While I’ve flown on my Nexus card before, I’ve never been through a land border before, and we learned somethings this weekend. It was rather funny as right after I qualified for my Nexus, I had a trip to the USA, and then a few months later, Covid hit and I wasn’t able to use it since.
You don’t have to hold up the nexus cards one by one to the RFID reader. You can hold them all up at the same time. There is a display next to the RFID reader that displays a count - this the count for the number of cards that it has successfully read. If the count matches the number of cards you were trying to scan, you are good to go.
Declaring purchases coming back into Canada by land is still all oral declaration just like if you were driving up on your passport. We weren’t sure if anything would be different travelling under a Nexus lane but it isn’t.
It was great because the nexus lane took us less than 10 minutes while the regular lane had an estimated wait time of 45 minutes.
As one of countless people interested in skincare (expect more posts about skincare in Canada), sunscreen is a topic that comes up a lot not only to prevent skin cancers, but to slow down the aging process.
Canada continues to have more sunscreen filters approved than the USA, and we do have access to such great filters such as Tinosorb S and M, and Mexoryl, a frustratingly few companies actually use those ingredients in mass market sunscreens and continue to rely on old and not as photostable ingredients such as avobenzone, octocrylene, homosalate and so forth. Avobenzone being of particular note of not being photostable on its own and requiring other ingredients to stabilize it in sunlight.
L'Oreal, the parent company of many cosmetic brands including but not limited to Ombrelle on the mass market side and La Roche Posay, Vichy labs and Bioderma on their luxury skincare side.
To the best of my knowledge, in Canada, L'oreal is the only brand using Tinosorb in sunscreen and it exclusively available in their luxury skincare lines. Mexoryl is currently under patent by L'Oreal and can only be found in their products while Tinsorb is available to be incorporated into any companies products if they choose to purchase it from BASF (a German multinational chemical company).
For example of a sunscreen with Tinosorb, I am very partial to the La Roche Posay Ultra Body Fluid - It retails for around $30 CAD for 150ml.
My tip - skip the face version and buy the body version instead. The ingredients are the same and you get more sunscreen for your dollar.
This bottle contains the below as it’s active sunscreen UV filters:
Of particular note is that Mexoryl, and Tinosorb are in the top position for active ingredients which is excellent news as you are getting the top quality photostable filters as your primary protection method.
L'Oreal generally advertises any mass market product that uses Mexoryl quite visibly on the front of the bottle. Another skincare Canada favorite is Ombrelle’s sport endurance sunscreen for its non oily light texture as a cheaper body sunscreen. It retails for around $16 dollars for 231ml.
What I disagree with is how L'Oreal positions advertising Mexoryl in their mainstream brands. In the bottle below it says “MEXORYL TECHNOLOGY "and then in smaller print "and other sunscreen filters”. In my initial reading of this, as Mexoryl was positioned as a the largest, most prominent text, I imagined, and I’m sure many others did as well that Mexoryl would be the primary broad spectrum UV filter.
It is not. The ingredients for the sports endurance SPF 60 is as follows:
From the ingredients list we can see that the bulk of the UV filters are the older less/not photostable ingredients instead of the photostable Mexoyrl giving you the primary UV protection.
I would very much like L'Oreal to be more transparent in that while their product does indeed contain Mexoryl, you are not getting it in a high quantity in the product and since you are only getting such a small amount, it should not be so prominently advertised. I can see this very easily confusing mass market consumers looking for a quality sunscreen.
My biggest wish is that more sunscreen brands in Canada would use other UV filters like Tinosorb but my guess is that the French language laws and Canada’s small population is a massive hurdle for any pharmaceutical company to make a new formulation that they would not be able to even sell in the USA as Tinsorb is not approved by the American FDA.
I want to write a quick review about these rather cheap contact lenses that I picked up on my last Clearly order.
Clearly is selling a 5 pack of daily wear lenses for $5 which would be perfect for me for how infrequently I want to wear contact lenses. Most of the time anything this cheap would turn me immediately away but I decided that I would try it and worst case, would be out $5 and no harm done.
Everclear lenses are a silicone hydrogel contact lens which Clearly says is manufactured by Visco Vision (A company based in Taiwan). Clearly doesn’t list it on the website but the lenses were marked on the box as being made of Olifilcon B. This material seems to be something that only Visco is using as they were the ones who filed to use it at the FDA in 2018. This material has little information that I could find on the internet and it doesn’t appear that other brands are using it. At the price point, I was concerned initially that they would be using a similar tactic like Hubble who was using an very old non silicone hydrogel style contact lens material with low oxygen permeability. This is not to say that there are not different kinds of silicone hydrogel, and some being much better than others, but it’s a good starting point that it was a hydrogel material.
