Gel), which is the topic of today’s…

I find drug store versions of name brand skincare products to be pretty fascinating. Recently I saw some pretty bold anti-aging claims on two SPF 70 sunscreen options at CVS. One was from the name brand (Neutrogena), while the other was CVS’s generic version, under a very similar name (Age Defense rather than Neutrogena’s Age Shield). A shield is a type of defense, so I think this is pretty much a case where the marketing team looked up “shield” in the thesaurus when it…