1 LAISSEZ-FAIRE ATTITUDE

One beauty adviser glanced in my direction before walking off, perhaps for her tea break. I was kept waiting for a few minutes before a beauty assistant from - get this - another brand walked over to ask if I needed help. She then told me to leave my phone number and come back in an hour.

At another counter, I had to wait for several minutes for a beauty adviser to finish checking her e-mail before she sauntered over. And, on more occasions than I can count, the beauty advisers were more concerned with putting the finishing touches on their make-up before they came over to help me.

2 IGNORANCE

'I'm quite sure this is a moisturiser,' a beauty adviser said as she handed me a bottle. I took it and read the instructions aloud: 'Apply before moisturiser.'

Turned out the product was a serum, which you are meant to apply before your moisturiser.

Her response: 'Err, I guess it's not a moisturiser.'

3 RELUCTANCE TO HELP

When I asked one beauty assistant to recommend a skincare routine, she motioned to the entire display with a flourish and said: 'It's all there.'

I then asked her to pick a routine that would work for me.

She responded with another cursory gesture and mumbled: 'Try this.'

Perhaps the products were so good that they could speak for themselves.

4 VERBOSITY

I know skincare products today are made using super-duper ingredients and technology but really, all I want to know is which one works best for me.

The job of a beauty consultant is to cut through the marketing fluff and condense the information in layman terms. Recite (and mispronounce) technical terms and chemical names and you can be sure I will be put off.

One consultant, for instance, pronounced 'exfoliating', a basic skincare step, as 'ex-fliating'.

5 PRODUCTS GONE BAD

Once, after smearing some moisturiser on my hands, I took a sniff and was appalled by the smell. When I asked the beauty adviser to take a sniff, she agreed that the product had gone bad. She then took a new jar out of its box and offered it to me for a sniff test. It smelt fine.

Instead of replacing the stinking tester bottle with this fresh jar, however, she put the new one back into its box. The offensive sample jar stayed on the shelf.

This article was first published in Urban, The Straits Times on Jan 30, 2009.