Beauty product reviews, makeup tips and news from your friendly neighborhood beauty addict.
Ladies, just wanted to quickly say thanks for your help making October 2009 a good month in the fight against breast cancer. With your help, our combined donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure was $500 this year ($250 more than last year).
Pat yourselves on the back. 
Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,
Karen
October 25th, 2009 | Karen | Filed in: News
Good morning, ladies. I hope you slept well.
Can you believe that today’s the last Sunday in October? November’s right around the corner. By this time next week, we’ll have said goodbye to yet another Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which means no more pink ribbons for a while (they’ll go back into storage).
Why it’s personal to me…
I’m kinda melancholy about it, but I feel like the world made good BCA progress this year. No cure yet, and much of the increased awareness comes via corporations commercializing the cause, but ultimately the how/why doesn’t matter, does it? More of us are aware of the disease than we were a month ago, and that’s a good thing no matter what.
There are still seven October days left for one final push to raise funds for research and support. That’s why I’m upping the ante in our MBB fundraiser for Susan G. Komen for the Cure. I pledge to match every $1 you donate through the widget here with $2 of my own (up to $500 total). If you can give $5, I’ll match you with $10 (for $15 total).
And if you make a donation to Komen through a different blog or through their site directly, just e-mail me a picture/scan of your receipt, and I’ll make the same 2-1 match (up to $500 total).
I feel like we should strike while the iron’s hot because soon we’ll move on to other causes, and the holidays will take center stage.
Please help make one final push before the end of October.
Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,
Karen
October 24th, 2009 | Karen | Filed in: Beauty Tips, Just For Fun, News
Even though Blog World wrapped up last weekend, I wanted to talk a little about traffic building because it was one of the most discussed topics at the event.
Assuming it’s one of your goals (it doesn’t have to be), the experts had a lot to say about building readership/viewership to websites and blogs. Today I’m going to gloss over the jargon and give you some tips you can implement on your own.
Previously in The Beauty of Blog World…
This one’s the most important tip but also the hardest to define. “Content is King,” the traffic experts say, but what do they really mean? Answer: If you think about it, what draws you to your favorite makeup counters, stores, websites and blogs? In my case, I visit MAC counters because I’m *obsessed* with their makeup; I read Zen Habits because it helps me relax. Ultimately, we visit the places that give us what we want.
As a practical matter, I think it’s harder (although not impossible) to attract readers to personal journal blogs because, let’s face it, our lives usually aren’t as interesting as we think they are. But when we blog with passion about specific topics (keeping in mind that no one owes us their time), we tend to attract people with similar interests.
What words would someone use on Google to find your blog?
Whatever they are, those are some of your key words, and you want to use your key words in as many places as you can — in your domain name (i.e. lipstickeyeshadowandgloss.com, catsinuniform.com), in your URLs (i.e. catsinuniform.com/cat/uniforms/catuniforms.php — the parts between the / slashes), in your post titles (Cat Uniforms Under $10, My 5 Favorite Lipsticks of 2009, Don’t Gloss Over These Lipsticks, etc.), within the text of your posts and also within the text using HTML header tags (h1, h2, h3, h4). The more you use your key words, the more credit your blog will get from Google and the other search engines for searches using those terms.
Not only do links translate into direct traffic to your blog, as they get clicked wherever they appear, but they also contribute to your placement in the search rankings on Google.
Continue Reading…
The Basin White store in Las Vegas, Nevada
All work and no play makes moi a cranky beauty addict, but the Las Vegas Basin White store, a beauty brand I’d never even heard of before, saved me from myself.
The company has just two stores for now (Vegas and Orlando, Florida). The Vegas one, located among the Grande Canal Shoppes at The Venetian Hotel, is brand spankin’ new. If you’d like to learn more about the company, the line’s also available online.
I guess it’s fitting that after their Downtown Disney store in Orlando, Basin White chose the Disney-like Grande Canal indoor mall for their second location.
Gondolas packed with tourists weave through Venetian-inspired canals as shoppers cross footbridges and live opera singers provide the background music for ambiance. Yeah … it’s Vegas cheesy, but still pretty fun.
The store itself stopped me in my tracks. It’s gorgeous and smells wonderful. There are other brands out there like Basin White, with similar rows of colorful glycerin soaps, tubs with gigantic bath bombs and various scents, but this one stood out to me for a bunch of reasons.
Their products look Lush-y — similar shampoo bars and solid moisturizers — but I think the shopping experience at Basin White beats Lush hands down, as a lot of Lush’s products pack too much fragrance for my sensitive schnozz. Sometimes it’s just too much.
Basin White’s products smell lighter and generally less synthetic to me. Granted, scent’s a very personal thing, but I absolutely love Basin White’s approach to fragrance.
The store feels like a spa. The open layout, lighting and black/white tiled floor reminded me of a Pottery Barn-inspired bathroom.
Like any good beauty store should, Basin White makes samples of everything available to smell, touch and test. The highly interactive staff isn’t pushy either, and they encourage product playtime, waiting at the ready by testing sinks with paper towels and smiling faces.
Josh Jacks, one of the sales associates at the Vegas store, gave me the background on Basin White while showing me around.
With only two physical locations, the line’s still pretty exclusive, but I expect that to change. Their products are made without synthetic fillers, parabens, alcohol or mineral oil and contain high-quality ingredients like shea butter, beeswax and sunflower oil.
Continue Reading…
October 18th, 2009 | Karen | Filed in: Beauty Tips, Just For Fun, News
If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, what’s a moving picture worth? Blog World 2009 speaker Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.tv posed that question at the convention yesterday, and it really made me think…
The answer depends on the quality of the video, right?
I’m on a mission to improve the quality of my videos (not just for the blog, but for home/travel videos too), so I sought out the sessions on video yesterday and took copious notes.
When it comes to video, material trumps production quality, but watch any random 10 videos on YouTube, and what do most of them have in common? According to Sara and Lee O’Donnell, the couple behind Average Betty, the most popular short-form food entertainment web series online, most of them weren’t made with a script.
It doesn’t have to be fancy — even a few notes scribbled on index cards — but working from an outline or script can really make your videos stand out.
“Buy a camera with the biggest lens, best glass and best sensor you can afford,” says Cali. Of course, that’s more for professional setups. Serious home movie makers and beginning web videographers might take a look at the Kodak Zi8 (about $180). Not only does it shoot in 1080p high definition video, but it’s image stabilized (less shaky in your hands) and has an external microphone jack (more on that later), too.
If you’re willing to spend more, both Cali and the O’Donnells mentioned the $550 Canon VIXIA HF200 HD Flash Memory Camcorder. It can do everything the Kodak Zi8 can do, does it better and does more.
For help choosing a camcorder, check out camcorderinfo.com.
Poor audio can ruin even the highest quality videos, and the microphones built into most small camcorders just aren’t very good. They struggle to capture clear voices more than a few feet away from them, and they tend to pick up too much background noise outside.
Continue Reading…
