Sweet on Tarte! Holiday kits galore!

There are but few things in this world that I love more than quality cosmetics and a great deal! Combine the two and I'm a goner. I bought 6 out of the 9 holiday sets that Tarte offered this year. I haven't tallied up the final cost and I have no intention of doing so! I will pay it off slowly over time thanks to my QVC card and some easy pay options! I swear, even if I didn't love the holidays for a million other reasons, the beauty deals alone would be enough for me to make my season bright!

Lovely goodies from Urban Decay!

I've been picking up Urban Decay products for a few months, but haven't had time to haul them before now. Around the beginning of April my area got both an Ulta and a Sephora and I the fact that I no longer have to drive to Chicago to pick up makeup has made things very interesting for me! My poor husband is in hell.

For me it's been a dream! Last Christmas my local Dillard's department store got in a shipment of Too Faced products to sell for the holidays. When I saw them I had an absolute GIRLGASM! Seeing my excitement, several of the cosmetics department associates came over and asked me why I was so excited, had I heard of the brand, and have I used some of the products. How could it be that these professionals had no idea what Too Faced was?! It's not like Dillard's just hires anyone for those positions, they actually hire trained professionals, licensed estheticians and makeup artists! But none of them had ever heard of the brand, and company policy didn't allow them to put out testers as it wasn't a brand they were going to be carrying after the holiday. Flabbergasted, I finally bought a few things and then handed them over so that they could do some swatches and pray at the altar of Too Faced.

Anyhow, my point is that just a few short months ago I was a beauty addict without anyone to share my addiction with. The opening of both Sephora and Ulta has given me an opportunity to join with other like-minded friends who text me if they walk into Ulta and they're handing out free samples (and OMG did they EVER that first month!)or coupons. It's been wonderful!

Which brings me back again to Urban Decay and my collective haul. It all started with the Naked Palette...

My Nightly Experimental Swatches

Follow my blog with Bloglovin
So for the last 24 hours there's been a huge beauty event on QVC. I watched as much of it as I could, and tivo'd some for later because despite the fact that I want to buy everything I see, I can't, and just watching the experts put on makeup is enough for me to get inspiration and try to duplicate things with my own makeup.

The things I was intrigued by today were the Laura Geller Eye Rims, which won the award for best eyeliner. It's a baked marbleized product and it's mostly black with other colors mixed in. I didn't want to pay the high price so I went and found my marbleized shadows from Too Faced that I got from their vintage sale. Turns out, what I already have looks just as good as what I could see on the screen! Awesome for me because while I bought all eight of the Too Faced shadows because they were cheap, I'm ashamed to admit that I've never used them. Not even once! So I'm pretty stoked to be able to use them as eyeliners so I don't have to feel any more guilt.

Oddly enough, besides using shadow for liner, the other thing that caught my attention was the founder of Tarte, who actually uses liners in place of shadows! It was opposites day, I guess. So I started experimenting with my liners seeing which ones would make good shadows, and I found seven decent ones that are long lasting but give me enough time to blend them out. After I tried them on my arms I tried my face and I found I oculd do a sexy, smudged eye in less than 5 minutes, and that incldes the mascara!

So that's what this picture is....liners smudged as shadows and shadows wetted and smudged as liners. I like the way they look on my arm. I think I'll keep them there until morning to see how they last throughout the night.

Now that all that's out of the way, I must admit to something. I did break down and buy something today. I bought the New Beauty Test Tube which debuted last night. The products in it are INCREDIBLE! I can not wait to get it so I can make a Sample Box Wars video!

From my KIN

No Bieber Fever Here! Stick to singing and leave the nail polish alone!

So I was at Walmart yesterday trying to find someone who could replace a watchband on my broken watch. The lady at Walmart was the 5th person to tell me no. Apparently I bought the world's only non-fixable watch! Afterwards I headed on over to the beauty section to see if any Fall 2011 products had made their way onto the shelves and besides some Hard Candy products, which I will talk about in an upcoming video, the answer was pretty much no for that as well. I did see a cute Nicole by OPI Mini Hit-Makers 4 piece nail polish collection and decided to check it out. For over 6 months, I've been picking up Justin Bieber "The One Less Lonely Girl" Collection polishes and then putting them back down because, to be totally honest, I find the kid more annoying than a herd of hungry goats. But this little mini collection was just too cute to put back so I spent the $10 and brought it home.

