I tangoed this afternoon for the first time in 20 years, and my partner was Make Up For Ever.

No, not tango in the ballroom style (“slow, slow, quick-quick, slow!”), although that always looks like so much fun. This was more just me dancing away the late afternoon with some pieces from MUFE’s new fall 2012 collection.

Ironically…my metaphorical dancing today was much more fun than the first time I tried the real tango.

It was the spring of my senior year in high school… My friend Alex and I had taken a ballroom dance class together after seeing the movie Swing Kids (5-second synopsis: a group of teenagers in Nazi Germany band together to dance to forbidden swing music from the United States).

Yup, that’s young Christian Bale in the middle

We started out hell bent on getting good enough to do the cool aerial tricks, tosses and lifts, so every Thursday after dinner Alex would pick me up in his rickety Dodge Dart, and I’d spend the 10-minute drive to the dance studio joshing him and his ride (“Dude, if this thing breaks down, you’re gonna have to flash your hairy leg on the side of the road and pray someone pulls over to help us, ’cause there’s no way I’m pushing this boat in these heels!”).

Then we’d shuffle across the dance floor for 45 minutes, with both of us spending most of the time looking down at our feet, to learn the basics of ballroom dancing with some of Union City’s sassiest seniors.

I don’t know what we were thinking, to be honest, because we were really, really terrible. Like the worst couple in class. Alex was over six-feet tall, and I barely cleared 5 feet, even when I was stepping on his toes, LOL! Seriously, if the class had given an award for crashing into other couples and stepping on feet, that’s the only award we would have won.

As bad as we were, though, the tango was sort of our specialty, and I still remember sailing across the dance floor, repeating “slow, slow, quick-quick, slow” over and over to myself.

“Slow, slow, quick-quick, slow!” I tried to get Tabs to dance with me this afternoon, but he wasn’t in the mood… Thankfully, the new Aqua Rouge Lip Colors ($24 each), Aqua Brow ($20) and new Black Tango Palette ($45) were.

Black Tango Palette

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Wearing the new Make Up For Ever Aqua Cream in 23 Acid Green

I feel like in summer we should all get passes to go completely buck wild with our eye makeup, no matter what we’re doing or where we are.

I mean, we can do that now — wear whatever we want — but there are social mores, workplace policies and dress codes, and those are what the passes would cover.

Want/need to run to Trader Joe’s for an emergency box of Mango Bars, but you glance in the mirror and notice that oops! — you’re wearing bright yellow eyeshadow all over your lids? No problem, because you’ve got the pass.

When I started getting into eyeshadow in my 20s, I only wore two colors, brown or beige — unless I was feeling extra adventurous, in which case I’d spice things up with a soft seashell pink, haha.

Hello, change. My name is Karen.

The old 20-something me probably wouldn’t even recognize the 30-something me who groans like a brain-hungry zombie and makes grabby hands in the air when she sees bright products like the four new Make Up For Ever Aqua Creams in 23 Acid Green, 24 Yellow, 25 Pastel Blue and 26 Purple ($23 each).

“Brains! Brains! — No, I mean shimmer! SHIMMER!”

Please tell me you’ve experienced the nirvana that is the mighty Aqua Cream. If you have not, joy awaits.

These potted creams, which first appeared back in 2010, are some of my absolute favorite products in the Make Up For Ever line. They come in a ton of colors and finishes now, too — some for Eyes and Cheeks, others for Lips and Cheeks — and all of them have the same special ability.

Once you get them on your skin, they DO. NOT. MOVE.

Special evaporating oils help the pigments stick to skin, rendering them smudge-proof, waterproof and sob-proof.

Clockwise from the yellow pot on the lower left: 23 Yellow, 23 Acid Green, 25 Pastel Blue and 26 Purple

Seriously, you could have a nervous breakdown at an ATM machine, not that I’d know anything about that (“Holy crap, did you just eat my card?! A Windows blue screen — are you kidding me? FREAKING MICROSOFT!”), and your shadow would still look as fresh as a daisy.

So yeah. Love these things.

These four new summer shades, all of them for eyes and cheeks, might look a little cray in their pots, but babe, the second I got that first batch of swatches on my arm, I wanted to smear them all over my body like a technicolor tart (I suppose this is how some folks feel at Burning Man after one too many special brownies in the body painting tent).

