I think a lot of people have a "staple" look, the one you go to when you want to look fancy, but don't have any time to experiment with colour or new products. This one's mine: Mac 'Ruby-Woo' on the lips, Sugar Pill 'Love+' under the eyes and the cut-crease is a red pencil rubbed in my pinky and blended over with a black eyeshadow. Dead easy! I wore it to an art auction the other night.
I've been having fun with my Too Faced Sugar Pop eyeshadow palette lately. This look is 'Blue Raspberry' (weirdly named because it's actually a nearly-matte turquoise) from the palette on the lids, blended out with some browns and bronzes.
I found this Too Faced Sugar Pop eyeshadow palette in T.K. Maxx the other day and thought the colours were so pretty that I just had to nab it.
It cost me £9.99 and, after looking it up and finding the normal price is £32, I was pretty happy with my bargain.
I'm no expert so I'm not going to even attempt to give this palette a serious review, but, for my own purposes, it's great. Macaron (warm glittery peach) is really nice under the eyes and I love using Rock Candy (pale glittery cream colour) on my lids. I'm really glad I picked it up.
Folk have been saying to me lately that I don't wear enough colour (I have bright pink hair! How much colour do you want?) so I decided to show them by wearing this very colourful black and grey jersey dress from h&m... Well... it's more colourful than a plain black dress anyway. Ok! I'm being a tease!
I've also started wearing slightly softer eye make-up lately Not a huge difference, but my eyes look a bit softer and it suits my specs a little better. (Also, I swear my eyes weren't as bloodshot at the time as this photo makes them look. What's goin' on there?!)
Oh yeah, and the best thing about the dress is that it was 5 quid in the sale. Sco-oore!
Here is a make-up look I tried out this summer. It's lots of metallic greens on the lid and purple glitter underneath the eye. I wish the photos showed off the purple glitter properly, but I'm sure you get the idea. I was wearing my little bird skull ring at the time too.
Tim's had some time off work lately which has been awesome since we've had lots of time to do things together. One of the things we did a lot over his holiday was go out for lunch. Here are the photos of the time we went to a place called Once upon A Tart in town. We didn't get served for 45 minutes so that wasn't great but at least we weren't in a rush. Actually, it worked out really well because it gave us lots of time to chat and have a good look at all the people in strange costumes going past the window (I think there was a steampunk event on that day). Anyway, the amazing cakes and even just the look of the whole place was enough for us to want to go back, maybe on a weekday though so it's not so busy!
Tim's camera makes me look weird and small
It's difficult to get a photo of him where he's not making a face
Coffeeee
The obligatory close-up montage of my make-up that day. I went for pale blue, purple and pink colours
First of all, I want to say that this post and this entire look was pinchedcopiedstolen inspired by the beautiful Aoife whose blog Vicious Beauty (why do I keep trying to type 'viscous beauty'? It's probably because my mind's on lipgloss) you're no doubt aware of. If you're not already aware of it, it's a really great blog. Please check it out!
Having recently bought Illamasqua's sheer lipsgloss in 'violate', I was thinking of ideas for how to wear it when it I remembered this post by Aoife where she layered it over mac's satin finish lipstick in 'cyber' and wore it with very dark green, sparkly eyes. Anyway, I fancied having a go at the look myself when I was getting ready to go to my cousin's wedding last Saturday.
'Violate' is a sheer lipgloss full of flecks of deep green and it's pretty awesome. I imagine you can, of course, layer it on like tar if you want it to look really super green, but I took a leaf out of Aoife's book and have been layering it very lightly over other colours for a subtle green sparkle that only shows up when it catches the light.
I wore the slightly altered Restyle necklace that I wore to our own wedding. I still just love it.
Again, inspired by the Queen of the Night look on Vicious Beauty, I used a thick black pencil to prime my eye and patted a shimmery deep green eyeshadow on top to bring out the green in my lips (now there's something I've never said before. Is that like when you wear something to bring out the red in your eyes?)
