How Cancerous Are Your Beauty Products?
Here’s a gem that I found out from online friends who have linked to this very interesting site. As you know, I’m not a huge fan of beauty products in general except for eye makeup, and don’t see much of a point in using 6-7 different facial products a day to keep my skin beautiful.
This site only reconfirms my idea that using too many beauty products is bad for your skin and health in general. As far as associating them with cancer though is another story. Skin Deep is an online safety guide on beauty products, assessing over 32,000 products on their cancerous capabilities. From skincare to fragrance, each product is labeled on a scale from 1-10, 10 being the most hazardous, as to how high it contributes to cancer. It also gives a very detailed page of each product on other hazards and a list of ingredients. The site conveniently categorizes by brand or product with a searchable engine.
Although it’s a little obvious that too much use of any product is bad for you, there are some people out there who believe what they use is little to moderate, when in fact it’s way too much.
For fun, I’ve listed the products I use on a regular basis and note the rating of each one.
Pond’s Dry Skin Cream - Hazard rating: 5
Pond’s Cold Cream (makeup remover) - Hazard rating: 4
St-Ives Cucumber Melon moisturizer - Hazard rating: 6 (that’s getting a little high…)
Aveda’s Pure Volume Shampoo - No data
Aveda’s Pure Volume Conditioner - No data
MAC Eye Liner Technakohl - No data, but looks to fall between 3-5
Ok, so I guess they can’t have all of the products on there, but it looks like most of the products I use have moderate ratings, and considering I use minute amount of these (an 8oz jar of Pond’s will last me a year), I think I’m in the safe zone. But the site does make you think twice about what you’re really buying.
Image credit: MOULU Philippe / SUNSET
Simons DJing it up with tshirt collection and live painting
Saturday Aug. 30th, there’ll be an event thrown by Simons at two of their locations, the one on downtown Ste-Catherine and the other at Ste-Foy. The event calls for a DJ spinning some special tracks and live painting from local artists. The party is actually hosted by DJab, a street clothing line for men being exclusively sold at Simons for the occasion.
If you’ve passed by Simons, there’s actually a listening station outside the store where you can preview the compilation album called “I See The Light” that will be sold for the event. From my impression, it’s one of those electro 80s inspired albums, which isn’t too shabby to listen to on a Sunday morning to pump you up in the morning.
While H&M may have had Lindsay Lohan’s girlfriend spin at the opening of the downtown store, it’s an interesting coincidence that Simons will collaborate with musical and street artists with much fanfare for a new collection they’ve just acquired. It’s especially notable that this is all for the men’s collection, which often gets overlooked and rarely receives any attention from the media. For a department store, Simons has done everything to keep its inventory fresh, exclusive and young, pushing past the traditional boundaries of department stores and really turning it into a fun shopping experience.
We can see that music is increasingly sharing the spotlight with fashion, which really has always been the case since the inception of popular music. We can associate music and looks with the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Music has really caught the eye of fashion.
Expect the party to go down at Simons from 12pm to 4pm on Saturday, I’ll be there to take in the scene and take pictures.
Made in Canada, Tide’s Anti-Aging Detergent, Simons Pulls Catalogue
I had originally dismissed The Globe and Mail for not reporting any worthy news on fashion other than trends, but I realize that my mistake was that I was looking in the wrong section. If you want some significant news on fashion that excludes trends and top 10 must-haves, you’ll have to venture over to the business section of most newspapers. And there you can find some pretty good articles. Apologies to the Globe and Mail, now I can’t get enough of your Report on Business section!
Which brings me to these very interesting articles that popped up in the last couple of days.
Made in Canada - An in depth look at the advantages and some tips on how to keep a Canadian business going with some examples of some companies who have learned harsh lessons throughout the year. This also highlights that despite China and India’s cheap price, in the long run, it could become more costly to make things overseas as wages will increase over time.
Procter & Gamble links laundry to fashion - Tide, owned by P&G, has come up with a new type of laundry detergent that could be called as the “anti-aging solution” for clothing. Sure it’d be great to have a detergent that didn’t destroy your clothes…but how about buying clothes made of reliable, high quality material instead of the cheap kind if you want them to last?
Sick of Slow Service, Customers Walk -This is an ever growing problem in the retail business as Canadian consumers are fed up with the slow service being offered to them. And here’s another contributing factor of the ailing department store industry:
Department stores lose the greatest amount of business because of frustrated customers leaving empty-handed, with 78 per cent of survey respondents indicating that they have left a department store because of long waiting times.
It looks to me that HBC will really have to put customer service as a priority if they want to lure customers back. It will also need to significantly exceed the kind of service you get at Holt Renfrew (which is to say discriminatory and snooty).
