If you don’t like the feeling of applying sunscreen with your fingers, sunscreen sticks are the way to go. A sunscreen stick also provides a much easier way to apply sunscreen on a squirmy baby’s face. Sunscreen sticks also travel friendly and portable—great for keeping in your handbag for a quick touchup on a high UV index day. Today, I’d like to compare two sunscreen sticks: Neutrogena Pure & Free Baby Mineral Sunscreen Stick SPF 60+ vs. Trader Joe’s Mineral…

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.

What do you think of when you picture California? When I was a kid in Maryland, I told my classmates that my family was moving to California, and they were in awe. They said that people in California only ate yogurt, so I should prepare myself for a drastic change in my diet. And they told me that the people were all golden tan there. They probably got this information from movies and books—after all, before I moved to the West Coast, I thought that all Californians were like Dawn from The…