Archive | February 2012

Mishellow’s Ultra Tips

I was asked if I would do a makeup tutorial recently, which I won’t do a makeup tutorial because I’m not a makeup artist and I wouldn’t know how to give tips for anyone besides myself. I get my ideas from tutorials on Youtube and also Japanese magazine scans. Instead I’ve decided to share my tips for beauty and fashion. I search Google a lot, so its not to say that you can’t find these ideas if you’re looking in the right place. I’m posting because I want to compile all of that searching into one ultimate post. A fair bit of it is also personal opinion.

I’m just going to post point-form in different categories. I hope that works ^^;

Skincare

Instead of buying expensive makeup remover wipes or gels, buy unscented baby wipes. Moisturize and DONE! Baby wipes are MEANT to kill bacterias for babies, so what do you think they do for your face? Yes, they may be a bit harsh for your skin, so wet the wipe a bit with warm water to dilute the wipe’s power and warm it up for your face. I stopped experiencing that odd breakout with this method also.

if your eye makeup is still stubborn, get some cotton pads and olive oil.
If you really want to, get a facial moisturizer, otherwise that giant bottle of St. Ives for about $5 is the cheapest and most non-grease ball moisturizer I’ve found.
Every now and then, get one of those $2 facial masks from the drug store~ They’re a nice treat for your skin and a good break for you.

Hair

If you’re lazy in the morning but you want curled hair, shower at night and twist your hair into 2 buns secured with elastics. When you wake up in the morning take them out and you should have mermaid curls, not crimps like you’d get from braiding.
When you wash your hair, focus the shampoo only on the scalp and scrub. when you apply conditioner, focus below your scalp
If you have hard water and your hair feels gunky even though you just washed it, rinse your hair with white vinegar.
I used to use Nice N Easy hair colour and people said “EFF OFF THAT ISN’T BOX HAIR COLOUR” … too bad it smells really bad and burns your eyes. If you can put up with it though…..
If you suck at dyeing your own hair, don’t be tempted to use that Perfect 10 comb unless your hair is pretty short, it DOES waste the product a lot faster. Just start at the bottom of your hair and take it slow.
For fried hair, break out the olive oil again, deep condition your hair with it.

Makeup

Any foundation that is very liquid is going to have a very light coverage. More creamy = more coverage depending on your needs.
Using waterproof mascara is much darker black than non-waterproof, don’t ask why because I don’t know!
If you have blue/grey eyes like me and love black eyeliner even though it makes your eyes seem to look dull, use a black-grey liner for the bottom lid only
If you’re half awake when you do your makeup like me, set out everything in order that you would use it, then put it back in your makeup bag as you finish with that item, then there’s no clean up and you always have all your items ready the next day.
PRIME your makeup so it doesn’t melt, finally Rimmel London has one that isn’t ORANGE and cheap. (Its the white bottle with BLUE text)
On the subject of “winged” eyeliner… A lot of tutorials tell you to go UP and wing, I think of my eye like a rainbow, I curve all the way down to my lower lash line then wing.
Don’t buy concealer that is too light, it will make your dark circles look worse!
If you hate fake eyelashes, but like super lashes get: 1 mascara for volume and 1 for length~! (like XXL Pro Volume and Lash Stiletto from Maybelline, I don’t like mascara from any other company)
If you like dark eye makeup, wear a light shade on your lips. If you like bright red or pink lipstick, do lighter eye makeup and emphasize your eyebrows more. (Or risk looking like a CLOWN)
If you FAIL with liquid eyeliner, get Maybelline Eyestudio, it’s thicker and comes with a brush. More solid and easy to handle with the same bold look of liquid.

