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One of the three Vice Lipsticks in the UD X Kristen Leanne collection is called Bun Bun (it’s the neutral one), named after Kristen’s bunny. ?
Isn’t that cute? Anyone who names a lipstick after their beloved fur-baby is A-OK in my book.
Kristen loves color, cruelty-free makeup and tattoos — all fab fits for UD — and there are three $17 matte lippies in her new UD collaboration (available meow). Bun Bun is the neutral, Cloud9 is the beautiful bright purple, and Spellbound is the deep burgundy.
Oh, beauty gods, how fickle are ye! One minute you make skinny, barely-there brows en vogue, and the next minute it’s wall-to-wall wild, bushy brows.
Speaking for myself, I hope the wild, untamed feather brow stays in style a little longer…
OK, a lot longer.
’cause I love the look, and because then I can use this new Hourglass Arch Brow Volumizing Fiber Gel to its fullest potential.
Hourglass just added this new line of long-wearing (10+ hours for me) tinted brow fillers to their permanent line. They’re $28 and available in six shades — Blonde, Warm Blonde, Auburn, Soft Brunette, Warm Brunette and Dark Brunette.
I bounce back and forth between preferring the lighter Warm Brunette and darker Dark Brunette shades, depending on how intense I want my brows at any given moment, although realistically I know that $28 for a brow filler is redonkulously expensive. Still, these little cherubs save me so much time.
They’re also really easy to use — even easier than similar ones I’ve used from Tarte and MAC.
Homegirl got NO time for fussy brow gels! Give me all teh tools! Every minute saved is another minute I can sleep in. 🙂
I’m usually a brow pencil-clear brow gel combo girl, and that combo usually takes me 2-3 minutes to use (yes, I’ve timed it), but Hourglass Arch is a one-stop shop where I can fill and set my brows in 30 seconds or less. And they don’t end up looking cray when I’m done, LOL!
Every time I open the $34 UD X Kristen Leanne Beauty Beam Highlight Palette and see the words “STAY GOLD” there in the corner, I think back to a phase I went through in high school when I would sign all of my letters — this was back before email and text, when we actually had to write things down on paper like animals — with the phrase, “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” hearkening to the book, The Outsiders…
I’m sure a lot of other people also did that…
From what I understand, one of Kristen’s catchphrases is “Stay Gold,” and now those words are here, immortalized forever in this trio of face highlighters from her new LE UD collection.
All three of these powder highlighters are different shades of shimmery gold. There’s a rose gold on the left, which looks a little like BECCA Rose Gold highlighter from the Chrissy Teigan palette — a palette which, to this day, makes me clutch my pearls. I still love it so much.
And then there’s the highlighter in the middle, a white golden pearl with a BECCA Opal vibe, and the one on the right, a warm golden pearl similar to Now’s the Time highlighter from the UD Jean-Michel Basquiat collection.
Assuming you like to wear gold (I do!), caution is still advised with these colors because they seem to apply, at least on my skin, much lighter than they look in the pans.
So what do you think that is there on the front of the $26 Urban Decay X Kristen Leanne Daydream Palette?
Is it…
A. Cake frosting (*nods enthusiastically*)
B. Body lotion
C. Shaving cream
Because it looks like all three to me.
But if I can only choose one (Monday Poll flashbacks), I’ll go with cake frosting because — hi! — I’ve been watching The Great British Baking Show for five days straight.
Incidentally, that show is like chicken soup (with baked homemade crackers) for the soul. It’s almost a cure for the common cold, but I digress…
Isn’t this palette cute? When you open it up, there are five warm neutral powder eyeshadows inside.
Daydream is part of the new Urban Decay X Kristen Leanne collection, which is available now. It’s a collab between UD and spunky, cruelty-free makeup-loving YouTuber Kristen Leanne. In a nutshell, she has colorful hair, she loves rainbow looks, she’s got tattoos, and she owns a hair color company called Arctic Fox that’s all about mermaid and unicorn colors…so she’s all about color.
There are two eye palettes in the collection — a colorful one and a neutral one. The latter, of course, is the one I wanted to try first.
Whoa, disco lady! This is way shiny… Almost too shiny for me. Antonym Cosmetics Organic Certified Highlighting Blush in Cheek Crush ($42) is a two-for-one combo. You get a baked blush and a highlighter in one alluring pan, and, seeing as how it was made in Italy and all (the land where the best baked powders come to life), I hoped it would romance my cheeks…but alas, I just can’t hang with the intense shimmer and the limited pigment.
