Smiles in Her Eyes

Have I mentioned enough times how bad reading beauty blogs is for my wallet and stash? Lately I've become better and being able to resist the brand new 'thing' everyone seems to be blogging about, but after reading nothing BUT positive reviews, I gave in and indulged... in Sugarpill. This is the new makeup line from Shrinkle and, for me at least, I've found that it is getting raves both across Blogspot, YouTube, and LJ. After reading and seeing so many swatches I gave in and went to place my order... only to find that the palette I wanted was sold out! Thankfully the shop restocked quickly, so here is my first purchase:

Please enlarge to see product names

Did it live up to the hype?

Got My Addictions

I seem to fixate on one type of product at a time in terms of purchasing... like for a long time I purchased only/mostly eyeshadows, and then there was a very brief period were I was really into foundations (I tried a lot but didn't purchase much), most recently I was into blushes, and after a brief foray back into eyeshadow I graduated to lip products. Of course. I think I do this because I can justify purchases of products I have less of, while it's much harder for me to justify eyeshadow purchases (which I have so much of I doubt I will ever finish ALL of them). Haha, mostly I look for reasons to go shopping ;)

When I first got into makeup all I was interested in was eye-makeup as my skin was normally pretty good and I didn't yet understand why blush worked so well, and frankly I thought lipsticks were absolutely disgusting. Which is probably a holdover by being kissed by too many "aunties" with gobs of awful smelling/waxy lipstick as a child. I slowly moved on to each successive category of makeup, and while I had accepted lip gloss, I still eschewed traditional lipsticks (though I liked the liquid ones, notably Chanel's Rouge Laque Allures) for whatever reason.

I still can't pinpoint what made me talk the plunge into buying 'traditional' lipsticks but 2 months later, these are my most recent purchases (except for MAC's Viva Glam Cyndi, but I am too lazy to go back and take more pictures). I wear a lot of colour so at first I was searching for the perfect nude lippie, and then it turned into the perfect nude pink lippie, and now I am just drawn to pinks (of course). Faced with an array of shades I will 95% of the time reach for the medium pink lipsticks to swatch first. So which are the ones I've liked enough to purchase?

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...

Creature of Habit

Excuse the scary picture, this is the only example of my 'work makeup' I have... this was taken at 4AM a few nights ago!

I've been back at work for 3 weeks now, and despite being off for more than a month, it was like I'd never left at all (aside from being sore after the first shift... that doesn't happen anymore). As one of my fellow nurses put it, ICU is generally 'Same stuff, different day...' or more like 'Same sicknesses, different patients'. So I'm back into the swing of things :)

Although I love to play with makeup (hence this blog's existence), the way I do my makeup for work hasn't changed very much in about a year, for several reasons, namely:
1) I wear the same thing every day for work (scrubs)
2) I work long hours and start EARLY (7AM) so my routine is fast thereby allowing me a tad bit more sleep
3) This 'face' is pretty much indestructible in terms of wearing off... I come home with the majority of it intact and that is after running around like a mad-woman at work for 12.5 hours
4) I am seriously trying to hit pan on some things, and these are the most likely to happen as I use them ALL THE time, if not every day
5) This is a pretty natural looking face I think... it doesn't look like I'm obviously wearing a tonne of make-up which is important to me at work :)
6) As long as I'm awake enough, this only takes me 10 minutes, including my hair :)

First off, the skin-care regime...