June 19, 2013

ULTA Beauty Smoothie

In my quest for things that smell delicious, I came upon ULTA beauty smoothies in my local ULTA store. Now, these bottles are normally $16 each, but if you happen to find them on sale, they are only $6.99! That's a pretty good deal to me. Sometimes they have a deal for buy 2, get 2 free also. These have such delicious scents and names, I want to try all of them! These are a 3-in-1 shower gel, bubble bath, and shampoo. I mainly use it as shower gel because my hair only likes a particular type of shampoo and I don't really take bubble baths. I want to try all the flavors! Here are the ones I've tried so far:


Note: The Apple Envy smells terrible. I literally smell like alcohol, like I had walked out of a bar from drinking all night. It seriously smells like rubbing alcohol.





The description provided by ULTA:

Free of Parabens, Phthalates, DEA and Gluten.

The rich and indulgent recipe leaves skin and hair soft and smooth with every yummy cleansing. What's our special recipe? A superboost antioxidant complex of acai, goji berry and mangosteen super fruits to enhance your health and beauty.

Directions
Take one part Beauty Smoothie 3-in-1, put on body, hair and bath. Swirl with water to mix. Make a rich lather. Luxuriate in the foam. Let the superfruits do their magic. Rinse and repeat for pure pleasure.


June 16, 2013

Perforated Lace-Up Heel Bootie - Coral

I was in Charlotte Russe one day with a friend, accompanying her to shop. I don't know why I expect to just window shop and not buy things because I always end up buying something. I just have this impulse to get everything. In the very back of the store are the shoes. They had a display of shoes that were the last size of their style (basically the last shoes of the line) and they were 50% off. That's where I saw these shoes.


They were originally $50 but were $25 in the store! Online, they are still listed as $50. You can check out the shoes here. In my pictures, they look a lot darker. The color really changes depending on the lighting. In bright light, then look orange-ish pink but in darker settings they can be red to almost a dark red. They are perforated so they have small holes in the side, which is fine to me. It lets my feet breathe. Here is the description provided online:

Go chic with this heeled ankle boot! Vegan nubuck upper includes a lace-up front and perforated design. Inner 5.5" zipper gets you in and out fast. Features a hidden 1.25" platform and 4.5" heel in faux wood. Style: PUFFIN 41


So they are laced up but have a zipper on the side, which in my opinion makes them easier to put on. The perforations don't extend to the toes so you don't see the toes, which is a plus for me. They are really comfortable and the shoe is made of a rubber kind of material rather than the cloth or suede material that make up most other boots this style. For me, it's easier to clean if it ever gets a stain and won't get soaked when it rains. It provides a lot of height, which is good for someone as short as me.


I almost did not get these shoes. I didn't want to spend so much on shoes even though at 50%, they were quite a deal. I had actually put them back and a lot of people were picking them up but they weren't their size (not many size 6 feet out there, I guess). With some words of encouragement by a certain awesome sales lady and my friend, I did finally decide to buy it. I get quite a few compliments when I wear them out. I don't regret the buy at all.


June 13, 2013

SOHO Beauty Sponge

So I have been seeing a lot of people using the Beauty Blender and they rave about it and say it's awesome. When I went to Sephora, I saw the beauty blender and it is so much smaller than I thought it would be. I mean, it's pretty tiny but it cost $19.95. I don't put on foundation or anything on a regular basis so for me, it is just too expensive for something I won't really use a lot. I decided to go for a cheaper alternative.


For my cheaper alternative, I go to stores like Ulta, Target, or Walmart. This particular product, the Beauty Sponge by SOHO, was from Walmart. It cost me $4.92 or something like that. I can't remember the exact price but it is under $5, which is way cheaper than the beauty blender. That for me is a good plus and it is latex free. Although I'm not allergic to latex at the moment, it is said that repeated exposure to latex can increase the risk of development of a latex allergy. So I might not have it now, but I could still develop it in the future. Might as well try decreasing my risk.


