Monday Makeup Madness: Linkroll

Feeling lazy tonight. I went to the Giants game earlier today, and now I'm just relaxing on the couch watching tennis. I attempted to swatch eyeshadow earlier the week, but I still have to work on the pictures. Perhaps next week. In the meantime, I present to you some links of interest:

All About the Parabens (The Next Best Thing to Going Shopping Yourself)
I enjoyed reading this. I'd been hearing "paraben-free" a lot but didn't really know what the deal was.

Anime and Company (The Girly Show)
OCC Lip Tar mixes featuring the color Anime. This one's over a month old, but it's still interesting.

Urban Decay Nail Polish!! New Apocalyptic Nail Kit for Holiday 2009! (Scrangie)
When I first saw these I was highly intrigued. However, the more I thought about it, the more clear it was that I didn't NEED it. I have way too much nail polish as it is, plus it's a set, and I could only see myself using half of them on a regular basis. I've seen some complaints that these colors aren't "unique like UD's old nail polish colors". I don't know...it seems like it was easier to make a unique color then than it is now. I mean, these days it's pretty easy to find nail polish in every color of the rainbow if you so desire. Anyway, for this set, the most interesting shade to me is White Widow, and the one I'd be most likely to wear is Gunmetal.

Another thing that was funny--and maybe some of you noticed this--is that the price was $25 but changed to $26 a couple of days later. I also noticed a similar change for their 24/7 sets--the Hi-Fi & Stereophonic sets were $30, then they were $29, while the Super Stash dropped from $39 to $36. I noticed the changes on urbandecay.com a day or two after I saw all of these products listed over on ulta.com with the second set of prices. (I'm going to guess the Super Stash and the nail set sold out over at Ulta since I no longer see them on the site.)

Monday Makeup Madness: Still Kind of New to This Nail Polish Thing

I have quite a few bottles of nail polish in my collection, but I still feel like a novice when it comes to applying the stuff. But lately I've been doing it more frequently, so I think I'm getting better. Kind of. Most of the time I stick to the safe neutral-ish stuff, but I do love color, and since my work setting is pretty casual I can get away with whatever color I choose...so I'm starting to venture outside the box.

I recently broke down and got Sephora by OPI's Dark Room knowing the actual color wasn't even close to what was displayed on Sephora's site (Scrangie and The Nailphile have posts that shows the color much more accurately). On a side note, I find it hard to trust swatches on Sephora's site. I remember buying an Urban Decay nail enamel way back in the day in the color "Perversion" because I thought it was navy blue (IIRC they only had the color swatches and not brief descriptions of the colors). Surprise! It was black. :P I kept it, though I only used it a few times. I actually like black nail polish, not because of my inner goth (which existed then and now), but because it reminds me of Russian lacquer boxes. /tangent

Er, back to Dark Room. I thought I'd like it from the way people were describing the color, plus I had a Sephora coupon, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I was going to wait until fall to try it out, but tonight I was in a dark-nail-polish sort of mood, so on it went! I like the color, it's not quite black, seems to have a green / blue / gray hint to it...it kind of reminds me of a blackboard (the slate type). However, I felt like I needed to add something to it, so I then used China Glaze Wireless Holographic Top Coat. ...Oh my. The combination seems to say--nay, scream "Outer Space Princess". I have not yet decided if this is good or bad. I'm so curious to see what it looks like in natural light...I'll take a pic tomorrow and update this post so you all can see too. :)

[update 8/18: Here we go--it was overcast in the morning (left), so I took another picture on my afternoon break at work when the sun was out. Click to see a larger version, and kindly ignore my cuticles.]

Monday Makeup Madness: Sephora Reviews Revisited

Previously on Framboise Noire, I wrote about an issue I had with some customers' reviews on the Sephora website. Well...at least that group of people actually wrote about the product in their review. Recently I've been coming across people leaving low reviews of a product not because they didn't like it, but because it wasn't readily available. See, for example, the following "review" left for Sephora by OPI's Dark Room:

"So I love getting Sephora e-mails to get the latest updates on what's new. I was super excited to see this beautiful color and went to the store the same day. To my disappointment our Hawaii store does not carry it and I was told would need to wait 2 weeks! I really think our stores should carry it especially when it is advertised in the e-mail."

Seriously, people? This is not the way to properly complain. How about something like leaving a comment on their facebook page? That makes more sense to me. More recent reviews for this particular color make sense, as it apparently does not match the color displayed on the website. Looking at the bottle there made me think it was slightly darker than OCC's Blackboard nail enamel, but I guess it's even darker than that...hmm. Another color that has had a ton of comments along the same vein as the above quote is 212-Sephora, but those are more, um, "ranty". The color is limited and apparently popular, so when they get stock for it, it's going to go quickly. Everyone needs to chill. :P Here's what I consider a good review:

"I have maybe a hundred nail polishes, and this just made the #1 spot. It's got so many different kinds of sparkle and glitter, but not in a god-awful teenage way. It's a little translucent on its own, so I layered it over a black creme for the best effect. It is also very cute on my boyfriend's toes!"

