Makeup Wars | Beauty and Fashion Tech

Nov 27, 2012

Makeup Wars, Great Holiday Metallics

November 27, 2012 By Carleenp 14 Comments

The Makeup Wars group is looking at holiday metallics this week. I decided to go dig through my favorite source of metallics, MAC Pigments, and see what I liked in the gold and silver range. I also have a new Laura Mercier gold eye shadow that I just adore. Plus, as a bonus, I dug up a blast from the past with a look at white and gold holiday nails from the 2007 MAC Antiquitease collections.

Between these you could go for a neat holiday look such as this one from the 2007 MAC collection, which was one of MAC’s best holiday collections in my opinion. I think their holiday collections have become a bit more generic the past few years.

Metallic Pigments

Pigments are great for holiday metallics. The high amount of pigment allows for the shimmer to really show well. Apply them wet for even more color pop. Here are a few favorites from my stash.

Here are swatches of the pigments in the shades Reflects Antique Gold (a glitter), Silver Fog, Gold Mode, Rushmetal, and Blonde’s Gold.

Silver Fog and Blonde’s Gold are available in the MAC regular collection. The others were limited edition.

Laura Mercier Eye Shadow

For a beautiful limited edition shadow that you can get right now, check out the shade Gilded Moonlight from the Laura Mercier Art Deco Collection. This true gold is gorgeous and is packed with pigment.

Here is a swatch of Gilded Moonlight.

Gold Holiday Nails

Metallic polishes are great for the holidays. In 2007 I copied the MAC Antiquitease nails by applying a flat white polish, followed by gold that was dabbed at with a paper towel. It makes for an easy to do nail art project.

I couldn’t find my old high res photo of it, but here is a smaller photo.

You can see my original Antiquitease post here: MAC Antiquitease Nail Polish.

Want to see more holiday metallics? Click on through to the other posts in the Makeup Wars group!

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Filed Under: Eyeshadow, Holiday Items, Makeup, Makeup Wars, Nail Products Tagged With: Holiday, Laura Mercier, M.A.C., Makeup Wars

Oct 29, 2012

Makeup Wars: Best BB Cream

October 29, 2012 By Carleenp 11 Comments

I love BB creams and have a number of favorites. Currently, I often find myself wearing Skin 79 products, in part because I got a kit with samples of 4 of their different creams. At $15 for this sample kit, it is a great value way to try a few quality BB creams. I got my kit at YesStyle, which is my absolute favorite store for Asian makeup and fashion (they are awesome for cool handbags and shoes too)!

The BB creams in the kit are:

Skin 79 Super BB (VIP Gold): Formulated for anti-aging.

Super BB Plus (Hot Pink): formulated for skin brightening and hyperpigmentation.

BB Diamond Prestige: A BB cream formulated for oily skin.

BB Diamond Pearl. Another good one for oily skin with light illuminators.

Skin 79 is a Korean company and these BB creams are the real deal, as opposed to the many drugstore brands popping up that claim BB in their title, but really are just tinted moisturizers. A real BB cream will be thicker and can often be worn alone in place of foundation with fairly decent coverage. It normally will also include treatment actives to address various skin concerns. The idea is to have a multi-function product all in one package.

Skin79’s products are tinted and they blend well, making it easy match your skin if you are in the fair to light range. Basically, once blended, they tend to look OK across several skin tone ranges. Where this brand it doesn’t work well though is for those with darker skin. The Asian companies have not done a lot to cater to that unfortunately. The US companies have done a bit better with that, but their products are often inferior. Look at the Bobbi Brown BB cream as an option for medium to dark skin (although they still lack a very dark shade) . The creams wear OK with my oily skin, but I do often apply a mattifier first, even with the creams that are meant for oily skin, as they still tend to leave me shiny at times.

Below are Skin79 swatches in the following order: Super BB (VIP Gold), Super BB Plus (Hot Pink), BB Diamond Prestige, and BB Diamond Pearl. All of these blend to match my skin pretty well despite looking different right out of the tube.

For example, here it is after I blended my arm. I was left with a smooth, skin tone matching surface. Coverage is quite good from them too.

Here is a goofy self portrait. I’m wearing BB Diamond Pearl, which is the lightest of the four. I put powder over it, which mattes it up more, but I think if you can avoid the powder (ie you have normal or dry skin), you can get a better look from it.

Want to see more beauty blogger favorite BB creams? Click on through the links below!

Filed Under: Foundation, Makeup, Makeup Wars, Skin Care Tagged With: BB Cream, Makeup Wars, Skin79, Swatches

Oct 15, 2012

Makeup Wars: Halloween Manicure Epic Fail!

October 15, 2012 By Carleenp 12 Comments

OK, so I am not a nail polish blogger for a reason. I really am terrible at nail art! But, I figured I would give it a go for the Makeup Wars Halloween Manicure topic. What you see below isn’t pretty. I partly blame myself, but mostly I think the kit I bought is not very good. I also made a video and, to compound the debacle, the camera died partway through and I didn’t realize it until after I took all of the polish off! Gah!!!! But I did add some fun annotations to the video to make up for it.

So read on for more on my epic manicure failure with a partial failed video!

For my manicure, I chose these Kiss Nail Artist kits at my local grocery store. These kits have three bottles of polish and some little stencils to use on your nails. Mistake number one that I stupidly did not consider: Buying a cheap kit probably isn’t going to result in good results, especially if you already are a klutz with a nail polish brush!

I quickly realized that I needed a base coat, so I randomly grabbed two MAC polishes. One was MAC Coral Wave and the other MAC Black Enough? from random past collections. Mistake number two was that I didn’t realize that Black Enough? was matte until after I put it on!

From there, I started applying stencils. They were a bit hard to handle, but not too terrible. The problem arose when I tried to paint them in. I think the idea is to paint carefully inside the stencil, let it dry and pull off the stencil. The kits lacked instructions on this. But the thin brush with the polishes just gooped up and dripped all over. If I wiped it and dipped it lightly, then it didn’t get enough polish. So on this I blame the product. Application was not ideal.

After letting things set, I peeled the stencils. My pinky, which was supposed to have a star, came out as a black blob. Perhaps I can pretend it is a smashed spider? Something that was supposed to look like a sword looked like black streaks. A few diamond patterns were so-so, but they smeared when I lifted the stencil. Yellow applied over black did not work at all because the yellow was not opaque enough, even with multiple coats.

But!!!! Despite being all thumbs, my thumb came out OK! So, here is my thumb because it actually looks OK (kinda sorta).

Here is a look at the shameful rest of the bunch. I declare these an epic failure!

If you want to see video of the process, here is part of one with annotations. Mistake number three was not checking my battery before filming. It died part way through and I didn’t even realize it! So this video ends a bit on the early side. Oh, and I really don’t recommend buying the Kiss nail artist sets. I realize I am not good at this stuff, but it still was not a good product in my opinion.