In my opinion, though I have not put the two products next to each other for comparison, this product is longer in length than the beauty blender but they seem about the same in width/circumference at the widest part. It has a much more different shape than the beauty blender but it still works for me. The product is much denser than other foundation sponges I have used, which I see as a pro. It has the density almost like a stress ball, just a little less dense. It has a lot of usable surface area and I like that.

Another cheaper alternative to the beauty blender that has a shape that is more similar is the Super Blender Sponge by ULTA. The site says it costs $4.99 so I may get that as well sometime in the near future. In the meantime. I can throw out my old makeup sponges because I like the quality of this sponge a lot better.


June 10, 2013

"Flurry Up" top Coat Sephora by OPI & NYC "Matte Me Crazy" Mattifying Top Coat

I really loved my "Only Gold for Me" Top Coat from Sephora by OPI that I just had to have the silver version of it to match my silver nails. I had bought a cheapo dollar store version but obviously that just could not compare at all. So when I had the money, I went to my local Sephora store and bought myself the silver version, which is "Flurry Up". I had been reluctant to buy it before because one bottle costs $9.50, which in my perspective is pretty expensive for a single bottle of nail polish. However, the "Only Gold for Me" was just one of my favorites and other top coats just didn't compare so I dished out the money.


I am so happy I bought this. The nail polish has both big and little flakes in it. Now, I do put another clear coat on top of the top coat usually because the flakes can feel a little rough. However, that top coat stays like no other. Seriously, trying to take it off with nail polish remover is a workout. I remember I was at the mall and one of the guys in charge of this kiosk was taking out the nail polish in one of my nails to use the product he is selling on it. I could tell her was getting frustrated because it just would not come off, though he tried not to show it. It's good because it lasts long and it's durable but it sucks when you are trying to take it off. This top coat needs serious professional nail polish remover to come off easily. Well, now my gold top coat has his silver version to keep him company.


The next nail polish I bought is a polish that leaves a matte finish over any polish it's on. I have been seeing matte nails a lot lately and I really want to try it out. With all things I try for the first time, I go for the cheap version and decide from there if it is worth getting the more expensive versions.


This is "Matte me Crazy" Mattifying Top Coat but NYC that I bought at Walmart for $1.79, which is cheaper than many other matte top coats I have seen in ULTA or Sephora. I do love it and it works great with making nail polish matte. The brush is a wider brush than other nail polishes and I thought it made it so much easier to apply. If ever I do run out, though I probably won't since it takes me forever to use up nail polishes  I would definitely buy this again. The result along with the price is pretty unbeatable, in my opinion.


Used these two along with my China Glaze "White on White". My mother commented that the matte white looks like white out. The matte over glitter/shimmer polish gives it a dull shine. It looks like a really interesting texture although the feel of the nail is quite smooth. I will definitely be enjoying doing my nails this whole summer. I should because when school starts, I can't wear nail polish anymore.


June 7, 2013

China Glaze - Cranberry Splash & White on White


Went to ULTA again this past weekend (obviously my one of my favorite stores) to go buy something since I had a coupon for $3.50 off of any $10 or more purchase. Truly, I would love to buy some Butter London nail items but I just can't afford that on my college student budget. Instead, I got two nail polishes by China Glaze. I do love this brand ever since my friend introduced me to it and the China Glaze gift she gave me has become my favorite nail polishes ever. So I'll stick with what I know. Tried and true is better than new?



Cranberry Splash is such a pretty color and it was on sale for $4.99! I always get some kind of red color on my toes (please don't mind my icky feet and terrible nail painting effort) and I usually get a pedicure with my mom but I went ahead and bought my own nail polish this time. I could always bring it in and get the nail people to use it. I like China Glaze much better than their OPI brands even though OPI is more expensive.


