I read an article today that seems to confirm what I’ve known all along: when times are tough, women buy cosmetics.  While I’ve significantly scaled back my shoe shopping, I see nothing wrong with purchasing yet another lip gloss.  I’ve already lost thousands in the stock market, and that did nothing for my appearance, why not shell out $10 for a bit of makeup?  There seems to be some evidence to support the fact that I’m not alone in my rationalizations.   The New York Times reported in their article, “Hard Times but your Lips Look Great,” that Estee Lauder noticed a significant uptick in lipstick sales following September 11th.   Panic in the streets, threats of war, an economy in a death spiral…no match for lipstick. More alarming still, is UK Popsugar’s article “You Have to Suffer to Be Beautiful During Credit Crunch” which claims: “Nearly one in three women, which is the equivalent to eight million nationwide, would prefer to eat less than curtail their spending on what we all seem to see as must-have essential beauty items.”  That’s right, some of us would rather starve than be ugly.  So why is lipstick seemingly buoyed by an economic slide?  Probably because in times of great economic stress, women cut back on the big ticket items and with it go things like apparel, shoes, jewelry and electronics.  But makeup…lipstick to be specific, is (relative to the car you’d been planning to buy pre-economy meltdown) practically free - a luxury you can actually afford. That said, lipstick purchases add up, especially if you buy them the way I do - blindly and with plenty of false hope.  With that in mind, I give you our Top 10 list in this category, as well picks from my fellow lipstick/lip gloss/lip balm wearers here at Buzzillions.  All these products have great reviews and none cost as much as a new pair of shoes (well, maybe the Nars, but it’s a cheap pair).

Buzzillions Top 10 Lipsticks and Glosses

And a very unscientific poll of what we like here at Buzzillions:

1. Elf Cosmetics Luscious Liquid Lipstick:  Lots of colors, and I mean come on, it’s a dollar.
2. Burt’s Bees Lip Balm: An old standby, tried and true. Lots of good stuff, no scary ingredients.
3. Bonne Bell Lip Smacker Lip Gloss, Dr. Pepper: Who doesn’t want Dr. Pepper on their lips all day?
4. Vincent Longo Baby Balm Lipstick, SPF 12: Also loved by Allure magazine in their annual Best of Beauty list.
5. Bonne Bell Lip Lites Lip Gloss in Cappucino:  A neutral gloss that compliments most skin tones, and smells yummy too.
6. L’Oreal Colour Juice Sheer Lip Gloss, Watermelon: Easy to apply, not too sticky and smells like candy.
7. Nars Frost Lipstick in Klute:  Yes, it’s $24, but there’s a reason it’s a beauty editors fave.
8. LipFusion Color Shine Collagen Lip Plump: Not a lot of reviews but one of our employees swears by it..
9. Carmex Lip Balm: A favorite for the guys too, and still comes in that familiar yellow pot.
10. Smashbox Lip Gloss Sheer Color in Illume: Another winner in Allure Magazine’s Best of Beauty Editor’s Choice Award for best lip gloss.

The last couple days we reached out to BabyCheapSkate, a popular mom blogger and long time Buzzillions user, to hold a giveaway on behalf of Buzzillions. We decided to give away two $25 cash prizes to two random people who write a comment on how they would use Buzzillions, what they think of it, what could be improved, and so forth. Reading all the comments has been really exciting for us, and it’s great how much time people spent exploring the site and telling us how they’ll use it for their new baby, or holiday shopping, etc.

You can see the contest here, and you can even comment for a chance to win because it doesn’t end until Monday!

Our second giveaway is being held on SisterlySavings and that contest is still running too :).

We love giveaways!

The Lobster Baby:

“..an adorable costume for Halloween. My old is going as the Little Mermaid and My 3 month son is Sebastian.” - Ellie and Eli’s Mommy from Charleston, SC.

Turtle

“My son is 6 months old and we hope that by Halloween he will be crawling, so the turtle with the shell will be perfect.” - Amanda from Lexington, South Carolina

Baby Duckling

“We added some orange tights to look like the duck legs. She was so cute! The costume is very soft and great quality.” - Angie from Columbia, SC

More baby costume ideas and reviews on Buzzillions

Like myself there are a lot of women (and men) try out new skin care products that make bold claims of reducing acne, preventing dryness, eliminating wrinkles, and so on. The Neutrogena Wave Power-Cleanser for instance has been widely advertised for a few months now, and it really did seem appealing with its creative design and supposed power to revolutionize your skin cleansing routine.

