The Chanel Glow I Wouldn't Buy Again

Used sparingly, the product can absolutely give you glow.

The problem is that I don't tend to wear it on completely bare skin.

I have base make-up on. And when I tried to add the highlighting fluid over it, I found myself disturbing the make-up underneath. Instead of adding the final lovely little bit of luminosity I had imagined, I was watching parts of my base come away with it.

That is not a beauty ritual I find particularly relaxing.

Perhaps there is a perfect technique for it. Perhaps somebody who wears less base make-up than I do would absolutely love it. Perhaps applied in another order it becomes exactly the product I thought I was buying.

But I don't think a product has to be objectively bad before I am allowed to say it was a bad purchase for me.

And this one was.

There is a slightly strange thing that happens when we buy something from a beautiful brand.

We want it to work.

Maybe a little more than we would if the same thing came in an anonymous tube from the chemist.

The packaging is lovely. The name carries a certain promise. You have spent enough money that admitting actually, I don't really like this feels annoyingly close to admitting you made the wrong decision.

So you try again.

Less this time.

Maybe with a different brush.

Maybe underneath something instead of over it.

Maybe on a day when the planets are better aligned.

At some point, though, I think you are allowed to stop auditioning a product for a role it clearly isn't going to get.

Chanel Les Beiges is not going to become one of my everyday favourites simply because I would quite like a Chanel product to be one of my everyday favourites.

I don't reach for it naturally.

I have to think about how to use it.

And when there are products in my bathroom that cost a fraction of the price and have survived years of new launches without me ever questioning whether I like them, that tells me something.

I still use Purol.

The little stick. A few euros. Nothing particularly glamorous about it.

I have used it for what feels like my entire life.

It doesn't have to persuade me with beautiful packaging or a campaign or a new formulation. It just sits there, gets used and gets replaced when it runs out.

I love that.

And it is probably the easiest way to explain what I mean when I talk about Tiny Luxuries.

This isn't a category for expensive things.

It is a category for things that make ordinary life nicer and genuinely earn a place in it.

Sometimes that is my €170 bottle of Santal Austral, which I will happily wear while working from home in Miffy slippers.

Sometimes it is Purol for a few euros.

And sometimes a beautiful Chanel bottle turns out not to earn its shelf space at all.

Price isn't the hierarchy.

Use is.

Pleasure is.

The tiny moment of oh, I love this is.

This is the less comfortable bit of a disappointing purchase.

I already own it.

The money has already been spent.

There is always a temptation to decide that means I should now dutifully use every last drop. Otherwise it was wasteful.

I understand the logic. I hate waste too.

But forcing myself to use a beauty product I don't particularly enjoy doesn't magically reverse the purchase. It only turns one disappointing decision into months of mildly annoying make-up.

I would rather learn from it.

What attracted me to this one was partly the promise: easy, beautiful glow. What I learned is that I want products that work with the way I already do my make-up, rather than products that require me to redesign my routine around them.

That is useful information for the next time something beautiful catches my eye.

Will it prevent every future beauty mistake?

Absolutely not.

I know myself better than that.

I actually think there is something freeing about being able to say that.

We are surrounded by recommendations. Viral products. Cult products. Things other people swear are life-changing. Expensive things that surely must be better because so many people love them.

But taste is personal.

So is routine.

So is skin.

And sometimes the product everybody else seems to understand simply isn't yours.

That doesn't make the recommendation dishonest. It doesn't necessarily make the product bad. And it doesn't mean you failed to discover the secret application method that would finally turn you into a glowing Chanel woman.

Sometimes you just don't like it very much.

My Santal Austral was an expensive blind buy that worked spectacularly well for me.

My Chanel highlighter was a much more sensible purchase on paper and didn't.

I like that both can be true.

Because if Tiny Luxuries is going to be about the things I genuinely love living with, it also has to make room for the things I thought I would love and didn't.

Otherwise this becomes a shopping list.

And I don't want a shopping list.

I want a record of what was actually worth bringing home.

This one wasn't.

Even if, used enthusiastically enough, I could probably be seen from space.