Beauty Tips

A bouquet of fresh picked wildflowers for you, my friend, courtesy of the “floral artisans” at the local playground.

Translation: Connor and the other little girl she was playing with ran up and down every hill plucking every yellow flower in sight when we were at the playground the other day, and when I was handed the final bouquet, my first thought was, “Oh, this is so pretty. I wonder how many dogs have pee’d on these flowers.” 😂

Got a few things on my mind today that I wanted to chat with you about, including expanding my makeup knowledge with a couple of new books, and a snazzy styling tool that will forever change the way you see flat irons.

Also, there’s a healthy, yummy, easy chicken recipe at the end that I think everyone — even the pickiest eaters — will love. It’s so good that if Tabs were around, I’m sure he’d try to steal the food off my plate.

Y.U.M.

As I know you know, this last month I was reminded that life is blisteringly (and unfairly) short. To put it mildly, this has lit a fire 🔥 under my @ss, and now I want to learn as much as I can about anything and everything — all of my interests. One of those interests, of course, is makeup.

I mean, I do know a thing or two about it already, but there’s a whole wide world of techniques and history and beauty vocabulary that I’ve yet to discover.

Kevin James Bennett, MUA and outspoken dude

This month I’ve been reading a couple of books that were recommend by makeup artist Kevin James Bennett. He’s an Emmy award-winning MUA and a somewhat controversial presence on social media because he goes for the jugular when it comes to calling out what he sees is wrong about current beauty influencer culture.

While I don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with that aspect of his content (again, life is short), I love the technical information he provides on his Instagram and his blog.

He wrote a list of his most-used makeup reference books, and I picked up two of them from Amazon: Color: A Course in Mastering the Art of Mixing Color by Betty Edwards, and The Makeup Artist Handbook by Gretchen Davis and Mindy Hall.

I’ve only been able to skim a few chapters in Color so far, but they were fascinating! The book dives deeply into the art and science of color mixing and explores the vocabulary and theory behind it.

I want to be able to understand the “why” behind which colors “go” best with which colors in makeup, photography and life in general.

The other book, The Makeup Artist Handbook, is like a succinct manual on everything you’d ever need to know and own to do makeup on a production set. It’s written for professionals and working artists in the industry and covers a wide array of things I’ll probably never need to do (like creating a beard! FROM SCRATCH!), but they’re still fun to know.

I think from a casual makeup lover’s standpoint, the chapters on beauty makeup and natural makeup for photography and film are the most useful and helpful, so I can’t wait to dive into that.

Mini flat irons are a thing

Check out this funky little piece of equipment I picked up recently at Ulta. It’s a mini flat iron!

LOOK HOW THIN THE PLATES ARE! They’re so skinny.

I had no idea that mini flat irons were even a thing until I recently looked for different ways to smooth the crazy rogue baby hairs around my hairline (because I know that plucking them isn’t a long-term solution).

They’re typically used to tame very short hairstyles like pixie cuts because the ultra-thinness of the plates lets you get closer to the scalp than a traditional flat iron.

I used it for the first time yesterday, and yeah — you can indeed get close to your roots.

Like, uncomfortably close.

On the one hand, awesome. On the other, I’m deathly afraid I’m going to accidentally burn myself.

It helped to smooth down my baby hairs, though, so that’s a plus. I’ll have to do it a few more times to get into a flow… (If you see me rocking a Disney Princess Band-Aid across my forehead in the next few days, you’ll know what happened.)
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