This time I held some patience and waited a few months to see what early adopters would actually end up saying. I’m really not surprised that a lot of people went online and swooped it up (it’s pretty cheap at $14.99), but the 72 reviews so far share a pretty bleak story.

Along with straight out disappointed buyers saying they want their money back, others elaborated on how the product doesn’t foam like it claims, and many even said it caused breakouts rather than diminished them! Don’t you just hate when a skin product causes acne when the one that’s the one thing you’re desperately trying to get rid of.

Disappointing to say the least, but I’m just going to stick to the basics and use the tried and true products highly reviewed on Buzzillions that never let down.

Recently we’ve had two widely regarded mom bloggers review their experience using Buzzillions. MomAdvice who writes helpful money saving tips, wrote a very flattering review about how she uses Buzzillions and how it helped her find the right GPS system. 

MomReviews also writes reviews on a wide range of products she uses, which is especially why she found Buzzillions to be unique for having reviews written by real people. She highlighted all the features we love seeing catch on with people, like the affinity recommendation wizard, review snapshot, and of course the discovery of highly reviewed products you never would have known about otherwise. You can read her review on us here. 

1. Mint.com is a highly addictive money management site. You can quickly see where you’re spending, where you can save, and where you can earn higher interest.

Mint is by far the coolest way to track your spending online. It’s is completely free, and it takes about 5 minutes to import your bank accounts, after which it spurts out a clean pie chart of your spending trends. I had no idea until I signed up for Mint that I spend about 20% more than people in SF eating out at restaurants, or that my most frequent merchant is Trader Joes :). There are all kinds of interesting nuggets you would never know about your spending habits! You can see how hundreds of Twitter users are benefiting from Mint.com as well.

It also showed me banks that would give me 2-3% higher interest than I’m currently getting! I don’t know anybody who has the patience to purchase and use Microsoft Money and all those other bland financial software tools, but Mint is sure to attract the masses as they continue to make financial tracking and budgeting fun .

2. Gas Prices from MSN Auto : Type in your zip code and find the cheapest gas locations in your area, the average gas price, and the highest price. It’s also updated every night. The difference between the cheapest and most expensive gas in our zip code in SF is 70 cents! You’d save a good $14 on a full 20 gallon tank of gas.

3. Read reviews on Buzzillions of course :). Chances are you’ve bought something for a great price, but it just didn’t cut it. Eeither it broke, or the quality was so bad it was unusable, or it just didn’t meet your expecatations. Reading reviews from actual owners of the product on Buzzillions can help you get the best bang for the buck. You never know afterall, since even the best brands out there don’t always produce the best products .

As I was browsing through Buzzillions last night, I found a bunch of products made by top brands and was pretty surpised to see how poorly rated some of these were! It goes to show that even if a product is made by a brand you know and trust, they can still be huge disappointments. 

1. Black & Decker 12 Cup Coffee Maker: 2.4 stars/ 5

Although Black & Decker is a well known and trusted brand, this particular coffe maker is a definite bust! Several people said it ended up leaving “a counter top covered in hot coffee,” and that this model is terrible compared to previous models since they’ve “finally cheapened it to the point of not being usable.”

2. Kodak EasyShare M883 Digital Camera: 2.8 stars/ 5

Even Kodak doesn’t always get everything right! Although it looks pretty sleek, the “picture quality is digusting .” Also, don’t plan on taking pictures indoors since the “camera is not usable in low light areas,” and pictures turn out “grainy.”

3. Magellan Crossover GPS Unit: 3.1 stars/ 5

Reading the reviews, this Magellan GPS system has pissed a lot of people off. I mean, if you had to “spend another $150+ to add the software to make it do what it says it does.” A few people weren’t even satsified with the basic necessities of  GPS system as it “responds slowly, plans poorly, has multiple misspelled road names, including freeway names, and is grossly out of date with the maps. ”

If you had to guess the top three pages visited on Buzzillions today, what would you say? Well, fortunately, you don’t have to guess. In fact, you can always check out what our users are reading about and researching by clicking the Sitemap link found at the bottom of every Buzzillions page.

So, today I went to the Sitemap page to get a sense of what’s popular right now. I probably could have guessed the top page, GPS Reviews, without much trouble. It’s summer, people are traveling, they’re hiking, and really, GPS is just cool. The second one, Television Reviews, is fairly predictable as well. Starting February 17, 2009, all television signals will be digital, so it’s understandable that people are starting to research (and buy) their digital TV options.