It also appears that Everclear is a Clearly / Luxottica brand that Visco is private manufacturing for them as on the Everclear website, the privacy policy link takes you to the Clearly website. It was concerning how basic and how little information the website had, and that the ‘English’ datasheets were actually in German.
For me, this seems like a classic, you get what you pay for, situation. The lenses in my opinion are not good. I could only wear them for at most 5 hours before I wanted to go home and remove them as they felt so dry. I’m not sure if this is a byproduct of just the lenses being cheap and other not including other technology that other companies use to keep their lenses moist throughout the day, or if it just my body not liking this material at all.
In credit to Everclear, I would be appreciative if other brands followed Everclear’s suit and made 5 or 10 lens packages available to buy for infrequent wear. It would also make it easier to try different lenses out and see if other companies had better technology.
I recently also tried the Acuvue 1 Day lenses as a comparison, and the lenses easily comfortable all day. They just unfortunately are almost double the price and are only sold in a 30 day or a 90 day pack.
I imagine that the markup on contact lenses must be astronomical so I shall keep hoping that a new company will come in and make a product that is cheaper, but doesn’t skimp on comfort.
Clearly is selling a 5-pack of daily wear lenses for $5 which would be perfect for me for how infrequently I want to wear contact lenses. Most of the time anything this cheap would turn me immediately away but I decided that I would try it and worst case, would be out $5 and no harm done.
Everclear lenses are silicone hydrogel contact lenses which Clearly says are manufactured by Visco Vision (A company based in Taiwan). Clearly doesn’t list it on the website but the lenses were marked on the box as being made of Olifilcon B. This material seems to be something that only Visco is using as they were the ones who filed to use it at the FDA in 2018. This material has little information that I could find on the internet and it doesn’t appear that other brands are using it. At the price point, I was concerned initially that they would be using a similar tactic like Hubble who was using a very old non-silicone hydrogel style contact lens material with low oxygen permeability. This is not to say that there are not different kinds of silicone hydrogel, and some are much better than others, but it’s a good starting point that it was a hydrogel material.
It also appears that Everclear is a Clearly / Luxottica brand that Visco is private manufacturing for them as the Everclear website, the privacy policy link takes you to the Clearly website. It was concerning how little information the website had, and that the 'English’ datasheets were actually in German.
For me this seems like a classic “you get what you pay for” situation. The lenses in my opinion are not good. I could only wear them for at most 5 hours before I wanted to go home and remove them as they felt so dry and uncomfortable. I’m not sure if this is a byproduct of just the lenses being cheap and not including other technology that other companies use to keep their lenses moist throughout the day, or if it is just my body not liking this material at all.
In credit to Everclear, I would appreciate if other brands followed Everclear’s suit and made 5 or 10 lens packages available to buy for infrequent wear. It would also make it easier to try different lenses out and see if other companies had better technology.
I recently also tried the Acuvue 1 Day lenses as a comparison, and the lenses were comfortable for about 8/9 hours. Unfortunately they are almost double the price and are only sold in a 30-day or a 90-day pack.
I imagine that the markup on contact lenses must be astronomical so I shall keep hoping that a new company will come in and make a product that is cheaper but doesn’t skimp on comfort.
In celebration of Canada 150, Via Rail did a really special promotion last year. If you were under the age of 26, and actually managed to buy the Canada 150 youth ticket, you could get unlimited travel for the entire month of July 2017 for $150. Demand for these tickets were so high that Via’s servers crashed and their phone lines were under such high call volume, the phone wouldn’t even ring. But if you were like me and couldn’t let such a deal go by without a fight, and had to stay up late to finish project work for your undergrad anyway, you had a chance of scoring a pass.
With my rail pass, I travelled from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Montreal, Québec, to Toronto, Ontario, to Edmonton, Alberta, and then to Vancouver, British Columbia. It was a long journey, but I think I’ve experienced everything you could with an economy class ticket.
As someone who has only travelled by car and plane, long distance rail travel had some changes that I wasn’t prepared for, so hopefully when you travel Canada by rail, you won’t be caught off guard like I was.
It was great to come back to UBC to see the show my friend was a part of designing. It’s called “She Kills Monsters” and is a Dungeons and Dragons themed production.
