Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews, Swatches and How-To Makeup

1. It does so much makeup heavy lifting.

I swear, I can get away with wearing so much less makeup when I’m wearing a bright lip. I can feel completely put together with just a bright lipstick, mascara and concealer.

2. Bright lipstick shouts however you’re feeling out loud to the world.

A smile is that much bigger and brighter with a bright lip.

3. It’s a classic.

Red lipstick never goes out of style!

4. The long-wearing matte formulas have improved so much.

They last through water, coffee, cat kisses…

5. They’re just so fun to collect!

You can never have enough. 🙂

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Please enjoy this repost featuring one of my favorite eyeshadow palettes for easy smokey eyes. Also, side note, I need to get back on the MAC Face & Body train. I forgot how beautiful it looks in pictures!

The Honest Beauty eyeshadow palette comes with a card with four looks you can do with the palette. I followed the one called “Classic Smoky Eye” for this post, although with one tweak. I started by buffing the matte beige shade (Vanilla’d Velvet) all over my lids as a base so the subsequent colors would pop a little more.

I was a wee bit nervous about using the shimmery gold all over my lids and the shimmery dark purple on the outer corner because…I’m in my 40s now, and shine doesn’t always play well with my 40-something skin, particularly in the crease. Some may even say that I’m “overly picky about shimmery finishes,” *ahem*. Can you blame me though? One false move and you see every fine line!

Buuuut, I decided to go for it anyway, hoping that the matte beige underneath would tone down the shine, and it did!

As I was blending, I realized another reason to love this palette. The more you buff and swirl these shadows, the less intensely they shine, until they have more of a satiny finish. The finish ends up as a soft, pearly glow, which makes this classic smokey eye very workable for daytime wear! When I dropped Connor off at school this morning, I didn’t feel like I was wearing “too much.”

Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you — I found the most beautiful cream blush by Chanel! It’s Les Beiges Blush No. 20, a stick blush, $45 (!), but dang, lady! It’s so good. It’s a bronzy, peachy tan with the finest flecks of pearly gold, and it adds a hint of natural-looking color to cheeks. I love how easy it is to blend and that I can’t see it sitting on top of my skin or in my pores.

If you’re a real stickler for blush that doesn’t heavy on your cheeks, then you might want to consider it because it’s so natural-looking on skin.

FYI, if you’re lighter than I am, No. 20 will probably function more as a straight-up bronzer on your skin, and if you’re darker, then you might better off with one of Chanel’s brighter cream blushes like No. 21 or No. 22, since I’m betting No. 20 won’t show up as readily on darker skin.

Other things I’ve been into lately: mixing two shades of Honest Beauty liquid lipstick, namely Passion and Off Duty, to create the purrfect mid-toned coral pink; and wearing an old-school standby base combination with MAC Face and Body (I mix C4 and C5), set with the tiniest smidgen of MAC Mineralize Skinfinish Natural Powder (my shade is Medium Golden).

Seriously, why did I ever take a break from wearing Face and Body? IT’S SO GOOD, especially for no-makeup makeup. I’ve talked about it ad nauseam on MBB for years, so if you’re relatively new here and want to know more about why it’s the stuff, hit me up in the comments and I will repeat myself once again, LOL! LOVE IT.

Oh, my gosh, one last thing before I leave you — have you seen the Britney Spears documentary on Hulu? I kept hearing about it, and I told myself, “OK, I’ll give this 10 minutes of my life, and that’s it,” but then I started watching it and I COULD. NOT. LOOK. AWAY.

The one-hour documentary by The New York Times charts Britney’s rise to fame, her very public issues in the press in the early 2000s, and the conservatorship that was placed on her in 2008, which some people believe was against her will. Some conspiracy theorists go so far as to think that her Instagram is an entire series of coded cries for help.

As you might know, I’m solidly on #TeamBritney, and so watching the doc left me with the hope that one day she’ll surprise us all (in the best possible, emotionally healthy way).

To Britney and all my ladies out there currently holding on, make that delicious lemonade out of those lemons, mama. You hang in there!

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

So…what is the Monday Poll?

Excellent question! It isn’t, contrary to its name, an actual poll, like with little clicky buttons. It’s just a list of more or less random questions I’ve been posting on this blog every Monday morning for the past quadrillion years (since 2007).

1. A good book you’ve read recently?

I really enjoyed “Killers of a Certain Age” by Deanna Raybourn. I’ve been needing a fast, fun read and it hit the spot! Next time you need a book for a plane ride or a vacation, grab it.

2. If you could move anywhere in the world without having to put any effort into it at all (assume someone takes care of the packing, logistics, paperwork, finances, etc.), where would you go?

I’d move us to the Manoa neighborhood on Oahu in a heartbeat.

3. What’s a weird breakfast that you like to eat?

I don’t know if it’s super weird, but I do love a toasted frozen waffle slathered with peanut butter and sprinkled with raisins. I don’t know how I got the idea, but I started eating it in college, and ever since then, it’s been my go-to quickie meal for breakfast or really any time of the day. When I was pregnant with Connor, it was pretty much all I wanted to eat, so the big joke around here is that her body was built on peanut butter, Eggo waffles and raisins!