Fashion

Use loose shirts with tighter bottoms, and tighter tops with looser fitting bottoms.
As with the above rule, to avoid looking like trash: wear a more revealing bottom with a covered up top and revealing top with covered up bottoms.
WEAR A WAIST BELT if you want to appear slimmer (if you’re a pear like me wear a high waist belt
I wear a uniform at work and I’m too lazy to bring a change of clothes so what I do is wear the black pants with a tank top and swap my work shirt for a nice button up sweater or a sheer top to wear over the tank top for going out after. In the summer you could just bring a pair of shorts and sandals~
NEVER EVER EVER EVER WEAR LEGGINGS WITHOUT A SHIRT TO COVER YOUR ASS!!!!!!!!!111111oneoneoneone I don’t care if you’re 11 years old and size 2… just NO!!!!
Try to choose colours that look good with your skin tone and hair colour. Example: When my hair was red certain pinks looked terrible on me, but as a blonde they look much better.
Don’t be afraid of patterns, stripes, and plaids~! Otherwise your wardrobe will look like its full of basics.

Exercise

……….ahahahahahah just kidding. I have nothing to say in the exercise department. The extent of my exercise is DDR every now and then.

Resources

Makeup Alley – Reviews for all beauty products so you can look it up before you buy it.

Vvshu – Where I get my Japanese magazine scans from. Everything for fashion and beauty

STUDY WEEK~!

Feb27

At last the freedom to relax from school and do some fun things~!

Over the weekend my oldest sister came with her husband. It was pretty sweet we went to the AGO (Art Gallary of Ontario), which I was really excited because I thought we could take pictures and then it turns out you can’t. Its only the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) that you can take (non-flash) photos. I already went to both as a school group this past year.

We had to research a specific country’s artifacts at the ROM to make a travel poster or book cover, then we saw the Chagall exhibit do analyze one of his works.

This is my Egypt “travel poster”

9″ x 12″ on brown canson paper, pencil crayons. 2011

It could have been better, but we had strict rules like: Can only say “Egypt” and must use content that you found at the ROM or from the reference library we visited also. On top of that we could only use pencil crayon. He would allow us to use black ink for the text only. Such strict rules~! I scored 18/20 (90%) on this so there~!

Anyways I’m going to finally do some work for myself this week since I’ve been putting off drawing any ANIMU. I was in the preliminary stages of a project in August, but it kind of died, as non-paid projects often do. Now I get to start over creating characters and all that stuff.

My younger sister Jen is coming later on today and it’s gonna be really AWESOME~!

The last February that there was a leap year, we hosted a weekend we called “Diabetes Weekend” simply because the point of it was to eat lots of junk food and have fun~! It was still the BEST time. We thought “we should do this again in 4 years, but I wonder where we will all be?” All in very different places now it would seem. The only attendees will be me and Jen, so we’re down to 50% of the original group. Its kind of weird that I’m the oldest out of the old group of friends and yet I’m still the least serious. I don’t understand people who don’t just want to have fun.

This year will still be even more epic because there’s lots of exciting things we can do in Toronto as opposed to our small town haven of extreme boredom.

Hope everyone’s study week is AWESOME~!!!!

Japanese Food & Bento Boxes

Feb21

Recently I finished reading Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat by Naomi Moriyama.

I got it on ebook since I have a Kobo Vox now. (Who knew that an anti-reading person could be converted by a device?)

It was pretty addictive to read, although I only skimmed the recipe parts.

What I liked about it

There’s a lot of information from different sources and she’s very encouraging that it can be easy to make and eat Japanese food more often. She doesn’t go too much into the ‘exercise routine’ idea of it besides just telling you to walk more often.

She has done good research which may or may not be a biased opinion for the sole purpose of the book. Either way it sounds convincing and professional.

Not only does the book include recipes, but also sample meal plans which include those recipes~!

A wide variety of research, life stories, historical tidbits, interviews, and myths are used to make the book addictive to read.

What really irritated me

The fact that after all that preaching about healthy eating, easy Japanese meals, and drinking more green tea…. She says at the end of the book that she really loves Starbucks coffee better than green tea, and enjoys eating burgers.

Also she stated that Japanese people aren’t concerned with diet because OBVIOUSLY JAPANESE FOOD IS SO HEALTHY…………. um if she has seen any of the 38kg models in Japanese magazines lately she would realize that Japanese people are obsessed with diets, diet pills, and super thin bikini advertisements for girls.

In Japan they are allowed to ask for your photo accompanying your resume and if you are overweight, they will be less likely to offer you a job.

