I mentioned in my blogiversary post that I feel one of the strengths of the blog is that I’m able to do comparisons between various products due to my stash. Here are some highlights of those comparison posts (I just remembered that I even did a week-long series called “Comparison Week” ha!):
Breathless vs Breathless
Today I’m excited to announce the launch of my first ever BLOGMAS! Ingrid of Curly.Spring.Blossom came up with this idea and asked if I’d be interested! So, Ingrid, Kaily of Hello Kaily, Sharon of Sharon Beauty Prime and myself (we’re calling ourselves the Babes in Blogland) will be posting 25 consecutive days for the holiday season. Our Blogmas will be primarily focused beauty topics with a Christmas spin. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday all 4 of us will be posting about the same topic, so be sure to check out each of our take on the topic du jour! 😀
Our topic today is RED & GREEN stuff (or Red & Green sh!t as the classy Kaily called it). I’m interpreting this topic as a showcase of red and green makeup items from my stash.
It would have been a bit of a cop-out to just feature nail polishes so I did make an effort to include actual makeup stuff. 😛
Finally, I’m getting around to wearing MAC Party Line! I got this a while back as my Back to MAC item, where I returned 6 MAC empties for a lipstick. That was back in September. But the shade I chose was quite a deep plum colour, more of a Fall-looking shade that I had to wait until recently to wear.
Plus, I had to work up the nerve to wear this deep colour! 😮
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Weird title for a post, huh.
Firstly: yay, it’s Day 150 of my No-Buy! Only 186 more days to go… (for those of you who don’t know, I’m on a yearlong No-Buy, but I had to restart it in Jan because I broke my No-Buy with a Target haul. My No-Buy ends on Dec 31st.)
Now, what does YDSMBSM mean? It stands for:
You Don’t Save Money By Spending Money.
It’s something my frugal bf says to me in response to when I try to justify my latest purchase, “I got such a good deal on it, it was 50% off!” To which he’d say, “You Don’t Save Money By Spending Money. You still spent money to save that 50%. If you didn’t buy it at all, then you would have saved 100%.” Party pooper. But he did have a point. 😛
Here’s a bunch of crap deals that I bought last year because I found them in the clearance section:
What did I need an orange eye shadow for? And a hot pink lipstick? I’ve NEVER EVER even worn that lipstick!
I was tagged by Sandy of Lippie Obsession to do this and it’s right in my wheelhouse! Since I pulled out all my lipsticks yesterday for the lip stash post, I figured I’d do this tag today. For the Makeup Muggles out there, MLBB stands for “My Lips But Better” which means these lip products enhance the natural lip colour – usually a close match or slightly darker / brighter / lighter / shinier – whatever is “better” to you.
I do not wear lipstick regularly, but when I do, I typically choose a MLBB shade. My lips are quite pigmented, so some of these colours may seem deeper than what you might consider a MLBB lippie. I chose these lipsticks not only for the colours, but also for how much I like the formulas:
From left to right:
• Illamasqua Glamore Nude Lipstick in Minx
• Elizabeth Arden Exceptional Lipstick in Breathless #17 (of COURSE I have to include this! See my post comparing the old vs new)
• Guerlain Rouge G de Guerlain Lip Color in Garance 06
• Shiseido Perfect Rouge in Dreamscape RD351
• Bite Beauty Luminous Crème Lipstick in Fig
• Shiseido Lacquer Rouge in Portrait RD203
(That Guerlain tube was a PITA to photograph!)
As I’m laying out all my lip stuff in preparation for photography in today’s post, The Boy asks me, “What’s the purpose of all these pictures?”
“They’re to show my whole collection on the blog.” I reply.
“So it’s like… makeup porn?” he asks.
“YUP! You got it!” 😆
My lip stash is probably the least exciting of all of my stashes – the majority of my lip products can fit into one frame:
I’m just not that into lipsticks. I feel bold colours don’t suit my face. I’m also not into matte textures or shimmer, or overly glossy finishes – so it leaves me with a fairly narrow band of comfort zone, as you’ll see in my stash. And I only own 5 MAC lipsticks! (of which 3 are retired) It’s relatively small by comparison to my eye shadow stash (600+) or nail polish stash (400+) That said, I have amassed a lot of lip balms and butter butters.
I had mentioned in The Lipstick Tag that my favourite lipstick is the Elizabeth Arden (EA) Exceptional Lipstick in Breathless (#17), which was sadly discontinued. In the comments of that post, the fantabulous fivezero informed me that EA still had the shade Breathless in their repertoire, but in a new formula called Beautiful Color Moisturizing Lipstick (renumbered as #31). I was SUPER excited! I mentioned this to my co-worker and it turned out she had received an EA gwp which included Breathless that she didn’t want. She was planning on giving it to her mother, but instead she gave it to ME (sorry, mama). So I decided to do a comparison of the 2 Breathlesses… (what’s the proper plural for that?)
The original Breathless is a slightly warm toned MLBB shade in a hydrating cream formula. It’s very comfortable on the lips yet manages to last a remarkable amount of time on my lips (~4 hours). I wear this shade whenever I want to look polished and put together.
Maybe I’m being too loose with the term “palette” since most of my favourites are just quads – but I suppose they fall under the umbrella of palettes? To me, a palette is anything more than a duo – so trios, quads, and quints all qualify. What I’m trying to say is that I do not like large scale pre-made palettes. I know that within a palette, I will always end up with at least one dud, and the more shades within a palette, the higher the odds are that I will end up with many duds (so no, I do not own any of the Urban Decay Naked palettes!)
My criteria for a good palette is one that I like most, if not all, of the shades, and one that I can create a nearly complete eye look from. They’re great for travelling and those days when I just want a one stop shop for my eye shadow look. Here are my favourite pre-made eye shadow palettes.
stash matters 