The Gazette (shocking, I know)
Catalogue Yanked -La Maison Simons has decided to pull it’s Fall catalogue from the shelves after receiving numerous complaints of using too thin models on its pages. Although it’s been argued that images of very thin models do not cause anorexia, it has been proven to be one of the triggers that can lead to eating disorders. Montreal has especially been aware of the image it projects to its consumers in the fashion industry and Montreal Fashion Week fully supports the use of not-so thin models. However, from my observations when I’ve been to MFW, some of those girls seemed too thin in my opinion. But kudos to Simons for taking action.
Two Retail Giants Still Missing From Our Streets
With all this buzz of fast fashion stores, I might as well touch upon two retail giants who have yet to make a landmark in Canada that could give H&M and American Apparel a run for their money.
TopShop (UK)
No, not the crappy little store in Montreal Trust that bears the same name, I’ve been to that place twice and their clothes and shopping experience wouldn’t be quite as near as I would expect for a Kate Moss famed store. This UK retailer is owned by Arcadia Group, TopShop along with TopMan are a British sensation with nearly 3000 stores, of which 420 of them are found in 30 countries. So why is it taking them so long to come to Canada?
Last year they’ve announced that their first American flagship store will be located none other than in New York City. A 40,000 sq.ft. behemoth on Broadway will open Fall 2008, making our new H&M flagship look impossibly small at 15,000 sq.ft. The birth of a TopShop flagship store in Montreal might mean the end of Le Chateau as they seem to operate in the same fast fashion styles. While Le Chateau is doing relatively well for itself earning over $240 millions in sales in 2006, its revenue is minute compared to Arcadia’s overall $3.7 billion revenue (even split into 9 brands, one brand would still dwarf our Canadian counterpart).
TopShop would probably be the last of the European giants rounding out St-Catherine, it wouldn’t be surprising that they would have to displace other businesses in order to make room for a TopShop like H&M did with their flagship.
Uniqlo (Japan)
Though H&M may be drawing some attention to Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo this fall, I ultimately believe the public will go for a more sensible Japanese fashion brand such as Uniqlo to make competition with American Apparel. Good quality office wear of chinos, button down shirts, long sleeve tees, and plain collared polos, Uniqlo is affordable comfort.
Though Uniqlo had 3 New Jersey stores a few years ago, the stores performed well below expectations and staggered in sales. Issuing a redirection, Uniqlo opened its flagship store in New York and closed the 3 New Jersey locations as to better reposition themselves on the market.
Uniqlo may not be as trendy as H&M or Top Shop, however they do tap into the market of shoppers who want to look put together without being over the top with casual wear that’s not Wal-Mart. It’s also a bonus that the New York flagship also carries Japanese yukata (summer kimono) for a cheap $40 during Spring, something that some consumers find fun and endearing. As Montrealers appreciate Japanese culture more and more, a yukata corner at Uniqlo would probably perform very well in Montreal as per my observations at this year’s Matsuri Japan festival at the Old Port. Long line ups snaked along the yukata rental booth, and many came owning their very own. At $40, it’s an affordable and fun investment.
Montreal is Delirious for Denim
Keeping up with a fashion blog takes some work. I get a lot of emails of companies pitching me a new line or new product in hopes of getting the word out there. But what’s really striking is the fact that I get a concentration of emails from one camp in particular: denim.
I don’t know how many denim companies are out there, but I think there are way too many. Especially in Montreal, I don’t know what it is about this city, but they’re full of denim designers. How well these small companies do is hard to say, but it’s suffice to say that I am about up to here with denim overload.
I mean I love my jeans, I read somewhere that the average shopper owns at least 5 pairs of jeans, which isn’t too far from the truth to what I own. So I’m assuming because people own so many pairs of jeans that there’s a hot market for it and a huge demand. Premium denim costs a pretty penny and I think shoppers are getting confused and lost between the difference of premium and a regular pair.
I’m no denim expert, but from what I’ve learned, premium is the kind that will last you forever. The way jeans were originally meant to be. Denim was conceived to be durable, and so farmers and laborers wore this material as they worked. Then it made its way with cowboys in the 1930s and popularized into fashion after WWII. You can read more about the history of denim on Lifestyle Monitor’s 2007 issue at Cotton Inc.
With everyone jumping the bandwagon and attaching “premium” to high priced jeans, or with the recent green movement that everyone is saying that they’re using organic cotton, there needs to be a simple certification system issued by the top guns in using organic fabric if you ask me. Like many things in fashion, education is essential if you don’t want to be duped, but it’s becoming increasingly complex. You’d really have to be a Denim Nerd to differentiate premium and fashion jeans. Something I personally can’t be bothered with. I equate jeans as practical winter wear, if they can survive the slushy cold streets of Montreal, they’re good in my book.
Image credits: Cotton Inc