For some people, living on the edge means base jumping from a skyscraper, surfing 50-foot waves, or getting hitched in Vegas to the lifeguard they just met at the hotel pool five minutes ago (granted, he was hot).
My idea of life in the fast lane is trying to use a matte eyeshadow that I’ve never used before in a 10-minute makeup look…
What can I say? I GO HARD.
Sometimes this gamble doesn’t pay off, and I end up with a choppy, patchy mess. Sometimes, however, it does, like it did with Organic Eyeshadow Quattro in Noisette ($39) by Antonym Cosmetics.
If you have lined lids and/or otherwise refuse to get drawn into eye makeup drama, I think you’re gonna love this. It’s from Antonym Cosmetics, a cruelty-free, organic line from Miami that I just started wearing and loving.
(Side note: Why aren’t more makeup peeps talking bout this line? It’s still flying under the radar for now, but they recently launched on the Sephora website (that’s how I found them). I’m convinced they’re going to blow up soon because every one of their products I’ve tried so far has been profesh-caliber — like Hourglass meets NARS.)
Ah, the elusive beautyblender! Here comes one in its pristine state… I’m hoping it’ll stay in my possession for longer than a week (or a month! — dare to dream), because I’m not the only one in Novato obsessed with these marvelous makeup sponges. All of the little animals I live with — a.k.a. “the boarders,” a.k.a Tabs the Cat and Connor Claire the Coywolf — are obsessed with them, too. They hide them, one (the furry one) bites them, and they rip them apart with their claws.
If it happens again, at least I won’t have to go far to find a new one, because now they’re also available at MAC.
#MACLOVESBEAUTYBLENDER
- beautyblender original — pink ($20)
- beautyblender pro — black ($20)
- beautyblender beauty blusher — gray ($16)
- beautyblender micro mini — chartreuse ($18)
- blendercleanser solid ($16)
This black one is the $20 beautyblender pro, and it’s my favorite. The black keeps it looking cleaner longer, compared to the iconic O.G. pink beautyblender, which is also $20 and also available at MAC. They both work just as well as the other, but the pink one, which is SUPER CUTE, shows off every single product that has ever graced it. It looks messy, and I’m not about that life.
I sure do love the pink ones when they’re new, though.
I primarily use mine to apply liquid foundation and concealer, but I have seen people use them for powders and eyeshadow. I use the larger end of the sponge to cover large swaths of skin, like my forehead and cheeks, and the pointier end for the nooks and crannies, like the inner corner of my eye, and the corners around my nose and mouth.
It’s true, you could use any old makeup blending sponge. There are lots of other non-latex makeup sponges for blending and application, and most of them are pretty good, but I’ve always liked that the beautyblenders are un-textured. When I blend my foundation or concealer, I don’t see a pattern from the sponge on my skin, so the coverage looks natural. Plus, they absorb juuust the right amount, so I don’t feel like I’m wasting much product when I use them (some makeup sponges are too absorbent, IMO).
I call this terrific tiny taupe my “Speed Racer shadow,” because it dries f-a-s-t, and because I can never remember what it’s actually called, haha.
But seriously, it’s Make Up For Ever Aqua XL Color Paint Shadow in L-54, a $25 cream shadow (0.16-oz tube) in MUFE’s Aqua XL Color Paint Shadow line.
In a nutshell, I 
it, despite the fact that it dries very quickly, which I normally wouldn’t be into because I like having time to play and blend and move stuff around, but it depends on my mood. Lately I’ve been into doing super fast eye makeup, which these are great for.
I dunno, it’s weird… I feel like I finally found my calling, like THIS was the reason I was put on this earth, to figure out every available path to putting on makeup in 10 or 15 minutes, and then spilling the beans about it.
Anyway, random tangent, LOL! What was I saying again…?
What’s an unsung makeup hero? For me, it’s an oftentimes underrated makeup morsel, a permanent collection product that scoots under the radar screen of many makeup lovers but regularly rocks my world. The long-running Unsung Heroes series features some of my favorites.
Oh, yeah, Speed Racer, a.k.a L-54, dries extremely quickly, but there’s something about that luster, which is sort of halfway between a shimmer and a matte, that still gives you enough time to move it around and blend it without any brouhaha, even though in real time it sets in less than a minute. Literally, 60 seconds is all you get before it sets, but you don’t need more time than that, because this thing is genius.