Big mistake! It took 4 coats of "Canadian Star" to get my nails to what I would call opaque. 3 was almost good enough, but it was pretty streaky. I painted "Eenie Meanie Marry Me" on my accent nails and that took 3 coats. I did test the other 2 colors and "Coral Denominator" shown on my nails below is the only color that can apply in two coats (I know it looks terrible, it was a rush job!). The last shade "I Pink I Love Him" is a pale pink jelly with sparse glitter and would never work on it's own, but also doesn't work well with the other 3 polishes in this set.

All in all, my first experience with Justin Bieber nail polish was just as annoying as I find the kid to begin with. I want my $10 back! For that amount, I could have gotten both an Essie and a Wet n Wild polish! Lesson learned. No Bieber fever here.

From my KIN

Giving myself a do-over!

So now that I've had a blog for over and year and never really posted to it, I've decided to give myself a do-over. This seems like the perfect time because I'm just coming back from a youtube break while I dealt with my seemingly never ending back problems. But this time is different. Not just my commitment to my blog but also because for the first time in 17 years I have a shred of hope at living a halfway normal life! I've been keeping a secret all summer and I think I'm finally ready to let the cat out of the proverbial bag. I thought before if I said it out loud to the world, then Murphy's Law would take hold and my shred of hope would be...well...shredded. But I've never been a glass half empty sort of gal and it's time I started acting like it! So here goes....My new pain specialist told me that there's a chance that he can CURE ME! Well, he didn't actually say cure, he said that he wants to perform a series of procedures on me called PROLOTHERAPY and that the procedures are curative. Potayto/Potahto, however you say it, it sounds like a cure to me!

What is Prolotherapy? As it was explained to me, it's an ancient procedure where an irritant is injected into your ligaments and then your body reacts to the irritant by growing stronger and more fibrous thereby strengthening your body. If this works, will I still have 6 bulging/herniated disks in my spine? Yes, there's nothing I can do about that but wait for the day they can give me metal spine like a terminator. But save the shooting pains down my legs, most of my pain is from my body reacting to those bad disks. My muscles have been locked up for years, I have arthritis, my hips are painful all the time, and I have joint and facet pain. Supposedly prolotherapy will cure all that. The downside to this miraculous new (yet ancient) treatment? It's not covered by insurance. And it's expensive. And it can take from 4-6 treatments for it to give maximum benefits. And there's no guarantee that it will work. OUCH.

They try to see if you're a good candidate for prolotherapy before they try it by giving you a test that IS covered by insurance. The doctor takes anesthetic and injects it into your sore places, or near them, or something, and then if you have significant pain relief for a few hours, then you're a good candidate. Problem with me is that I'm so absolutely fucked up that at first they decided they could only do half of my back because I was needing just too much anesthetic, and then there came a point when my doctor told me that he couldn't even finish the one side, that if he did any more, I'd get really sick from the amount of anesthetic. So I walked out of the office with about one half of one half of my back done and then I was supposed to figure out if it was helping? The only way I could describe it was like it felt like my hip and leg were asleep. They were tingling and numbish yet still painful. So here I've spent weeks praying that it would still work, and wondering where the hell we were going to come up with the money to try it.

So that's my big secret. Potentially life changing, at least I hope it is! Until my next appointment with my doctor I'm just going to stay hopeful and hope I find a copy of The Declaration of Independence behind an ugly painting at a garage sale, or plant a quarter and see if I can get a money tree to grow, or find myself filming the next viral video. None of these things is likely, but a girl can dream, right?!

Which brings me full circle to my do-over. If I'm going to potentially get a fresh start, why not my blog as well? This time I'm much more computer savvy, I can even edit my videos now, so why not make a run at the blogosphere? Besides, maybe if I start putting my thoughts in my blog posts, I can keep my youtube videos down in length? I sure hope so!