My uncle snapped a photo of my at the wedding
And a photo of my husband showing some leg. Phwoar.
Last week, I was very excited to have a parcel from Illamasqua waiting from me when I got home from Edinburgh. I had decided to make use of their special offer on lipstick and lipgloss if you order them as a pair. The lipstick I chose was kontrol, an awesome purple lipstick that's tones in with my hair, and the lipgloss I went for was violate which I'll be going into detail on in another post.
My family came over for my birthday the other night so I decided to try out kontrol, knowing that family are the only people you can really rely on to be brutally honest and tell you if you look like a freak because you're too old to be wearing purple lipstick. Anyway, at the end of it, I think I passed the sister test and the even the brother-in-law test and my little 3 year old niece seemed to love it!
I did my eyes in blue and green and decided to go full-on dolly-mode with pigtails and my new lace collar from New Look (£2.50 in the sale, reduced to £1.25 since it had a fault in it I had to sew. I'm turning into a bargain hunter like my dad). Hope you like the look!
I've been having problems lately with the colour of my hair fading too quickly. I normally use semi-permanent hair dye such as Crazy Color or Fudge paintboxes since wild, unnatural hair colours are only widely available (as far as I used to be aware anyway) as semi-permanent for some reason. When I was at the hairdressers last time, however, they tried me out with apermanent purple (and a permanent black, as usual) to see how that goes. I'm really excited to see how long it lasts this time compared to the semi-permanent stuff. The ends have faded slightly already because that's where my old greencolour is still growing out, but the top of my head still looks great! I plan to keep it topped up now and then with fudge paintboxes to keep it vibrant but at least I have a strong permanent base to begin with.
Here are the photos the hairdresser took. I go to a training salon called UConcept Hairdressing Academy. You can see their facebook page here.
Wearing purple nail varnish to go with my hair
And it was a sunny day too so I got my fishnets out. (Please ignore my husband's feet butting in on the photo)
Here you can see me wearing false eyelashes (which I never do!) and my snake necklace. I also got a new attachment for my labret which I'm pretty pleased with.
... and I found these earrings in Claire's which I love. They're all spiky and thorny and cool. I can only wear one since the hole in my right ear closed up after the wedding, but I think that looks ok.
Today's make-up was inspired by the lovely Lisa Litzium! I've seen this look before, but Lisa pulls it off so well. I'm not sure if it suits me though. I have pale grey eyes so it just makes me look a bit like a fish. It's kind of cool anyway though. Also, the pictures make it look silver, but I actually only used plain ol' black eyeshadow with a little bit of a brow highlight.
I thought I would show off my new t-shirt from Restyle because I love it so much. It's so comfy and I've wanted a ribcage t-shirt for ages so I finally treated myself to one. It's a long shirt too and the design goes all the way to the bottom of it, including the top of the pelvis. Don't you love when people put that much detail into something?
Despite the fact that Restyle is in Poland and I'm in rainy Scotland, it's still cheaper to order clothes and jewellery from there (including postage) than it would be to buy from a lot of places here. I've only ordered jewellery from Restyle twice and both times they arrived broken, but, at their prices, I'm certainly not going to complain! If you've got a pair of pliers, some metal fixings and nail polish handy, it's easy enough to fix most jewellery mishaps in life anyway.
I snapped the one above the other day before church and below is a picture of me wearing the shirt back when I accidentally dyed my hair green! Sorry all my pictures are badly taken mirror pics, by the way. One day I might figure out how to do this a bit more artfully, but until then my excuse is still that I'm an illustrator not a photographer! (Dagnabbit)
Incidentally, my make-up here is purple and black in the crease, a little bit of shimmery mint green in the inner corner and some sparkly black liquid eyeliner over ordinary black eyeliner on the wing. The make-up in the one above is my everyday black and red in the crease.
