snow day

It snowed today! As much of an inconvenience it is to get to work and home, I don't mind it as much as I used to. Maybe it's because I'm looking forward to taking pictures now, so I'm always keeping an eye out for what would make good picture material. Sometimes I regret not taking a picture of something out of fear of looking silly to strangers around me. Not like I know anything about photography of course, as my camera of preference is the one on my phone. I have close to zero sense of lighting and composition and things like that. I mean, the out of focus-ness in the first picture was purely accidental and I've been trying to figure out for ages how to do that on purpose! But it's always good to have something you enjoy doing or look forward to doing consistently, and learning new things and improving. Even if you really have no idea what you're doing, but thinks it looks good anyway.

Until next post,
Becky

sister's makeup: my favorites

Aside from the occasional fights and mishaps, having a sister is awesome. Even though my sister is younger than I am, she's the one who introduced me to makeup. We use each other's stuff all the time, so that's where the idea for this post came from. Here are some of my favorites from her collection. 

★ maybelline instant age rewind dark circle treatment concealer in light and brightener

The name of this product is ridiculously long, haha. I used to use the shade neutralizer, and even though it did help cover up my dark circles I felt like it was the wrong shade for me now that I look back to it. My current concealer routine consists of Motives Creme Concealer in Amber for my undereye area first, then dabbing the brightener shade on top, followed by the light shade. Three concealers for the eye area is probably a bit excessive, but this combination works really well for my dark circles.

★ nars sheer glow foundation in santa fe

I used to hate foundation because it made my face feel really heavy. My sister was raving about how she loves this foundation, so I gave it a try as well and ended up buying my own after a few uses (in my defense, I'm running out of my Too Faced BB cream so this is kind of like a repurchase). The formula is really light but provides medium-ish coverage (I'm not well versed in the foundation department, so how would I know?). I love how this truly gives a natural look to the skin - the "glow" part definitely means a healthy glow, not shimmery or dewy, which I think is really flattering on both my sister and me.

★ mac 168 large angled contour brush

I never understood the hype for MAC brushes, until I tried this one. It's the perfect size and shape for contouring my cheekbones and for some reason I can never achieve the same effect with any other brush. It's rather expensive in my opinion for one brush, but I think it's worth the investment.

★ clinique take the day off cleansing balm

I'm extremely gentle when it comes to my eye area, so using my regular makeup remover takes a while and I'm not very patient with it. I used to use olive oil in the past and it takes eye makeup off really easily, but it's a mess to work with. I love this because it has the same quick, easy, and gentle removal properties as olive oil but washes off with warm water without leaving residue. I only need a pea-size amount to remove all my eye makeup, though I still use a regular remover for the rest of my face.

Aside from the foundation, I probably won't actually purchase any of these until she goes back to Ohio for college. The perks of having a sister, eh? ;)

Until next post,

Becky

sephora wishlist

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I made myself a promise that I wouldn't purchase anything new from Sephora (repurchases are ok, though) until their spring sale. Beauty products from other stores count too, but for the sake of simplicity I'm just going to say Sephora. It seems to be where I get most of my makeup, anyway. Except I failed, because I bought some things from Urban Decay recently. In my defense, they were having a sale on something that I couldn't pass up on (will blog about it later) and I needed to get something extra to bump up the cost for free shipping. Oh, the ways I try to convince myself...

For now, I'm putting items that I like into my cart and giving them some time to see if I actually want it or not. I was going to make a typical white background wishlist, but I decided to be a little more creative and go for the formatting that I usually see in magazines (fancy background included). It's not much in terms of graphics, but it's a start!