But number three came right out of left field. The number three most visited page today is the Trojan Elexa Ultra Sensitive Premium Latex Condoms product page! This means that this single product is getting almost as much “play” as the entire GPS or Television category! Let’s see if they can keep it up

My first child never figured out how to get out of her crib.  Ever.  Either she was risk averse and didn’t fancy a nasty fall to the floor below or she wasn’t as clever as other children.  When my sister in law told me about crib tents, I only half listened.  After all, my child was well behaved and sensible.  She stayed in her crib all night.   And so I had the luxury of dismissing crib tents as being vaguely barbaric, in line with those leashes you sometimes see on children in airports.  “It sounds like a cage,” I remember telling a friend.  Fast forward four years, and I’ve got a set of twins on my hands.  One docile, loving, sweet and cautious.  The other, oh, the other.  The other will leap from countertops, throw herself into swimming pools, run with scissors, pocket knives and, if she could get her hands on them, fireworks.   She has, in the last week, smeared yogurt on a cat, stood on glass shelving, put jello into my shoes and, in a particularly impressive Houdini manouver, managed to free herself from her duct taped diaper (which she takes off when dirty).   The first time she got out of her crib and toddled down the hall into my bedroom, I thought, oh how cute and amusing.  The fifth time, it was less adorable.  And so I remembered the crib tent.

Near as I can tell, crib tents are only made by one manufacturer, Tots In Mind, who make the The Cozy Crib Tent II.  I think they have some kind of monopoly, or patent, because they aren’t terribly well made and yet they don’t seem to improve in quality much.  I’m on my third (broken zips seem to be a common problem along with tears in the nylon during installation.  I’ve installed several, all with some degree of tearing, so I know it’s not a fluke.  Here’s the thing though, in general they work.  The tent is made of netting with a structure very like a real tent, with poles that hold the thing up.  Even a tall child can still stand up fully, but can’t (and here is the wonderful part) get out.  That’s the theory anyway.   Remember I’ve been through three of these.  The first, the zipper broke because she managed to wiggle her fingers in a gap at the end of the tent and use that gap to push the zipper open.  The second, she pulled off all the velcro tabs and slipped underneath.  This doesn’t happen with the latest crib tents - The Cozy Crib Tent II which has webbing all around the insides of the crib (see picture).  The third one, with the new wrap around webbing, is working quite well, and strangely enough, she likes it, even helping to zip herself in at night.  Normally I would give a product that broke this routinely two stars, but the thing is, I can’t live without it.  Even if I’ve bought three crib tents, it’s worth her not getting out of her crib and (as she is liable to do) walking down the stairs, out the front door, and hitching a ride to Canada.

We sat at our desk pounding away at our keyboards and managing the online content for Buzzillions. Somehow the Content Team ended up talking about Axe. Yes, Axe shower gels, the deodorants, the body shots. While comparing the smells of these Axe products, my colleague Pete revealed his dismay for Old Spice, because it gives him rashes.

Perplexed, we hopped on to Buzzillions and we researched the product to see if anyone else has that issue. Pete found the product and we read the reviews. Someone else actually had the same issue. Bingo Neat-o! Buzzillions really does empower[s] consumers by providing the purchasers’ experience with legitimate data.

This experience led me to think, “What does empowering the consumer mean?” Empower, (in street terms), means to give an edge to. Empowering consumers, from a sociological perspective, means providing legitimate data for consumers to make educated purchases. Data needs to be managed to ensure quality. Buzzillions now has over 2.3 million reviews. These reviews are managed by the 30+ member Moderation Team led by our fearless leader Lily. They scan the reviews to ensure that the data is coming from legitimate sources, and they follow strict guidelines that ensure useful comments.

In the end process, consumers can draw data from the reviews and make their own conclusion on whether the product is worth their hard earned money. The clean data can help answer many questions that a common consumer has. What type of person is this product made fore? What are some of the cool features? Are there common issues with the product? Should I get a warranty for the item? How good is the quality of the material? Is there a possibility that Old Spice might cause a rash on me? (It did for Pete.)

So Buzzillions is in some way a database for people to research and buy their product in a streamlined process. It offers a way for a community to get useful data to buy products that they will be satisfied with. Since I’ve been informed of the possibility of Old Spice causing rashes, I think I will stick with Axe. It smells really good. Trust me, check it out here.

Bert