Makeup Of The Day: Peacock Blue

I am still revelling in the ability to wear elaborate make-up to university. 

I haven't been wearing it as much as I like because I have been ill, and if I am coughing and sneezing I do not have a steady enough hand to apply my usual make-up, plus I am liable to poke myself in the eye, and my eyes are already watering and my face is all puffy. I am not going to try and cake myself in make-up to hide it, because it will make it worse. 

Selfies by HouseCat

I have been playing with making my makeup a bit more colourful to match my hair, and this look incorporate both blocks of dramatic, dark colour and my usual swirlies. As you can see by the top two pictures, I am trying to wear my glasses in my makeup photographs because that is both how I usually look (I need my glasses to see what I am doing at university), and because I think it is interesting to see how my makeup and glasses work together. As my glasses are quite swirly and dramatic themselves, my makeup has to be quite strong to still be the main visual element. 

Gloss black lipstick is currently something I really like doing, but sadly it is not something that lasts very well for clubbing, and certainly not eating out. It ends up matte very rapidly at college, but at least it remains black. 

Makeup Of The Day: Being batty!

Hallowe'en is coming! So I experimented with something a little bit kitsch and Hallowe'en-y.

As such, on Monday I decided it would be a good idea to draw bats on my face. I was right; bats ARE a good idea. I need MORE bats, in a greater variety of arrangements! I recently bought a selection of vinyl bat stickers for my study window, which I have arranged in a sweeping colony swirling around the edge of the glazing, and I figured that this sort of arrangement of bats would be good for curling down my cheekbone. 

Selfie by the HouseCat

I used greens and blues for the eye-shadow because that matches my hair. I was thinking of using purple for a more stereotypical Hallowe'en colour, but I think slime-green has become somewhat of a traditional Hallowe'en colour too now. Orange doesn't suit me, so it would never be orange. 

Also, these pictures are a somewhat edited, and not necessarily particularly well, because they were phone-cam selfies that turned out washed-out, faded and weirdly blue because I didn't adjust the white balance & exposure right. I tried to make the dark bits darker and the colours right, so that includes darkening up the makeup a little and putting the vibrancy back in my hair, but I know that on some monitors it looks like I have over-compensated and the pictures are too dark in places. As per usual, edited with ::PicMonkey::, which is a free online picture editor, and has a neat collage tool.

Mermaid Make-Up

Today I experimented with colourful make-up. 

A very short post today!

I'm usually the sort of person that opts for very monochrome eye-makeup, but today I tried doing some make-up to match the colours in my hair. My hair is currently a darker gradient than before, with Directions Apple Green at the top, Stargazer Turquoise in the middle, and Directions Alpine Green for the back and bottom of my hair.

Not the best selfies. Photos by HouseCAT

For extra vibrant eyeshadow colours, I mask off under my eyes with bandage/dressing tape (being careful not to press too hard, otherwise it sticks fast and hurts a lot to pull off!) and then masking from the outer corners of my eyes to the outer ends of my eyebrows. I then cover the whole eyelid area right up to my brows in white foundation. The white foundation gives the eyeshadow something to stick to in order to last longer, and acts as a white ground to enhance vibrancy (something I learnt from Pre-Raphaelite painting techniques!). The masking using bandage/dressing tape also creates very clean, crisps edges. Really be careful not to stick it down too hard though, otherwise it really does tug at your skin to remove it (and as I have particularly stretchy skin, this is not fun!).

The finished effect reminded me of mermaids and ocean colours. Traditionally, mermaids are not always nice creatures, at least not in British mythology, where they're often a bad omen, or want to drown sailors - a bit like sirens - and are often associated with the weather turning nasty (this is Britain; the weather does that a lot, so perhaps we are overrun with mermaids? :P ). In Scottish mythology, there's a mermaid that's woman for the top section, and salmon for the bottom section, called a Ceasg or Maighdean Mhara that is a bit more benevolent, and she will grant three wishes to whomever catches her.

The photographs were taken on my webcam, and are not the best quality and are a bit hazy. They were also really quite dark despite it being a bright day, so I had to artificially lighten them in PicMonkey, so apologise if I look a bit paler than normal and a bit digital. The resolution wasn't good to begin with, and using tools that aren't meant as dodge and burn for those purposes in PicMonkey sort of smudged me further.