Yes yes, I’ve been extremely lucky lately, winning a few giveaway in quick succession! 😀 I won this NYX Highlight & Contour Pro Palette from Sandie’s Stash:
I’ve never owned a highlighting and contour palette before. I love the notecard that Sandie included – thank you!. 🙂
For someone who’s a self-professed NON-lipstick junkie… I seem to own a lot of lip products. And we all know that lipsticks don’t have a long lifespan – really, one should be tossing lip products about 18 months after opening. I’m guilty of keeping mine for MUCH longer than 18 months! (but let’s be reasonable here, common sense should prevail – if the lip product doesn’t have a funky smell or a weird texture, it’s probably ok). All that said, I need to get rid of a whack of stuff that I hardly ever reach for – some have gone bad, and others are just taking up precious space:
By now you’re sick of my hauls, right? I’m sorry, but you realize January was NO HOLDS BARRED month, and I just came off a yearlong dry spell, so every makeup item looked mighty tempting. This is the LAST of the January hauls (until I receive the items I ordered online). Here are some random bits and pieces I picked up that I haven’t covered in my previous posts:
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. 😛
Ahh, this blush. THIS BLUSH. I love it, and I hate it. Well, I mainly hate the fact that I didn’t buy a back-up of it. It’s not the blush’s fault. But the love I have for it… yes, I want to marry it.
It was part of MAC Give Me Liberty of London collection from 2010. MAC’s official shade description is “neutral nude” which really downplays how nuanced the colour is.
It’s a shimmering bronze nudey shade, yet it’s got a plummy-ness to it as well. It registers as both warm and cool tone on the skin, depending on the rest of my makeup look.
Starting this Friday, I’ll be on a road trip! We’ll be heading to northern parts of our province, also known as “cottage country” (don’t let the word “cottage” fool you, they have multi-million dollar homes that are owned by Hollywood celebs), and then heading to Ottawa. We’ll be staying mostly at Bed & Breakfasts (B&Bs) which are essentially rooms or a portion of someone’s house. They’re more homey than hotels – and usually the breakfasts (included) are amazing! We won’t exactly be roughing it, but I will be fairly low-key in terms of attire and makeup. I always ask myself 3 questions when packing makeup for a trip:
Keeping these in mind, here is what I’m packing for our 9-day trip.
I typically carry my makeup roll for the cosmetic items and a separate bag for skincare. The makeup roll was a gwp from Smashbox, and the cute travel bag is from Consonant Skincare.
When I finally understood the concept of a transition eye shadow, it upped my eye shadow blending game by tenfold. A transition eye shadow shade is one that is typically matte and slightly darker than your natural skin tone – this helps to blend the lid colour into the brow area. Most days now, I just pop on a shimmery neutral shade [taupe!] on the lid up to the crease, then I blend the edges with a transitional shade – something like this:
My blending skills are better than my photoshop skills.
It looks like I spent a lot of time with my eye look but in fact, it took less than 5 minutes. I’ve depotted some of my most used transition colours into a small z-palette so I can have a range to choose from each morning:
I would group my transition shades into neutral, warm and cool categories. I’m around NC25 so these would be suitable for skin tones that are similar.
Here’s the motherlode. I’ve mentioned many times that I have a lot of eye shadows – over 600 – it is the most abundant makeup category that I own. I just love eye shadows and it’s the area of my face that I spend the most time applying makeup. I’ll keep this introduction brief and just let the pictures do the talking.
It took me over 2 hours just to sort and photograph the whole eye shadow collection and probably another 4 to edit everything. Usual disclaimer: this isn’t meant to show off. It was actually quite a beneficial exercise for me to display all my eye shadows visually. Warning: photo heavy post! (50 images)
stash matters 