My haul this month is barely even worth writing about! But, I like to look back and see what I bought and when, and so I persevere…
This month? I didn’t buy anything interesting. Hell, I didn’t even buy any makeup, which is slightly shocking. (Not to mention supremely boring!)
So what did I get?
Yep. That’s it. Makeup remover. Terribly exciting.
Please tell me you picked up something far more interesting than me this month!
Just a quick post today to wish everyone a Happy Pride! It’s World Pride this year in Toronto and the streets of the gaybourhood have been alive with people and music for the past week. The bigger events take place this weekend and I’m looking forward to a lively weekend!
Happy Pride Toronto!
My general idea when doing makeup for holiday events is basically… “why be subtle?” So if you’re Canadian and/or looking to celebrate the 1st of July and want something a bit different, gather up your red eye shadow and let’s get cracking.
We’ll start this off with the more “in your face” of the three looks I have prepped for this post.
I *LOVE* how this came out. It was touch and go for a while – drawing that maple leaf with gel liner was no easy task, so make life a bit easier on yourself and use a stencil. I printed out this one, and cut it up. Using Inglot‘s Gel Liner in 79 (red) with a small liner brush, I traced around the stencil. Go incredibly slowly and clean your brush off often so that the edges don’t get gunked up.
I then took Inglot‘s Matte 382 eyeshadow on a pencil brush and starting at the points of the maple leaf, I feathered the eyeshadow in towards the center. This was done SOLELY to make the darn stencil not look so tatty, and I think it turned out rather well.
I free-handed some black swirls with my MUFE Aqualiner in 13 Black, applied some small clear crystals I got from a craft store with eyelash adhesive and finally tapped some silver glitter in random places all over the entire drawing because really… who doesn’t love glitter?!
On my eyes is Virgin, Buck and Smog from the Urban Decay Naked 1 palette. MUFE Aqualiner in 13 Black for the winged liner and MUFE Smoky Lash Extravagant. Anastasia Dipbrow Pomade in Blonde on my eyebrows. There’s nothing else on my face, but on my lips is MAC‘s Strawberry Malt lipglass.
And for those not looking to do actual facepaint on themselves…
I actually wore this one to the pub for the England vs Italy World Cup game, but with the full realization that this would work equally well for a Canada Day look. (And my bubble got kind of blown at the game, not only by England losing the game, but also by their jerseys being suddenly white and blue for some odd reason. :/ )
Eyes
MAC Blanc Type on my browbone, Tarte gel liner in Black for the wing and MUFE Smoky Lash Extravagant on my lashes.
Rest of the Face
This is the actual look I wore last Canada Day, which is essentially just a toned down version of the look above. I’m pretty sure I also wore Rimmel‘s Big Bang on my lips, but I didn’t take a picture of it.
Eyes
NYX Jumbo Eyeshadow Pencil in Milk all over the lid as a base, then;
MAC Shroom on the browbone, Maybelline gel liner in Blackest Black for the wing and CoverGirl Clump Crusher on my lashes.
Happy Canada Day everyone!
Last month I did a “Four or More: Lips Edition” post, and this month I thought I’d bring you the Eyes version of that. So here are quick reviews on eye products that I happen to own four or more products!
These Maybelline Color Tattoos are beloved by almost every beauty blogger, beauty YouTuber and many a person I know IRL. And while I own a lot of them, I just never really fell in love with them like everyone else did. I really did try to – clearly I did, I kept on buying them – but on me they seem to make my lids really “crackly-looking”. I know that’s an odd description, but it’s the best way I can think to describe it. They also don’t blend out as well as I want them to. And they definitely do dry up over time, even though I store them top-down. They do have insane lasting power however: I wore Edgy Emerald and Tenacious Teal while swimming in the ocean by accident once while on vacation in Florida and they did NOT budge. I will say that I bust these out if I need a really quick eye colour that I don’t want to fuss with, but I’ve put myself on a Color Tattoo no-buy because despite the pretty colours, I just don’t use them as much as I should given how many of them I own.
