A tale of two soft shades

After my experiment with Sportsgirl’s Cupcake I’ve been on the hunt for just the right soft shade. I’m really going for a 1960s, slightly saucy, Catherine Deneuve in Belle De Jour style soft shade, the kind of nail polish that can take you from urbane salon to bordello in a single day. So I scoured Scrangie and The Polish Addict for swatches, then put in an order for polishes from Misa and OPI and, well…

The first one I tried, OPI’s Who Needs a Prince, wasn’t quite the sleek, elegant nude I was hoping for. It’s a white jelly with superfine red shimmer, making it look pink from a distance, and… eh. It’s pearlescent but a touch too girly for my tastes.

The second one, Misa’s High Waist Hue, is a strange one. It’s a pinkish-beige, bandaidy creme, potentially the most Belle du Jour of the two, but it just looks… odd. I’m a huge fan of the Stickey sandwich to keep my polish in place, and I usually never see the green of Stickey through my polish, but Stickey did weird things with this colour.

I’m still on the look out for the right quietly sexy soft shade. Any suggestions?

Oh the boob-manity

Kush Support – A Natural Rest For The Breasts – The funniest videos clips are here

Zoe’s recent post on mysterious boob lines is a timely reminder that, even in the current wintery climate, One’s Face Ends at One’s Boobs (actually, I believe it was Zoe who reminded me of that back in the days of Fruity Beauty). I was lucky, because when I was a mere 12 my grandmother who, bless her, had more wrinkles than a shar pei fresh from the drier, seized me and said ‘WHATEVER YOU DO always take your moisturiser down to your boobs OR YOU’LL END UP LIKE ME,’ thus triggering a lifetime of feverish boob-moisturising.

And remember: just because it’s winter doesn’t mean there’s a sun up in that sky waiting to destroy your lady treasures.  My favouritest thing in the whole entire world is the Cancer Council sunscreen roll-on, because you can carry it in your bag and it won’t explode. Roll it all over boobs, neck and arms whenever you see it. I’m also a huge advocate of extending your exfoliating products down to your boobs, but that is the subject of tomorrow’s post.

Either way, as with the One True Ring, you’ve got to keep ‘em secret, keep ‘em safe.

MAC VIDEO TUTORIALS, YOU GUYS!!

I am in superficial lady heaven. Via Specktra.

A winter lifesaver

I love winter. While the chill and wind does dry my skin out a little, it’s much easier to add moisture to your skin than matte out overheated, oily slickness. I love coats, and thick tights, and boots, and scarves, and everything. I don’t, however, love the usual frizzed-out, tormented hair, so for the first time this year I bought a cheap knitted beret from Target to hide my shame.

I’m not usually a big hat wearer, as they seem to scream you don’t have to be crazy to wear a hat, but it helps, but keeping your head covered truly does help. For a while I was letting my hair outside the hat, but then I watched the epic French slasher Inside and, as usual, got a new hair idea from the least likely of sources. Right in the beginning the doomed protagonist peevishly twists her loose hair up and pulls a beret over the top, and my life was changed. The only problem is it can be hard to keep all the hair tucked up inside, so I began keeping a couple of bobby pins in my back pocket. Now, when I want to head out on a cold day, I just twist my hair into the loosest of buns, secure with a pin or two, cover with a hat and head out. The hat stops the cold from wrecking my hair, and when I unpin the bun I get loose, soft, frizz-free waves. Perfect.

This might prompt the question, why don’t you just use a hair elastic? Well, I have the world’s most dentable, pliable hair, and I find that hair elastics crease my hair into big, unappealing folds. Pins make better waves, and I reckon you should totes try it.

Game changer

Apologies for the Image Searched photo - my camera was uncooperative this morning.

My best friend gave me the most amazing box of delights from Kit Cosmetics, aka baby Mecca, aka the one store we actually breathlessly talk about when we’re out for a drink or two. Oh, the love for Kit is strong amongst my friends. We love their superlative nail polishes, their great range of brands, we love Korres, Mario Badescu, Too Faced, theBalm, everything Poppy King has ever done, ever, we love the friendly staff and great store fit-outs, we love it all.

Anyway, my best friend gave me theBalm’s Hot Mama, a peachy, blush with a gold shimmer often described as a dupe of the ubiquitous Nars Orgasm. Now, I teach 18 year olds, 18 year olds with liberal access to their parents’ credit cards, and this has given me an aversion to Sass & Bide jeans, spray tans, aggressively GHD’d hair, Lancome Juicy Tubes and Nars Orgasm, which they positively baste themselves in before coming to class, but my BF has fine taste, and is also a very pale girl like myself, so I gave Hot Mama a red hot, if skeptical, go.

I also have offensively oily skin, so I am a total shimmerphobe, fearing the slightest hint of iridescence might transform into a greasy mess. When I first brushed a little Hot Mama onto my cheekbones I was apprehensive. There was definitely shimmer, verging on shine, and I didn’t know how it would go during the day. Then, as I was walking to the tram stop, I caught sight of myself in a window and, goshdarnit, that shine was pretty. I finally understood that ‘glow’ all those beauty editors are always going on about. What’s more, I found myself embracing my natural grease glow. While I still blot my nose and forehead of an afternoon, I let the rest of my face do its own thing, and I’m also on the look out for more shimmer products.

