The stuff that improved my life for under $50 this year:

You’re reading This Heaven Gives Me Migraine, a shopping newsletter about searching for lasting pleasures in a world of disposable garbage. Didn’t get anything that truly appealed to your inner bonne vivante for Christmas? Check out our gift guides for inspo (a gift to yourself is still a gift, after all): Gifts for Fashion Girlies; Gifts for Kitchen People; Gifts that Disappear; and Last-Minute Gifts.

How was your holiday? Was it cozy and warm and happy and, unlike mine, healthy? (Norovirus on Boxing Day—do not recommend!) Did you get something you really wanted? We’d love to hear about it. If you unwrapped something spectacular this holiday and want to spread the good word (or, honestly, just brag), please reply to this email. Better yet, if you went on a minor wishlist-clearing spree post-holiday, let us know what you got yourself. Sometimes these are the best gifts of all.

And that’s what we’re here to talk about today: things we’ve bought ourselves. 2024 was—and this is true—a year. A year that happened. Ugh, let’s not get into it. But amidst everything else, we all bought stuff—some of it functional, some of it frivolous, most of it somewhere in between, verdict yet to be decided. The Life-Improvers List is (like it says on the tin) about stuff that made a measurable, distinct impact in our day-to-day lives. For $50 or under. Honestly, this is one of the all-time best categories of Stuff out there: stuff that exceeds expectations wildly and removes friction. It may not be the most glamorous list in the world, but trust: these are power players.

1) AROMA Digital Rice Cooker ($30)
Did I say “not glamorous”? I know, I know. This little guy is not winning any beauty pageants. But trust me on this one. Years of city living had ingrained deep into my subconscious the cardinal rule of apartment kitchens: Thou Shalt Not Buy Any Appliance or Gadget That Has A Single Function. This has, it turns out, led to all sorts of unpleasantness. I avoided buying a garlic press for close to a decade, only to finally cave and discover: A garlic press is a great thing! However, I didn’t learn my lesson. I easily spent over a year deliberating on The Rice Cooker Issue. Certainly, one can make rice in a pot, as I always did before this lovely device came into my home. But it was always kind of…bleh. Too wet, or stuck to the bottom of the pot, requiring soaking. Boiling over on the stove and burning on a starchy mess. Kind of generally a pain in the ass. (I realize many of you will tune out at this point, because, Jesus, the woman can’t cook rice?! Go ahead and judge. I’m a pretty competent cook, I’m just always trying to make rice at the same time I’m making one or two other things to go with the rice and then forgetting about it. Judge if you want.)

This year, I caved and bought the cheapest rice cooker that was reviewed favorably by Wirecutter or The Strategist or whomever. It cost $30. It immediately made my life ten times better. Why?

It’s impossible to fuck up rice in this thing. It auto-calibrates, it auto-senses. When it’s done, it turns off cook mode automatically and gently keeps the rice warm for you. Here’s how I make rice now: I dump some washed rice into the bucket, fill to the corresponding water level, and then I go take a shower. When I return, the rice cooker has made rice for me. Like a friend. (Does this sound insane? I don’t care.)

Mine is the “pro” version, which seems to have very little to distinguish it from the “non-pro” version, but the instruction booklet tells you how to use it for all kinds of other things like oatmeal (hmm, okay) and risotto (hmm, okayyy….). Owning this gadget has made me entirely re-assess the breathless tone with which Roger Ebert (yes, that Roger Ebert) speaks about his rice cooker in his seminal rice cooker manifesto, The Pot and How to Use It. (Look it up. This is not a bit.)

Buy this rice cooker. Buy it for $30. What have you got to lose?

2) Experiment Beauty Softwear smoothing lip treatment ($16; $14 with subscription)

There’s a lot of competition in the lip-balm-slash-lip-treatment category these days. “Best of” lists often fall short for me, because they’re often topped by either something immensely pedestrian (Vaseline; Burt’s Bees) that has personally failed me, or by something immensely trendy (Glossier; RHODE) that has personally failed me. I don’t know; lip products are very subjective. But if you’ll excuse me, I have no self-control and will go on to speak in absolutes about this product from Experiment Beauty:

It’s the best thing out there. Hands-down.

If you know Experiment already, it’s probably because of a semi-viral blue goop called Super Saturated (“Super Satty,” for the cool kids), which is a glycerine-packed multifunctional serum-type product that is a great, low-fuss way to plus-up the hydration in your regular skincare routine for winter without having to recalibrate the whole thing. (I hate that, don’t you?) I say all of this to say, the folks at Experiment know what we want. So I shouldn’t have been totally shocked by how much I love Softwear, but (per former lip product failings), I was.

Softwear is so good because it’s both hydrating and exfoliating. This time of year especially, you’re on a fool’s errand if you’re trying to hydrate the dry mess of your lips rather than remove the dry mess to begin with. Softwear is gentle enough to use daily (or multiple times a day, as you’ll soon want to) but the exfoliation is no joke. After even 2 days of use, we’re talking new holy grail of lip products. To try it is to love it. Immediately.

3) Fanttik Pro X9 portable tire inflator ($44***)

Annnnnd, we’re back to the un-sexy stuff! Woo!

I started getting ads for this lockbox-looking device on Tiktok, after the algorithm correctly intuited that my “check tire pressure” light has been on for the past ~6 weeks. The Tiktok reviewers promised that this diminutive gadget would allow me to re-inflate my car’s tires to a desired pressure level without getting down on my hands and knees at a gas station. Reader, I bought it pretty much immediately.