1. Apply a pink primer. I used Barry M Super Soft Eye Crayon no.9 ♥ 2. Blend the edges out with your finger ♥ 3. Use a shimmery purple eyeshadow over the main lid area ♥4. Use a metallic copper eyeshadow around the outside of the purple and under the eye too ♥ 5. Blend the copper and purple together with a soft brush and blend the copper out around the edges ♥ 6. Add eyeliner and mascara however you want to ♥
People always say blue eyeshadow is a risky thing to wear, but I'm not exactly a fan of playing safe when it comes to "the rules" of style or whatever.
Seriously, who invents these ideas? Don't wear blue eyeshadow; don't wear blue and green clothes together; eyes or lips but not both; legs or cleavage but not both... *pffff* Anyway! Here I am doing the very (for real!) brave thing of wearing gold jewellery instead of silver. I had a gold candelabra earring in (which you can't see, oops), a gold bracelet, the skull ring from this post and a gold cross with red jewels on a red velvety band.
I'm also very excited because a new Paperchase shop has opened in town. It's a massive one with art and craft materials as well and even a Tinderbox coffee shop inside. If you don't explode with the cuteness of the stationary before you get upstairs to the coffee shop, that is. Tim and I tried it out ourselves one particularly hot day after a visit to the GoMA. I had a vanilla milkshake, but I think they'd forgotten to put any vanilla in it so it was technically just... uh... warm, sweet milk, I guess? At least Tim was smart enough to get a chocolate one .
This is my hollow zombie eyeshadow look, something I've been wearing a lot lately. I like to wear it with a plum lip to make my skin look extra pale.
I also accidently managed to dye my hair turquoise, but I'm kind of liking it so I might keep it. I really don't want to have a different hair colour every month like it's turned out lately. I want to find the one colour I like and then stick with it - at the moment it's come down to a choice between this turquoise or the bright purple I had before. I think the purple's really pretty and feminine but sometimes it feels a bit ordinary. I like the green/blue too because it makes me feel like a sort of gothic mermaid and gets lots of stares (I think that's a good thing, right??) although I feel a bit too old for it.
I should say the reason it's an accident is because I bought Crazy Colour hair dye in Violette instead of Hot Purple. Turns out that Hot Purple is purple and Violette is somegreeny-blueycolour... Well... on my hair, at least.
Oh, and I got that necklace for a quid the other day. I think it's meant to be a wallet chain. It's a bit spiky, but I love it.
Here's a wee tutorial on the make-up if you're interested (click to enlarge):
1. After using primer, lining your water line and sealing it with some black eyeshadow, rub a thick black eye crayon over the lid and under the under the eye ♥ 2. Blend in the eye crayon a bit. I use my finger to blend the lid and a brush to blend the crayon underneath the eye. Seal with a matte black eyeshadow then blend out the edges again with a big soft brush ♥ 3. Use a metallic red/maroon eyeshadow around the outside of the black. I used Mac's frost eyeshadow in Cranberry. ♥ 4. Blend the red into the black with a big soft brush and blend the edges out. Then finish with liquid eyeliner in a small wing and use mascara etc. ♥
Incidently, here's something I can't stop listening to lately: 80s German electronic band Warning. I only heard of them because the band Pungent Stench, covered their song 'Why Can The Bodies Fly' on their Dirty Rhymes and Psychotronic Beats EP. The original song was part of the soundtrack used in an episode of Tatort, a German TV cop show (I'm not making this up). I was listening to the death metal version of it for years with no clue that the original band was involved in spooky electronic music rather than metal. I have to admit that the vocals are very death metal sounding though, which come over as genuinely creepy sometimes as well as joyfully campy. They use female backing vocals too and the music is altogether better than I expected it to be (I say this as if I know anything about music). Expecting just a novelty band wearing costumes (it's both of those things as well), I was surprised to find legitimately good electronic music, sometimes sounding more like Italian horror soundtrack music (In The Crowd) or even, in one song, John Zorn's Naked City (The Doors (Part 2)). Check out their self-titled album from 1982 and also 'Electric Eyes' (1983).
