Happy Birthday Fun Time!

Birthday Look 2012

Hello, Beauty Fans! Let's face it, gals, when you're over 45, as I am, birthdays can be a little daunting, bringing on crankiness, a maudlin attitude, and a rethinking of the whole 'No Plastic Surgery For Me' resolution.

So to make it all go down easier, I invite a few friends, find a new exciting bar, make sure everything I'm eating, drinking, and wearing on my face makes me smile, and try to look as fabulous as humanly possible.

Here's what I did with my look:

Hey, I EARNED these crow's feet!

Peekaboo Green Lids

So let me tell you what I wore on my face, and then we'll talk further about the festivities.

Face:

• Embryolisse Lait Créme Concentré
• Olay Wrinkle and Line Filler as primer
• skin79 Hot Pink Super+ Triple Function BB Cream
• Bare Minerals Mineral Veil
• Cinema Secrets Peach corrector for under eye circles
• Dermablend concealer in Sand

Wet n' Wild Color Icon Comfort Zone Palette

Eyes:

• Urban Decay Primer Potion
• Wet n' Wild Color Icon Comfort Zone eye shadow palette: Crease color on left, duochrome (yay!) definer on right, green eyelid color on outer edge of lid, and orange eyelid color on rest of lid. So if you don't own this one, go get it! I love it so!
• Ardell false eyelashes in #150 Demi. I love false eyelashes for vamping up a look. They are so old school and wonderfully challenging to put on. So feminine and romantic. This set is still a bit natural, and yet thick and dramatic.
• Urban Decay 24/7 glide on pencil in Perversion. The best black gel pencil eyeliner I've ever tried. I applied it to upper lash line and lower lash line, smoked it out a bit with a smudger brush, and put some more of the Wet n' Wild definer shades over it to blend it even more.

Cheeks:

• La Femme Blush in Coral on apples
• Milani XL Bronzer in Fake Tan 02A as contour under cheekbones and around forehead and temples
• NYX "butt" naked palette, the pink highlighter, on tops of cheeks

Lips:

• Ellis Faas Milky Lips in L204

CVS Drugstore Haul with a touch of Halloween!

Went to CVS while waiting for my husband to get out of outpatient surgery, and found many lovely new things! Here is my video, and a few lovely photos.

Wildlash feather peacock lashes

When I bought these, the check-out woman was all, "I just put these out!" So go get 'em. I have a feeling they won't last long in the stores. I can't wait to try that Pat McGrath butterfly eye look with these on Halloween!

From September's Elle Magazine. 

The Pat McGrath look is at the top of this page above, from Elle Magazine's September issue.

Don't you love when magazines do pieces like this showing all the products and where each shade goes on your eyes? Thank you, Elle!!! And thank you, iPad, for having a way for me to take a perfectly clean shot of any magazine page when I open my magazines digitally. Yay!

Mr. Pussycat loves the limelight

Here are the products from top left, clockwise:

• Revlon Colorburst Lip Butter in Berry Smoothie
• Essie in Jamaica Me Crazy!
• Wet n' Wild in Poison Ivy
• Spoiled by Wet n' Wild in Show Me the Money!
• Revlon Gucci Westman Cream Eye Shadow Palette in Midnight Express (Did anyone see this movie in the 70s? If you did, you'd never ever name anything remotely related to beauty after it. Maybe this dates me just as much, but you would also never name anything beauty-related after Deliverance, no matter how much you love Burt Reynolds, and John Voight, who does still have a pretty mouth. Nuff said.)
• Ardell Wildlash false eye lashes.

Gucci Westman Midnight Express Revlon palette

Since I bought this, I tried the burgundy shade bottom right as a base, and over Urban Decay primer potion. It has some subtle golden glitter in there, and the burgundy shade is gorgeous with my green eyes. Believe it or not, it did crease, even with the UDPP, just a tiny bit. I still like this thing and want to test out the rest of the shades. Creasing is bad, tho, especially on my hooded lids!

