The neighborhood birds like to chill out on my garage; Tabs likes to watch them from the office window 🙂
Birdwatching
Archives for April 2012
3.14159 More Reasons to Heart Tarte, or Why I’m Obsessed With Pie: Tarte Summer 2012 Collection Pics and Swatches
Wearing Tarte Gifts from the Lipstick Tree Achiote Color Collection from summer 2012
I’m currently in the throes of fuzzy pre-vacation brain, so I apologize in advance for eny tipos in this post and weird sentences that don’t make sense…
I did two things today instead of the really important things I needed to get done (like packing). 1) I dreaded the fact that I wasn’t doing the things I needed to get done, and 2) I thought about pie.
The Caramel Apple Pecan Pie at The Right Slice
Yes, that’s right: pie (not pi). 🙂 I was looking online for good eats on Kauai and found a highly recommended place called The Right Slice.
They sell pie. Just pie (and things like pie). In a wide variety of yummy-sounding flavors.
They have savory pies (Classic Chicken Pot Pie, Shepherd’s Pie); spicy pies (Chocolate Chile, Spicy Apple), fruit pies (Guava, Lilikoi, Blueberry Piña Colada); and rich, and/or gooey pies (Carmel Apple Pecan, Haupia Purple Sweet Potato, Lilikoi Cheesecake, Chocolate Chip Macadamia Nut).
Thinking about all of that pie is giving me the sugar shakes!
I wonder if it’s possible to overdose on pie. My, my, my, gonna eat some pie…
LOL!
Sorry, I’m having a hard time concentrating today. I feel like it’s the last day of school before summer…and speaking of summer, have you seen the summer collection from Tarte?
They’re keeping it short and sweet with just six items this year, which is a drop in the bucket compared to their spring 2012 release.
I still see some pretty interesting things…
Primers seem to be playing a big role. There’s a new one for eyes and two new ones for the face — the Clean Slate 360 Creaseless 12-Hr Smoothing Eye Primer ($20), Clean Slate Flawless 12-HR Brightening Primer ($30) and Clean Slate Poreless 12-HR Perfecting Primer ($30).
There’s also a new Body Bronzer ($37), a new LipSurgence Lip Tint shade called Sprited ($24), and a $42 three-piece set with an awkwardly long name — the Gifts from the Lipstick Tree Achiote Color Collection.
Here are pics and swatches of everything, with the exception of the face primers…
Gifts from the Lipstick Tree Achiote Color Collection
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Wander Into the Garden of Long-Wearing Liquid Lipsticks With Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics and the Garden Collection Lip Tars
Wearing Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics Lip Tar in Belladonna
Gardening. I’m obsessed with gardening. But not the botanical kind, at least not today. Today, I’m obsessed with Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics, and the new Lip Tars from their Garden collection.
It’s easy to get lost in this garden because it’s filled with psychotropic plants, dude (like Kava Kava). And poisonous ones (like Belladonna).
Lip Tars from the left: Pennyroyal, Kava Kava, Ophelia, Digitalis, Belladonna and Chlorophyll
For their spring and summer 2012 Garden collection/harvest, Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics (OCC) is growing six new Lip Tar shades for the company’s permanent line, and all of them are named after plants.
No, not roses and daisies. 🙂 Not this time. You won’t find any ruffles and bows here. This Garden is wicked! — as you can tell by the color names, but most of the shades themselves, which range from pinks, browns and corals to a smattering of edgier purples and greens, are actually pretty wearable.
OCC has a full range of 100-percent vegan and cruelty-free makeup made without parabens and preservatives, but the Lip Tars are probably their most popular product.
Sticking with the botany metaphor, if you crossed a long-wearing, full-coverage liquid lipstick with a gloss, and then squeezed it into a tiny tube, you’d get a Lip Tar, tada! Opaque coverage and out-of-this-world wear time makes them special.
Just squeeze out a tiny bead, and spread it over your lips with a lip brush or finger (yea!). They start out glossy but dry down to a satin finish.
SO pretty!
Of this bunch, I think I like brown Pennyroyal and coral Kava Kava the most. I think they look the most natural/wearable, but some of the others also look fun.
Pennyroyal
Kava Kava
So how long do they really last?
We’re talkin’ hours and hours. They’re total long-wearing rock stars. On my lips, they start looking sketchy after about six hours, when a visible line of product begins to build up along the inner part of my lower lip. No biggie — I just scrape it off.
It’s only after about six hours when they start to fade, slowly and evenly, until they eventually disappear between hours 8-10.
They even last through meals, beverages and repeated kitty kisses (“Give mama a kiss, mwah!“) without migrating or fading at all.
More details…
- Texture: So lightweight and comfortable! Sometimes I forget I’m wearing anything on my lips at all.
