Ulta

December ipsy Glam Bag

Leave a Comment

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

Without flash

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

Leave a Comment

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

Leave a Comment

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.

 

Life Lesson #1: It Costs $0 to be Nice

Leave a Comment

Last night, I drove home from work crying. At the time, I was rather confused as to why. I had a normal shift until the last five minutes, during which one of my managers asked me if I remembered a customer from the previous night. She showed me an email written to Ulta customer service in which the customer said that I was rude, condescending, and glared at her because she wanted to split a transaction because she wanted to give the products she was buying as gifts. In the conclusion of her short statement, she recommended that Ulta “reconsider my employment” because she deemed my behavior unacceptable there, or in any retail job. Her statements were false.

Though I do not remember exactly the interaction with this customer, I know that I was not rude or condescending to any customers. I did not glare at any customers that night, or ever. What I do remember, is that there was a customer with her name that came in. There was a customer that wanted to split a transaction to use two coupons, something I was told we are not allowed to do. I apologized and said that I could not do it. She seemed a bit annoyed but left without making a big fuss. This was not the first time that this situation occurred since I started working at Ulta in July, but this was the first time I heard something back about it.

After reading the statement and telling my manager that I was sure it was about the coupons, she told me that she didn’t think it sounded like me, and that she was, in no way, reconsidering my employment. She also added that I was not in any sort of trouble. I followed up by asking her about the coupon situation, actively trying to figure out what I had done wrong and how to fix it in the future.

We closed up the store, I got in my car, and started on my short drive home but started crying at some point. It took until Luke came home from work for me to finally understand what I was feeling. This woman, someone who has next to no impact on my life, attacked my character, not knowing me at all. Have I been rude and condescending to people in my life? Yes, who hasn’t? I will be the first one to admit that I’m not always a nice person. But over the years, I’ve tried to fix this. Other than “positive outcomes only,” the other motto I live by is simply “don’t be a dick.” Much in the same way I am fighting the internalized misogyny I have been ingrained with, I am fighting being a horrible person.

Many people will tell you being mean is easier than being nice. Obviously, if the current state of the government is anything to go by, this is true. I’ve stated this for many years in conversations with friends, family, and anyone that would listen. It is something that I preached about on my radio show at The University of Tampa. I wish I could be a bitch. You can get what you want much easier because you can step on, and over, people without giving it a second thought. You can use them, you can degrade them, it doesn’t matter. I’ve never been this kind of person.

However, I am not 100% nice. I’ve talked about friends behind their backs. I’ve not supported friends when it benefitted me. I’ve not supported friends when it hasn’t benefitted me. I have, for no reason other than I am petty and like drama, criticized people, their looks, their life choices. I am not 100% nice and I do not claim to be. Again, this is something I am working on.

This customer however, did not write that she didn’t like my hair. She did not write that I was too ugly to work at a make-up store. She did not write that I didn’t let her use coupons so she was mad she couldn’t get another $5 off of her purchase. She lied and called for corporate, and my managers, to terminate my employment at a job that I actually really enjoy. She told them that, in a heavily customer service role, I showed poor customer service.

I’ve had customers unhappy with me in this role. It happens, you can’t make everyone happy. Every other time, I’ve brushed it off. This time it stuck. It was because, as Luke explained to me, she lied and attacked my character. According to her statement, she was not unhappy with the policy, as other customers have been. She was unhappy with me. Even though I have had many customers very happy with me- a teenager hugged me, another woman brought us samples of her product (I’m not allowed to say what) because she had a fight with her partner and we helped her feel better before she went back home- but this occasion had me in tears.

This got me thinking about my future and what I am trying to do with it. Since I was young I have wanted to be famous. The reasons for this have changed over the years. When I was younger, I wanted to be famous because it seemed glamorous. As I’ve gotten older, the reason has changed to the fact that I simply want to have a voice. While this is still a dream for me (part of why I’m going to start making videos again) I had another dream: working for the Events Team at Rooster Teeth.

