(Warning: This is a notice to all male readers. The following post is very chick-oriented. It involves cosmetics. It is the blog equivalent of your wife’s purse. You know it’s there, but you don’t mess with it. Ever. Proceed at your own risk.)

I was desperate. I’d tried everything. I was standing in the bathroom holding the industrial-sized vat of petroleum jelly and seriously considering the unthinkable. Can Vaseline be face cream?

Recently, my normally ultra-dry skin had gone over to the dark side. It was cracking, peeling, sloughing off. There are Gila monsters with a better epidermis. Dogs had started to bark and whimper as I walked down the street. I looked like I smeared library paste on my face and let it dry. I am telling you, it was serious. It was so serious, my friend held an impromptu intervention.

I had walked down that street in Santa Monica a hundred times and never noticed this shop. Never. And apparently, no one else had either. People were walking past sipping Starbucks and holding their shaky Chihuahuas, never turning their heads. No one looked in the window. No one went inside. It was a magic shop. No, really. Go with me on this. It was like it only appeared when you desperately needed it. Like you’d rubbed a genie lamp and “POOF!” there it was. And only the Gila-faced could see it. (Very Harry Potter, room-of-requirement-esque for Rowling fans.)

Inside everything comes in little jars and tubes, like an old-fashioned apothecary. (And everything is in French, so you know it’s going to be expensive.) Amy leads the way up to the well-groomed, face cream enchantress behind the counter, who had also appeared “POOF!” in the otherwise empty store.

“My friend has Gila face,” Amy said in her remarkably charming Australian accent, “what can you do about that?”

“POOF!” a second enchantress appeared next to the first. I swear to God she wasn’t there one second before. “Try these,” she said handing over some samples. “And these,” said the other woman, handing over some more.

No sales pitch. No give-me-all-your-credit-cards-and-no-gets-hurt spiel. Just two other-worldly smiles and waves as they sent me on my way with a handful of little packets. I could practically hear the “POOF!” behind me as the shop, having granted its wish, disappeared.

They could afford to be confident, those enchantresses. Those were magic packets. Magic packets from the magic store, and tomorrow I will run out. I am nearing panic. My face is like a French baby’s butt. I am smooth. I am soft. I feel the need to say “oui, oui” a lot and eat more than the normal amount of cheese. I can not possibly be expected to go back to Gila face.

I have planned my route. Tomorrow, I will park in the same place. I will wander in the same manner. I will hope the same hopes, and pray in the name of all things holy that this phantasmal apothecary will appear again.

Wish me luck.