Now, I started this blog with women like me in mind. Women who want to look like they have millions in the bank, but who have closer to maybe...$7? give or take.

There is a difference in drugstore and high end makeup.

But, it's not always that noticeable, and it's even less noticeable to the people around you. Let's break it down.

Mascara
I've always been a big advocate of drugstore mascaras. There are so many choices, and they're so accessible, plus, I'm constantly bombarded with commercials for them, so drugstore is usually what I've leaned towards. My favorite brands?
Maybelline's LashStiletto
This mascara is my holy grail of mascaras, and I know I'm not the only one obsessed with this stuff. It's so black, makes your lashes sky high, and totally seperates your lashes. I always get compliments when I wear this mascara, not to mention people asking, "Are those fake lashes or...?" which is every woman's dream compliment. I could talk about this mascara for 48 minutes and still just be talking about the packaging.
If you live your life and never try LashStiletto, then you never really lived at all.

L'Oreal's Voluminous Million Lashes
Okay, you think I'm obsessed with LashStiletto? Wrong. I'm in love with this black gold. Look at it. It's beautful. I feel so fancy that I can't even. This mascara has it all, length, seperation, volume, and it's really black. It's wonderful, and this may be weird, but it actually smells kind of good.
This mascara is wonderful, but want to know the secret to BAM WOW lashes?
Layering different mascaras.
That's right. This may sound like it goes against my strict no spider leg lash policy, but it doesn't. 3 liberal coats of mascara will get you those wow factor lashes. 10 layers- good luck even opening your eyes with all that gunk.


The verdict?
Get yourself some drugstore mascara, it does the job and then some. Plus, nobody even knows that that's $40 mascara if you do buy some. You might as well just save yourself some money honey.



Eye Shadow
This is where things get more complicated.
Eye shadow is the staple to any makeup look (everything is the staple, who am I kidding) and it must be treated with respect. The biggest sin in the makeup world when it comes to eyes?
Not using eyeshadow base.
Just typing that sentence sent shivers down my spine.
Does your shadow crease into weird zebra-esque lines on your lids at the end of a long day? Well it's your fault. If you're not applying eyeshadow base, or plan on starting, then just move along. (Okay don't, but I'm seriously doing this for your own good. Tough love.)
Go out and buy this


You can buy a little mini tube at Sephora for only $12, and while that seems like a lot (that's like, 11 McChickens) it'll be well worth your buck. It's Urban Decay Primer Potion, and it will always be in my makeup bag.
This primer is the secret to eyeshadow, because from experience I have found that if you prime your lids with good primer, then even the cheapest eyeshadows will last all day crease free. But back to the shadow.
 My favorite high end shadow is..


Urban Decay's NAKED 2 Palette
This palette is my best friend, and guess what, it's the 2nd palette out of THREE that UD offers. This one is my personal favorite, though. It has these gorgeous eyeshadows, and I use every single one of them. The spectrum of colors is absolutely gorgeous and works with any skin tone/eye color. There are even tons of tutorials on YouTube showing you how to create looks with this palette. The shadows are extremely pigmented, and it also comes with a quality double-ended makeup brush. I can't even think of one con for this product, and I usually hate everything. This is a must-have product for every woman. You can buy this palette at your local beauty headquarters (Sephora, Ulta, etc.) for around $54, and what this product lacks in affordability, it makes up for in quality and how long it lasts. I know girls who keep their NAKED palettes for years. Plus, there are a few shades in this collection that are so glittery, you'll feel like Beyonce.




NYX Eyeshadow Palettes

I say palettes because I'm referring to all of them. I love NYX, and guess what? Their stuff is dirt cheap. them and E.L.F. are basically the loves of my life. I'm yet to run into a product of theirs that did't feel/look like it cost about 10X the amount that it actually did. Their eyeshadows are surprisingly pigmened, and even last fairly well without the *gasp* primer. I applaud this brand, and it's well worth the few dollars you'll drop.


