I just spent the last two hours trying to imitate Michelle Phan’s Sailormoon look. It is much harder than it looks in the video! I think I ended up looking more like an evil witch than anywhere near an anime character. 

Even though this is my first time ever using an eye liner (I went to pick up a L’Oreal Lineur Intense Brush Tip Liquid eye liner since it topped Allure’s best make-up list this year, just for this!), it wasn’t as hard to catch on as I’d feared. I was actually quite impressed by how easy it went on. Plus I love how it just rubs off! Yet nothing about my look was quite right. The lines I drew were either too thick or too thin. (HOW did she get the eye liner line on the lower eyes to look so thin???? I couldn’t even get that width practing on my hand!) The eye lashes I drew were nowhere as cute. The shape wasn’t right. Or I’d blink too quickly and it would smudge. It turned messy quite messy pretty quickly! I even messed up the part where I had to put white eye shadow/liner in to fill in the blanks. I ended up over shadowing the eye liner and getting a lot of powder into my eyes (my poor eyes). I did learn one thing though. Don’t be afraid to extend the two top lashes further than your instinct tells you to. Once you get the hang of drawing them properly and getting the length right, it really does take you a long way towards anime eyes. It’s a genius idea!

I’m not quite there yet with the whole look. Maybe I just don’t have the right eye shape for this. Maybe I don’t have the skill for this and should stick to a simpler look. Or maybe I’ll give it another try tomorrow. Who knows, maybe I’ll make another break through playing around. Will keep you posted!

Ps. If you’re still looking for ideas for Halloween, Michelle Phan has a few other neat ideas including Snow White, Seductive Vampire and Barbie.

It was love at first sight. It was hiding on one of the lower shelves at the very back of the Urban Outfitters store, but I saw it anyway and knew I had to have it!

 It is no cashmere or pashmina, but I love the print, I love the simple black/ivory color and I love how it looks on me! And it was only $28! So I decided to get myself a little something for my birthday 🙂

As it so happens, my birthday also happily lands on the first day of the Sephora F&F event. The perfect excuse to stock up! Currently I have the above in my basket. I’m still brainstorming what else I need before I hit “check out” tomorrow!

Image Source: Sephora

This morning the Olympics committee announced the winner of the 2016 bid in Copenhagen. I was really excited, because I’ve been keeping up with it for months (my friend works in the committee for Chicago) and I was really feeling the spirit. My office is also conveniently located next to Daley Plaza where the city was gathering to watch the announcement, so every now and then I’d look out the window to see. There were banners everywhere, they dyed the fountain orange, they were giving out orange tees (I would’ve gotten one too if the line wasn’t so long), they put a crown and medal on the art statue, it was all very festive! I really thought we had a chance. The 2012 Olympics is going to be in London, so they were not going to have it in Europe again. China just did it in 2008, so bye bye Tokyo. Rio has a good chance locationwise, but then they’re doing the 2014 World Cup already, so isn’t it just a tiny bit greedy of them to do the 2016 Olympics as well (in my head, both are big international events)?  Plus, we had the Obama effect, whatever that is worth. Obviously I wasn’t the only one thinking this, since people were bidding 60% for Chicago a mere 48 hours before.

So we were very disappointed when we saw people swiftly trickling out of the plaza indicating that we’d lost- first round! People around the world must really hate America. I was vouching for Madrid in the semi finals, just because Brazil it doesn’t seem fair and I’ve always wanted to go to Spain, but alas Rio won out. To give them credit, they did seem to have a bigger, more enthusiastic crowd in Rio watching the announcement than Chicago (in Chicago’s defense, we had to work!).