9 April 2013

Zen and the Art of the Blowout


(Image from Allure)

After decades of never owning a blowdryer, much less using one, I now have two hair dryers. One is a salon grade tourmaline heat gun, and the other a Babyliss Big Hair. I got the latter for christmas after seeing Ruth’s brilliant review of it (from A Model Recommends). Blowdrying my own hair normally resulted in a weird straight but frizzy situation, but the Big Hair smoothed all that down.

When I went home to the states in January, I didn’t want to take it with me, but ironically my mom presented me with a magical John Frieda blowdryer that she picked up at Dirt Cheap. Damn, that is a great blowdryer. So I bought a ceramic round brush from TJ Maxx and learned to do my own old school blowout while I was there. In the two months since, I have sort of perfected blowing out my hair, with the various methods below, depending on how much time/effort I want to put into my hair.

For all of these blowouts, I start out the same way. I start off by working a light oil (I use Elvive Extraordinary Oil) through towel dried hair and comb through. Spritz some volumiser on your roots if you fancy. Then rough dry your hair upside down, focusing the heat on your roots to get some volume in there, but leave the ends just a tiny little damp.

Rough and tumble

This is the quick and easy way to get out of the door fast with sleek model off duty body waves. While your hair is still hot and upside down, comb it to unsnarl, then twist it and put it in a high, loose bun and fasten it with a clip. Blast the bun once more for a few moments with the low-speed but high-heat setting to warm it up. Do your face or whatever, then after 15 mins or so, take the bun out and run your fingers through your now-lovely hair that has nice body and a slight wave. Sorted.

Smooth and sleek

Otherwise, blowdry upside down, but once the roots are dry and cooled off, get out that Babyliss Big Hair. Put all of your hair up in a clip except the the very back bits at the nape. Apply the Big Hair magic to these. There is a technique to using the Big Hair, which is best shown in this Youtube video. Gradually work your way up and through your hair, letting a section down from the clip at a time. When you do the front bit, really pull it forward, so that it has some lift when you flip it back and out of your face. If you don’t have a Big Hair, this is when to use the standard round brush and hairdryer blowout technique.

Bouncy and sleek

Do the Smooth and Sleek blowout, but after you blowdry each section, wrap them around your fingers to make big pin curls and clip to your scalp using sectioning clips. Leave in while doing your face, then unclip for bounciness. Allowing the big curls to set this way means that you’ll get more and longer-lasting body.

Bouncy and bodacious

If you want the full big blown out sexy hair experience, do the technique above, but set your hair on velcro rollers instead of pin curls. Once your whole head is set in rollers, spritz with hairspray and evenly warm the curlers up with the low speed high heat setting. Don’t remove the rollers until they have cooled (now’s the time to do your makeup), but the longer you leave them in the better. Once cool, carefully unroll your hair and fingercomb into place (see the end of the video above). It will be big Brigitte Bardot sexy, so just tousle it a bit and then leave it alone. Gorgeous.

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8 April 2013

Gone Girl

OK, so I *finally* got around to reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, despite it saturating the bestseller lists in the US. I actually suggested it as a gamble intro read for my neighbourhood’s book club. I’ll be interested to see what the other ladies thought of it, but I have to say that I am quite glad that I made the effort to read it. It’s also just now gaining momentum in the UK, so it’s nice to feel slightly ahead of the curve there, somewhat.

Let me say up front though that the book isn’t one of those totally enjoyable reads, by which I mean it isn’t necessarily comforting or relaxing at all, and you don’t get everything tied up in a nice shiny bow at the end. It’s a rather confrontational book because, when it comes down to it, this is a book about how to get away with murder.

The thing I liked most about this book is that I could see how much craft went into it. I won’t say it is the best-written book ever, and in some places it drags a little bit. But most of the time when you are reading it and get that urgh/annoyed/frustrated feeling, I can see how it is quite deliberate on the author’s part.

It is almost as if this book was written to meet the following writing challenge: Write a book where you have one sympathetic character, and one abhorrent character, then develop a plot where they switch places, then develop the plot more so that they switch back again. Gone Girl is a character study in how to make your readers grow to like a character that was initially off-putting, and how to make your readers totally hate a character that they initially thought was quite a nice person. The book really plays with how easily we put so much faith in the facade projected by people, and ultimately how that facade breaks down so easily under the slightest questioning.