Over all

It’s a good book, I really enjoyed it. Although really all I can take away from it is:

- Eat more veggies/fruits/fresh food in general

Unfortunately I don’t like fish much and Ariel is allergic…

I’ve been interested in bento for quite some time now though. I had a bento box but it has been lost forever, probably thrown out in the trash at Ariel’s parents place. T______T

I bought him a bento box a couple of years back but its VERY under used. He has the blue one so I decided to order the red one: (photo from Jbox.com, click photo to visit the vendor’s website)

For a while when I was out of school and unemployed, my little sister was in high school still. I made her bento-style lunch for a while until she told me she doesn’t really like eating lunch :/

I used to visit Cooking Cute religiously…it seems that she doesn’t update the website much any more since the birth of her son and work schedule. She’s a great resource for those who need a gluten free diet~!

Honestly I’m still very much a newbie. I hope I will be encouraged to make cute lunches once I receive my new bento in the mail <3

(Please note that I’m not affiliated with Chapters/Indigo/Kobo/Jbox/Jlist companies, The products are NOT sponsored, and purchased with my own funds.)

My NEW Olympus

Feb15

Last summer I had a pretty pink Olympus camera, but I dropped it in the sand attempting to take sexy bikini pics of myself <_<

Sand got in the lens….. and made it eternally unusable. Ariel then took it upon himself to help me pick out a new camera. He said “No more pink ones” T_____T

In August I ended up with a Sony Cybershot, some 12 megapixel one in red. It was an alright camera, but I never really fell in love with it. I probably charged it about 5 times over a course of 6 months time. When the battery died after last time, I charged it overnight. When I took it the next day the battery was dead.

-_-

Then I realized when I tried to charge it again, that the battery light would come on for 5 sec then not charge any more. Ariel cracked the charger opened and said it smelled burnt and short circuited sigh…

So I obsessed for a while about which camera to get. I just missed my old pink Olympus but they don’t make that one any more.

I found a model that came in purple and decided I’d get that. Until I went to the store and they told me they didn’t have the purple one……

I agonized about it some more and there’s NO CAMERA (in my price range) that I really want. I thought about my colour scheme, which is pink x black and realized after looking at the pretty deco on my old pink camera that I could buy the black one and deco with pink zing zing~

So I went back to the store to get it and this guy helped me out, but he gave me the SILVER model, which I didn’t realize until I got home D=

IMO silver is the WORST colour for a camera………. I don’t know why I just HATE IT. I went back within 3 hrs and exchanged it.

Now my new baby Olympus is home with me <3

Its charging now so I should be in business again by tomorrow morning ^w^

Aahahah there goes all my money so I dunno what I will do for fun to even take pictures of…

SPROUTS~!

Feb11

It’s hard to believe that only 4 days after the planting of my seeds that I have sprouts~!

Actually only after 2 days some of my plants shot up, but now they’re almost touching the lid~! Ariel freaked out because I put the carton on top of our heater with the lid on. He thought I was trying to boil the water inside until I explained:

IT’S WORKING AS A GREENHOUSE~!!!!

I’m pretty sad because my camera’s charger isn’t working and I just got that camera in August.

So through the power of my cell phone’s craptastic camera:

12/16 pots sprouted so far, but I’m not sure which is which.

I know I planted:

8 Lettuce

4 Mint

4 Wildflowers

But I didn’t mark them and their freshly sprouted leaves all look the same.

Other than the miracle of plant growth I’ve honestly been working around the clock and then crashing from so much school work.I think I slept for like 13 hours last night.

>_<

The Beginning of my Urban Garden

Feb7

^O^;

I’m super-excited~!

I planted the seeds today for my first attempt at a balcony garden~!

I’m just having difficulty not being able to connect with nature in the city unless I go to High Park or Rouge Park. Both are a fair distance from where I live. It feels like I have everything I need here in Toronto, except freedom to move and experience the wide open vast world. My spirit still wants the beaches 10 minutes away and the grass on my feet no further than my own back yard. Perhaps one day when I have gained enough success here I can move somewhere with a yard. (I’m too scared of stepping in doggie doo doo in the park….)

