This evening's after-work plans fell through, so I decided to take a quick (yeah, right) stroll through the super-mega-grande-mondo Sephora in Times Square. It was high time for some product testing, friends.

I quickly spotted the latest and greatest from Fusion Beauty, the people who brought us Lip Fusion. LiftFusion Micro-Injected M-Tox Transdermal Face Lift sure has a fancy name, but does the product live up to it? And does it live up to the $140 price tag, for that matter?

LiftFusion claims to work "immediately to relax muscles and help prevent new lines and wrinkles from forming," using a host of botanically derived compounds. It has a phenomenally long list of ingredients. The science behind all these Fusion products is beginning to sound fishy to me.*

But, intrepid beauty reviewer that I am, I pumped some out and rubbed it into the back of my hand. 5 minutes later, while fiddling around with some Chanel lipglosses, my hand started putting out the red alert. Itching, burning, agh! I looked down and saw that a nasty red rash had bloomed on my hand in the exact area I had applied the LiftFusion.

Thank goodness I only tried it on my hand!

I scratched, but decided to tough it out and leave it on, just to see if I could discern any results beyond the rash (I told you I was intrepid). A couple of hours later, I still don't notice any difference between my left and right hands, besides the rash, that is.

So, needless to say, this is definitely a no-go for me.

* In another note, I recently found out that Fusion Beauty is the brainchild of the notorious Randi Shinder, she who brought us the abominable Dessert Beauty, and the overhyped and overpriced Clean fragrance. (I like Clean, but $76 for a small bottle of something made to smell like soap just seems a bit ridiculous.) My suspicions of being "taken" by Fusion Beauty's marketing machine are beginning to feel like a little more than just suspicions, now that I know Shinder is behind it. She is a master marketer, for sure, but marketing faux science smacks of quackery. I am not a fan.