Month: January 2018

December ipsy Glam Bag

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December is a busy month for most people. That said, here’s my ipsy review.

The bag itself is super cute. It’s simpler than some of their other designs but it’s a nice silver color with the stripe of glitter at the top and the zipper and pull are a turquoise color that I love. In the bag I received Purlisse Beauty Coconut + Rice Nourishing Sheet Mask and Green Tea + Ginger Treatment Sheet Mask, Smashbox Cosmetics Be Legendary Lipstick in Legendary, City Color Cosmetics Shimmer Shadow in It’s a Girl, NYX Professional Makeup Faux Blacks Liner in Midnight, and Chella Eyebrow Defining Gel. Overall, I’m fairly pleased with this bag. Onto the specifics!

Purlisse Beauty Coconut + Rice Nourishing Sheet Mask and Green Tea + Ginger Treatment Sheet Mask

I’m not including photos of me using/wearing these sheet masks because they look the same as the rest-white and wet. From what I can tell, they pretty much perform like the rest as well. My skin felt nice and refreshed after using them but only for about a day. They smelled nice and were very relaxing and cooling while I wore them. Sheet masks, to me, seem to be a good thing to do when you need to take a load off but aren’t quite as beneficial to your skin as we make them out to be. Good skin comes with good hydration and good everyday care. But they’re still fun and when I get them from ipsy or when they’re on sale, I’m still going to use them.

Smashbox Cosmetics Be Legendary Lipstick in Legendary

Without flash

Smashbox is a brand that I tend to like but also question heavily. I like what I’ve used from them such as their Photo Finish Primers and X-Rated Mascara but I never want to try their other products. That said I wasn’t mad at this lipstick. It’s a nice, normal red, and it’s not a matte but could easily be made one with some setting powder (I’ve been swaying away from mattes lately because I’ve been trying to take better care of my lips). It applied easily and stayed on the rest of the night while I was moving around my apartment cleaning. I’ve yet to wear it out or to work, but it was a solid 4-ish hours that I wore it inside.

City Color Cosmetics Shimmer Shadow in It’s a Girl

Without flash

With flash

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since I’ve started doing more eyeshadow, I’ve been more excited to get them in my ipsy Glam Bags. Getting bright colors like this one is especially exciting because I can use them as a pop of color in my otherwise dark and monochrome work outfits. When I swatched this one on my arm, I was very excited because it was super pink and it had a good amount of shimmer to it. When I finally used it the first time on my eyes however, I was rather disappointed. It gave a nice pink for my crease into upper lid area to layer on top of, but the shimmer seemed to disappear and it did not seem nearly as pigmented as when it was on my arm. It still works as a pretty nice base to the Anastasia Beverly Hills Modern Romance palette that I recently bought, as well as the tarte Magic Star palette that I got for my birthday. A customer at work even asked what it was and I had to tell her that it was, unfortunately, not something that we sell in our store.

NYX Professional Makeup Faux Blacks Liner in Midnight

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The tip broke

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With flash

The NYX Faux Blacks and Faux Whites Liners have intrigued me since I first saw them at Ulta. As someone who loves all things black, especially her eye makeup, I have never understood why people use brown eyeliner or mascara. When I was younger, I dabbled with colored liners, picking out a bright turquoise one, but when I wanted black, I wanted black. Recently however, because I wear black on black on the daily, I have been branching out with my make-up and looking for it to make my color statement recently. This eyeliner doesn’t do that, but I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would. It’s a nice navy blue color and goes on pretty well with some pretty good staying power. Without really looking at it when it’s on, you’d never tell that it wasn’t black besides the fact that it’s not quite as intense. For comparison of color, I swatched it on my arm next to the Urban Decay 24/7 Glide-On Eye Pencil in Perversion, UD’s blackest shade. The reason it seems kind of messy is because in the middle of the swatch, the tip broke off. Regardless of the fact that you can easily sharpen this pencil, the product breaking is not great because it may be dry which would make it more difficult to use and it might tug and get stuck while you are applying it. I intend to sharpen this and keep using it, but that took it down a tick in my book.

Chella Eyebrow Defining Gel

I really don’t have much to say about this one. I like eyebrow gels because they do tend to help tame my brows a bit but when I really need the help because I slept on them all night and they’re incredibly unruly, no gels really do anything at all. This one has been pretty great however because I have been using it before and after filling in my brows and it a) may be helping my product go on a little better/stay a little longer and b) doesn’t seem to be taking product away when I use it after filling in, something that other brow gels and spoolies tend to do. Now if only it could grow hair back where I over-plucked it…

One Year with My Human

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One of the more serious photos Shayla got of us.

Monday, January 8, 2018 was Luke and my first anniversary. It was a roughly 3-day celebration.

Our potato pancakes!

On Sunday, we spent roughly the whole day together after I got home from work at noon. We went to a couple grocery stores then made potato pancakes for dinner because we are #PotatoPancake. The recipe that we followed (mostly) can be found here. We cut it down greatly because we only had two medium-sized potatoes and are only two people. We also added paprika because Luke loves paprika. We also shallow fried them because 2 cups seemed like they would be deep-fried and that just didn’t seem right. They were delicious but could have used a bit more salt than we used.

On Monday we (I) woke up early and hung out in the morning. We exchanged gifts. He had gotten me more because he was short on cash for my birthday and Christmas so he made up for it for our anniversary. I opened an amazon box to find a pasta roller for us to make pasta together, Egghead by Bo Burnham, and Eggsistential Thoughts by Gudetama, The Lazy Egg. I gave him a “date jar” filled with popsicle sticks that had different date ideas written on them. Afterwards, I went online to look up the sushi restaurant we were going to and find out what time they opened. We weren’t just planning to do regular sushi; we were going to do all-you-can-eat sushi. In doing my research about when the restaurant opened, I found that for $23 during lunch hours, you only got one hour of all-you-can-eat-sushi. This hardly seemed like enough of a deal since the sushi was made to order so you had to wait for it to come out to you. We almost gave up on the AYCE deal but found instead that another restaurant, Sushi Bang Bang, does AYCE sushi for $26 at lunch. They opened at 11am and we arrived around noon, after I did my hair and make-up.

Not only could you get sashimi, nigiri, and maki rolls from the sushi bar, we were able to get a number of appetizers from the kitchen as well as tempura and other Japanese entrees. From deliciously fresh salmon sashimi to hot takoyaki and pork katsu, Luke and I ate $100 or more of sushi for about half the price. We went home happy but incredibly stuffed and felt the need to just lay around for a while before either of us had to go to work.

The same faces we make at each other, all day, every day.

On Tuesday, the last day of our 3-day celebration, we met with Shayla Webb at Bull Creek Park to get photos taken for our anniversary. I met Shayla at Ulta but she left since her photography business started taking off in December. Now she’s been taking photos for families, couples, and weddings and doing it very well. We were all ready for it to be a bit awkward because she wasn’t sure how to pose us and we weren’t sure how to pose, but in her telling us what to do and us being our goofy selves, we got some amazing photos out of it. We laughed basically the whole time and Shayla captured every moment and the essence of our relationship very well. It was such a fun experience too because whenever I’d gotten professional photos taken before, they were in a staged studio and this was out at a public park around nature and with a beautiful creek and waterfall. There was also a film crew in the area filming, what Luke thinks, was a commercial. They brought in potted trees.

After we left the photoshoot with Shayla, Luke and I were deciding what to eat when we got home but realized we wanted to go to Costco and get samples and $1.50 hot dogs. We got samples, a hot dog, drink, and chicken bake and also got a few groceries. Doing domestic things with Luke like grocery shopping are some of my favorite things to do with him.

Our first year as a couple absolutely flew by. We went from friends to in a relationship and moved to Austin together in 2017. I’m so excited to see what 2018 is going to bring us.

 

If you’d like to see more of Shayla’s work, check her out at swebbphoto.com!

Make-Up Wipes Don’t Remove the Ugly

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I love make-up. It’s fun and it makes me feel good. What I don’t love is taking it off at the end of the day. Regardless of how little I’m wearing, it always feels like too much when that time of night comes around and an immaculately white wipe or cotton ball turns brown. As someone who doesn’t really wash their face every night either, save for make-up removal, sometimes I still feel dirty when I go to bed. I also hate the amount of waste I make using make-up wipes every night and how much I felt I had to scrub using them. I used micellar water for a while but while it worked better and felt less abrasive, I was still using too many cotton balls for my liking. I wasn’t raised in a home that used disposable dinnerware regularly and that always recycled, so throwing away wipes and cotton balls day after day feels wrong.

Some time last year, my mom gave me make-up removal towels that worked well but still felt rather abrasive and had to be washed with a special soap that was rather expensive so I stopped using them and went back to my wipes and micellar water. I still felt bad, but had to worry about my finances. If I end up in the hole because I was worrying too much about the environment, I’d be even worse for the environment because I would be living directly in it.

When I started working at Ulta, I got to see many new products. One that I was always on the lookout for was new make-up remover. Something cheap but works well and maybe wouldn’t create a lot of waste. I found other micellar waters that worked well. I also found the Urban Decay make-up removers that are amazing but expensive. Both of these products would still create a bit of waste however. In the Ulta Beauty line, I knew of make-up removing towels, similar to something I’d seen some YouTubers use in the past. They are little grey towels that are super soft and supposedly remove all make-up, including waterproof mascara, and only need water to be activated. On Associate Appreciation Weekend, when we received an extra 10% discount, and the Ulta Beauty Collection was Buy 2 Get 2 Free, I decided I’d buy a set and try them out.

In order to test them, I went to work with a full face of make-up on and then used one of these wipes to take off the make-up on one half of my face and used a traditional make-up remover wipe to remove the make-up on the other half of my face. I was surprised by how much I liked these and how well they worked.

I used the towel first and it felt that I mostly removed the make-up I had on that day. I was satisfied. Then I used the wipe on the other side and both sides of my face felt about the same. They both removed my eyeliner and mascara, some of the most difficult make-up to remove, and neither felt super roughed up though the wipe side did feel a bit more raw, especially around the eye.

After removing everything that I felt I could with the towel and the wipe, I took a cotton ball with micellar water to both cheeks to see how much make-up was leftover. This showed results as expected.

Leftover make-up after using a wipe.

Leftover make-up after using the towel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was more make-up left after using a towel than a wipe. I figured this was because the wipe has make-up remover in it while the towel is just using water and its fibers to remove all of the gunk on my face. Regardless, I think that the towels are a good replacement for wipes because they are less abrasive and less wasteful. If you use them however, you should definitely wash your face afterwards, though you should be doing that anyways.