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

Comment to Win a $50 eGift Card From MAC! (Ends Monday)

by 373 Comments

** THE GIVEAWAY IS CLOSED **

This giveaway is closed, and the winner has been contacted (CONGRATULATIONS, CHELSEA!!!), but check back next Saturday for another giveaway.

mac-giveaway-08-09-15

tabs-circleGooood morning, glory! If you have not yet had your Caturday feline fix, allow me to help…

I hope you had a nice night. Mine was pretty chill. We just kept it easy and local with two words: take out.

Wait — I think that’s one word…

El Hub and I got takeout Puerto Rican for dinner because I’d been craving good beans and rice, then came home and checked on our neighbor’s kitty cat and bunny. Yup, we’re on petsitter duty this weekend for their cute orange tabby and little white bunny, and that’s fun. After providing the entertainment for their evening, we rented a pretty good Western on iTunes called Slow West starring Michael Fassbender. Good movie, but not a lot of rainbows and kittens, if you know what I mean…

After that, it was off to bed for this gal!

I’m not sure yet what we’ll do today, but it feels like a good mall day to me. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something in the air. I feel the mall vibes… LOL!

Have a wonderful weekend, my friend, and give yourself a big hug from me and lots of sweet kitty hugs from Tabs. 🙂

Prize

  • One (1) MAC eGift card containing $50 sent to the winner by email (international readers, you may opt to receive $50 sent by PayPal instead).

$50 MAC eGIFT CARD

Rules

  • Enter by leaving a comment below.
  • Open to U.S. and international readers.
  • You must be 18 or older to enter (or otherwise an adult based on your local laws).
  • Your comment can be about anything at all, but here are some ideas if you’re stuck:
    • Would you rather live 1,000 years (just you, not your family members) or win $1 million?
    • What’s a word you always have a hard time spelling?
    • Have you ever dated someone you met online?
    • A skin care product you’ve been wanting to try?
    • New shoes or new lipstick?
    • A TV show you would love to see turned into a movie?
  • One entry per person.
  • You must use a valid email address to win.
  • The giveaway ends on Monday, August 10, 2015 at 11:59 PM (Pacific Time). 🙂

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Smile! You May Want to Trim Your Nose Hairs (Just a Quick Tip About Smiling and Maybe Trimming Your Nose Hairs!)

by 20 Comments

Wearing makeup from the new MAC Lightness of Being collection

OK, I don’t really know how to start this blog post, because what woman in her right mind admits to the Interwebz that she has nose hairs, but whatever — here goes!

I am about 20 years away from becoming a full-on Sasquatch.

Seriously.

One day El Hub is going to wake up and find Mrs. Chewbacca sleeping next to him. (Part of me believes that he would think he had won the lottery if this happened because he is a HUGE Star Wars fan, haha.)

Anyway, I’m getting hairier, and I have concrete evidence to support this, because one day not long ago I was looking at a bunch of pictures that I had just taken for the blog, and I noticed — ruh-roh! — that in all of the pics in which I was smiling, the hairs in my left nostril were totally poking out.

Now, they weren’t long enough to braid or anything (OMG!), but I could definitely see little hairs poking out in all their nose hair glory.

(I’m convinced that there is some kind of correlation between smiling and nose hair visibility…)

Because I know myself, and I know that if I get anything sharp like regular scissors close to my face things will not go well, later that day I went to the drugstore and bought this pair of safety facial hair trimmers from Tweezerman.
[Continue reading…]

Fri-Yay Makeup Fun: How to Do a Graphic Cat Eye

by 22 Comments

graphic-cat-eye-makeup

Today was the first day in the past two (or three) weeks I felt makeup motivated enough to do something more ambitious than color in the crease, color on the lids and a little in the outer corner, and I’m hoping it’ll break me outta my current eyeshadow rut (*crosses fingers*).

I call this a “graphic cat eye,” and you may or may not remember it from this Buxom Eyeshadow Bar post a while back.

graphic-cat-eye-1-final

It’s an exaggerated version of cat eye liner (aka “winged liner”) done with colorful purple eyeshadow (instead of liner), and it’s one of those makeup looks that might seem hella complicated, but it’s really not at all. The hardest parts are probably getting the wing angle and the shape of the eye symmetrical on both sides, but if you go slowly and work in layers, I’m sure you’ll be perfectly fine.

Here we go! 🙂

First, I started by curling my lashes and tightlining my upper lash line with black liner…but you can skip that if your lashes are naturally curly (lucky you!), and/or you’re just not that into tightlining (oh, and I do both eyes together at the same time to keep them symmetrical).

Next, I lined my upper lash lines and drew a wing using an angled brush and a dark plummy purple eyeshadow, but I started by sort of marking in a couple layers first with the shadow and the brush head dry to get the general shape. Then I wet the brush head, dipped it back into the eyeshadow again and went back over the line and wing to deepen the color and create a slight gradient.