- Packaging: On the one hand, the tubes are great. They make it easy to precisely control how much product I use, cutting down on waste, but they aren’t the most elegant products in terms of presentation… Still, I think it fits their personality.
- Flavor and scent: It’s faint in both cases. A combination of peppermint…and wax. I don’t mind the peppermint part so much, but the wax? I could do without. Thankfully, both are very faint and fade in under a minute.
- Hydration: I wouldn’t call them exceptionally moisturizing, but at least they don’t make my lips drier and worse, which is good for a such long-wearing product.
Now, if you’re looking for something funkier than Pennyroyal and Kava Kava and don’t mind a bit more work, Belladonna (a bright grape), Digitalis (a pinkish violet), Ophelia (a pink) and Chlorophyll (a bright green) might be more your speed. I find that I get better results when I use a brush to apply all four of these.
NOTE: The lighter pastel colors appear to slightly emphasize the vertical wrinkles in my lips, and the green shade, Chlorophyll, applies a little patchy.
Ophelia
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Mother’s Day Gorgeous Gift Ideas: Roger & Gallet Bois d’Orange Fresh Fragrant Water
Mark your calendars! Here in the States, May 13 is Mother’s Day (click here to find out when it falls in your country). Want to get Mom something special this year? Looking for gift ideas? Check back over the next few days for a different Mother’s Day gorgeous gift idea (a new special something with which to spoil Mom). 🙂
My mom is the only person I know who makes a sour face whenever she drinks orange juice. She scrunches up her nose and knits her brow, as if she’s just bitten into the sourest lemon on planet earth.
To this day, whenever I see a carton of orange juice, I think of my mom standing in front of the fridge at home with a glass of juice in her hand. “It has vitamin C,” she’d say, and then slam it down and make that funny face. “Very good for you!”
LOL!
OK, so she may not be crazy about orange juice, but she absolutely adores citrus scents. If your mom does, too, she just might love Bois d’Orange Emperor Fresh Fragrant Water, a limited edition fragrance from Roger & Gallet, a 150-year-old French fragrance line.
Moms who appreciate hard-to-find luxury brands might like that it isn’t carried in every store. It can be hard to find here in the U.S. This particular bottle, one of three new pieces in the limited edition Emperor collection, is currently available online at Shop Londons (you can also find permanent Roger & Gallet fragrance, body and bath items online at Dermstore).
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Milani Gray Tux
Milani Nail Lacquer in Gray Tux, $4.99. This shade reminds me of a starry night.
Banana of the Day
New Milani Powder Eyeshadows, Long-Wear Eyeshadow Pencils, Glosses and Nail Lacquers Coming to Drugstores This Year
Drugstores are gonna be hoppin’ over the next few months, babe. Milani, for one, plans to launch a new line of eye shadows, a new shadow pencil and new shades of Crystal Gloss for Lips, Glitzy Glamour Gloss, Color Perfect Lipstick, and some new Nail Lacquers, too.
I’m still tracking down exact release dates for these, but here’s a look at everything Milani has lined up for the rest of the year.
Powder Eyeshadows, $4.49 each (a brand new product; will be available in 12 shades, exclusively at select CVS/Pharmacy stores)
More Powder Eyeshadows, $4.49 each
Powder Eyeshadows from the left: White Lie, Pitch Black and Shocking Pink
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MAC Unsung Heroes: Care Blends Essential Oils, Grapefruit + Chamomile
You know what they say. The squeaky wheel gets the…soothing essence of grapefruit and chamomile in a base of botanical oils. 🙂 That’s today’s Unsung Hero, MAC Care Blends Essential Oils in Grapefruit + Chamomile.
Pretty good on its own as a soothing super moisturizer, this $19.50 potion is even more potent when mixed, like with concealers, for the ultimate in dark-circle destruction. Combined with MAC Pro Longwear Concealer, for instance, which I already love, the mixture is like Hogwarts’ magic.
Playing Elliott Stabler to Pro Longwear’s Olivia Benson, Grapefruit + Chamomile makes the duo greater than the sum of its parts. The two products have such great chemistry together that now, when I use them individually, I feel like something’s missing.
So the Care Blends? — they’ve been around the block as limited edition products in other collections, like 2010’s Warm & Cozy, and I remember mixing the Sweet Orange + Lavender one into my hand cream and liking it back then, but now the Grapefruit + Chamomile version has a spot in the permanent line.
MAC Pro Artist Louise Z is the person who convinced me to give the Care Blends a try last summer when she raved about how it performed when she mixed it with under-eye concealer for a shoot she did with the Oakland Raiders cheerleaders. I thought, “If it’s good enough for the Raiderettes, it’s good enough for me!” 🙂 So I ran out and bought a bottle that day.
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