Gucci Westman Revlon cream eye shadow palette in Midnight Express

Spoiled by Wet n' Wild in Show Me the Money

Leprechaun Pot O Goldy! So shimmery and wondrous!

Wet n' Wild in Poison Ivy

I love dark green nails. So much more modern than the tried and true OPI Russian Navy. More interesting than black.

Essie in Jamaica Me Crazy

This is such a fun disco-ish Bob Mackie shade. Super glam and girlie.

OMG—these are fantabulash!

Look at those brilliant cobalt spots!

Crest 3D White Tooth Paste

I think this is making my teeth look whiter. Cool!

Revlon Colorburst Lip Butter in Berry Smoothie

Here's what I love about the Revlon lip butters:

• They are soft like a balm, but they seem to last a lot longer on my lips: 2-3 hours, which is a long time for me!
• Their colors have dimension, with some interesting shimmer with subtle yet unusual colors (green? gray? blue? look closely at some of these and see if I'm not crazy) That shine and borderline duochrome helps round out the shape of your lips, just as a duochrome shade on your eyes will make your lids look nice and rounded. I have thin lips, so I need this!
• The packaging is yummy looking.
• They are way cheaper than the Clinique lippies for which they are clearly a dupe.
• Even though they come in a wide variety of shades, from brights to neutrals, each one is a bit sheer, so they all work quite well for day and office.

This one is very much a YLBB, aka, a "Your Lips But Better" shade

I love to wear bright lips, but on most days, a nice neutral pink that gives your lips just a bit of pop is a wiser way to go. This shade is perfect for that!

You can see the soft, satiny sheen here, and the subtlety of the shade.

Well, that's my CVS September beauty haul! Hope you liked! Please leave your comments in the bar below, and I'd love it if you'd subscribe to this blog on Bloglovin, and to my YouTube channel. That way you won't miss a thing!

Random stuff:

• I just tried stand up paddle boarding through a Groupon I got for http://www.gosurfla.com/. So much fun! Our teacher Ethan was supercool, and gave us all we needed to know to get up, including a nice firm push through the surf to get out beyond the break. Feels like walking on water, not to blaspheme or anything. If you've always wanted to try it, do! Us women have a nice low center of gravity, which gives us an advantage in most board sports. Try it and see if I'm wrong.
• I got Rosetta Stone French, all 5 levels, for my birthday, and I love this program! If you want to learn another language, this is the way to go. Pleasantly addictive and motivating with lots of helpful lessons and live online real time classes! What an amazing deal! Je l'aime!
• If you're like me and you watch tons of beauty YouTube gurus, you know the expression "I absolutely love it!" is one everybody says a lot. I have caught myself using it quite a bit, too. Maybe us beauty fans should come up with a YouTube Beauty drinking game? That phrase would definitely be a cue to drink!

Happy Sunday, and thanks for visiting my blog!

<3BeautyJones

Robert Palmer Girl Look for Awesome 80s Run

Robert Palmer Look Before the Race

When my friend and I signed up for the Awesome 80s 10k run, I knew we had to take a crack at the Robert Palmer Girl look. With a little research, I was able to find a video showing the original makeup artist using more modern products to recreate it.

 

Score!

Before the Race

Before the Race

Before the Race

 Here is the video just below. And it's a surprisingly simple look to do. Basically you are taking a wet product and applying it in a winged shape on the eye, and then both sealing it and blending it like crazy with a powder version of the same color, in this case, black.



The key to making it sweatproof for a 10k run, which is over 6 miles, was a special sealing spray. I went over to Cinema Secrets in Burbank to chat with the makeup artists there. They really know what they're doing, and the free consultation is a special feature I'm pretty sure folks don't know about. Otherwise this place would be packed. Cinema secrets has a Super Sealer that worked very well.