Foundation

Okay, here's the most important thing in this post.
Not all foundations are equal.
If you want to have that flawless skin look, you're going to have to invest in it. I know, it's sad, but it's true.
I've gone through just about every drug store foundation you can, liquid, creme, powder, even the airbrush one (which feels like hairspraying your face, it was basically a trainwreck), and I've never been happy with any of them. If you've always used drug store foundation, and have never ventured into high end makeup and think that things will never be better, I am here to tell you that yes they will! And it's all up to you.
Not sure where to begin? Let me tell you

If you have normal/combinatio skin, and are looking for a medium (buildable to full) coverage foundation, I suggest...


MAC Studio Fix Foundation
Okay, now don't run. A lot of women who are new to high end makeup seem to think that MAC must cost hundeds and millions of dollars, and that's simply not true. Theire prices are actually quite reasonable. This foundation is wonderful for those of you who like a dewy/natural finish, with a lot of coverage. It's very blendable, has a silky texture on the skin, and doesn't look mask-like. So what's the price? This little beauty will only set you back about $27, and you can find it in your local MAC store, or in Dilliards, as well as ordering online. Finish with the matching Studio Fix powder and you're good for a night on the town.

If you have combination skin with redness/scarring/acne and want a full coverage foundation, I suggest...


tarte Amazonian Clay Full Coverage Foundation
I adore this foundation. It's got amazing coverage, and can cover scarring, acne, and redness without the need for concealer. It's got a creamy consistency, and a little goes a long ways, meaning that one tube will last you for a couple months with every day use. This foundation also does a good job at mimicking the texture of smooth skin once applied, and doesn't feel chalky to the touch. It lasts all day, I've never had to touch-up my foundation with this product. I do suggest it to the more dry skin/combination skin ladies though, because on smooth flawless skin, this foundation just seems to slide off. (If you've got smooth flawless skin, just don't wear foundation unless you absolutely want to. You've already got what the rest of us are trying to achieve).


So, is there a difference in drug store and high end makeup?
Yes, but there are times when either one will work.





Either way, I hope you end up gorgeous, and fab on.

The classic "Beauty Don'ts" post.

I wouldn't feel the need to add another post/video/whatever about what not to do, if there weren't so many of you still doing these things.
So, just like any rule, I wouldn't have to say to not do this if you weren't doing it.

1. Eyeliner on lower inner rim & mascara

I see this look on women all the time. Not much makeup at all. Just eyeliner and mascara, but, just on  the lower inner rim.

Look how small and strange her eye looks.
Ang guess what? It doesn't look good on ANYBODY. That's right. Megan Fox could do this, and it would look frumpy.
It's not an option ladies.
Why not spend that time you would spend lining the inner rim, and applying a little liner along the upper lashline.
Did you know you could even rim your upper inner rim? You can, and it actually gives the appearance of thicker lashes (never a bad thing).
So next time you're in a rush, it's better to just wear some mascara than to line that rim.


2. Not blending your eyeshadow

Seems like a no-brainer, right? Women everywhere are spotted commiting this crime every day. That's right ladies. And the worst part? Some women don't even realize it.

Laugh all you want, but I see girls that look almost this bad every day.
What is blending?
Blending is the art of swishing a blending brush along the edge of your shadow to blend it into your skin/the next shadow.
It's simple. It's easy. It's mandatory.


3. Too much mascara
It's actually a thing. No, really, it is.
Now some of ya'll may be thinking, "Eyelashes? Pfft. Like, you wear fake ones so what's the dif.?"

Allow me to ellaborate.



I'm honestly impressed at how much mascara she caked on there.
The rule is usually this: if you want some oomph on your lashes, go buy some.
That's right.
There's no need to wear falsies every day (unless you want to, then fab on), but if you want your eyelashes to look extra special, pop on some falsies and move on, because no matter how much mascara you pile on, it just looks more and more clumpy and terrible.
 I promise, on your 78th layer, it won't suddenly look like Kim K's lashes.



4. Not matching your foundation correctly.

If I had a nickel for every time I've someone's walked around like this, I'd be a bajillionare.
Okay, maybe I have made this beauty blunder a couple more times than I'd like to admit, but I have seen the error of my ways, and learned what I was doing wrong


The biggest mistake is when shopping for foundation, too many girls put the foundation on the back of their hand or wrist to match the color.

