If you’re on the lookout for silicone-free foundations, I’ve found another one for you! (the first one was Bare Minerals’ BareSkin Pure Brightening Serum Foundation) Now straight up, I must admit that I’m typically not a fan of silicone-free foundations. I’ve used far, far more conventional foundations with silicone than I have the silicone-free ones and the latter are harder to blend than the regular ones.

However, I know that there are people who may be allergic to silicone or would prefer silicone-free foundations, which is why I’ve decided to also give this a go. While I did have several issues with this foundation, there was something about it that almost blew my mind.

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© asife

I’m sure that this has happened to us one time or another. Picture the scenario: You have a great idea for a blog post which you think your readers will love. You end up spending many hours working on just that one blog post, perfecting it with beautiful pictures, witty anecdotes and a great storyline. You click on the Publish button, sit back and wait for the comments to come from either the blog or social media.

*sound of crickets*

You get bupkis. Instead of the usual number of comments you get per blog post, you’d be lucky to even have one. Where’s the engagement? Where are the comments? You spent so much time on the post! Why isn’t there more enthusiasm from your readers? Does no one care? Did you do something wrong?

Sound familiar?

Ahh…let me tell you, I’ve been there. In fact, I still go there from time to time. There are blog posts that I’d spent hours on that I expected a lot of comments for. I had just about a handful. I remember one blog post that I spent 6 hours creating and it only received 1-2 comments. And then there are those blog posts that I whipped out of a hat; written and published in 15 minutes which received a lot of comments. It’s almost hilarious and I would laugh my head off if I didn’t feel like crying for that lost time.

To be honest, I don’t have the exact answer for you as to why sometimes our blog posts just weren’t as well received as we expected. If I do, I wouldn’t still be getting periods of this. But over time, here’s what I’ve learned, and that knowledge has helped minimise the lack of reader engagement and the heartache from what I thought was wasted hard work.

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I used to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with hand sanitisers. They’re a brilliant idea and are staples in my bag. I rarely leave the house without carrying a bottle of hand sanitiser with me. I’m not a germaphobe by any means but if you’ve seen that many women who don’t wash their hands after using the public toilet like I have, you’d be using bottles of these like there’s no tomorrow.

See, the thing is, I love how handy it is (ahem see what I did there?). But I hate how dry most of them make my hands feel. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten into the habit of immediately using hand cream right after hand sanitiser just yet so I have to rely on good hand sanitisers that don’t dry my skin out. After much searching and trialling of budget and more expensive hand sanitisers, I’ve come down to these few that work very well without making my hands look like prunes.

Straight up, you’ll see that there’s only one budget hand sanitiser in the shortlist. My problem with what I call supermarket/drugstore hand sanitisers is that they’re often drying on the skin. A large bottle of Purell is certainly budget-friendly but if you tend to use hand sanitisers regularly yet don’t apply hand creams often, they’re going to dry your hands out really quickly.

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