Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews, Swatches and How-To Makeup
A beauty blog blooming with fresh makeup reviews, swatches and beauty tips from your friendly neighborhood beauty addict
When the bathroom floor is cold, and you’re literally freezing your butt off, bring your body moisturizer or body oil with you into the shower.
Stick it on a shelf, and do your shower thing. Then, when you’re done, towel off and moisturize before you even step out of the shower.
Then shake your fist at the horrible hobgoblin who decided not to install central heating in your apartment! 🙂
Cream shadows are cool. They’re like secret little weapons…
You can make your eye looks more interesting by giving them dimension using cream shadows.
Just apply a cream shadow in a color that’s relevant to your look on your lid, then layer a complementary powder eyeshadow on top.
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Here’s a hump day (yes…I actually forgot what day of the week it was and only just now realized it two hours after publishing this post, LOL!) morning makeup tip for easier, more blended eye looks… Use multiple transition colors, instead of just one transition color or none at all.
For instance, for a smoothly blended brown smokey eye, use the darkest shadow color on your lid (MAC Ground Brown), then a slightly lighter color in your crease (MAC Saddle), and a slightly lighter color than that moving up the crease (MAC Soft Brown), so that you have a smooth gradient that goes from darkest to lightest. 🙂
OK, so, first, the big stuff.
It is storming! I’ve seen two emergency flash-flood alerts on TV so far this morning, and I’m watching a torrent of water in the storm drain on the hill outside. There’s a major storm hitting Northern California right now, and it’s supposed to be a bad one.
Tabs, El Hub and I live on a hill, so we’re hopefully safe from the flooding, for now. There’s also the possibility of our place just sliding down the hill in a mudslide, which makes me kind of nervous…
I think we’ll be fine. Electricity might go out soon though.
I’ve been trying to distract myself by watching makeup videos, and I found a crop of fab one-minute vids on the MAC website called Instant Artistry.
They’re just quick, little blurbs. Each one covers a single topic, like two-tone lips or ombre eyeshadow.
The looks are mostly accessible and not outrageously cray-cray, which makes me think, “Hey! I can do that.”
Assuming the power stays on, and I’m able to actually see what I’m doing, I’m going try the look in the colored eyeliner video today.
I guess if I were to attempt it in the dark…that might also be kind of fun, haha!
Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,
Karen
I’ve been riding the false lash train pretty hard lately (eh, I go through phases). I usually do a layer of mascara on my bare lashes before I apply my falsies (instead of after) because it makes cleaning easier and puts less wear and tear on them, and they don’t get as goopy, which means I get to reuse them a couple more times.
Sometimes I do go the other way, though, applying my mascara after my falsies to really marry them together, but I’m not Mariah Carey… I can’t see her reusing drugstore lashes (in my mind she has a new diva set every day), so I’d rather be able to reuse my lashes a few more times instead.
How about you? Do you usually apply mascara before or after false lashes? Or not at all?
Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,
Karen
P.S. I have a lady date tonight! — and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m meeting my friend Marisol, and we’re gonna go to Sephora, and we’re gonna go to HomeGoods, and we’re gonna get ramen, which is basically a recipe for a really happy evening. 🙂
Hope you’re doing something fun today too on this soon-to-be very rainy day. (There’s a storm brewin’… Didn’t Sarah Connor say that?) Yeah, I don’t even know if I should bother doing my hair. That’s the thing about cutting it shorter. You gotta do “stuff” to it.
For better or worse, the ’90s are back.
On the one hand, I’m hoping this does not mean the reincarnation of lumber jack boots (NOOOOO!). On the other, I’ve been having a lot of fun listening to music I haven’t heard in ages.
This last-minute Halloween costume was inspired by an album I had on repeat for months back in the day, Hole’s Live Through This.
The costume came together pretty quickly. Done in less than an hour, and it was easy since there wasn’t a ton of blending. The makeup took about 20 minutes, and the hair about 15.
I wanted the eyes to be dramatic like the girl eye’s on the album cover, and I didn’t want to spend a ton of time blending eyeshadow on my lids since the smeared mascara was probably going to overpower the eyeshadow anyway.
So, to start, I grabbed a frosty silver cream shadow and applied that all over my lids and crease. Then I rimmed my water lines with a black kohl pencil and popped on a pair of fierce false lashes.
Candy, costumes, crazy makeup and cats! As much as I love Halloween, and I do love Halloween, I don’t think I’ve ever planned a Halloween costume more than one week out, which is kind of funny, considering how with certain other aspects of my life, like packing for trips or making playlists, I’m a compulsive over-planner.
I mean, dude! — you should see my running playlist. I have every track planned down to the last minute/mile. I kid you not.
With Halloween, though, I’m all about fast and loose. I think I’m addicted to the last-minute thrill, the pressure of putting something together at the last minute and seeing it all come together. 🙂
I wasn’t even planning on dressing up at all this year, truth be told. I dunno… I just haven’t really been feeling it lately (it happens), but today, as I was squeezing my employer’s front paws into his velvet royal tabby costume, I felt inspired.
So I whipped up this simple, sassy kitty costume using some things I had on hand/paw.
I’d already done these cat-shaped smokey eyes earlier, and I think they exude Halloween drama, so I started with them.
To ramp things up you could add falsies, which would be super cool. I wanted to, but I’d just applied the long claw nails (see step 3) and didn’t want to risk poking my eyes out, LOL!
Throughout the long, hallowed (not really) history of Karen’s Cat Eyeliner Life, Volume I, I’ve drawn a lot of cat eyeliner looks on my cat lady lids, and over all those years, I can count on one paw the number of times I’ve drawn two perfectly angled flicks. That’s how rarely it occurs!
Most of the time, it’s my left flick. The right will be OK, but the left will turn out wonky, angled either too low or too high, or too short or too long.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that one or both flicks will need an adjustment.
One quick way to fix your flicks is with an eye cream and a Q-tip. What I’ll do is soak a Q-tip with a little bit of the cream, then run that along the edges of the flick to instantly sharpen them and/or fix any mistakes, all while adding some extra moisture around my eye area (something I need anyway).
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Just something I figured out the other day when (surprise, surprise!) I couldn’t find my Beauty Blender. I swear, one of these days I have to finally, FOR GOOD, straighten out my office.
Sigh…
So I’d just finished applying Laura Mercier Flawless Fluide Foundation and needed to blend it out, but no Beauty Blender…so I MacGyver-ed (yes, I just turned that into a verb) an improv Beauty Blender with a kabuki brush and some MAC Fix+.
Take a kabuki brush — and I’m using the Too Faced Retractable Teddy Bear Hair Kabuki Brush here — and spray it three or four times with MAC Fix+.
When I do this, I hold the bottle of Fix+ about eight inches away from the brush so the spray envelops the brush head evenly, and you want to just dampen the bristles, not make them dripping, soaking wet. Next, gently buff and blend your foundation and concealer on the skin using the dampened brush head and a circular motion.
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