So thank you, Hot Mama, for helping me to accept my hideous oil slick of a face youthful dewiness.

I’d have called it Suspiria

Don’t ask me why, but Cupcake, this peachy Sportsgirl polish with the finest of champagne blonde shimmers, really reminds me of a Dario Argento film. Standing amongst the fast fashion chaos of your average Sportsgirl, it made me want to run terrified down the hallway of a ballet school in a filmy nightdress, curtains billowing, menaced by some unseen presence.

But that’s just me.

Sportsgirl polishes continue to perplex me. I really don’t buy into the hype that price = quality, especially with nail polish. I’d rather one of Rimmel’s beautiful, unique polishes over Chanel’s overpriced, chippy disasters every time. For me, polish wear is determined largely by the base and top coat combination (for me, Seche Vite and CND Stickey), application technique (tip wrapping and the Stickey Sanwich), nail length and shape (short, faintly below the finger tip, and square) and maintenance (slicking on another coat of top coat a couple of times a week, wearing gloves to do housework, opening Coke cans with your house key), and my manicures typically last a week before they get too scrappy to handle.  But Cupcake just killed me. It refused to dry. Refused to. It remained soft and smudgy and wrong for hours, even under my usual fast drying coat of Seche Vite, and I could dent it days later. I really adore this odd, 70s-ish colour, reminiscent of Giallo films and the girdles your grandmother wore, but the formula really spoils it for me. I’ll be on the lookout for a better peach.

I’m so into you, Nerdboyfriend

You so have the best taste in men, and in clothes, and in finding men and clothes. I just wish there was a lady version, and I wish that lady version would include…

Jane Birkin

Isabelle Huppert

Marlene Dietrich

Pam Grier

Medieval

Is it a bad sign that every time I reach for my new favourite everyday lipstick I get this song in my head?

Lipstick Queen’s Medieval is my new favourite thing.  It’s a beautiful, creamy, silky balm with the most perfect cherry red tint. Once again, Poppy King has hit it out of the park. At only $34 from Kit, it’s affordable and luxurious and very, very wearable. With winter coming it really is a must-have.

I never thought I’d love you so

You know how in romantic comedies some adorable, clear-skinned, bouncy-haired lady might bump into a tall and infuriatingly arrogant man in a beautiful and clean street, and perhaps he knocks her shopping out of her hands and she immediately swears that she hates him, and then, after a series of unlikely and quirky events, she realises she looooves him?

That’s how I feel about Kiehls Ultra Facial Cleanser. But first, allow me to backtrack. I like to use a separate cleanser for morning and night, simply because my nighttime cleanser has to deal with all the sunscreen and foundation and powder and whatnot I wear during the day, and my daytime cleanser has less to worry about. For a long time I’ve been using straight sweet almond oil to emulsify my makeup, then cleanse with warm water and Neutrogena’s most excellent and truly gentle Fresh Foaming Cleanser. I like having a little surfactant action to get rid of all the oil and makeup, and it has yet to dry my skin out in all the year’s I’ve been using it. Also, it comes in a satisfying blue pump pack.

For a while, morning cleansers were a little harder. I bounced from Priceline brand to Priceline brand, this one too harsh, this one too oily, this one too foamy, this one irritatingly full of menthol. One day I wandered in to the Kiehls boutique in David Jones on Bourke St and thought, hell, at least Kiehls will look cute in my shower, and I picked up Ultra Facial without much thought.

And, you kow what? Kiehls Ultra Facial Cleanser truly is the greatest morning cleanser I’ve ever used. It’s a heavenly, creamy gel, completely unscented and non-irritating, with enough cleansing power to remove anything that needs removing, without drying your skin out. And at around $34-$36 for a large tube it’s totally economical. My tube is just starting to run out, and I know that I simply cannot live without my beloved.

Nails this week

Gosh, it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these, hasn’t it? It’s not as though I haven’t been doing my nails. I have, a lot, and in a great deal of colours. It’s such a shame I didn’t post Dirty Sexy Money from my latest Misa haul because, holy cow, what a great weird murky greeny blue that was, but I shall swatch soon. This is CND Regal Revenge, definitely a top 5 polish. I’m not even sure if this is in the permanent CND collection or not. CND is such a strange brand. I couldn’t live without their Stickey base coat, and while I’m starting to prefer Poshe AHA cuticle care to Cuticle Eraser, Cuticle Eraser is still a great product. But they don’t seem to be making seasonal collections any more, and I also heard they slashed their permanent collection, which makes no sense.

Either way, Regal Revenge is a beautiful, deep, glowy pink of the sort that makes my heart flutter. For someone as obsessed with all things beauty as I am, I’m actually a bit androgynous, style-wise, which is why it’s perhaps surprising that I always fall for the deep, berryish pinks in a collection. The application for this polish is smooth and flawless, and it dries into an elegant, glassy cream. An absolute must-have, if you can find it.