There's no place like Sephora...There's no place like Sephora...

Several days ago I went to another big makeup and beauty retail shop that touts itself as a "the store on everyone's lips". I was thinking it would be like another Sephora.

I was sooooo disappointed. Chagrined, really. Crestfallen, if you will.

They had proudly displayed a full array of - are you ready for this? - drugstore makeup!! Now, why would I waste the gas to drive out to this so-called "specialty" beauty store and buy stuff I could buy at Walgreens?! Silly!

Plus none of the workers there seemed even remotely interested in being helpful (it was totally dead in there so they had no excuse) which was highly annoying. They did have a few good non-drugstore brands there, but the mojo there wasn't anything like the energy at Sephora.

But I have to set the emotional and mental stage for you before I tell you about what a relief it was, how absolutely euphoric it felt to set foot today in that mecca, that promised land, that nirvana of nirvanas.

Here's the deal. I've been staying home a lot these days, mostly because:

• work hasn't started up again yet,
• there is a $#!+load of work to be done around here, most of which somehow is stuff only I seem to notice around the house. Curious, that. {*grumble*}
  
• David is working several shifts in a row so I'm on Ben duty (which is sometimes the only fun I'm getting these days), and
• our laundry pile, which I am in charge of, has grown so large I have actually become genuinely afraid of it. I can't put it off any longer. I simply must do it before it gets its own zip code.

Another piece to this puzzle is that I have conscientiously taken off playing the horn since I played my last concert in Breckenridge, and have vowed to myself to wait until Monday to start up again. It was a decision based on the fact that my face had some serious callouses on it by the end of the festival. But the horn is a major expressive outlet for me, and I'm sort of not the same without it. I feel "off" when I've been away from it for too long.

So with all the work that needs to be done around the house swallowing me up and making it very difficult to pry open time for fun, I knew I would explode with household drudgery insanity if I didn't get the hell out for a few hours. I didn't have much time today, because I had to get home for David to be able to bike in to work in the afternoon, but...

I went out to Mayfair, which is hands down the best mall in Milwaukee, and hit my two favorite stores: Sephora, and The Body Shop. I got a shimmery eyeshadow (in Fairy Wings), an eye highlighting pencil, a new lipstick (Beige Star), and some undereye brightener (6am feedings - you do the math) at Sephora, and then got mango and coconut body butters at The Body Shop along with some other skin care products.

I adore retail therapy. After such a disappointing experience with that other beauty store (tsk!), I breathed a contented sigh of relief the moment I walked in. Immediately a Sephora sales associate rushed over to me, headset buzzing (I'm assuming they wear them in case they have...I don't know, a lipstick emergency? A bronzer cleanup on aisle 4?), clad in the uber-chic uniform of a total black outfit and Sephora apron, asking me if I needed any help. I smiled brightly.

"Actually, yes...do you have the Urban Decay line?"

(smiling and rolling her eyes jovially) "Well, of course we do! It's right there (pointing). And our organic skin care regimens are all on the back wall."

I exhaled and felt my entire body relax. Of course they have everything I need! More importantly, they have everything I don't need! I basked in the glow of the bright lights, which somehow, miraculously, don't make you look like the living dead like the ones in so many other stores. (Fluorescent lighting should be outlawed in public places.)

And it was truly an escape into a different world. The lighting, the music, the glamour (yes, that's how they spell it in there - more European or British or something - infinitely more alluring that way, don't you know, dahling). The unspoken but everpresent promise that all of your problems will be solved if you just look gorgeous and smell good...ah yes. I am intimately familiar with such a promise. The efforts of the beauty and fragrance advertising world are not lost on me. Sephora is truly a blissful escape from the sometimes oppressive reality of daily life. Truly, nothing bad can ever happen to you when you're at Sephora.