HELL. YES.

GOLD AGAIN!!! GOLD IN WOMEN'S AND MEN'S ICE HOCKEY!!

What an AMAZING Olympics!! After a less-than-ideal start I think we went on to ROCK these games!! 14 golds, a new record both for Canada AND for most gold medals won by a single country in a Winter Games AND at home.

I have the stupidest grin on my face right now and I am SO PROUD of the athletes right now!!

And my Team Iginla T-shirt lasted me all the games! Every time I wore it we WON!! (I was at work, in scrubs, when we lost the USA game in preliminaries).

So sad the games are over, but WOO CANADA!! VANOC did fantastic!!

A Need for Symmetry

So, confession time: when I arrange things, I really need them to be symmetrical. In nursing school I was once told that everyone has some degree of OCD-ness, and mine manifests in liking 'nice' numbers (like perfect squares) and symmetrical shapes. You're probably wondering what his has to do with this post, but basically, I was getting ready to post about the Maybelline Eye Studio quads, but when I went to go take a picture of all of them it bothered me a LOT that 11 did not make a nice shape so I went looking for the one I had missing and bought it today.

Maybelline Eye Studio quads are part of Maybelline New York's spring collection and were also released with mineral baked shadow duos (which looked nice, but didn't pique my interest). I saw them first before Christmas at London Drugs, and was struck by how 'Asian' the display looked... it reminded me a lot of the displays I saw in drugstores in Japan! Naturally I had to take a closer look, and while the display only offered a tester for the Sapphire Siren quad, I was impressed with the texture (soft) and pigmentation (decent) of the shadows swatched with my finger and was totally ready to pick up a few... until I found out that they were 12.99$! I thought this was too expensive (though this is in line with the pricing of KATE's palettes so I'm not sure why I have such a double standard) so I passed, and went on with my errands.

Eventually they popped up at WAL-MART and Superstore for a more palatable price of 10.00$ CAD so I picked up one, then two... got a couple with Christmas gifts and then when ALL the stores had them I bought them during the BOGO sales (or with gift cards - I had one for Shoppers Drug Mart for instance). Soon I had most of them (save for the elusive 12th quad) and now that I had all of them I figure it's a good time for a review and swatches :)

Purple for Love

Maybelline Give Me Gold Eye Studio Quad, MAC Violent Grape Blush Ombre + Shell Beauty Powder on cheeks, GOSH Angel Balm on Lips

First off, Happy Valentine's Day and Happy Lunar New Year to everyone!! This year is the Year of the Tiger (which is what I am... which means I'll be 24 this year... XD) Hopefully everyone's been having a good 2010 so far. Actually made it out to celebrate CNY this year, dim sum with the besties, and otherwise I've been watching the Olympics. GO CANADA GO!!! This next picture has nothing to do with the post but I'm happy at how my avatar turned out so this is who you'll be 'seeing' on twitter until the Olympics are over... or I take another picture I like:

Maybelline Purple Icon Eye Studio Quad, Shu Uemura P Brown 76 Glow-on Blush, Dior Serum de Rouge 510

I love my Team Canada sweater, and my Olympic mittens :D

I digress. Yumeko did a magazine scan post a while ago that talked about lucky signs for each Zodiac colour. My colour was purple, and while I like the colour a lot I'm obviously more partial to pink... but then I checked my Pantone colour of the year at www.colorstrology.com and that was also purple so... maybe it's a sign.

I have been wearing a lot of purple lately, eyeshadow, clothing, etc, but the strangest/newest thing that purple has invaded is my blush collection :)

MAC Violent Grape Blush Ombre, Illamasqua Powder blush in SIN, Illamasqua Powder blush in THRUST

Do those blushes not look terrifying? ;)

In which coupons are hazardous to my wallet's health...

Despite my promises to shop primarily at Shoppers Drug Mart to buy most high-end makeup, I do occasionally purchase things from the Bay (I have 10$ coupons I can use once a month which is a nice incentive) and even more than occasionally, Sephora. There are still brands that only Sephora carries but mostly I still shop there because of Urban Decay and Kat Von D... and because once-in-a-blue-moon Sephora will send out discount coupons.

This is a large part in my failure to NOT SPEND there. Makeup so rarely goes on sale that when I GET Sephora coupons I 'look' for stuff to buy. So bad. So when I got my Congrats-You're-A-VIB-10% off e-mail I immediately began perusing the site, only to realise like always that [1] Canadians aren't allowed to use their coupons online and [2] By the time the stuff online I wanted came IN the coupon would probably have expired. Luckily (or unluckily?) it turned out that the e-mail had been sent out mistakenly, but I was still allowed to use the discount... and got an extra couple of days to do it.

My devotion/addiction to Dior has been well-documented, I think. Since my last post I've purchased 3 quints, and the most recent one was Extase Pinks which I found (you guessed it) at Sephora. As this quint was a new permanent addition to the line I wasn't in a huge rush to get it (in fact I was planning on waiting until SDM had it and had a bonus points event to buy it), but when I went on the last valid date of the coupon it was the only thing I wanted in the store... I caved. Saving 5.80$ is pretty decent, hey? Plus it gave me enough points to redeem a sample on the e-mail the coupon got sent to, so double bonus. :)

I normally don't post single-item-reviews but I did promise Haru so...