Cinema Secrets Super Sealer

Tools and Products:

Face:

• Cinema Secrets Base in a neutral shade a touch lighter than my skin
• Cinema Secrets White liner to pale it out even more
• Cinema Secrets Peach corrector in lighter shade under eyes

Finisher Medal, Tools & Products for Robert Palmer Girl Look

Eyes:

• Urban Decay Primer Potion
• HIP Gel Liner in Black - in Wing Shape
• Wet n' Wild Blue Had Me at Hello, Black Definer color on Left Side
• Smashbox Full Exposure Mascara in Black
• Anastasia Lash Genius
• Brows: L'Oreal HIP Gel Eyeliner, and Brown Shade from NYX "butt" naked eye palette 

Cheeks:

• La Femme Blush in Coral Spice and Coral
• Contoured with contour shade in NYX "butt" naked palette
• Important to do the blush and contour in vertical slashing stripes, and just a bit on the temples

Lips:

• Smashbox Limitless Lip Stain & Balm (too long of a title, People!) in Sangria
• Revlon Lipstick in Fire & Ice over the top
• Style it up to make the shape of the closed mouth as round as possible—pretty challenging on my thin lips!

Tools:

• Real Techniques Eye Kit and Face Kit brushes
• Sigma Mrs. Bunny Travel Kit brushes
• Let it all set for a few minutes and spray Cinema Secrets Super Sealer over the top.

 

After the Race

After the Race

Robert Palmer Girl Look After the Race

 Results:

• I won't make any bones about it—I sweat a lot when I run. Especially in Pasadena in summer.
• With the super-sealer, the face lasted. And the lips wore off but left a nice stain.
• No, I didn't end up looking like Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Thanks, Cinema Secrets!

Neon Runner

Boy George-Alike

About the Race:

• The Awesome 80s run in Pasadena was quite poorly managed and organized. 
• They started the longer race AFTER the shorter race started to come in. 
• They had one water station and they ran out of water. As a result, I got that totally not awesome dehydration foot cramp at the end.
• It's Pasadena on the first of September, so, um, duh, it's pretty freakin hot, and the run doesn't start until almost 10am. Should have started no later than 8. 7 would be even better.
• I saw no visible medical presence. 
• They are lucky lucky lucky no one fell out and/or sued them. Or maybe they did. There's still time.
• Anyways, hopefully they'll learn how to do it from all the complaints on their Facebook page.  Because the outfits and neon, the riot of color, and the music were lots of fun. People love the 80s, and I'm no exception.
• The finisher medal itself is the best I've ever gotten. The design was great.

 Have you ever tried this look or something similar? Comment and tell the story below!

Hope this was fun for you guys! Aside from the dehydration, I had an awesome time!

Love, BeautyJones

No Raccoon Eye Video for My Mom

Recently I had a chance to visit my Mom in NYC and have dinner for her birthday. We got to chatting about makeup, and she was asking about how to put on eye makeup so it doesn't move around and streak downward to create that dreaded Raccoon Eye.

I realized that since I got serious about beauty blogging in March, I've been doing lots of research on this, and have come up with some pretty good tips and helpful products.

So here's my video on this.

Apologies if I'm whining too much about the heat in my office during the vid. Could have been a hot flash. Who knows?

Anyway, Mom--This one's for you!

And Lovely Readers, I hope you enjoy and I hope there are some pointers in here that help you out a bit on that never-ending quest to keep your makeup looking fresh all day long!

As always, please let me know how you liked this, and feel free to share in the comments below!

Let me know, too, if there's a particular product or technique you'd like to know more about. I feature lots of my drugstore favorites here. The only hard-to-find item is the OCC Lip Tar, which you should really check out. I got mine at The Makeup Show LA, but you can buy them online, too. I also love my Wet n' Wild palette. All those fun subtle shades with such strong pigmentation. This look is great for every day wear, too.

And don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel, and to this blog on Bloglovin, or in Google+, or in the RSS Feed Reader of your choice!

Happy Friday!

:)BeautyJones