RTW tips: personal care on the road
As I approach the half-way point of my Round-the-World journey, I want to share some practical tips about personal care that I've picked up along the way.
1. I highly recommend solid castille soap. It doesn't count against your liquids limit, and you can use it as shampoo, body soap, face soap, and even laundry soap and dish soap. What I love about it for laundry is that rubbing it into your clothes gets stains out that soaking in Tide in your sink will not. What I love about it for cleaning my water bottle is that it rinses very quickly to a squeaky clean. It breaks into tiny pieces easily, making it practical to take just what you need into a shared bathroom, and not worry about carrying around wet soap later.
2. Buying regular-sized bottles of product can be more economical and practical when you're in one place for a while. When I got to Brazil where I was going to be staying for a couple weeks, I bought regular-sized bottles of Pantene, Colgate Total, Dove moisturizer, L'Oreal Solar Expertise, and La Roche-Posay Anthelios (both sunscreens). Since a lot of foreign airlines have stringent weight restrictions on carry-on bags, I couldn't avoid checking in my backpack even if all of my liquids fit in the quart-sized bag.
3. Brazil is a great place to stock up on personal care products, because they not only have familiar brands, but also some products that I haven't seen in mass distribution yet in the US, like Solar Expertise and La Roche-Posay. They both are L'Oreal brands, and both have the Meroxyl ingredient that gives great protection against UVA rays. Plus, neither irritates my skin the way J&J brand sunscreens do (Aveeno and Neutrogena).
4. The other product that you can find in Brazil is single-serve sachets of honey. I had a mild cold, and Brazilians have obviously gotten the message that honey beats cough medicine in soothing and healing.
5. South Africa is the place to get hand sanitizer; I couldn't find this in South America.
Besides these products, I've been harvesting the little bottles from my airline amenity kits. So far, I've used the H2O+ products from United (love the marine scents), and am carrying around the Clarins (from South African Airways) and L'Occitane (from Turkish Airlines) just in case.
Today, I also bought some products from the Lush Cosmetics store in Istanbul. This is the first place I've been to that has a Lush store; I don't think even San Diego has one yet. Lush specializes in solid shampoos and soaps, and I wanted to replenish my stash of castille soap cubes that I've used up. I got the Godiva and Squeaky Green shampoo discs, Sea Vegetable body soap, and Fresh Farmacy face soap. I went in only planning on getting one shampoo disc, but got suckered into the "buy 2 shampoo, get a free tin" and "buy 3 products get 1 free" promotions! I'll let you know later how these products turn out.
