Colorfully Broke

When I started wearing makeup I couldn't believe in all the brands and color choices that were at my fingertips.  However I, being unemployed thirteen year-old with a dismal allowance could only afford three brands on my own: Covergirl for powder and ill-matched foundation,  Jane for lip, eye and cheek color, and Wet&Wild for the occasional black, metallic blue or rainbow glitter nail polish.  It wasn't until my Mom bought be a M.A.C gift certificate for my fifteenth birthday that I got the taste for luxury cosmetics.  Those colors performed above and beyond the stuff that I was forking over my weekly ten dollars at Wal-Mart.  So, I was pleasantly surprised when I found that Wet&Wild had some, what seemed to be, fierce colors.  I also found two eyeshadow palettes from Absolute at one of my local beauty supply stores.  The Wet&Wild colors clocked in at $2.99 and the Absolute palettes were a whopping $1.99.  Great color pay-off for very little money.

                                       
                   Wet and Wild - I Dream of Greenie

                                                    
                       Wet and Wild - Spoiled Brat

                                     
                                       
                           Absolute - Paradise

  

                           Absolute - Electro

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

If you live anywhere in or around the New York metro area, go see this before it closes.  August 7th is the last day to be McQueened.

Beauty Bender- Thank God the bills are paid.

I, like all beauty junkie's I'm sure,  go through a bit of product schizophrenia. It all started a few days ago when I after I had arrived to work.  I was sure that my makeup was looking flawless.  I had properly cleansed and exfoliated my skin, rubbed in my moisturizer, prepped with foundation primer and applied all of my makeup with clean brushes.  To my horror, when I caught myself in the mirror at work I nearly fainted. My skin, which is normally oily, was cracked and flakey only to be enhanced by my setting powder, and my under eye concealer looked as though I had smeared it on with a putty knife.  I'm sure there were various non-cosmetic factors (lack of sleep, not enough water, supplementing water intake with coffee, poor bathroom lighting, air conditioning, and etc) that contributed to the ashy mess that was my face. I also have the occasional eczema flare-up around my chin. To counteract this, I've been upping my water game to offset the coffee intake and I've been trying to get at least six and a half hours of sleep instead of my usual five or sometimes, eek, four hours.  This was also an excuse to try some new products, so, I did some research, talked to some people and decided to go with these. Some are for my skin condition but I got side tracked and got some fun stuff too.

                   Embryolisse 24-hour Miracle Cream

Make-up artists and francophiles alike go ape-caca for this stuff. It's a facial moisturizer that can also be used a facial cleanser, makeup primer, post-shave irritant reducer.  I tried it after my usual anti-acne/benzol peroxide/Sub-Saharan inducing moisturizer and it felt very smooth and absorbed quickly. It definitely counteracted the dryness and helped with the eczema around my mouth. I wouldn't recommend it for oily skin without eczema, though.  It might be too thick if you don't have any bacteria killing chemicals drying out your face first.


                                     Yu-be Cream

This Japanese cream the "#1 selling medicated, vitamin-enriched skin cream in Japan."  That's in quotations because it's printed on the tube.  Apparently one can use it to treat rough, dry skin as well as: split cuticles, chapped lips, cracked heals, calluses and burns. One could also use it (according to the tube) all over the face and body.  It is a thick cream with the scent and texture of thinned out Vick's Vapo Rub. So, unless your face is extremely dry or you plan on scaling Mt. Everest sometime soon, I would suggest this on spots where needed on the face.  Try it for the split cuticles, cracked heals, calluses, and burns while you're at it.  I would skip the lips because Japan's #1 selling medicated skin tastes like Japan's #1 selling medicated skin cream, ie disgusting.

              
                              Mandom Beauty Cleansing Lotion

I picked this up makeup remover in Chinatown at New Kam Man on Canal street.  It's a Japanese product that you should be able to use on the face and eyes with cotton.  The girl on the bottle looked very excited and it does remove non-waterproof makeup pretty well.  I bet she'd just explode if it could remove waterproof mascara.


                                BY TERRY- VIP TOUCH EXPERT ADVANCED

Terry de Gunzburg created touche eclat for YSL some years back so, this product is a bit reminiscent through it's texture and click pen packaging.  This does help hide the sleep deprived zombie disks under my eyes fade into oblivion without looking cakey.  I do wish it came in darker shades because I've lucked out being the darkest shade she carries. Maybe if more people buy this product , she'll expand the line.  I hope so, because through my superficial observations, we brown girls seem to be predisposed to Zombie-eyes.