***One callout: do not spend $60+ on this thing. It’s amazing, but there’s just no need—Amazon’s price for it fluctuates wildly (be sure to check the oft-overlooked coupons checkbox), but the brand’s own site has it for about $44, and lord knows if Tiktok Shop is listening, they’ll probably start offering it to you for fifty percent off if you just wait a minute. Go ahead and shop around.

Now. Of course, I’m a perfectly capable person who absolutely could go to the gas station or Costco or wherever and use their air pressure thing. Even though it’s loud. And probably greasy. I definitely could do that. But you know what? Most of the time, I’d rather not. Which is why I put it off, and put it off, and end up feeling like a real garbage-person for weeks at a time because that damn light comes on every time I start my car. We all have our weird avoidance-tasks, and this is mine.

Sometimes, life is about making allowances for things that make it possible to show yourself a bit more grace. Owning this gadget and re-upping my tires in the comfort of my own parking pad is one of those allowances. Take that as you will.

It also works on bikes and sportsballs, I am told.

4) MakeUp Eraser 7-Day Set (from $20)

If you’ve ever been inside a TJ Maxx or a Marshall’s, you’ve probably seen these things stuffed into an endcap or the impulse-purchase display leading to the register. Like me, you probably assumed they were a scam in some nebulous way you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Reader, they are not. I got one for free in some kind of gift-with-purchase situation a while back, stuffed it in a corner of my bathroom closet and ignored it for a while. And then one night, one glorious night, for reasons I can’t quite remember, I pulled it out and tried it on a full face of “going out” makeup.* The results were pretty striking. With just hot water alone, this thing made short work of my evening lewk. I immediately purchased this handy 7-pack and never looked back. (Mine are all black, obviously—though there are several endearing colorways, including a very tempting Hello Kitty set.)

I’m sure that people smarter than me have reasonable objections to these. (There are microplastics everywhere for those with eyes to see.) But if your New Year’s Resolution is to stop going to bed with your makeup on, you could hardly do better than picking up a pack of these. I’m a firm believer that the only way to change a habit in a lasting way is to make it stupidly easy for oneself—it should be almost impossible to avoid doing the thing you want to become routine, because inertia is real and the human brain will find or concoct almost any excuse to avoid a smidge of discomfort or friction. These MakeUp Eraser cloths are frictionless. (I mean that purely metaphorically—in reality, they work entirely by creating friction.)

They come with a little net bag for easy laundering (no fussiness here—they like hot water and hot dry-cycles). I roll them up and put them in an old Diptyque jar because my other firm belief about making routines stick is that you have to make them feel fancy.

*Full disclosure: I don’t use these cold-turkey for eye makeup. My sole, precious affordable beauty hack is that, ever since my early twenties when a Russian pedicurist told me she and her sisters used to use burnt almonds for eye liner because almonds are good for your eyelashes, I’ve been using cheap healthfood store jugs of sweet almond oil as eye makeup remover. I decant it into a little amber-colored bottle with a pump and apply it to cotton rounds, whose wastefulness I feel is somewhat offset by my use of the above makeup remover cloths over disposable ones. If anyone has any reasons for why I shouldn’t do this, honestly, don’t tell me. Let me have this.

5)

1. FIEYUE Low 1920 sneakers (from $18)
   
   As a millennial, I am told time and time again by media and the internet that my fashion sense has been frozen in an amber made of Cringe.
   
   Most of the time, I disregard that, because I’m confident in what I like (if this newsletter has proven nothing else). But I don’t get a ton of compliments from Gen-Z. UNTIL: I bought these shoes.
   
   I first saw these sneakers being worn at a dance club in Berlin, and was instantly attracted to the sort of New Wave, Godard-y look of the typography. I was told that they’re primarily a martial arts shoe. Later, I saw a very sensible podiatrist on Tiktok proclaiming that they were some of the best shoes you could buy for your feet. (“They let the toes spread,” she said, and I just nodded as if I understood why that was important.) Pretty soon after that I bought them, because a) I wear a lot of shoes that are not good for my feet, and b) because they were under $20.
   
   Immediately, Gen-Z folk started stopping me in the street to compliment my shoes. Also immediately, I did notice some podiatrist-y benefits to my overall comfort and posture and that kind of stuff. (But I could’ve just been standing taller because of all the compliments.)
   
   In the time since then, I’ve discovered some other hip, like-minded creative folks who also love these sneakers, which has further cemented them as a Cool, Under-the-Radar Thing in my mind. I’ve also personally convinced at least three people to purchase a pair of these, to great effect. They come in a bunch of nice colorways and, again, they’re both good-looking and ostensibly good for you. Not hard to influence people with something like that.
   
   A note on the price: I cannot speak to how much of a “lasting pleasure” these shoes will ultimately be. They are, it must be said, suspiciously cheap. I’ve had mine just under a year, and they’re showing some definite wear but holding together. I did wear them in the spring to trek all over Paris and Amsterdam, and then in the fall to trek all over New Orleans, so they’ve seen a good bit of mileage in excess of my usual daily steps. But again, they’re supposedly martial arts shoes, so they’re not really meant for that, I guess. For my money, they’re doing fine. But while they are excellent shoes, they are not a Forever Purchase.
   __
   
   Okay! That’s it. If you enjoyed this—or, maybe especially, if you purchased anything from this list—let me know. I don’t have affiliate links because I’m not a Real Person yet, so you can feel confident my recommendations are genuine. Do you have a New Year’s Resolution that requires some new stuff? Drop me a line. I’m into the idea that one day this newsletter will become a hallowed hive of good-taste people recommending charming and lasting things to other good-taste people. You could make that happen!