The plot itself is deceptively simple at first and becomes more and more convoluted as the characters get more and more caught up in their lies and circumstances. I also appreciated how much thought and research went into the plotting, and most of the time it moved along at a clip that kept me reading into the wee hours of the morning. Another aspect of the book that I liked was role that the setting played. It is nominally set in the present Midwest, but there are dystopian aspects of it that are a deliberate portrayal of the American dream gone wrong. That combined with the intrusive presence of mass media in the plot only adds to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the novel.

Overall, it was a pretty uncomfortable read. It is the sort of book you put down and then think about later like “Ugh, I wonder what they are up to now” and pick it up to find out. Not because you really want to, but because you have to.

Worth the hype? Perhaps. I think it is a very refreshing change from the usual fluffy fare that’s been offered up lately, that’s for sure.

TLDR: A compelling read, good character study, nicely plotted, give it a go.

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7 April 2013

Sunday Drive to Eastbourne

Eastbourne Pier

The sun finally FINALLY came out yesterday, and it was still out today despite a bit of haze. Even though it is still quite cold, we decided to take a break and go for a Sunday drive down to the coast. We ended up going to Eastbourne, just because it was not too terribly far away, and it meant I had the chance to finally see Beachy Head.

We got to Eastbourne just after lunchtime, so the first order of business was to walk out onto the pier and see about a bite to eat. We first got sidetracked by the penny arcade, where we wasted a small amount on penny drop coin pusher games. I’d never played one of these before, so it was worth a go.

arcade

After that, we found the Victorian Tea Rooms, which had that whole English seaside shabby thing going on that I am a bit fond of. We each had a cream tea (scone + clotted cream + jam + tea), and the scones were so big that did us for lunch.

Then we got back into the car and drove up to Beachy Head and had a nice but very brisk walk around. There were quite a view paragliders up there riding the thermals, and I couldn’t decide if it looked like fun or just plain crazy.

The views from the top of Beachy Head are really stunning. I was a bit leery of getting too close to the edge, what with the 500 foot drop down, but I was very glad to be able to see the lighthouse.

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1 April 2013

Packrat

A confession. Here are the the things that I hoard, relentlessly ever in pursuit of perfection:

* Lip balm
* Tea
* Striped tops (a la breton/mariniere)
* Scarves
* Skinny jeans
* Men’s button up shirts
* Sunglasses
* Bikinis
* Nail polish
* Perfume
* Cashmere
* Black cats

I also used to hoard fountain pens and ink, but I have found perfection in that department (MB 164 + MB blue-black bottled ink) so I have stopped acquiring. I also used to hoard notebooks, particularly Clairefontaine, but now I am no longer in education I have also stopped buying. Thank goodness.

But as for the “collections” above? I really need to do a spring fling and thin them out. Except for the cats, of course!

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27 March 2013

Freedom Palette: Think Outside the Box

Unii Palette

About a month ago, I ran across the cutest thing online: the Unii Palette. It is basically a little magnetised makeup case, a palette that can hold a few of pans of your most essential cosmetics so that you can just chuck one in your bag and go. It just ticked all of my boxes: small and cute, super portable, reasonably cheap, helps to organise and simplify your life, and comes in Tiffany blue.

The reason I was on the hunt for something like this was because I was thinking about how great it would be if I had one makeup palette that could hold everything I needed to be able to do up my face while on the go. The primary motivation (besides day to day touchups) was that any makeup in pans doesn’t have to go into the infamous TSA ziploc bag during airport security scans. Even creams that are solid enough to stay in a pan are classified as a solid and so can stay in your carryon during screening, which would seriously save me from a load of hassle, and also save me a lot of packing real estate. Let’s face it, all those bottles of various creams take up a lot of space in the ziploc.

Of course, no one really sells an all-in-one palette, and even if they did it would be impossible to get all of the colours right, so I decided to try and DIY my own Freedom Palette (“freedom” because you are free to pick and choose). That led me down a whole rabbit whole of palette systems. Trish McEvoy does a palette system. So does MAC. And Inglot. And then there is Z-Palette, and finally the one I opted for: Unii. I went for the Unii because it is the smallest and, well, cutest of the lot. Also, it feels quite sturdy and I think will take a beating in my bag while travelling.

The thing about putting makeup in a palette is that of course have to de-pot all of it. This is a pretty harrowing process that involves heating the compacts on a flat iron and then carefully trying to pry out the little metal pan of makeup. Sometimes the powder shatters, sometimes the creams melt and spill out. I’ve got pretty good at de-potting but it’s still hassle. Also, this is the main reason why you generally want to only put cheap makeup in your freedom palette: I would be super sad if I broke my Bobbi Brown bronzer.