The back of your hand receives more sun than your face, and your wrist doesn't receive quite as much as your face, resulting in whatever foundation you buy being either darker or lighter than it needs to be.
To match your foundation to your face, test it on your neck.
Seems like a no-brainer but most women actually don't do this. This way, your face blends seemlessly into your neck.
Welcome to being flawless.


These may only be 4 don'ts, but they are the most crucial.

Thanks for your time,
and may you always be fab.
xoxo

You see these two words everywhere. They haunt your dreams and infiltrate your thoughts.

Eyebrow game.

or whatever the heck this means:

I'll admit, sometimes I see these girls on tumblr, insta, whatever, and they look so...flawless. They're eyebrows are these amazing sculpted works of art. Like, look at this

wha? how? huh?
How do you do that?
They look so perfect, and makeup artist-ish (is that a word? yup).
She even has a tutorial and I still can't make that happen. I even went and bought all the name brand products that she used. So what am I doing wrong?

I'll tell you.
I can make my eyebrows look like that, but when I look in the mirror, all I see is just that.
Eyebrows staring back at me.
Yes, yes I know.
The eyebrows frame the eyes, which are the focal point of the face.
But what happens when you frame a picture with a ridiculous frame?


And let's face it, trying to achieve the coveted eyebrow game can go terribly wrong. In fact, I'm sure you've seen the horror stories all over the internet. But, in case you haven't, feast your eyes on these:




I have to stop there. It hurts me internally because all these girls are so pretty, but they decided to get some fleeked out eyebrows or whatever the term is.
Some girls are like eyebrow unicorns.
They have brow game from the womb to the tomb, without much effort at all.
Exibit A:

She looks gorgeous, and I'm jealous.

And here's something that no one talks about:
What do those girls with the mad eyebrow game look like after a shower? Or first thing in the morning?


HELLO
Without the 37 steps they take to get that flawless brow, they look like their own worst nightmare.
You mean to tell me that they can commit like that?
Commit to having to fill in their eyebrows every single day?

Nah.

So what's right for you?
There's a happy medium, I promise. Grow your eyebrows back out, but pluck the little stray ones. Get rid of the weak. And the hairs in the middle.
Look up tutorials for how to tweeze your brows, not "how to get perfect brows"

The general rule is this chart:


Pretty self explanatory, but

A) line up a pencil with your nostril, and lay it flat against your face. Wherever the pencil lays, that's where your brows should start.

B) now take that same pencil and rotate it to meet the far corner of your eye. Wherever the pencil lays, that's where your brow should end.

As for the rest, I feel like every person is different, but that should serve as a pretty good reference.

So what do I say to those girls with the fab eyebrows and never ending perfection?

Now, don't get me wrong, if you give me 7 hours to get ready, I will use every second of that time to get ready. Believe me, it can be done.

But for most of you ladies, that sounds insane, and you only have about 5-20 minutes to get ready in the morning, and it usually comes down to that for me too, because I would rather spend every precious second I can in the heaven that is my bed every morning.

This tutorial will be of my everyday look, and while I won't go through every step (meaning eyeliner, lashes, brows, and foundation), I will show you ladies how to achieve the biggest part of any eye look:
the eyeshadow.

What you'll need for this eyeshadow look:

• Eyeshadow bruses (one blending brush, and one flat shadow brush)
• Eyeshadow (at least 3 or 4 colors, ranging from dark to light)
• To wake up at least 20 minutes before you have to leave. (I know, it seems impossible)

Start off by applying primer to your entire eyelid.
This is the secret to have crease-proof eyes, and it also keeps your eyeshadow looking freshly applied all day.
I use an Urban Decay primer lotion, and it is pretty much magical. I have a lot of redness in my skin naturally, and this primer totally takes that away.

Next, you're going to get your flat shadow brush, and your darkest eyeshadow, and begin to "pack" it on your eyelid. Packing means lightly pressing down, not swooshing. Swooshing it on will cause "fall-out", which means you get a dusting of eyeshadow on your cheeks, and this is basically

the worst thing ever.