Okay, the last sentence was a tad TMI for my liking, but hey, to each their own, plus it gave me a good idea of what the color was like and whether or not I'd want it. It sounds really pretty, so if I happen to see it around I might snap it up. Not that OPI's cheap or anything (unless you know where to go, though that doesn't apply to Sephora's colors), but they are a good brand. I have a nice little collection of them, so maybe that'll be next week's post...

Makeup Reviews

I was considering heading down to Burlingame Avenue today to poke around various shops, including the Sephora store they have down there. It ended up being too damn hot. Perhaps next weekend. I'll buy stuff online, usually when it's something I've bought before, but sometimes it's just nice to see the stuff first. I like browsing through their website too, it's put together pretty nicely. The only problem I really have is when you're reading reviews on products like eyeshadow or lipstick that come in more than one color...you'll often come across reviews that say something like "love the color, really makes my eyes pop!" Well, crap. That doesn't help me when I don't know what color you tried out. Perhaps I should start rating and reviewing. I can write pretty decently when I know the topic, if I do say so myself. :P

(I'll leave out the emoticons in my reviews, of course.)

Stuff I've been doing, reading

It's been a while. I haven't gone missing, it's just that every time I try to write something here, the words disappear from my head. I'll try to fix this now. Here are some recent points of possible interest:

- I went to the State of the Sharks last Tuesday. See my half-assed account here.

- Travels with Carlo (The Wonderful World of Loser Domi)
I don't know who Carlo Colaiacovo is, but he seems to get injured a lot, and I think his name is awesome. Anyway, Loser Domi writes funny stuff.

- It took me forever to sign up with sports message boards because I couldn't think of a handle to use. (Also, I'm not very witty and never know what to write, but I digress.) On Saturday, I was at the MYFO liveblog for Game 1 and I wanted to comment on something, so I had to come up with a name. The only thing that popped in my head was "insert bad Czech pun here" which got shortened to "Bad Czech Pun". Guess I have a handle now. It's better than the names I've come up with in the past, so I'm fine with it.

- Yesterday I went shopping at the Scrapbook Nook. That place is dangerous. I'm also super-new to scrapbooking, so I was overwhelmed. I was able to pay cash for all the stuff I got, but that's because I only bought travel-related stickers. I should find some kind of primer for scrapbooking to help me organize in my mind how it all works. I can't see myself making actual scrapbooks because I know I'd get tired of it too easily, but I could definitely make gift tags, invitations and other small things like that. I also want to host a party in mid-December with a tropical theme, so it would be awesome if I got the gist of it by the time I need to send out invitations.

Fun with Advertisements

I went looking for a disturbing commercial to share and see if others also found it disturbing (you know that one for some shave gel where these rocketeering chicks representing "scent" fly up a dude's nose? yeah, that one). I haven't found it yet, but I came across this site, whose URL I first read as "Irate Ads" but then quickly realized was "I Rate Ads". :P I enjoyed what I saw, so I'll probably visit regularly. I'd like to share this one with you:

Lululemon Athletica — The Mansy

Did you look?

...Done? Okay. As soon as I saw that it was available April 1 I knew it was a joke, but it was a good one.

Oh, I'm still here.

Why haven't I been posting? Well, I've been lazy, sick and stressed, so...there's that. But I digress.

So I have the espn.com NHL scoreboard open. I didn't think much a while ago when I saw that that Cristobal Huet had a shot on goal in the Caps-Devils game, but just now I saw "Cristobal Huet credited with hit on Sergei Brylin"...and right before that, he won a faceoff? Obviously his name is in place of someone else's name. Also, upon checking out the boxscore, I don't see Huet's name anywhere, and it appears that no one is in goal for Washington. :P I'd find these errors less baffling if I could figure out how things are supposed to look...meaning, who actually hit Sergei Brylin?

One Minute Wasted

I came across a list through digg.com that was of "the 10 most racist Disney characters". I thought there was a chance that it would be interesting. Instead, it was one minute of my life that I would never get back. Aside from Aladdin, everything listed was from the 1960s at the latest. [edit: I remembered later that Sebastian from The Little Mermaid also made the list. Still, 8 out of 10...] Well, shit. I could have told you that. The country was a different place then, and we've made great strides since, so...I was almost offended that someone compiled this list in the first place. Almost. More than that, I was annoyed at myself for having gone to the site. Bah.

Halloween Storm

I was sent an e-mail at work regarding this fun stuff, and one of the safeguarding tips went something like this:

"If you receive a message containing a link from a person you don't know, or haven't heard from for a long time, delete the message without opening it"

The "haven't heard from for a long time" part is new to me, though I guess it makes sense. At any rate, I'm guessing now is not the time to try to connect to any of my old friends from the Japanese animation fandom days. Happy Halloween, everybody.

I remember when I was into this stuff!

I was introduced to TOKYOMANGO today through a link to the Condom Fashion Show in China entry. I was waaay into everything Japanese in the mid-late 90s. Not so much now--I have enough other obsessions to keep up with--but I did spend a few awesome days in Osaka five years ago.