De-potting is cool, though, because it is ultimate in divorcing product from packaging. I mean, do you LURVE your makeup, or are you only buying Chanel blush because the compact is so shiny and has a satisfying click? Nothing makes you realise how much packaging sways your decisions until you rip the makeup out of it. Then you really see it for what it is, and that Laura Mercier caviar wet/dry eyeliner doesn’t look like all that when it’s just a metal pan. Shiny packaging will find it hard to seduce me ever again!

Project Fill Freedom Palette commenced. The main sticking point has been trying to locate powder foundation and pan concealer that doesn’t cost a fortune. At first, I went to Superdrug and picked up this MUA complexion kit for about a fiver and depotted it and put the foundation and concealer in my Unii. They do the job, but they are kinda cakey and don’t last too long on my skin. I could make do on a weekend trip, but for day to day, I’ve replaced them with a bog standard pressed powder. My mom is sending me some Neutrogena Mineral Sheers pressed foundation power from the states which will probably become my portable standby.

What I should have done from the very beginning was go to Inglot. They sell plain metal refills for their freedom palette system in a whole range of products, the textures and pigments are nice, and their prices are really quite reasonable. I trekked out to Westfield on Monday and picked up a few things and now Inglot is a major presence in my palette. I’ll definitely be using their products again in the future because they are affordable, have a great range of colours, and the metal pans stick in my palette without me having to faff about with sticking magnet stickers on the bottom like I had to do for the drugstore stuff.

Unii Palette

So what’s in mine? I have a few random de-potted things that I can swap in and out, but currently:

* L’Oreal Match Perfect pressed powder
* Inglot blusher in a shade closest to my bronzer (also used as eyeshadow)
* A peachy cream blush from Collection 2000 (I think)
* Inglot concealer
* Inglot triplet eyeshadow in neutral browns
* Revlon Lip Butter in Candy Apple melted into a pan
* A black eyeliner
* Eyeshadow applicator + powder sponge (not shown)

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24 March 2013

A Wintry Wander + Recipe

I don’t know why people expect it to be all glorious and spring-like in the UK in March. This is just simply unrealistic. I know it’s frustrating, but the reality is no flip-flops until May. Right now the reality is…wellies in the snow. The weather in Britain is utterly crap, news at 11.

So let’s move on from that and go for a walk down to the local farm shop, shall we?

If you know where to look, there are a few signs of spring under all the snow and ice. If the sun ever comes out again, the daffs are all set to explode into bloom, the birds are going crazy looking for food (put some out!), and the trees all have little buds on them.

But mostly, things do look quite bleak. It’s kind of beautiful, though, in a desolate way. I quite like stark landscapes.

Because it hasn’t been cold enough to freeze solid, the path down to the farm shop was super muddy and slippery at times, but that’s what wellies are for. In some places the path was a total quagmire, but we soldiered on.

At the farm shop we treated ourselves to tea and cake because we badly needed warming up. I had carrot cake with my usual Earl Grey tea, but I did put a little milk and sugar into it. It’s unorthodox, I know, completely utterly not proper, but it’s something I really like to do on a cold winter’s day. It just gives it a little more body so that it becomes like a warm bergamot hug in a teapot. Mmm.

On the way back home, we passed this very ghoulish gnarled old oak tree. There are quite a few of these around where we live. Some of them are hollow, and some have what look like creepy melting faces in them.

Back at the house, we saw that we’d had a visitor because they left their tracks. It reminded me to go put some bird seed out in the garden for our feathered friends, although I’m convinced that the dastardly crows and magpies eat it all.

Once I got my muddy wellies, off, I quickly threw together a steak casserole, because it is the best food for this cold gloomy weather.

Quick Recipe:
Grab your trusty Le Creuset, pour a little oil into it, and put it on a burner. Throw in some chopped onion and stir it around until it starts to go translucent. Add your choice of meat (I prefer lamb but we only had some old steak in the fridge today). Put it in the pot to braise. Liberally salt the top of the meat with some Sel de Provence (sea salt mixed with herbes de Provence). Flip the meat and salt the other side. Once the meat is a little golden, throw in a glass of wine to deglaze the pot. Add chunks of potato and carrot. Add enough water to cover the meat and veg but not drown it. Add another couple of pinches of sel de Provence. Add some lentils if you fancy. Let simmer at the lowest heat possible on the burner for at least 3 hours. Add some kale, spinach, or other greens. Let simmer for 30 more mins. Serve piping hot in bowls with crusty bread!