Now, I see women leave their eyeshadow like this, completely not blended out, and let me tell you:
It doesn't look cute. Not on anyone.
So make sure to grab your blending brush (I use my MAC 117) and get to blending.
To blend, you're going to lightly brush back and forth over the eyeshadow. It may take some time for you to master, but once you learn to blend your eyeshadow properly, it will change your life. The best way to explain blending is brushing in a windshield wiper motion over your eyeshadow. It will look a little like this...

and then it will look like this

ahhh, much better, right?
Alright, next step.

Now that you've got your sexy dark shadow on, choose a slightly lighter shadow (remember, we are pretty much ombre'ing your eyes, lightest color on inner corner, darkest on outer corner/crease) and pack that on in the middle of your lid, being careful to blend this shadow into the darker one.

I chose a nude shimmer color.
Next, take your dark color again, and pat it along the lower lash line, BE GENTLE, or else you'll end up looking like a panda.

disclaimer:
I do not sell for Younique nor do I represent them in any way.

Now, I'm not the type of girl to just bad mouth products because they're popular. I'm not a beauty hipster.
But, lately I've seen an explosion of women selling the so-called miracle mascara,
Younique's 3D Fiber Lash.
It's everywhere, but is it really what it's cracked up to be?? I've seen a lot of reviews on this miracle product, but sadly, all of the reviews I've seen have been from people that actually sell it, and that's going to be clearly a little, let's say...amped up.
The very picture that convinced me to purchase this mascara is this...

Ahhhh...the holy grail of today's beauty.

HAIR EXTENSIONS.

For some, these two simple words sends jolts of excitement all through their body. Visions of long flowing Rapunzel hair fills their dreams, and they begin to do their best version of "the hair flip" just thinking about them.
For others, images of 2007 Britney come into play...

I'm here to tell you ladies (and gentlemen) all about the wonderful world of weave, and how it could apply to YOU. Plus, what beauty blog is complete without an entire post about hair extensions?

Let's start where any great story starts: at the beginning.
Well, let's start at the beginning of my journey with hair extensions, and go from there. I don't really want to do a history on them, and I'm sure ya'll care about as much as I do when it comes to how long women have been swapping hair.
I started wearing extensions at a relatively young age, around 12, and that's where my love/hate relationship began. I saved up for my first set of hair extensions for months by helping with chores/mowing/cleaning and anything I could do for an extra buck, which I had to do a lot because little naive me thought that the most recognizable brand, HairDo (which omg, had jessica simpson on the package so obvi was the best hair, right?!)
WRONG! Oh so so so wrong. Stupid me decided to spend my hard earned money on the worst thing a girl with little to no hair expertise could do;

SYNTHETIC HAIR.

Let's just say, I made this mistake only once. Synthetic hair, although it usually claims to be "just like human hair", is not. It is some foreign, mystery, evil thing that would be a wonderful material for birds to nest in, but not much else. It comes out of the package feeling like a conditioned horse mane, and only gets worse. Oh, did I forget to mention that synthetic hair doesn't move? That's right. It lays there like a hair scarf. I can't even tell you how hard it was for me to take this sensuous selfie...

They looked a little like this....


(Look at me, being all scientific in my sophomore Chemistry class...this was the best view I had of this hair, to be honest.)
This hair was great. Looked real, felt real, held curl, and was all around awesome. The one complaint I have? The itching. This wasn't from the hair, but from the method of application. Having the hair sewn in meant that all the area under the cornrows wasn't able to be shampoo'd or scratched or brushed. This caused an obnoxious itching sensation all over my head, which I learned to do the weave pat..

which actually really kept the itching at bay. But alas, eventually, when it was time to take my hair extensions out, I decided to try something else, and continue my mission to find the absolute best way to attach hairs to my head.