I love these so, so much. L’Oreal‘s Infallible Eyeshadows are amazing. Very smooth and incredibly pigmented. They’re essentially loose pigments pressed down by a stopper to keep them from sloshing about. You get the benefit of the pigmentation of a pigment, without the horrific powdery mess that inevitably ends up EVERYWHERE. My absolute must haves from the line are Amber Rush and Hourglass Beige
(called Iced Latte in the US – I think you guys got the better name on that one!). But the best one out of the lot is that amazing darkened, shimmery red second from the left. It’s called Golden Mahogany and was only available in Canada for a limited time. I happened to find a complete ratchet one at Walmart about a year ago and snagged it up because that particular shade is completely gone from the line now. Regardless of your colour preference, these are worth picking up just to test out and see how you like it.
Fluidlines are MAC‘s term for a gel liner and a product I always come back to. I’ve been through a few pots of Blacktrack, and continue to repurchase it when I run out. These stay surprisingly creamy for a very long time. That brown shade, Dipdown, is roughly four years old and is still as creamy as when I first received it. There’s something about MAC‘s fluidlines that just make them go on the lashline a lot smoother than any other gel liners I’ve tried. Other liners can tend to skip on me, but these flow on like BUTTAH. The brown and black shades are in their permanent line, but the dark blue (Midnight Blues) and green (Dark Envy) were from their MAC Me Over collection from 2011. Highly, highly recommended – though I will point out that they are not waterproof.
Oh baby do I ever love Sleek and their 12 pan eyeshadow palettes. So much so that I’ve picked up six of them over the years whenever I’m in the UK.
The pigmentation on these is incredible for a drugstore brand that is relatively inexpensive. My favourites are the two matte palettes – the bright one and the dark one. It can be hard to find mattes at the drugstore in a variety of colours, never mind actually finding bright vivid ones as well! Hands down Sleek has the best drugstore palettes that exist. If only they’d come to Canada! (That being said, the shipping from the UK to Canada is incredibly cheap, so it’s worth ordering some palettes online if you would like to check them out.)
I went through a phase of loving MAC‘s Mineralize Eyeshadows, but have stopped collecting them in more recent years. On me, these are best applied wet in order to bring out the pigmentation and shimmer (water works just as fine as MAC‘s Fix+ does). While the duos are easy enough to get your brush into, I will say that the trio get to be a nightmare when you wear down the middle strips. You end up needing smaller and smaller brushes to get just that single pigment and it can be tedious to do so. My favourite of the lot? Of course it’s the red-tinged one: Heat Element.
That’s my round up for Four or More: Eyes Edition. The only thing not mentioned were my MAC eyeshadows/palettes as I’ve already done a few posts on those. You can check them out here:
So I work for Scotiabank, and every year the bank does a “Rat Race” for United Way. The idea is that it’s a bunch of corporate big cheeses running a 5K through Toronto’s downtown financial core (although the route has changed a few times over the years). I’d only ever run it once before several years ago (I’m thinking circa 2006, but I’m not positive). This was long before I knew anything about running any kind of long distance seriously, what a “personal best” meant or that there was technology to track your racing times.
So when this popped up on an interoffice memo at work one day, I was like “Ooooo yes!” This race is basically a free entry race (5Ks generally cost about $35 to $50), but you’re expected to raise $100 in donations for the United Way which is the charity this race focuses on. Being the cat lover that I am, I knew I wanted to pick some kind of cat theme for my team. In an attempt to find an internet meme that wasn’t too difficult for people to understand, I went with:
And called our team “Staying Late To Catch the Red Dot”. It even made sense because he’s in a business suit and we’re staying late after work to run this race! I thought it was incredibly clever and his little faece makes me laugh whenever I look at it. So even though I had to explain it to everyone who joined my team or asked about the race, it was still worth it. Some of them thought I was talking about having my period. I even tried to make the meaning more clear at work:
Although I may have gone a little overboard! In the end, I managed to recruit 12 Rat Race team members from the office and we raised over $1400 for United Way.