To be blunt, they’re beyond bright!

Swatches from the left: 23 Yellow, 23 Acid Green, 25 Pastel Blue and 26 Purple

26 Purple
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I was lying awake in bed the other night, nestled like the insomnia meat in the middle of an epic El Hub/Tabs snoring sandwich, when I thought, “It’s bad enough that El Hub snores, but when did Tabs start?”

As I lay there, wide awake, I wondered a great many things…like are there Breathe Right strips for cats? And if there are, I bet they look pretty funny.

It occurred to me that maybe that’s what I could do when I grow up, be the inventor of Kitty Breathe Right Strips, because I still don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life.

I started ticking off a list of things I know to be true. 1. Tabs loves gravy, 2. Nutella and asparagus taste terrible together, 3. the world really didn’t need a sequel to Honey…

I must have dozed off somewhere around 3-4 in the morning, only to wake up a few hours later, more than a little cranky and with zombie-fied eyes.

Some serious eye-brightening action was in order.

I grabbed my iPhone (“Siri, remind me to research cures for insomnia!”) and peered into my makeup bag…

That’s when I saw it — Make Up For Ever’s new nude brightening Eye Prime ($22), the brand’s very first eye primer.

A magical brew of waxes and fixing polymers that, according to MUFE, creates a smooth, long-lasting base upon which to apply other eye makeup products. The supposedly universally flattering nude shade (for every skin tone) is also supposed to brighten while amplifying eye makeup colors and reducing creasing, and it’s designed to work with everything, from powder eyeshadows, to cream eyeshadows, liners, and basically the whole gamut of eye makeup deliciousness.

Well, hello, bright eyes.

Turn around, bright eyes… Every now and then I fall apart! And I need you more tonight! And I need you more than evuh!

(Sorry. Spontaneous ’80s sing-a-long moment.)

Unblended (left) and blended (right)
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Dang, it’s hot out here in Nor Cal today! It must be in the low 80s. That, or I’m just not at all used to the warmer weather yet.

To hurry up and get into the spirit of swimming pools and water parks, I thought I’d bust out a few of the new waterproof Make Up For Ever Aqua Shadows ($20 each) for my makeup today.

The Aqua Shadows, which are available now at Sephora, are a new line of long-lasting waterproof eyeshadow crayons. They come in 12 smudge-resistant shades designed to resist fading and creasing just as much as they resist water (more on that in a minute).

Apply, count to five (or 10, to be safe), and then bring on the water!

A few things about the Make Up For Ever Aqua Shadows…

• Easy does it with these. My lids turn into cake central when I over-apply.
• From my experience, they live up to the “Aqua” in their name, resisting water like our resident tabby cat. They also last all day long for me, but I do get some creasing when I wear them without an eye primer.
• They feel drier and thicker than some of the other shadow pencils I’ve tried, like Urban Decay’s 24/7 Glide-On Eyeshadow Pencils and the NARS Soft Touch Shadow Pencils, and take a little more time and effort to blend.

For this look, I also used a few other Make Up For Ever favorites that I recently noticed at Sephora — the Compact Shine On Powder highlighter ($30; comes in two shades), Sculpting Blush ($25; available in four shades) and Mat Bronze bronzing powder ($32; available in two shades).

Make Up For Ever Aqua Shadows from the left: 30E (a pearly pink beige), 26E (a pearly peach) and 4E (a matte taupe gray), $20 each

Make Up For Ever Sculpting Blush in 10, $25
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Wearing Make Up For Ever Rouge Artist Natural in Soft Fuchsia

Although I’m running on fumes right now, I feel surprisingly perky for having only gotten three hours of sleep.

Those must have been three spectacular hours… Or maybe I should credit these new $19 Rouge Artist Natural Lipsticks from Make Up For Ever, which are packed with so much vibrant pigment that they’re lifting me up like shots of espresso today, BAM!

Dropping next month at Make Up For Ever Boutiques and Sephora stores in a massive array of 50 creamy, moisturizing shades, they’re also spread out across three different finishes in satin, iridescent and diamond. All 50 colors are coming to MUFE boutiques, but Sephora stores and sephora.com will only be getting 18 of the shades (I’m not sure which ones).

From the left: N31 Soft Fuchsia, N45 Red and N4 Pink Beige

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