I got the white just so I can do French tips on my nails but who knows, I will do something different with it this time. I feel like white, along with black, is always a nice neutral nail polish color to have. But yeah, a french manicure is hard to maintain, in my opinion. Especially when your nails grow quickly, you may have to update that manicure every two weeks or so, which can get very expensive. I can pair this with any of my glitter nail polishes.


June 4, 2013

Lorac Pro Palette & Mini Behind the Scenes Eye Primer

I finally had enough money to buy myself an expensive neutral palette so I can replace that cheap ELF palette I had. I mean, ELF was okay but I wanted something better. I had been thinking of getting the Urban Decay Naked palette but I couldn't really choose between Naked 1 or Naked 2. I liked colors from both palettes and I had wished that I could take those colors and make them one palette. I sought advice from a certain someone and she recommended to me the Lorac Pro Palette if I had wanted something that was a combination of the two Naked Palettes. I looked it up, liked what I saw, and bought one at my local ULTA store.




The palette is much smaller than it looks. It was much smaller than I expected it to be, at least, when I first went to ULTA to check it out. However, I would say it was about the same size as the Naked Palettes, maybe just a bit smaller. I bought this for $42 and it came with a mini Behind the Scenes Eye Primer, which was a plus for me. Unlike the Naked palettes, it does not come with a brush.



There are 16 colors total. The top 8 are matte while the bottom 8 are shimmer. I loved that it has so many matte colors because I feel like the Naked Palettes were mostly shimmer. I love how it has such a wide spectrum of neutral colors, especially the pure white and pure black matte colors. Those colors were one of the reasons I bought this palette.



The colors have great pigmentation, which I love. The colors are so very pretty and show up wonderfully on my skin. I was not used to how pigmented it was (because my old ELF one was not very pigmented and I had to apply a lot more to get some color) and put too much on my face at first.


It came with this adorable Mini Behind the Scenes primer. It's a very small bottle and I don't think it will last very long if you use makeup constantly. I love the consistency of it and it goes on so smoothly on my skin. It is very sheer so you don't really notice that you have it on. I really like it.



I truly enjoy using this palette. The colors are so wonderful. In the top picture, I'm using the matte colors white, taupe, and espresso. In the bottom picture, I am using the shimmer colors champagne, gold, and pewter. I really love this palette and it just has such a good range of colors. I can make a lot of neutral looks with this.


June 1, 2013

The Ultimate Fairytale Story

This dream that I had is pretty epicly long. Tried telling a friend but did not have enough time to tell the whole thing. It's clear to see that this story needs quite a bit of time to tell.

I am in my room upstairs in my bathroom. I notice that someone had left my wet wipes open and so now they are all dry. I blame my grandmother who is staying with me at the moment. She's old so she always forgets the little things and it irritates me. I go downstairs to the living room and on the TV is a movie showing. It's a Disney movie that apparently puts together a lot of fairy tale stories into one. I start to watch since it seemed interesting.

I had missed the beginning of the movie but it seems to start out kind of like "Beauty and the Beast" where a pretty girl and her medium sized dog Posh venture into the woods on horse and somehow end up at a mystical castle that somehow no one else in the area knows of. She goes through an entrance on the side of a stone wall. From the outside, it looks like a solid stone wall but it is a hidden entrance and she just slipped through the wall. Magic!

She finds herself in a very large and messy kitchen, kind of like those in cafeterias and restaurants. It is dark and cold, none of the lights are on. No one is in the kitchen but you can hear talking and music in the next room like there is a party going on. A large Beast looking creature in fancy clothes comes joyfully into the kitchen, having sensed his new guest's presence. He finds her to be quite pretty and introduces himself to her.

The Beast then gives her a choice. He points at the wall she came through. At first it was just a stone wall but then a wall of ice freezes it to the bottom. The ice is like a painting and in it you see what it is outside.The beast says that she may leave through this wall and be escorted by two of his servants. Two men, twins, appear in the ice. Quite handsome looking twins, I might say, in fancy carriage driver wardrobe, one in blue and the other in red. They smile at the young lady. The Beast then gives her another choice, to come be merry with him at the party, although she may leave at any time she wants.

The girl decides that it couldn't hurt to stay for a little while. She joins the Beast and leaves the lonely kitchen and goes to the banquet room. It is quite merry and loud, with fun music and lots of guests (I can't say people because not all of them were human). There is lots of delicious food and everyone is just drunk and merry. What the occasion may be, no one really mentioned. Although I'm sure the wine is interfering with that. The Beast takes the girl on a tour of the castle. However he does not let her into one particular room, his step mother's room. After the tour, they return to the party and be merry.

The girl parties for a little bit but she is so curious as to what is in the room of the step mother. Somehow, she gains the gossip that the stepmother is not in the castle at the moment, out on a business trip or whatever.  She is so curious about what is in that room that she steps out of the crowd without anyone noticing and goes to the stepmother's room. She opens the door and the room is dark, but on the wall of the room is a glowing magic mirror. She is drawn to it and walks up to the mirror. She does the whole "mirror, mirror" speech but it isn't that type of mirror. The mirror is magic, and along with having the knowledge of everything in the world, the genie that lives inside of it can also grant wishes.

She is so entranced by the mirror that she does not notice the Beast come in. He is furious and he yells at her. She is frightened so she runs down the stairs and to the kitchen and to the wall, asking the twins to take her back home. They bow and say yes so she runs through the ice wall, breaking it as she ends up outside of the castle. The twins each have this bike that look like a fancier version of the 74-Z speeder bikes that the storm troopers used on the forest moon of Endor. Except they put theirs together to make one big bike, with the girl riding with one of them. They take off into the forest.


The bike is going so fast that it blurs the surroundings. The twins are also joking around with each other and laughing maniacally, very much unlike the gentlemanly appearance they gave before. And as the settings became more blurred and the laughs became louder, the twins started to look more demonic. They had guns at the end of their bikes and they decided to break apart bikes and shoot at animals while winding through the maze of trees.

They find this lone cabin in the woods with a cow outside and a college student studying inside. The twins apparently have the ability to influence people to do bad things. Somehow, they got a passing by pickup truck to skid out of the road and drive straight to the cabin, killing the cow and knocking out part of the wall. Inside, the college student is joyfully exclaiming that the cow is dead. The twins have done their damage and leave the cabin. In the cabin, the college student gets a phone call from his parents and he tells them the cow is dead. With the twins having left, his thoughts clear and he realizes the damage that has been done. With the cow dead, he yells that now he will not have food for the rest of the winter.

The winter forest then abruptly stops and on the other side is the warm weather of what looks like a Louisiana swamp. The twins drop her off there and return to the castle. But before they leave, they zap her dog, Posh, and turn it into a little fluffball, so small it could fit into a teacup. The girl is furious but the twins just laugh and leave. The girl sees the bus that she was on and returns on it. Inside the bus are her fellow classmates who are here for a field trip. They are visiting a poor mental health hospital to see how things work here.

The supervisors round up all the patients and start to head down. Apparently it is time for their bath and since there are no bathrooms, they must bathe in the swampy lake down the road. As the supervisors and patients walk, they follow them in the bus. They arrive at the lake and all the patients rush in to bathe and gossip. The teacher parks the bus at the edge of the lake, with the front part a little submerged in the water. She opens up the top of the bus (sun roof) so the students can look up and be able to see. The teacher says some other instructions but no one was listening.

The girl and one of her friends talk for a little bit and decide to walk out of the sun roof and sit on top of the front of the bus to have a better look at what is going on. They talk for a bit and listen to the gossip, sometimes spying some alligators and snakes in the water. Although apparently these patients live with these animals in harmony so they are not attacked. They hear gossip about the mysterious castle and that the step mother was using the magic mirror to take over the world because she had somehow trapped a powerful genie inside that mirror and he is forced to do all her commands. She has apparently been altering the world and everyone's memories slowly so no one remembers except for the patients, but everyone thinks they are crazy so no one believes them. They admit that they have some mental issues and shortcomings but they are adamant that their memory is correct.

She is so occupied by what the patients are saying that she doesn't notice her teacher coming back. Her teacher is then yelling at her as she wades through the water towards the bus, saying that no one is supposed to leave the bus. She gets up to go back inside, but she sees that other people have left the bus and were on the shore and some in the water, talking to the patients. When the two girls get into the bus, only half the students are inside the both while the other half is outside. Suddenly, the bus's brake comes loose and the bus starts moving forward into the water.

The teacher is yelling at the students to stop the bus and put their foot on the brake. The girl goes to the steering wheel but the passenger's side has a brake two (kind of like the cars they use in Driver's Ed.). She tries both of them and neither are working. The teacher is hanging on to the side of the bus and gets dragged along the water for the ride. About halfway through the lake, her grip fails her and she slips off as the bus continues forward. Eventually the bus ends up all the way at the other side of the lake and into the mysterious forest over there.

The forest on the other side is very dark and eerie, with lots of fog (kind of like the planet Dagobah from Star Wars). They continue down a road where they can't see what is ahead because of the thick fog. The longer the girls are in the fog, the younger they become, they notice. Now, they are children, probably around 8 years old as the possessed bus leads them to nowhere. The girl's best friend, let's just call her the BFF, hears a voice calling her. The BFF recognizes the voice to be her childhood friend from long ago.


The BFF jumps out of the bus and runs down the road, looking for the source of the voice. The bus stops when she jumps out and the other students yell for her to come back. She hears the voice coming from somewhere up a tree and she turns to look there. On a high branch a little boy about her age that she recognizes. He yells his name and jumps up to greet him. They instantly recognize each other and hug. The two of them then swing from tree to tree using the randomly placed window curtains hanging from the ceiling of the dense forest.

They swing on the curtain right by the parked bus and the boy catches her in his arms. She exclaims to the students that she has found her true love and pulls on a sheer curtain hanging near her, which is connected to a large bell that starts to ring loudly. As the bell rang, they returned to their normal age and so did the boy. The BFF and the boy then attach a long large purple curtain to the end of the bus and run to the shore, swing  to the other end of the shore, and give the the end to the rest of the students and the teacher. They begin to pull the bus back to the other side of the lake.

This mystical ringing bell somehow returns everyone's memories about the evil deeds of the stepmother. There is now a mob like movement to the castle to destroy the witch. I am then called away from the TV by my mother to go do some chore in the kitchen, which makes me unable to see what happens next. I go do the chore with my little brother and then we return to the living room to see the rest of the movie.

We return to the characters doing some sort of musical number, assuming that this is in celebration of the defeat of the step mother. The castle seems to have been destroyed and winter has ended in the snowy forest. The mental health patients are no longer considered crazy and are normal citizens of the town in the swamp. The lake is now one large aquarium where you can easily see all the alligators and other swamp animals.

Somehow, in the course of the battle, the main girl's dog Posh got turned into an alligator. Now he is just lazing around in the aquarium. The people attempt to return the the area devastated by the battle to what it was before so they engineered it to what they thought it was like and returned the native species of the area, toads and goombas. However, they did it wrong and the toads are completely taking over and destroying all the goombas.


For help, the girl returns to the ruins of the old castle to get some help from the magic mirror. She talks to the genie to ask for a gun to make whatever it shoots disappear, intending to use it on excess toads. She makes a hole into the mirror world with a glass cutter to talk in person with the genie. The genie tells her that is not effective and that he can fix it with his powers, for he has all the knowledge in knowing how to fix it and how things should be. The girl agrees and she sets the genie free.

The genie then uses his powers not only to make right the area of toads and goombas, but also all the wrongs the witch did in the whole world.

The End.