Beauty Sharing Session

Who doesn’t like getting a gift?  My good, great, fantastic and totally awesome friend bought me a bottle of Viva La Juicy by Juicy Couture last Christmas. Now, before I got any further, I must confess, I have been wearing the same Chanel perfume since high school. (Pause for shocked shrieks of horror).

I know, but it seems there are so few perfumes that I really love.  I’m just picky I guess.  So while I love my fantastic, stupendous and oh-so thoughtful friend for sending me this perfume, when I opened the box, I was a bit, well, nervous.

It’s a gift so you want to accept it gladly and be excited, but in my head I was already trying to tactfully word how much I was obviously going to hate this scent the next time I saw my friend.

To my awesome surprise, I took a whiff and fell madly in love with this scent. If I could spritz this post and have you smell this gorgeous stuff somehow, I would.  Let me try and pin down the scent for you. It has tones of berries and mandarin, but it also has a few smells I couldn’t decipher.  I’m not a perfume expert, just in case you were wondering.  When I looked it up on the web, I found that the gals behind this perfume also used Jasmine, Amber, Gardenia, and Honeysuckle.  It’s such a couture fragrance that it doesn’t really matter to me what exactly I’m smelling though. 

I’ve worn it a few times and I always get comments and inquiries as to what perfume I’m wearing and where to get it.  If I’m feeling generous, I might tell people, even though it kind of a secret I’d prefer to keep to myself. 

So if you’re like me and you’ve been going steady with the same fragrance for more years than are worth mentioning, give this perfume a try.

There is a reason chapstick companies make a lot of money.  Most of us experience dry, cracked, and peeling lips from time to time. I, however, feel like I experience peeling, flaky lips quite a lot of the time. What happens is that because they are flaky, I start to pick at my lips as it really annoys me. This all leads to sores and even bleeding lips. It’s a really bad habit much like biting your nails is.  I have found that I will often pick at my lips due to stress or boredom. It has gotten pretty bad actually. Some people see me and ask if I’d like to try this cold sore treatment they know. Imagine my embarrassment when I tell them it’s not a cold sore, it’s just my bad habit!

Even when I manage to leave my lips alone long enough for them to start to heal,  when I start to feel the edges of the dead skin healing, I’ll pick at them again, making it bleed.... I feel rather compelled to pick off all the dangling bits of skin.  At some point I knew I needed to do something. Where would you have gone for advice or treatment?  Do you think my reaction to stress or boredom is weird or crazy?  What bad habits have you formed when under stress?

Have you ever had an experience where you've had to quit a habit?  What helped you?  How do you deal with the temptation to start back up again?  Shoot me your comments, I’d love to hear from you!

It’s often very hard for me to pin down a favorite movie. People always ask questions like that when they are trying to get to know someone, and I always say some movie that I really like, but a favorite? That I just don’t know.  There are too many to choose from!  But when someone asks me for my favorite book, that I do know.

I generally read a lot of dystopian literature now days. I love The Hunger Games by Suzanne Colins and Divergent by Veronica Roth and one called The Maze Runner by James Dashner. And while I loved all of those, they don’t really hold a candle to my favorite book.  What’s odd is that my favorite book isn't even in the same genre as the ones I mentioned. It wasn't even written in the same century. No, my favorite book is called The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the person who asked me about my favorite book hadn't ever heard of this book or its author. This book doesn't have an post-apocalyptic world or anything like that. In fact, it is very much like a character drama.

It’s about this young, impressionable man named Dorian Gray. Privileged and handsome, he travels in the best circles and is exposed to many different ideals. What I like about the book is that it is a very rich study into the concept of influence. Dorian Gray is a rather tragic story and the reader has to wonder if one of the other two main characters, Basil and Lord Henry, have anything to do with the story’s rather dark ending. Can we really influence people to their ruin? Even though we all have our right to choose for ourselves, are those that heavily and willfully influence us also to blame when our lives fall to pieces? The premise of the book is that a portrait of Dorian Gray changes and distorts overtime as the real-life Dorian Gray makes questionable moral choices. It makes the reader wonder how different they might act if their soul could be painted for them.

It’s very much a book to think and ponder over. There’s very little action and quite a lot of talk, but it’s witty, intelligent and I love it.

Okay, while most of my posts focus on beauty and make up products, I decided to make an exception on this one. The reason is simple; I am pissed! If you didn't know, I go on a one day shopping spree at the start of each month, managing to lose 25% of my paycheck over beauty products. But every 3 months or so, I also stock up on clothing.

My dad used to tell me that the difference between branded and non-branded apparel was just a name tag on the collar. Thinking about it now, If I was one to follow everything my dad told me, I wouldn't be wasting a quarter of what I earn over beauty products now would I? Anyways, so I was window shopping as usual in one of the high end shopping malls, just like 90% of the people that come to the malls, when I came across this...

It was love at first sight right there and then! I mean, look at that beautiful plaid sweater! Look at that awesome contrast! I had to have it, so I went in and inquired about it. After learning that the sweater would cost me $2xx, I decided to do the practical thing and left the store. Psyche! Just kidding, I actually bought the sweater on my borderline maxed out credit card.

I couldn't wait to wear it later that week at a good friend’s surprise birthday party. I didn't even take the sweater out of the packaging for fear of upsetting the holy goddess that dwelt inside my closet. I just wanted to look like the model in the picture!

So I got the sweater straightened out that day and wore it an hour before the surprise was due. Things were all well until I actually started making some body movements. Right then and there, I noticed that the sweater was a bit tight around my belly’s circumference. I tried to loosen it up a bit and then I noticed something else; I simply wasn't looking as good as I thought I would. In fact, the contrast that I saw in the clothing store was barely noticeable right now. It was as if I had bought a different sweater altogether.

As a final ditch measure, I looked up the picture of the model and compared it to myself in the mirror. Though the clothes we were wearing were the same minus the skirt, there were many other differences. For one, I wasn't nearly as tall or light skinned as the model in the picture. Secondly, I didn't have the natural cat eyes she was sporting. After a little more looking around, I realized I had fallen prey to the marketing techniques of these overpriced clothing brands.

You see, these clothing brands hire ‘beautiful people’ to wear their clothes in order to attract us. They try to paint the idea that by wearing these high priced shirts and sweaters, our figure will automatically become closer to what the people in the ad are sporting.

Now sure, the first word coming into your head is conspiracy nut, right?