Not only is Rooster Teeth in the gaming community, one known to be less than cordial towards women, they are also an internet-based company, another community known not to be nice to women. This has always been a reservation in my mind, but it was one I was sure I could get past. I always thought that because a) I’d have a strong community of women behind me and b) I’ve generally had thick skin in the past, I would have less of a problem with the online abuse than some others. Now I don’t know that that is true. This incident has caused me to, once again, reconsider my life and what I’m going to do with it.

In a few days, weeks, months, I will get over this incident. I will laugh about the extreme that this woman went to to call for my termination over a coupon. I will have more amazing encounters with customers that love me and the service that I give them. I will make even better relationships with my managers, proving to them further that I am not the person this woman alleged that I am. It will not keep me down. But it will still be a fact of my life, and an event in it. It will still be something I have to think about, something that could very well shape my future. This customer was mad that she couldn’t save an extra $5 on her purchase, so she felt it worthy of her time to lie and call for me to be fired. She could have spent $0 to just be nice.

Thoughts on No Longer Being a Student

Leave a Comment

Yesterday was the first day of school at my alma mater, The University of Tampa, and at Austin Community College, the school Luke is now attending. While he is not big on photos to document big moments, and his parents did not have to move their baby boy into a dorm for the first time, I still saw many move-in photos from UT on social media over the weekend and it made me a bit nostalgic.

Since graduation in May up until the first of August, I was not working. This was not such a strange feeling because I’m used to having the summers off. As a student for the last 16 years of my life, I’ve gotten used to being busy as can be from August to June and then being a carefree kid in the remaining months. I knew this wasn’t going to continue to be the case however, which is why it was still scary even though it felt normal.

Now that I have been working for about a month at this temp job, I feel like I am back into a routine, much like the same routine I have known since I was five. The problem however, is that a) since this is a temp job, I am very likely to get thrown out of this routine very soon and b) even if I can keep it permanently, come May/June, I’m going to be ready for a three month break that isn’t going to come.

Even while I feel that I am back into the routine, the amount of free-time that I have when I get home from work has been weird. When I was younger, homework was no big thing for me; I finished it within an hour of getting home from school and then I had the rest of the night to go outside and play with the rest of the neighborhood kids. As I got older, this playtime went away. In high school and even middle school, my time at home was to be spent on homework and studying- there was no time for dilly-dallying (I still dilly-dallied… at the cost of my proper sleep schedule).

Then I got to college and found a ridiculous amount of free-time again. I went to classes for four (or less) hours a day and then had the rest of the day to do nothing as I pleased. I started to get bored so when I found an organization that I liked, I latched on and didn’t let go for my entire four years at UT. By the time I graduated, I think I’d spent more time in the Student Productions office than in my own rooms on and off campus. It was there that I’d found a love for event planning, so it just made sense that I was going to spend every free hour I had in the office. Even if I wasn’t exclusively working on programs, I found a way to make myself busy.

Now this temp job has me up at 6:30 am and home at 5:30 pm with nothing to do until I go to bed around 11 pm. With Luke working nights, I’ve been alone too, some nights unsure of what to do with myself. Recently, I’ve been crafting, working on ideas for this blog, and other personal projects. This has been a lot of fun, but I’m still missing something (and need more money) which is why I’m so excited that I’ll be working at Ulta.

This will hopefully be taking up a lot of the free-time I spend doing little to nothing at home, in an environment that I love. Ulta is a store that I’ve wanted to work at since I could work and, though it is part-time and at a pretty low wage, it will be something to keep money coming in if I don’t make this temp job into a permanent one. I still have my fingers crossed on that though.

And now, just to reminisce, the first photo taken of me at UT. I’ve used it a lot to look back at the times, but it’s still definitely one of my favorites.

With my roommate from Freshman year, Sammi at the first event at UT that we attended, Man of Steel in Falk Theatre. If we hadn’t gone to this I don’t think I’d have gotten involved in SP.