Anyway, we’re not free from winter yet (there’s more snow possible in the forecast this week), and of course I would vastly prefer some sunshine and warmth at this point, but it is what it is. That said, I would dearly love to fly south at this point!

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22 March 2013

Cat Fight: French v. American v. British Style

Let me tell you about something that initially interested me but I’ve since come to find a little tiresome. Basically, I’ve gotten quite bored of a) the Anglo-American fascination with all things French and its converse, b) the French being snobby towards British and American women wrt their style.*

I know I’m not the only one that’s feeling a little bit jaded (can I get an Amen?!) by the breathless gushing about the superiority of French beauty. Now, let me make some things clear first. I am personally quite a huge fan of French pharmacy beauty products. My own bathroom cabinet is utterly chocka with La Roche Posay, Avene, Embryolisse, and Bioderma Crealine miscellaire solution. I brook no argument with the fact that French pharmacy skin care is by and large really great stuff and excellent value for money. No argument there.

But the idea that all French women are somehow instantly chicer than any of their more Anglo counterparts? That somehow they are more sexy and worldly and sophisticated? Mais, non. Sorry. The French do not have copyright on sexiness. Or even on good taste.

Just this past week, I got and read a copy of Paris Street Style by Isabelle Thomas and Frederique Veysset. I suppose I was taken in by the subtitle, “A guide to effortless chic.” Supposedly, French style is defined by those two little words: effortless chic.
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21 March 2013

Comfort reading for a winter’s day

Murasaki Shikibu

Completely not by surprise, the weather of late has made London a bit less of a des res than usual. I don’t know why everyone gets caught out by the March crapness every year. It’s almost like every last person here turns into a FOB immigrant from warmer climes, shivering into their voluminous coat and bleating, “Is it always this cold and rainy?!” Yes. Yes, it is. Just because we made it through February, and yesterday was the Vernal Equinox, winter is still not over, I’m afraid.

This means that for me, March is the month of comfort reading. Since I have no plane tickets lined up in my immediate future, I have to take myself away from it all via the aid of plain old ASCII. While I’m not usually the sort of person that likes to re-read books, there are a few books that I find myself dipping into time and time again when I just want to curl up in a duvet and hide from the greyness outside.

My list of comfort reads isn’t really easily defined by a particular genre or theme, but today I’ll start with some of the oldest of my favourites.

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Genji is considered the world’s first novel. It was written around the year 1000 by a Japanese noblewoman who served in the Heian court named Murasaki Shikibu. In the Heian era, upper class women were all literate and educated, primarily because all seduction was done via the means of poetry (a la haiku) rather than any other means. In fact, a woman’s grasp of poetry and excellent penmanship would stand her in better stead than a beautiful face, since women’s faces were almost always hidden from view. They communicated by passing notes with men via messengers, so even the type of paper they used would take on romantic significance. It was a very effected and different society from our own, and it intrigues me almost like a science fiction society, and yet it is not some strange alien planet in the future, it was Japan a millennium ago.

Since the Tale of Genji was a product of this world (commonly referred to as The Floating World), it is a very genteel and stylised work, a novel of courtly love. It is a very long and meandering work, but this is because it was sort of the first soap opera, where Murasaki Shikibu would would out instalments of it and distribute the chapters around the court. So if you want to be transported to a world of intrigue and poetry and seduction under the cherry blossoms, the Tale of Genji can take you there.

A public domain ebook of the Seidensticker translation (my fave) of the Tale of Genji is available here.

A scene from Genji

The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
Also from Heian Japan (I went through a real Heian phase about a decade ago), there is the smaller and more idiosyncratic Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. While the Tale of Genji was the first novel, the Pillow Book was definitely the first blog. It ranges from pure poetry to sheer cattiness, and I particularly like the evocative little lists she writes (yep, she started the list thing, too).

There’s just something very genteel and calming about these books, and they sort of go with a cold winter’s day, with wrapping oneself up against the harsh winter winds and waiting for the sun to come back out. Hopefully I can come back soon with some sunnier suggestions.

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15 March 2013

Best £5 I ever spent: Grey Sweatshirt

grey sweatshirt

Just before Christmas, I went to some not inconsiderable pains to acquire your basic all-American grey heather Fruit of the Loom sweatshirt from Amazon marketplace. I wanted one purely for a yoga warmup, something that I could just chuck in the wash and beat to hell. And particularly, I wanted the classic American grey archetype, so it had to be Fruit of the Loom. It took a couple of mishaps, but finally my bit of comfy cotton fleece arrived, and I promptly cut the neck out of it a la Flashdance. OK, maybe not so much so that it hangs off of my bare shoulder, but I did cut the neck band out because it just looks better that way on me.

The surprising thing is, although I did and do wear it as a comfy yoga warmup/cooldown topper, I seem to wear it…all the time. Non-stop. Initially I had an internal ban on wearing it up to town (I have the same mental block on wearing Uggs to town, as in DO make an effort, love) but then I finally broke that rule and wore it to run around doing errands all over London (and probably with Uggs, it’s been cold, I’ve been tired). And you know what? I love it. It has this really elegant Isabel Marant-like minimalist simplicity about it. It’s very zen. And the cutout neck just perfectly conveys a very nonchalant “What, this old thing?” vibe. Honestly, I should have known better.

Anyway, I want to apologise to my sweatshirt for being a bit snobby about it when I first got it, passing it over purely because it isn’t made from cashmere. No more. Now, my pile of cashmere is being somewhat neglected in favour of a five quid sweatshirt.

How to wear it? Keep it simple.

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5 March 2013

Enter the WeddingDome

tacky cake topper

Want to be queen for a year? Get engaged. Go shopping. EVERYONE and I mean every last person at the wedding fair will coo over your engagement ring and that pic of your dress that your mom snapped the day she bought it for you. Because that’s all you’ll be seen as: a ring and a dress.

I’ve been doing wedding planning, you see. And while it is very touching that the people around me seem to care enough to hear me kvetch about every little sordid frustrating detail…the truth is that I don’t really like talking about my flair.

Because I decided a few weeks ago to try and tick off every conceivable wedding to-do list item now while I have no other projects on the go, I have been mired 100% in the bridal morass ever since. You’d think I’d never done this before, but the truth is, I haven’t, not on this scale. And this scale is kind of itchy and uncomfortable and expensive…not unlike a really awful wedding gown.

Anyway, I have booked the venues, photographer, Routemaster, hair and makeup artist, bought the dress, found a fitter, hired a wedding coordinator, booked the honeymoon, and hired the manicurist. Yes, manicurist. I’m most of the way to hiring a florist, and I just need to order the invitations, which are already laid out. And a DJ, I need a DJ, still.

I now officially have wedding fatigue, and it’s really throwing light on the things about weddings that really piss me off, which are myriad. The thing is, it isn’t like I haven’t done a wedding before. But somehow, while the first one retained a huge element of sanity and discretion, everyone seems to be dogpiling into this one so I am feeling quite a bit more pressure to have All Of The Things and I don’t want All Of The Things.

When I meet with suppliers, I give them a list of things that are banned outright from discussions: bridal party, groomsmen, speeches, birdcages, chair covers, cake toppers, crystal trees, crystals in any form whatsoever, blue LED uplighting, choreographed first dances, etc. What a great lot of utter nonsense. I am trying to hold onto my sanity when faced with the full onslaught of the wedding-industrial complex, but ultimately what saddens me the most about the whole thing is that there are all of these “brides”* out there who actively want All Of The Things. Why?? Why can they not see what a horrific waste of money this whole production is? People ask me about my wedding budget, and I shrug. I watch the deposits as they hemorrhage out of my bank account and part of me feels happy to amaze and delight all and sundry and part of me just wants to AGAIN suggest that we merely skip the whole production and go straight to the Maldives.

Ah, but one cannot simply go honeymoon in the Maldives without having “earned” said honeymoon first by having a big fat Anglo-American wedding. Well, then.

* Can I just say how much I utterly hate being referred to as a “bride” at all of the wedding fairs and by suppliers? As if that’s all I am, a bride, a naive blushing girl about to be foisted upon some unsuspecting man to embark on grand procreational misadventures. A surefire way to lose my business is to refer to me as a BRIDE. No, I may be engaged, I may be a woman about to get married, but I am not a bride until the actual day, ok? Calling engaged women brides that seems somehow demeaning to all other women, as if they are of some lesser status because they aren’t about to drop 25 grand on what amounts to an overblown birthday party with ponies with bells on.

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