Canadian Beauty Journal is an independent consumer magazine built on a simple premise: readers deserve to know how beauty products actually perform, not how they are marketed. Every item we review is purchased anonymously at retail, using our own budget. We do not accept free samples for testing, and there is no such thing as a sponsored ranking in these pages. Our comparisons are conducted the same way a careful, skeptical friend would approach them — methodically, with attention to Canadian conditions, from dry prairie winters to humid coastal summers.