The tools of beauty...

Nope, this little selection of steel instruments does not belong in an OR!

If you look a little more closely, I'm sure you'll recognise some very popular beauty tools, which are almost essential to any beauty routine that wishes to be complete (by the way, don't they resemble weird torture devices at first glance, or is it just me?)!

So, as presented to you from left to right and as I'm sure you've figured it out by now, we have: a blemish extractor, slanted tweezers, pointed tweezers and an eyelash curler.

The blemish extractor is something that I refused to purchase for a long time, even though my nose suffers from whiteheads on a regular basis (that oily t-zone we've talked about is to blame) - the reason being that it looked extremely painful to use. However I picked it up on a random Sephora trip and haven't looked back since: it's the only thing that helps me remove those nasty whiteheads effectively (no scrub has ever made a difference on me in that department)!

The best way is to use it after a shower, when your pores are already dilated, but me wanting to be super thorough, I wash my nose with warm water in addition to the shower. As instructed, I use the wider tip first, pressing it on the area of choice to "mark" it and begin the removal, and then I follow with the finer tip to completely remove the yucky sebaceous content of the selected pore, aka a whitehead. Yes, my nose is all red and swollen afterwards, but once it calms down, I can actually feel the skin less congested!

A couple of things you should know about this method:

1. It will exctract whiteheads, as well as blackheads, but the latter will be a tad more difficult to remove, since the material inside the pore has been there for a lot longer (blackheads began as whiteheads, but the material has oxidised over time, giving it a darker appearance).

2. Always make sure that your pores are open before you start the "procedure", and

3. Be gentle and don't push too hard. If the extraction isn't happening, don't be too hard on your skin or you'll end up breaking tiny blood vessels (and who wants to deal with those)!

The Tweezerman tweezers have, too, been a fairly recent addition to my collection. I was using the generic type of tweezers that you can find at your local drugstore and thought to myself, "these work, why is everyone raving about the Tweezerman ones, what's so special about them" until... I tried them! I was immediately impressed by their precision and sharpness! Now, I can't really imagine plucking my brows without these babies!

I use the regular slanted ones for all the heavy duty stuff and the pointed ones whenever I'm faced with the unfortunate condition of in-grown hairs in various places, or simply when the hair is super fine and tiny, and even then, it will work its charm guaranteed (even when my brows are glued to the mirror and there's still very fine blonde hair that my eyes may question if its there, well, the pointed tweezers won't - that's the level of precision we're talking about)!

And finally, the eyelash curler, namely the infamous Shu Uemura one! I cannot say that much about it, despite the obvious: that it gives my lashes a nice curl before mascara application. But since my eyelashes are not really flat to begin with, I can't say that I see a major difference. I like these though, because they're gentle to my lashes and they don't pinch them, and also because their shape follows the natural shape of my eyes.

Personally, I don't travel anywhere without my tweezers and the blemish extractor; the curler wouldn't really upset me if it stayed home, but that's just me rating a whitehead-free nose way higher than super curled lashes, I'm sure that your preferences may vary!

So, have you tried any of these and what are your thoughts?

And what are your essential beauty tools (nope, brushes don't count, the more odd-looking they are the better)?