I’m a pretty frugal person, but I still get the urge to splurge once in a while. And I usually don’t feel too guilty about splurging on sunscreen because it’s an essential product. A few weeks ago, I impulsively purchased a bottle of La Roche Posay Anthelios Mineral Sunscreen SPF 50. I bought it on a whim after skimming a few reviews online, and hoped for the best. The reviews were typical of a mineral sunscreen—hard to apply, leaves a white cast, yada yada—so I wasn’t…

It’s Father’s Day! My dad and I aren’t the kind of people who can just shoot the breeze over the phone. When we can’t be together in the same place, it’s often hard to get him to keep talking to me unless we have a specific reason to talk. So I’m grateful that this blog has given us a new way to connect and share ideas, and for me to learn more about what he did for many years before he retired.

The American in me is primed to feel like anything instantly gets glammed up once you slap a French name on it. “Escargot” sounds way more appealing than “snails,” and “merci” seems more refined than “thanks.” So it should probably come as no surprise that I always think of La Roche-Posay as a premium brand, even though it’s widely available in drugstores, and not terribly expensive.