The shape, angle and length of your wing, which is probably a tad messy at this point, kinda serves as a roadmap for the rest of the eye look.

graphic-cat-eye-2-final
[Continue reading…]

Would You Rather Spend $90 on a Christian Louboutin Lipstick or $90 to Get a Bunch of Other Products Instead?

by 56 Comments

loub-lip

Have you heard? Christian Louboutin is launching a new line of lipsticks at Saks, and each lipstick — as in each single tube — is ninety freakin’ dollars. OMG!

I mean, I totally get the allure of high-end, exclusive makeup (Hello, Chanel!), but $90 for a single product makes a $50 Tom Ford lippie look like a freakin’ discount. That’s craziness.

The funny thing is that I would spend that much (or more) on a single skin care product if I loved it and knew it worked for me, like Skinceuticals C + E Ferulic Serum (which basically saved my skin when I was experiencing terrible hormonal chin acne), which is $162, but that’s skin care, and the way I look at it, I live with my skin day in, day out.

But a lipstick is more temporary, and I can’t see myself wearing a $90 lipstick, or any lipstick for that matter, every day for long because I change my mind about color so often. Plus, IT’S $90 FOR A LIPSTICK! My mom, the lovable cheapskate that she is, could very well kill me if she ever found out, LOL!

No, really. She would kill me with a long-@ss lecture on frugality and the importance of saving for a rainy day.

This was my long-winded way of saying that I’d go for the latter option, aka the bunch of products. No $90 Loub lipstick for this girl.

How about you? Which one would you pick? The $90 Loub lipstick, or $90 worth of other products instead?

Would you rather spend $90 on a Christian Louboutin Lipstick or $90 to get a bunch of other products instead?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

P.S. TGIF!?

Chanel Fall 2015: Highlights and Faves

by 24 Comments

Ooh! Smokey brown eyes. That’s all I have to say. And red lips, too, and some touches of khaki and bronze and copper… All in all, lots of good stuff in Chanel Fall 2015, so when you get home, freakin’ press play, and then let me know in the comments what you think.

And don’t laugh! Well, you can laugh, but I’m pretty sure that I butcher all of the French names.

Also, more swatches and product pics in this post from earlier this week.

chanel fall 2015
Chanel Fall 2015 Collection Les Automnales

chanel fall 2015

chanel fall 2015

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Open Thread: The English Period Piece Edition

by 57 Comments

english-period-piece-oak

I watched the best movie last night, and I liked it so much that the first thing I did this morning was start it at the beginning again while I had my coffee (I’m still on the decaf kick).

It’s called Far From the Madding Crowd and stars Carey Mulligan and a dude named Matthias Schoenaerts, whom I can’t remember seeing before, but note to self: I like the name Matthias.

There’s intrigue; multiple love triangles; a lamb as an engagement gift, which, not gonna lie, if a strapping farmer dude rolled up with a lamb and said, “Marry me,” I’d say yes (assuming I wasn’t already married); a smarmy soldier — basically all sorts of drama. Highly recommended.

Well, the funny thing is, a few years ago I wasn’t into English period pieces at all, and I think it was leftover trauma from college. I was an English major and at one point took an obscene number of British literature classes. I was just reading a whole bunch of 19th-century British lit over a matter of months, and by the end of it, I was so exhausted that I stayed away from period pieces for a long time…

But now I’m back! 🙂

I blame Downton Abbey…

So, open thread. I feel like doing one today because I’m in the mood to chat. Topics are your choice (we don’t have to talk about English period pieces, unless you want to).

See you in the comments!

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Makeup Tip: Go Sample Crazy When You’re Looking for a New Foundation

by 36 Comments

go sample crazy

Whenever I go to Sephora or Ulta or to a beauty counter at the mall, and I’m looking for a new foundation, I’m that person who leaves with a purse full of samples.

No, seriously. It’s like “No sample left behind!” 🙂

The main reason I do this is not because I’m super chintzy (although I can see how it would be entirely possible to exist solely on samples if one were extra crafty and bound and determined), but because when it comes to foundation, I don’t always knock it out of the park on the first try. Sometimes it takes me a few swings to find the right match.

Try to get samples of the neighboring shades

I always ask for samples — as many as I can get — of the neighboring foundation shades around the one that looks like my closest match in the store. That way I can test them all at home to find the one that looks best on me in natural light, see how each one wears throughout the day, and also see how they all look in pics.

Plus, you just never know if a formula is going to oxidize and darken on your skin throughout the day. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve tried a shade that seemed to match me perfectly in the store, only to have it look totally wackadoo a few hours later, and that’s when it’s nice to have a sample of the next lighter shade on hand.
[Continue reading…]

Copyright © 2025 Makeup and Beauty Blog. Get in touch.