I tested over 100 beauty products this month — here are 5 I'm buying for myself

I love this product! This pumpkin enzyme mask has been a favorite of beauty editors for decades, and for good reason: It's a powerful at-home exfoliating treatment that truly wakes up your skin and gives it a serious glow. It uses enzymes from pumpkin, which are similar to alpha hydroxy acids like glycolic acid except a lot more gentle. This makes it an ideal exfoliant for those with sensitive skin. 

Additionally, pumpkin is hydrating and packed with antioxidants like beta-carotene that can help nourish skin and soften wrinkles. This is the lowest price I've seen all year, and my favorite deal of the week. 

Two signs that I am 51 and not a young beauty-editor whippersnapper: First, I totally forgot that Smashbox, a high-quality cosmetics brand I used and loved 20 years ago, even existed; second, for the first time in my life, I'm contending with weirdly bloated dime-sized pores all over my upper cheeks and nose.

Menopause has brought all sorts of odd indignities, but the pores were something I didn't know to expect (they're caused, as are so many signs of aging, by a loss of collagen). But my old friend Smashbox has come to the rescue with this magical lotion, which blurs and smooths imperfections nearly upon contact. 

It's ideal for wearing over your moisturizer and under even the sheerest foundation, though this week I tried it with just a light tinted moisturizer and that worked too. If your complexion is uneven in a way that makes you feel self-conscious, this is a safe bet, either for everyday use or for special occasions when you want your face to look flawless.

It's embarrassing to say this as a beauty editor with access to the best hair products, but my own mop has looked like absolute trash for months. It started with a bad haircut to hide the thinning, but then I hated styling it, so I started pulling it up every day — and that created strain, which added to more thinning. Then I used about a million different shampoos while traveling all summer, all of which made the problem worse. I was about to shave my head and start over before discovering this stellar, award-winning shampoo from Verb.

Formulated with strand-nourishing ingredients like moringa oil and sunflower-seed extract, Ghost is the most gentle, lightest weight shampoo I've tried since that one time I used my kid's Johnson & Johnson's baby shampoo in 2011. It's sulfate-free and lightly (but delightfully) scented, it moisturizes on contact and it restored my sad fine and wavy hair to something bouncier, smoother and frizz-free upon first use. 

I found it so transformative that I picked up the travel size too so I'm never without it.  

If there's anything I've learned in a year of reporting on skin care, it's this: Our skin truly benefits from the daily use of a well-made vitamin C serum. Choosing one, however, can be a bit tricky, especially since so many cost more than I pay for a week's groceries. 

There's an entire worldwide web of vitamin C serum-heads debating individual products' pH levels and the inferiority of C-derivatives like sodium ascorbyl phosphate compared with the gold-standard, L-ascorbic acid. However, once you get that deep in wonky skin-care Reddit, you find a consensus: For an affordable, high-quality vitamin C serum, the closest to top-of-the-line Skinceuticals is this one by Timeless. It's lightweight, absorbs quickly, is less sticky than C-Firma and contains the right percentage of the main ingredient, combined with vitamin E and ferulic acid. 

It boasts more than 6,000 exuberant five-star reviews on Amazon, all repeating something along the lines of this one: "OMG! Someone finally did Vitamin C right, and they're not charging hundreds of dollars per ounce!"

I am not an empress, a socialite, a CEO or the "real housewife" of a wealthy man. Therefore, I despise buying products I'm not sure I'll like unless they cost less than a sandwich. However, I was willing to make an exception for this rich, hydrating, dark-circle-eradicating eye cream because I've only heard amazing things about it and because I have the shadowed under-eyes of a mourning Italian widow. I also know enough about the best eye creams and how vitamin C works to ascertain that this one — formulated with 5% encapsulated L-ascorbic acid and moisture-infusing hyaluronic acid — could actually soothe my orbital woes.

But lo! My conflict has been resolved by the bargain gods! BeautyStat's brightening potion is on sale for more than half off, which means it's in my cart as I type.

"Feels like velvet," raved one five-star reviewer. "This eye cream is such a game-changer. The bottles last me about six months so it's great for the money. And I can see a definite change in my crow's feet since using it for nine months."