On to the actual race…
I was really nervous for this one. REALLY nervous. Because my last 5K had gone so poorly, I was worried that maybe I was just naturally that slow and that there was really no use in working on my running times. Shitty mentality, but there you have it. This race felt very much like I needed to prove to myself that I could run faster than I had before and if I didn’t, I was going to be immensely disappointed.
This was a smaller race (under 2000 people) so there would be a lot more space to get around other runners if I needed to (unlike the disaster starting zone of the Ottawa Race Weekend 5K). I was also slightly worried about the 2k incline at the start of the race. The remaining 2k would be downhill, but it’s really nasty starting a race with an uphill incline like that for such a long stretch.
All 12 of us headed over to the starting line around 7 o’clock. Since most of us worked in the downtown core, it wasn’t a whole lot of hassle to get us out to the start line close to Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto.
The race started with very little fanfare, not even a starting gun bang, and we were off. As I’d said before, the first two kilometers of this race was a 25 meter incline up University Avenue until we hit Bloor Street. The start of any race is always the most unpleasant for me – everything always feels wrong. My breathing feels wrong – I feel out of breath and like maybe I’m not strong enough for the pace I’d set out for myself. I also managed to get a stitch in my side that didn’t help matters. But I just ignored it and tried to regulate my breathing a bit better. I really didn’t start to feel solid until I finished the incline at the top of Bloor Street when the ground evened out.
Oddly, the entire road wasn’t closed down for the race – only one lane was shut down so we had to maneuver around people through a single laneway of traffic. But with only 1500 people in the race, it didn’t make zigging and zagging too bad. I caught up with one of my team members at the 2k mark and whacked him on the shoulder (this is becoming a trend) to let him know I was there. Afterwards he told me that I set his pace and he just stuck with me after that to ensure he stayed on track. That was really nice to hear because I never really thought of myself as much of a pace setter. (I was, however, glancing constantly at my Garmin to make sure I was personally on track for a finish time under 27 minutes.) It’s also pretty rare to find a person that you can run beside at the exact same pace, so it was really nice to have the extra motivation whenever I got a glance of him over my shoulder.
As we finished the Bloor stretch of the race, we made a turn onto Yonge which (blissfully) was the downhill portion of this race. I could easily make up for any slowness on the uphill by pushing it on the downhill. The run down Yonge remains a blur in my mind except for the wayward pedestrians who would try to cross the street amongst the racers and the one very small child who jumped onto the street in front of me that I had to grab in order to steady him from falling over (including myself!).
As we made the last turn onto Queen Street and saw the finish line, my team member pulled ahead and started the sprint to the finish line. Once again, I couldn’t do that last sprint, and while that frustrates me, I’m content with the fact that it meant I was pushing for the entire race instead of just at the very end.
For once I finally managed to spot the clock time at the very end, which logged me in at 26:28. I knew I had started a bit further back from the start time so I knew the chip time would be shorter. The Garmin was logging me in at 26:13 so I was getting VERY excited to find out what my time was. When I checked online later, I discovered my chip time had clocked me at 26:10!!! OH HELLLLLL YES! A very solid 26 minute 5K, and a HUGE 75 seconds cut off my previous fastest 5K race (which had been in Baltimore, Maryland). I’m so close to being in the 25 minute range!
I hung around at the end of the race watch my other team mates finish. One super power woman on my team had done an INSANE 19 minute 5K, but the rest of them trickled in after me. For some of them this had been their first 5K race and I was excited to see that they were really happy to have done it and were looking forward to doing it again next year!
I was on such a high after this race – I was incredibly excited to have finished with a much better time than my last race and I’m on target for getting into the 25-26 minute range for a 5K. Having a solid race like that gives me so much more motivation to keep pushing myself every time I train.
Race Results