                                           Becca
Luminous Skin Color, Shimmering Skin Perfector, Stick Foundation and Shimmering Pressed Powder.

I went a little Becca-crazy but I do love this stuff.  The range is so wide in terms of skin tone and depth that I became a huge fan.  The tinted Luminous Skin Color is very sheer but the Stick foundation adds a nice amount of coverage where needed. I bought the Shimmering Skin Color in Topaz (a golden bronze shimmer) to darken my current foundations.  The Shimmering Pressed Powder is the perfect highlighter providing you choose the right shade. The Skin products have moisturizing ingredients so, they can feel heavy at first but once they are set with powder, my skin was able to breathe comfortably in ninety- degree city-heat*.

*city-heat is when you're walking passed a New York City bus as it pulls away and the heat from the exhaust damn near gives you a first degree burn.

I forgot to mention the foundation stick, tinted moisturizer, and shimmering perfector have a nice amount of sunscreen, yada, yada, yada...

Orange you glad it's lipstick? - An ode to my first beauty Icon.

"Your mother is so beautiful" was the chant of all my friends mothers as they would pick me up for kindergarten carpool. "Her makeup is always perfect!"  I really didn't understand how makeup could be perfect. I really didn't notice. I thought all moms spend at least an hour a day applying various paints and potions as though they were going to be judged at an amateur beauty pageant. Clearly this wasn't the case.  My mom was different from the other moms in our small midwestern town.  This peaked my curiosity and set me on a course that shaped me into who I am today- an aesthetics junkie with a dash of beauty A.D.D.  My first foray into makeup happened at a very young age.  I remember tooling around in my Mom's makeup caddy and layering on anything I could get my hands on.  I started with her blush.  It was a deep rosy color almost like a light burgundy.  I'd swirl that all over my cheeks and then dust it down with a heap of loose powder that I'm sure was darker than the medium olive skin that was my mother's complexion.  It should be noted that this was the mid eighties so color choices for any woman of color whether olive, yellow, brown and the in-betweens were limited, to say the least. So, light burgundy blush and bronze powder were what she had to work with.  I would then take her dark brown matte eyeshadow and smear all over my eyelids in a not-so-uniform fashion. Then I moved onto her mascara.  I want to say that it was by Maybelline (it's definitely discontinued now). I started with two conservative coats.  I was astounded by the way it opened up my eyes.  My lashes were now visible and I had begun to understand the concept of what "batting an eyelash" was. Of course, I had to apply about ten more coats on each eye which eventually made my top and bottom lashes stick together every time I blinked.  I perused the eyeliner but was way too intimidated to even try it so, I opted to skip that step and topped off my look with a bright orange lipstick.  The end result: busted-booger midget drag queen who, after being denied an audition at Lucky Chengs, drowned her sorrows in a couple of scorpion bowls.  Some Ponds cold cream was able to erase the wreckage of a cosmetics collision course that was my face but even thickest of petroleum jelly couldn't remove the orange stain on my lips.  Which, without the rest  of the hideousness, was actually quite fabulous. 

I've come full circle now.  My new favorite shade of lipstick happens to be a bright orange (mother approved).  It was all over the runways this spring and now it's all over my lips and a little on my cheeks when I'm in a pinch for blush.  It's a great shade to create a monochromatic look by blending a little over the eyelids as well as the apples of the cheeks.  If I'm not in the mood for mucho naranja then I just smear it on the top lip, press together, and top it off with clear or golden gloss.  My favorite is Lime Crime's "My Beautiful Rocket" as pictured here:

 

Click Here to visit Lime Crime's website.

Welcome to my spot on the web.

This is my first foray into blogging since 2001. Yes, it's been about ten years but I say better late than never.  I may be rusty at first but I think I'll get the hang of this in no time at all.  What's the deal with this blog and is it another beauty blog because there are, like, over 200 on the web as it is?  Well, A Primped Life is a place that lets me express my love for beauty (makeup, skincare, hair, etc) but also general musings on fashion, film, television, literature, and the great NYC where I've lived for 10 years. Essentially it's a beauty/pop culture/food/homedecor/NYC tour guide blog with a dash of media and politics to boot. It's a hodgepodge of my various interests and general antidote for my insomnia.  If you're into any of these things this may be of interest to you. By no means am I an expert in any of these things but an overall enthusiast who really should be getting more sleep.