Illamasqua Lipstick in Kontrol

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!

Old Calton Burial Ground

It was my birthday this Friday so my husband took me to Edinburgh for four days. Edinburgh isn't very far from where we live, but it's perfect for a nice trip away without the hassle of a long journey. Although we didn't get around to doing all the things we planned, we still managed to go around all the main art galleries including the current exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art which was a bit hit and miss for us, except the work they had from Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle which was awesome. I've never had the chance to see any of his sculptures up close before and they were playing videos from the cycle (although the segments were too long to stand and watch the whole way through) so that was a bit of a treat.  The most fascinating stuff though was at the annual RSA exhibition, which we were both bewitched by. I even bought the exhibition poster to sput up in our bedroom.

As well as being overly critical about art and eating lots of cake, we also found time to go on some walks at night. Here are some photos from the Old Calton Burial Ground where we went for a walk on the first night. You can read up on it on the wikipedia page here. The parts that stood out for me were the monument commemorating Scottish soldiers who had fought in the American Civil war and also the David Hume Mausoleum.

Permanent Purple Hair

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 a permanent 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 green colour 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.

Bone Brooches For Sale on Etsy

My little felt bone-shaped brooches are now on sale in my online shop! You can have a look at them here. What do you think?

They are approximately 7.5cm in length and each bone brooch is handmade so they might vary in stitching very slightly. The packaging colour is random, but if you have a particular preference for the pink or the purple just let me know!

Chai Tea Cupcakes

I decided to make some chai tea cupcakes. I adapted a recipe for Earl Grey tea cupcakes (you can see the London Fog cupcakes I made using the same recipe here). The truth is that I wanted to use up this pack of Chai Tea teabags. I found that, in a tea, the teabags smell very much like lovely chai tea. However, the taste isn't the same - it seems to be all in the smell. So! The perfect solution: use them in baking! I think it worked pretty well. They sort of tasted like gingerbread, but gingerbread's tasty so it's all good, yeah?

Next time I'm going to try it with loose leaf tea and see how that goes. I already have a tin of amazing Yogi Yogi Chai from Tchai-Ovna, a local tea house here. I might try it with that!

This time I opted to skip the icing and sprinkled glitter straight onto the cakes when they were still hot so it stuck. You can use icing if you want though. Vanilla buttercream icing goes with everything.

Striking Eyes

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.

Ribcage T-Shirt

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.