4. How do you spend your breaks at work?

I like to save my morning and afternoon breaks and tack them onto my lunch so I can take a longer break in the middle of the day. When I take that longer lunch break, I usually go home, take Marnie out for a quick walk, and then eat lunch while I read at the kitchen table. If I do decide to take a morning or afternoon break, I’ll go out for a quick walk to move my body around. Staring at a computer screen for hours does me no favors, ya know?

5. Do dreams come true?

I like to think so!

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

P.S. Here are the questions to copy/paste with your answers in a comment. Talk to ya soon.

1. A good book you’ve read recently?
2. If you could move anywhere in the world without having to put any effort into it at all (assume someone takes care of the packing, logistics, paperwork, finances, etc.), where would you go?
3. What’s a weird breakfast that you like to eat?
4. How do you spend your breaks at work?
5. Do dreams come true?

So…what is the Monday Poll?

Excellent question! It isn’t, contrary to its name, an actual poll, like with little clicky buttons. It’s just a list of more or less random questions I’ve been posting on this blog every Monday morning for the past quadrillion years (since 2007).

1. What did you do for your most recent birthday?

I had a lovely casual tea with my peeps, aka El Hub and Connor.

2. How organized are you?

At work my organization is pretty darn great, if I do say so myself. At home it’s another story, ha ha ha!

3. One thing you need to do more often?

Honestly, stretch. I’ve gotten back into the habit of *not* doing it every day and my body suffers when I’m not consistent.

4. What’s the best day of the week?

Saturday!

5. One of your favorite fall activities?

Does eating pecan pie count?

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

P.S. Here are the questions to copy/paste with your answers in a comment. Talk to ya soon.

1. What did you do for your most recent birthday?
2. How organized are you?
3. One thing you need to do more often?
4. What’s the best day of the week?
5. One of your favorite fall activities?

Hi, friend. Happy Caturday! Goodness gracious gravy. I am overjoyed to be sitting here, just happily typing away about whatever I wanna gab on about, and to not have to deal with a myriad of last-minute, pseudo work emergencies that could’ve been avoided by taking care of one’s administrative tasks early on, OMG! Side note, my day job has been kicking my butt lately.

I really do wish more people understood that 1) getting things done early makes everything easier, and 2) you get more bees with honey.

Anywho, I’m overjoyed that it’s Saturday, the sun is out and that we have a good chunk of the weekend ahead of us. 🙂

Before I sat down to write, I was thinking about how sometimes, I fall into a mode where everything I want to do feels so daunting that I get overwhelmed before I even start.

Like this morning, the first thing my inside voice said to me when I plopped into my chair was, “I’m too tired to sit down and bang away at the keyboard.” It’s been a ongoing internal creative struggle that I’ve been dealing with over the past month, sigh.

I’m realizing, though, how it’s so very easy to fall into a pattern of being too tired to do things, especially when you feel tapped out from adulting in general.

Anyway, I’m over it, so I’m trying to shake things up a little by breaking each task in front of me down to the smallest, easiest version.

The idea is that if I can do even just a little bit of something, that’s more than I would’ve done if I didn’t do anything at all. My hope is that tiny sense of accomplishment will propel me to keep the momentum to move forward.

Today, I told myself that if I could find just three beauty-related stories — ONLY THREE — which I wanted to read and share with you, I would be doing a-ok.

And guess what? I did it!

• Apparently you can use Dawn dish soap to wash your brushes. Who knew? I certainly did not! Now I really want to try it.
• I’m very intrigued by some of the items on this list of Japanese makeup brands to try, but I gotta say that $138 for a bottle of foundation is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s.
• This is giving me ’90s brows PTSD.

I will now rejoice in the small victory of doing the tiniest little bit of something.

Have a great rest of your Saturday, and take good care of yourself. 🙂

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Honestly, so many things…and that makes me wonder what I’m doing now that will make me cringe in the future, ha ha ha!

A couple have been relatively recent, like not washing my hair every day. This was during the phase when my hair was long and caramel brown with blonde streaks, and so to help retain the color and keep it from getting too dry, I would try to see how long I could make it through the week without washing my hair. Some weeks I’d go four or five days without washing it.

On the one hand, this saved me SO MUCH TIME in the morning because I could just do my hair on day one, and then not really have to do it until after I washed it again, so my hair styling time was like one minute in the mornings, which was FANTASTIC.

Also, not having to spend the time in the shower washing and conditioning was great too, but ya know…eventually I just got tired of dealing with an itchy scalp and greasy-feeling roots, and I slowly got back into the habit of washing it every day. This really kicked in when I started working out consistently. Now the thought of having even one-day roots grosses me out.

I also went through a spell where I was wearing full-coverage base every day — primer, foundation, color corrector, concealer, powder, the whole nine yards. It looked great in pics! — but dang, girl…it was WORK. I think at that point I was blocking out at least 45 minutes just to put on makeup.

Now I rarely wear full-coverage base because I can’t tolerating feeling like I’m wearing a ton of stuff on my skin, and the thought of wearing full-coverage all day, every day makes me go YEEOUCH!

And, of course, there were the many questionable beauty decisions I made in the ’90s. The one that haunts me the most is plucking all my eyebrows away!

How about you? What’s something beauty related you used to do that makes you cringe now?

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen