Review: Vapour Organics

Since I started working in a Major Cosmetics Boutique a few years ago, I have amassed a large quantity of makeup. In my teens and 20's, I used as much makeup as most girls that age. I even worked for a Major Cosmetics Store in my early 20's and had access to makeup and skincare that no girl that age should be able to afford. I fell off the makeup wagon while I was working at a spa, but now my makeup bag is bursting with primers and highlighters and liquid tints and powder blushes. However, my one consistent love has always been red lipstick. On days that I'm too lazy to wear anything else, red lipstick gives the illusion that I'm wearing a full face of makeup, even if I'm not.

One thing that the Major Cosmetics Boutique is not is organic. I'm the type of person who is concerned about what I put in my body, and as an esthetician I'm very concerned about what goes on my skin. So even though I love my products from the Major Cosmetics Boutique, I'd like to find a more natural alternative to it. Not to replace all of it, because I don't think you can get cancer from a cheek tint or an eyeliner. But seeing that I am a lipstick addict, and lipstick is the one cosmetic that gets ingested, I should probably be more concerned about what I'm putting on my lips.

And that is my quest. To find an organic lipstick that doesn't SUCK. My big problem with organic makeup in general and lipstick in particular is that it is mostly made for hippies. Girls who don't want a whole lot of color on their skin and think that pale pink lipstick is too much. Not to mention these companies usually brag about how moisturizing their lipstick is, which basically means that the color fades in two minutes. If I want my lips to be moisturized, I'll use a lip balm. Give me a lipstick that LASTS.

I discovered Vapour Organics by doing a search on Pinterest for organic lipstick (how on earth did I ever find anything before Pinterest? These days I almost prefer it over Google). They offer sample packs for $15 so I figured I'd try it out. You can get whatever you want, so I chose their Siren lipstick, their Atmosphere Luminous Foundation, an eye color, and a cheek/lip stain.

When I got their samples, I was a little disappointed at how small they were, just scrapings inside of small plastic sample packs. I just reminded myself that not every company has the cash to make travel sizes the way Major Cosmetics Boutique can. Also, it turns out the samples are so concentrated that I still have enough a week later.

Out of the four, I probably won't buy the eye color or the stain. Both were good, it's just that the eye color creased really bad. I have a couple different eye primers that would help it stay on, but what's the point of buying an organic eyeshadow if you're wearing it over a primer that has chemicals in it? As I said before, I'm not too concerned about using non-organic eye makeup anyway. I was "meh" about the cheek and lip stain too. It's good. In fact, if you're looking for an organic cheek and lip stain, I recommend it. I just like the cheek and lip stain my company sells better.

I really liked the foundation. It isn't cakey, it blends well, and it gives my skin a nice glow. I'll definitely buy a full sized version. And the lipstick? It's my organic lipstick dream come true! The red is perfect, it isn't too slick or too dry, and it last longer than any other organic lipstick I've ever tried. Hell, it lasts longer than the lipstick my company sells! I'm still using my sample, but I can't wait to buy the full size, and will probably get some other colors as well. I might even become a Vapour convert, because I know I'll try more. Other organic cosmetics company take note...it isn't enough that your products have natural ingredients if they aren't sexy.

For anyone interested in skincare/cosmetics that don't use toxic ingredients, here are all the companies listed in the Compact For Safe Cosmetics.

The Knitter's Nightmare

Years ago, in the few months of unemployment I had between esthetician school and my first esthetician job, I learned how to knit from Debbie Stoller's Stitch and Bitch. Like an army of other young women that summer, I fell in love with it. I bought plastic needles and soft acrylic yarn from Joanne's Fabrics and knit my little heart out. It especially came in handy when I started working, because I could knit a scarf in between clients. As the years went on, I bought nicer needles and pricier yarn made of natural fibers and worked on more complicated projects, like lace and cables and sweaters and socks. Knitting is a great hobby because it's portable enough to take anywhere, and it makes lazy nights in front of the TV productive. ("I just watched four hours of Buffy re-runs, but now I have a hat!")

The last year has seen a sharp decline in my knitting. We moved to our first condo, and even though one of the reason I like it here is because there is a lot of natural light, there is an unfortunate lack of unnatural light. Basically the light fixtures the developer put in are very fancy looking, but suck. They require expensive little spotlight bulbs that burn out in less than a week. So once the sun goes down, it gets too dim to do anything crafty. So I haven't really picked up the needles in a long time. I tried working on a sock over the summer, which was nice and reminded me of how much I miss knitting. Then I stopped when I realized I had messed up the number of stitches cast on, which is such a newbie mistake I was disgusted with myself. So I put it down and didn't pick it back up.

The other night, Trench asked me if he could borrow some yarn for the Halloween costume he was putting together. I went into my long-neglected stash to see if I could find something. As I delved in, I realized that something was wrong. All my little rolled up cakes of yarn looked rough, like something had been nibbling at them. For the last couple months we had seen tiny little brown flies around the apt. I didn't think much of them because it was summer, and bugs happen in the summer. I thought they were coming from the drains so I'd been pouring bleach down them. Could they be...moths? My suspicions were confirmed I saw a worm crawling on MY PURPLE MERINO.

I had Trench throw the entire basket out immediately. I rescued a sweater that had still been a work in progress...I only needed one more sleeve. Once the infected basket was gone, Trench and I went through the other boxes. (What, you thought I only had one basket of yarn?) All the natural fibers were toast. Acrylics and cottons still looked okay. I went into the closets to see if they had gotten any of my finished knits, and yes they had. I lost hats and scarves. Luckily the scarf/shawl that had taken me two years to finish was fine because I'd been wearing it. Same with Trench's gray scarf with the intricate DNA cable pattern I had made him years ago. We tend to throw our outerwear on the bed in the guest room rather than hang them up in the closet like we should. Laziness for the win! Sweaters that I've made didn't have worms, but did have webbing (re: cocoons) on them. I stuffed them into the freezer. From what I've read (and you know I was doing research as this was happening), freezing temperatures kills larvae. Heat kills eggs. My sweaters, half-finished sweater, and whatever yarn remains of my stash (because those little fuckers don't eat acrylic but could be hiding in it) have been in the freezer for a few days now.

Dry cleaning kills moths, larvae and eggs so I'm taking my finished sweaters, as well as a couple of coats from the closet that have traces on them, to the cleaners today. My almost-finished sweater is sadly going to be a casualty. I threw out the rest of the yarn that went with it, so there's not much point in keeping it, and it had been in the most infested basket. Tonight the rest of my yarn is going to get baked in the oven. Seriously. 110 degrees for 30 minutes (under careful watch, of course). I don't like the idea of insecticides, so I'm going to douse my closets and drawers with eucalyptus and lavender. (Thank the gods they didn't hit my wardrobe! Except for my knits I mostly wear cotton and acrylics.)

If you knit or crochet and have a stash of yarn hanging about, be aware of what's flying around your home. Clothes moths do not look like the normal moths you see flitting around light bulbs in the summer. They are tiny, about the size of a fruit fly, and look like a fleck of wood when standing still. From now on, my stash will be kept in ziploc bags. Once we get a new light fixture for the living room, I'm hoping to return to my knitterly ways, but now I'm slightly terrified of natural fibers. I might just knit with cotton blends for awhile.

Snowpocalypse! (old buried post)

Things To Do When You're Snowed In

* If you've had enough warning about the snow...like hearing about it three days in advance, down to a starting point such as 3pm on Tuesday afternoon, you'll probably want to hit the grocery store for essentials. Don't buy the entire store out in a panic, just get what you need...toilet paper, ingredients for food and some snacks, batteries for the flash light just in case, and most important of all, booze.

* Don't worry too much about your husband driving home that night. He will power that beat up little Honda Civic through the worst blizzard since 1967, screaming, "THIS IS AWESOME!" through the white out. That is the man you have married.

* However, when parking in the indoor parking garage nearby (good idea!), open the door to get your ticket because if you roll down the power window? It might not roll back up, and then your car will get filled with snow during the night.

* Nature can be awesome. THUNDERSNOW!

* If you work from home, my apologies. No snow day for you.

*If you're a student, you don't get an extra week to do your homework. Get it done, and email it in. Thanks technology!

* When you're snowed in, you will want to bake. Hopefully you bought enough ingredients to indulge this. Blueberry cinnamon muffins, mmm!

* Sure, there's two feet of snow on the ground, but that's not an excuse not to go out in it! Go explore. You'll find the happiest dogs and kids ever. Poor adults will all be shoveling out their cars. Sweeping snow from the interior is no big deal at all compared to that!

* Take pictures. Especially if you live by the lake.

Wow! I remember trying to publish this blog when the blizzard happened, but I thought blogger ate it. Turns out it was just hiding as a draft. No reason not to post it now, although I doubt anyone wants to think about snow at this point.

music and madness and some laziness too

It's my day off today and I'm being entirely too lazy. Laziness is my fundamental problem in life. I just missed yoga class because I got caught up in looking at pictures of tattoos. I woke up a little late today, so yoga probably wasn't going to happen anyway. Oh well, I'll do some yoga at home and then go jogging. It's gorgeous out and I won't be able to do that soon. It's still shocking to me that I've started running since I hated it so much when I was a kid. Then again, jogging by the lake is a whole different animal than jogging in my loathsome junior high gym. I'm not interested in gyms or running on a treadmill so I'll stick with yoga classes over the winter.

Despite my inherent laziness, October is always a big month here in the robot-pixie house. Tonight I'm blowing off class going to be really really sick, and the only way to cure it will be going to see Portishead play at the Aragon. Then next week we're taking a quick trip out to the Quad Cities to watch the Indelicates play in a small intimate setting, then the last Friday of the month we'll see them again in Chicago at a much bigger venue, which should be interesting. And of course I already took off the weekend of Halloween, cuz that's our holiday. Why do I love Halloween so much? Besides the fact that it isn't very hard to convince me to dress up and put on a costume? I consider it the perfect holiday because it's not about spending time with your family and eating a big meal and breaking the bank on presents for people. It's about throwing on some fake blood and having a fantastic time with all your friends. Not that I don't like spending time with my family or buying presents for people, but that does pale in comparison to finding the perfect costume and dancing your ass off in it. I love the rampant creativity this holiday inspires.

So that's what's on the agenda this month. Music and madness. Now I better go take a jog so I look good in my slutty Halloween costume.

Nook Review

Yes, it's been months since I've posted. Yes, I've been a bad blogger. I think I'm going to try and post every Tuesday since it's a pretty easy day for me. In November I'll try to post every day again and see how far I get. I think that I get blocked because in my public blog I like writing about something instead of updating about my day to day life, like, "This week I worked a bunch of days, and then I went to class and it was pretty boring, and then I went out to dinner with some friends." No one wants to read that.

About three weeks ago, I finally joined the future and bought an e-reader. I decided to get the Nook instead of the Kindle, because you can download library books on it, and also you can buy books from other stores, not just Barnes and Noble. I got the latest one, which is smaller and has a touch screen, and so far I love it. I was one of those people who hated the idea of an e-reader when it first came out. "Nothing will replace books for me! You'll have to pry paper books from my cold dead hands!" But e readers have advanced since then, and now I love the idea that I don't ever have to be in between books till I get to a bookstore anymore, the entire world of literature is at my fingertips. Also, I'm a very bad library grad student who never uses the library. Now I can download library books, and not worry about late return fees if I'm too lazy to bring the book back on time. Another perk is that I can download pdf files onto it to read instead of killing more trees by printing them. This makes it very handy for the mountain of journal articles I have to read for school, so I can write the Nook off on my taxes, woot!

So far I've waded in slowly. Trench recently got me sucked into the first season of Game of Thrones, so I bought the first book and have been reading it on my Nook. I didn't know if I would like reading fiction on a screen, but if you are a person who likes to read, you will read anything as long as there are words printed on it. I like that the Nook is so slim, so I never have to leave it at home, like I do sometimes when I'm reading a fat book. I've even been reading in bed, although in a fit of sleepiness the other night I reached up to the corner of the Nook to turn a page instead of swiping the screen.

All the same, when I finish this and go to read the second, I think I'll get the paper book instead. As handy as the Nook is, at the end of the day it's still another screen to stare at. I'm excited to use it for non-fiction, and even for hardcover fiction that is too difficult to carry around everywhere, or silly chick lit that I don't want people to catch me reading. As for really good fiction that I can barely put down, I think I'll stick to paper.

Theater of Yesterday*

I'm watching the first season of Ally McBeal on Netflix. I watched most of this show when it first aired, though I stopped at some point. Whatever shark they jumped was so boring that I can't even remember what the shark was. Oh wait...it was when she suddenly had an eight year old daughter out of nowhere! At that point I think that Sex & the City was on the air, and everyone had stopped watching poor Ally.

In fact, it's really interesting watching the show in that context...S&tC aired just a shade after Ally premiered. Fall of '97 vs. spring of '98. Network television vs. cable. Both shows were about single women finding love, but say what you want about S&tC, it resonated with women in a way that few shows have. Possibly because it showed different types of women. If you didn't like Carrie, you might still identify with Miranda or Samantha. Ally McBeal is what happens when a show is centered on Charlotte. And although there are different types of women on Ally McBeal, they all still agree that single = lonely = sad. Even Renee, Ally's sassy and confident best friend, will say things like "She's marrying him because she just turned 30." "We hate weddings because we're single." "If you're not careful you're going to end up alone." The S&tC crew were allowed to be happy without men. To this day my friends and I will be talking about a situation and be able to relate it to a S&tC episode (seeing that the show went off the air in 2004, this says a lot about the need for a new show centered on women), but no one ever says, "That's just like the time Ally had a meltdown in public and smacked someone for saying her skirt was too short!"

That makes it sound like I think the show sucks. Well, I think that Ally sucks, but everyone does. Did anyone ever like Ally? The show ran on the steam provided by the secondary characters. I've been squeeing over John Cage listening to the bells, and the first time he dances to Barry White in the co-ed bathroom. Richard Fish (who I have decided is basically who Jeff Winger was when he was a lawyer, before he had to go back to community college because he didn't really pass law school) with his "Fishisms" and brushing off everything with "bygones". Jane Krakowski's portrayal of Elaine, the attention seeking secretary, which is the exact same character she plays on 30 Rock, and I find myself not minding. The beautiful thing about this show was that it was about very odd, quirky people, and that's why it worked. In fact, I think we should bring back "bygones." Say there's a huge blow up in an internet chatroom. Just write "bygones", and it'll all be diffused. And it goes without saying that there should be more impromptu dance parties. Maybe not in public bathrooms, but hey, that's where the mirrors are.

I've forgotten almost everything except for the main plotline (Ally finds herself working with her first love and his wife, hijinks ensue!), but there's one plot that everyone remembers whether they watched the show or not. The dancing baby. Full disclosure, I do not have a biological clock. Trench and I have agreed that we're mad about each other enough that we don't want any tiny being taking our attention away from the other. I finally got to the dancing baby episode, and it scared the crap out of me!

Honestly, I don't even think the lack of biological clock has anything to do with it. This is very early CGI we're talking about. That baby is terrifying! Remember when that was on everyone's screen saver for awhile? What the hell were they thinking? The baby is Ally's biological clock hallucination. This hallucination happens because she has sex for the FIRST TIME ALL SEASON with someone just because he was hot and she feels guilty about that. Yep, this is definitely pre-S&tC. She's standing in the office, and suddenly the pitter-pat of little feet goes off like a gunshot. And then there's the OOGA CHAKA OOGA CHAKA from Paul Simon's "Hooked On a Feeling." And that CGI baby runs out and starts dancing in this very jerky way, moving its limbs in ways that limbs were never meant to move. I screamed. And for the rest of the episode, every time I heard the pitter pat or the OOGA CHAKA, I screamed and lifted my feet off the ground, as if the baby would run out and grab me.

Think I'm exaggerating? Check it out here, if you dare. Just don't blame me if you aren't able to sleep tonight. But if you think the baby is cute...that you found Ally dancing with her biological clock to be liberating...that it was your screen saver back in the 90's...well, what can I say? Bygones.


*Title stolen from Rebecca T. Thanks Bekka!

shoe lust

So I saw these shoes recently at a shoe store close to where I work that regularly gets me into trouble. They've been hanging around for awhile, but I didn't pay them too much attention, assuming they were too ostentatious/expensive/uncomfortable. So I fawned my attention over a different pair of wedges. Recently I tried the wedges on, but on my foot it wasn't love. So "just for fun", I tried these on.

Oh goodness.

Wedges can be uncomfortable for the same reason heels are uncomfortable...your foot is in an unnatural tip toe position. Platform wedges, however? Are a whole different story. My foot was supported and cushioned. The shoes were light instead of heavy. And when I looked in the mirror? The style worked on me! And why wouldn't they? Hell, when I was in my 20's, I wore Creepers for comfort. Suddenly, I had a new shoe lust. They would be mine!

However, like a sensible woman, I decided to wait another paycheck to be sure I could afford them. Then June hit like a ton of bricks. I got sick and missed a whole week of work. My car broke down and then got stolen, in that order. I had to take rental cars to my summer class out in the burbs. Trench and I are still trying to catch back up from our June From Hell.

Today I went back to go "visit" my shoes, and see if they were still there. I can't afford them, but I thought I'd take another look and see if they were as fabulous as I remembered. I shouldn't have been surprised that my size was gone. Unfortunately instead of being all "c'est la vie, that's how it goes!" it put me into hunter mode. This is when I start scouring the internet for the perfect shoes that I want. I even thought that maybe I could find them a little cheaper. I learned that apparently the store by my work was THE ONLY STORE IN THE WORLD THAT CARRIED THIS SHOE! Learning this made me panicky. Can I afford these shoes right now? Absolutely not! Are there a billion other things I should be spending my money on? Of course! Should I not be spending money on anything, and instead be saving so my checking account will start looking healthy again? Hell yeah! However, none of this matters as I have turned into Gollum and I must have the PRECIOUSSSSSSS!

Hear that sound? That is the sound of the Universe kicking me in the ass and telling me to save my damn money.