This all started when I browsed a discount book store and found a book on urban gardening for $3. I’ve still only skimmed most of the info in it, but the main point is that I can refer to it for reference when I need to. Sometimes books are better than searching the internet for hours on end.

At the moment I’m starting out with three items to see how it goes:

Lettuce

Grand Rapids type is recommended because you can take the leaves from it without taking the whole plant. Perfect for me, since I use only about 4 leaves or so for a salad. The package doesn’t really say what kind of lighting is recommended, so I’m not sure if it will work, but it would be nice to be able to have a literally FRESH salad from my balcony and not waste as much lettuce as I do already by having only two people in my household.

Mint

Herbs are generally supposed to be ‘easy’ to grow. My reading mentioned that mint is a greedy root plant, and once you grow it, you’ll have it forever. My grandma used to have mint that grew in her back yard and we’d always have some tasty mint when we played in her back yard. My grandma passed away in 2001, and I still miss her. It would be nice to have that scent memory of her with me at home.

Wildflower

Where would I be without something that won’t eventually be ‘harvested’? I think wildflowers will be easy to grow and I will get many different varieties. The packet also mentions that its okay to be in partial shade. I’m not really sure if they will need to be pollinated… I guess I can attempt to do that on my own if no bees come to visit my residence.

My investment in this project so far is under $20

- Seeds for x3 plants (3 X $1.89)

- small pots to get the seedlings started ($2.99)

- seedling soil ($4.99)

- watering can ($2.99)

With taxes it came to about $18 CAD

I’m still going to need:

- bigger pots in 2 – 4 weeks

- fertilizer

- new soil

I expect to invest $50 or less for the whole project. We’ll see how it goes once I start shopping around. The great thing is that next year, I will have plenty of supplies to get started again. (If I so choose to try again depending on how it works out)

Wish me luck~~~

The Crafting Addiction

Feb5

I went to Michael’s for the first time, which is a crafting supply store O____o

There was so much awesome stuff for ANYTHING you’d ever want to make. Usually I just like to sew, but I had something specific in mind I wanted to make.

When I think of “crafts” usually I think about all the horribly tacky items that are FUN to make, but not useful to anyone anywhere. It was really neat to look around the store, but mainly I avoided the yarn section and scrap booking.

I’m not really sure why but I just LOATHE scrap booking. (please don’t rip my head off if you happen to like it, maybe I just have no talent for it)

I always see these really pretty designs of hair clips in the Japanese magazine Koakuma Ageha which is pretty much my ideal for beauty, even though I’m often too lazy to do the actual look. I try to do everything nice at least once a week if I can.

This is what it looks like just laid out on my desk.

Me wearing it~!

It’s actually really EASY to make a neat hair clip just like this, but not exactly cheap. I mean, you COULD make it out of less-expensive flowers but then the result wouldn’t be the same. If I narrow down the cost to just one clip, I’d say they cost about $25 to make just one. Like I said, I chose the highest quality flowers I could find.

I don’t really have many followers for my blog so I’m not going to bother posting a tutorial on how to make one.

Wearing it, I feel kind of like I should be going to a wedding or something, but I really love it~!

I’m getting pretty busy with school now, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for creating things in the future… ^^;

PS: Sorry for the link-inserts into my pics, I don’t really like to do it, but at the same time this is my project so I don’t want people to steal my pictures and claim them as their own…

M.I.A.

Feb1

I’ve been totally neglecting my blog… my life has been a whirlwind and there’s no chance of it letting up until Friday night, when I will pass out asleep.

Sunday – work schedule got switched on me, putting a real damper on my plans to go out of town in the afternoon, but it worked out.

Monday – appointment with my dentist, shopping ( got some shoes <3 )

Tuesday – early start and appointments x2. I think my orthodontist wants to take my wisdom teeth for fun….. he’s strange. I also got my hair cut.

Have to be up for around 6AM, so I don’t even know why I’m awake now. I have another work shift an hour after my train gets in, then a class.

Thursday is also a marathon school day. Friday I will make a feeble attempt to catch up on sleep and go to more classes.

gogogoogogo level 100~

T________________T

☆ Mishellow ☆