Makeup and Beauty Blog | Makeup Reviews, Swatches and How-To Makeup

So…what is the Monday Poll?

Excellent question! It isn’t, contrary to its name, an actual poll, like with little clicky buttons. It’s just a list of five more or less random questions I’ve been posting on this blog every Monday morning for the past quadrillion years (since 2007). I love reading your answers, and it helps me get my week off to a good start. ?

1. Have you ever ridden a moped?

Nope, but I seriously thought about doing it many times when I lived in SF. I just never got around to actually doing it.

There’s something very appealing to me about tooling around town in a mint green Vespa for some reason (it’s gotta be mint green though… No other color will do). I’ll probably never do it at this point because I know myself way too well, and I absolutely do not belong on anything motorized with two wheels.

2. An instance when you were genuinely shocked?

A few years ago when El Hub got home from work and told me that our long-time family friends were getting a divorce.

It blew my mind. It was the proverbial “They seemed so happy!” thing. It just goes to show you that you can’t always tell from the outside what people are really going through.

I’m also a bonafide softie, and I always want to believe that love lasts forever, so I was shocked — like jaw dropped to the floor — when I found out.

3. List all of the skin care you’re wearing on your face right meow.

Ooh! OK, here we go! These are in the order in which they’re applied…

• Drunk Elephant C-Tango Multivitamin Eye Cream
• Tarte Knockout Tingling Treatment
• Kate Somerville Dermal Quench Wrinkle Warrior
• Kate Somerville Anti Bac Acne Clearing Lotion
• Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Cream mixed with a few drops of Fresh Seaberry Moisturizing Face Oil
• Clinique Superdefense Broad Spectrum SPF 20 for Very Dry to Dry Combination Skin

4. How often do strangers mess up your name?

Not too often. “Karen” is pretty basic, but I’ve still gotten my share of creative monikers written on my to-go cups when I’ve ordered a toasty beverage from Starbucks, Cairn, Carrot, Care and Karun (pronounced Ka-roon).

Sometimes I think maybe the baristas do it on purpose to amuse themselves, which is TOTALLY what I would do if I were writing names on cups all day long, ha ha ha!

5. On a scale from “Fabulously festive” to “bah humbug,” how do you feel about the holidays today?

Full-tilt fabulously festive ??. I’m feeling the spirit!

Life Lesson No. 3,546

Girl…if you’re gonna take a selfie with a goat, be prepared for that goat to 1) lick your hair and 2) outshine your bad self.

I guess I should be glad the goat didn’t try to eat my hair? After all, my hair did smell a little like bacon and Cheetos, so I wouldn’t have blamed her had she tried, ha ha! She (the goat) lives on a Christmas tree farm in town. We visited it yesterday, not to get our tree yet, because we’re doing that next weekend, but because I wanted to take a family selfie for the holidays, and it was the closet Christmassy-looking place nearby. #keepingitreal

So, yeah, if you live in Novato and saw a lady shamelessly walking around Cousins’ Christmas Trees yesterday with a selfie stick, looking for good lighting, that was yours truly!

Have you put up your tree yet?

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

P.S. Question time! Here they are to copy/paste with your answers in a comment. Talk to you soon.

1. Have you ever ridden a moped?
2. An instance when you were genuinely shocked?
3. List all of the skin care you’re wearing on your face right meow.
4. How often do strangers mess up your name?
5. On a scale from “Fabulously festive” to “bah humbug,” how do you feel about the holidays today?

Hello, friend! Happy December Caturday ❄️?? to ya.

You know, just when I think I’ve seen it all among the pantheon of makeup tips and now it’s just the same bevy of basic tips recycled and repackaged for the quadrillionth time and I stop expecting to ever see anybody ever add anything new to the beauty news cycle, ever, I stumble upon something I’ve never tried before, and sometimes it rocks my world.

Two words: reverse foundation.

It’s a new (I think) base technique, and I gave it a try for the first time the other day. It’s where you start by applying cream products to your skin first while it’s bare (contour, if you wear it, blush and then highlighter), let them set, and then do a sheer foundation on top.

Girl, it is game-changing.

Blowing my mind right now

The idea is that by layering the foundation on top of the contour/blush/highlighter products, everything blends together so seamlessly and naturally that it looks like you’re wearing the perfect amount of makeup. I tried it and took pics the other day, and I think the subtlety of the effect gets a little lost in photographs, but it looks really, really good in real life, especially outdoors in full sun.

Try it sometime!

I’ve been even more into “real life” makeup than usual lately because of a late-night vortex I got sucked into on Facebook called Celebrity Close-Up. It’s a page that posts zoomed-in pics of celebs wearing makeup, and OH, MY GOSH, it’s a revelation. I mean, I take a lot of closeup pics of myself for the blog, and I’m know that many things can influence the way a particular look will look in real life, like the direction of the light source, the color temperature of the lighting, the finishes you’re wearing, the makeup brands themselves, how much water you’ve been drinking, and the techniques and tools you’re using, and the same looks can look cake-y one minute and natural the next, but to see celebs without any filtering or airbrushing is pretty eye-opening.

I have to say that whoever is handling Kiera Knightly’s, Lupita Nyong’o’s and Kristen Stewart’s makeup is a freaking genius (hmm, I wonder if it’s Lisa Eldgridge’s work?), because up close all of them are wearing breathtaking full-coverage makeup, but it doesn’t look heavy at all.

On that note, this weekend’s reading…

• This post talks about some of the different approaches to natural-looking, or “no-makeup,” makeup, including this year’s new-ish “boy beat” trend.

  First, what’s the trend and who defines it? And if you can’t see a “no-makeup” makeup product on your skin, does that mean the product is doing what it’s supposed to do?? I’m so confused…

• One of the biggest beauty trends right now is vegan makeup, and it’s poised to blow up into a $20.8 billion business by 2025.

• Toddlers: the newest market for makeup. Stila’s former chief product development officer just launched a new makeup line called Petite ‘N Pretty for girls as young as four years old.

  About this, part of me thinks, “It’s all in good fun, Karen. TAKE A CHILL PILL,” because my mom let me have Lip Smackers when I was a kid, but another part of me is also super uncomfortable with the idea of kids being shown that they need to do things to their faces.

• Cats in literature? It’s a long tail… (Badum-tss!)
• This writer decided to find out what would happen if all of the makeup she had to work with was food, and yes, in case you were wondering, there *was* a dry spaghetti noodle involved.
• A breakdown of how moisturizers work
• Fave read of the week: The Joy of having a bare face
• I’m sorry I had to subject you to this, but I can’t be the only person haunted by this MAC brush manicure.
• This 39-year-old cat lover became a millionaire by inventing a contraption that potty trains cats.

This dude makes udon noodles from scratch while he hangs out with his cats!

Modern day cat ladies tend to the kitties that live in the ruins of Rome.

Ooh, I wanna try this.

And I want to try this too (I’m a little obsessed with Pixiwoo at the moment).

OK, now I’m off to go wash my brushes because I haven’t done a deep clean in weeks. I’ve just been wiping the same ones off on a paper towel and hoping for the best. #keepingitreal!

Man, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to make it through the day, you know? LOL! ?

You have a good weekend, OK?

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen