And I wonder, I wah-wah-wah-wah wonder

I'm so bummed. Almay is no longer making their Pure Tints line of tinted chapstick-like lipcolors. They were so perfect, particularly the shade Cocoa. They were skinny and small enough to fit in my pocket, just like a chapstick, so I could take it everywhere. They were SPF 25, for my butt-white self.* They put just enough color on your lips to, well, give your lips some color, but they were sheer enough not to look too lipsticky.

I'm not a big makeup person, particularly since I can almost never find colors that look good on my tres tres pale ass. I don't buy department store makeup because it's too friggin' expensive - who wants to spend twenty bucks on a mascara that you're supposed to replace after six months when it "expires?" I don't wear it often enough to make it worthwhile. So I stick to makeup I can buy in the drugstore, without the interference of a "helpful" saleslady whose job it is to sell me more than I really need.

Even with drugstore makeup, I've made some expensive mistakes, especially in the lipcolor arena. I walk out with a lipstick that looks great in the store, seems to be that perfect pinky-browny-red I've been looking for all my life, but then when I get home and put it on in natural light, it always becomes too...something. Usually too magenta. And I look like a dead fish. So it gets thrown into a drawer, never to be seen again, at least until the next time I move house and start boxing up the bathroom, only to discover the makeup graveyard I've created.**

But the Pure Tints! They were fabulous! My mom introduced me to them, believe it or not (my mom's not a big makeup person, either). Two years ago at my wedding she brought the Nude and the Cocoa shades and I borrowed one from her purse and was like, "WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?" Ever since that day I've been buying the Cocoa on a regular basis. And it was only 5 bucks! And they lasted, well, not forever, obviously, but quite a while. I would slip one in my pocket (I'm not a purse person, either) when I grabbed my money and driver's license - it was like, part of my essential equipment. "Cell phone - check. Money - check. Pure Tints - check."

I got suspicious that something was afoot a couple weeks ago when I did my usual drugstore run at our local Brooks and found the Almay display conspicuously empty of Pure Tints. They didn't have any of them, not a single shade. So I figured maybe their shipment didn't come in or something and I'd just check back next week. Then I looked at the Big K-Mart the next time I went and THEY didn't have them either, and alarm bells started to go off. I asked my mom to look down where she lives and she can't find them, either. Where have all the Pure Tints gone?

Almay's discontinued product page doesn't even list them. They're still on Drugstore.com, but who knows for how much longer? I'm going to buy a bunch of them right now and hoard them in my medicine cabinet. I hate it, HATE IT when a company discontinues a product I love without telling me. Why wasn't there a news bulletin about this? How dare they stop making Pure Tints without a Homeland Security Alert? Argh.

Thanks for reading.

*When a makeup company finally invents a shade of foundation or concealer called "Butt White," I will know it is for me.

**Of course, the makeup graveyard is nothing compared to the hair product graveyard. I have probably spent, over the course of my thirty-one years as a Curly Girl, enough money on hair products to finance Nolan's college education, 95% of which products did nothing special to my frizzy-ass, wacked-out hair.