I decided to go ahead and do some online research, becuase I didn't want to go back to the travesty that was HairDo, so I got my laptop out, some nutella, and sat down for an afternoon of online searching for the best brand of hair extensions.
BELLAMI.
Their name was everywhere I turned...youtube, beauty blogs, everywhere. The website was beautiful, adorned with some of my favorite youtube gurus bragging about their Bellami hair extensions, and how it was the key to their flawlessness. I was hooked.
I saved up for a couple weeks and put down the $250 required to get their thickest, longest set of extensions, because go big or go home, right?
I waited pretty impatiently for my Bellami's to arrive, and when they did, they were gorgeous. They slid out of their packaging like silk, and when I put them in my hair, they blended seemlessly.

That's where the pro's end.

Yupp.
Screwed over by the hair gods once again.
Let's talk about BELLAMI. The hair sheds. I'm not talking a strand of hair here and there, I'm talking full blown hair falling out to the point where you nearly have a coniption type of shedding. Hair on my clothes, in my car, in my bed, on my boyfriend, on my dog, in my food, IT WAS EVERYWHERE. Also, the small amount of hair that was left on the wefts of hair became a matted, tangled mess after one wash. There was a mat of hair at the nape of my neck, and trust me, I did everything in my power to fix those extensions.
Conditioning treatments, letting them air dry, never brushing them wet, nothing made a difference. And why do I only have a couple of pictures of me in these extensions, and how long did they last exactly before they were simply un-wearable?
These extensions lasted about 1 week with everyday wear.
After that, they became a matted pile in my trashcan.
I contacted Bellami's customer service, and they never replied. Lovely, right?
They looked like this when I decided to toss them...



So, after all the drama, horror, and scary experiences I've had, I've made the decision to stick to my 'ol faithful of hair, Euronext.
I wear the clips ins currently, every day, and let me tell you, they're the best.
They're light weight, they blend perfectly, and they don't damage my real hair. Best of all, they last forever. The set I've had currently, I've been wearing for more than a year, and they're still in pretty good shape! I need to go get another pack or two just due to normal wear, but they've held up amazingly well.
Nobody ever knows I'm wearing extensions!

I love them, and I suggest everyone to try them.

My one complaint about Euronext?
Each pack is only about 80 grams of hair, so you need to buy several packs if you have short hair, and probably one or two if you have long hair. I have about chin length hair currently, so I have to buy about 3-4 packs.
It's a lotta clips, but it's a lot of glam, too ;)

So the basic rundown is this:
You get what you pay for, unless it's Bellami. I also know that there are other companies out there that claim to be something they're not. Do your research. Find the pros and the cons, and if the hair sounds to good to be true?
It probably is.

If you still haven't died of boredom reading this, I applaud you. You're one of the few, the proud, the informed about hair extensions.

I pray that you always make wise weave decisions. May the hair gods be with you.

I'm finally going to do it.
I'm going to buckle down, and write a beauty blog.
You know, I've been saying I was going to do this for years. Seriously.
Even when I thought that blue eyeshadow and clear sparkly lip gloss was the biggest beauty staple that everyone should carry around in their lipsmackers carrying case (it was junior high, give me a break).
(See? I was 13 in this picture, and as you can tell, I was just too cool. Abercrombie shirt and peace symbol included.)

Through the years, I've often been asked how I learned to do my makeup. Now, I know that a lot of women learned through youtube, some from their friends, some from magazines, and others just never learned and can't tell you the difference in a highlighter or a blush, but me? Well, I learned through all of those. I learned how to do makeup by going through years of not knowing how to correctly apply eyeliner, and getting teased for it at school. I learned through watching my mom carefully apply her simple makeup, and ending up making my face look like something a bunch of three year olds decided to color in with crayons.
So what do I tell people when they ask me how I learned?
Through MISTAKES.

The reason I want to write a blog is for the people who learn like I do. Not by watching flawless women apply their $50 mascara and billion dollar foundation.
I want to show women who are like me that it's possible to look just as good (if not better) than those fabulous women on youtube. I have a million flaws, and when I wear makeup, I'm not trying to put on a mask, I'm just trying to create the me that I see when I picture myself. So be it that that me has ridiculous fake eyelashes and Kim K. level contouring, but I think I have found a look that suits me, and I'd like to help everyone find their "look"