Karen

Let me tell you; you haven’t lived until you’ve taken a toddler to the ballet. It’s an experience, LOL! I took Connor to watch the Nutcracker yesterday, put on by a local ballet company here called The Stapleton Ballet, and they did a performance for parents and young kids.

Technically, it was a dress rehearsal, but it was open to everyone — even babies! The kids got to enjoy the ballet and could move around and get their wiggles out if they needed to.

It was cool. I have so many memories of the music and the dancing from Nutcracker when I was growing up. I had a well-loved record (YUP) and a book, and I’ve gone to see the ballet a few times.

Back in high school band, I played parts of the music when we did select excerpts one year. My favorite piece, by the way, is the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, because it has the best flute parts. 🙂

I think Connor enjoyed it… It’s hard to say… She didn’t want to sit on my lap, which I guess isn’t a huge surprise, since she’s a high-energy kid with her own agenda.

She’s a mover and a shaker, but we were in a row toward the front right, with about three seats between us and the next family, so she had room to groove.

When the house lights came on and the curtain went up, she said, “WOW!” Then when the dancers started kicking and flying through the air, she decided that she wanted to participate in the performance, so she started twirling in the aisle and kicking her legs. It was quite the adventure!

We ended up leaving during intermission because it was nap time, and she was getting cranky. But it was fun. I’m hoping to make it a new tradition for the two of us.

So, I didn’t have a lot of time to get ready before we left for the theater. In fact, I had literally two seconds to put on my makeup…

OK, maybe it was a little more than that, but not much.

Anyway, I’m always cutting it close, but lately I’ve been cutting it REALLY close.

Normally, when I only have 10 minutes or so to get out of the house, I won’t attempt winged liner, but I did it yesterday. You can totally do it if you have an angled liner brush and a black eyeshadow.

The trick is to only load the tip of the liner brush. If you do that, you get much more control over where that shadow is going, and if you happen to make a mistake, it’s easy to correct because it’s just shadow.

I used matte black powder MAC Carbon eyeshadow and a MAC 263, which is their small angled brush.

I think it’s so much better than the 266 if you have limited lid space because it’s thinner than the 263 and much easier to control.

On that beauty note…here are some stories (some beauty related, some not) that caught my eye this week.

• Could glitter eventually become a relic of the past? Scientists call for a ban on glitter in an effort to protect marine life, and microplastic bans could soon include glitter used in lotions, cosmetics and more.
• Work can become a major part of your identity. The danger is letting it define who you are. Here’s how to emotionally detach from your job.
• Mad props to this photographer who pulled off a high-fashion photo shoot at a mega hardware store.
• The Paul & Joe Spring 2018 (!) collection is paws-tively purr-fect because of — you guessed it! — cats. LOTS OF CATS. The green nail polish looks like pretty cool paw polish.
• Spa experts offer their tips for glowing skin, and part of me hopes a 120-minute deep-tissue massage is somewhere on the list.
• Beauty stocking stuffer ideas for those on your nice list.
• Presents for the skin care addict in your life… Or, presents for yourself, you skin care junkie, you. 🙂 Either way, it’s all good!
• Speaking of skin care, the Algenist Genius Liquid Collagen is supposed to start showing results overnight. Sign me up because I don’t have time to waste, yo!
• The holidays are hopefully a happy time, but sometimes people are going through difficult things this time of year. Here are four mistakes we often make when comforting friends over the holidays.

Have a good rest of your day, OK? I hope you find a nice balance between being productive and finding time to relax before the sun goes down.

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

P.S. Do you have your tree yet? We’re thinking of getting ours this weekend… So excited! 🙂

Hmm, let’s see… Measure here, tilt head there… Maybe a six? Or seven?

No, I think that’s too high. I’ll say five, because they’re symmetrical in some ways, but they’re inconsistently symmetrical, if that makes any sense.

They’re on the same horizontal plane. I mean, they both start on the inner side at around the same area, but things start to get a little wonky toward the outer tail.

My right brow is a completely different shape than my left, too. The right one is shorter by at least a quarter inch, and the arch is slightly higher, so whenever I fill in my right brow, I have to take it out further than my left.

I also have to sort of “do things” to the arch…

I’ve been doing these little tricks when I fill in my brows for so long that they aren’t a big deal anymore, but it took me a long time to actually figure out which brow was thicker than the other one and how differently they were shaped.

One thing that helped was taking pics of myself for MBB. I’d look at them on my computer screen and be like, “What’s up with my right brow!?”

Well, a) it was/is shaped differently, and b) my right brow always looked darker because I was pressing harder on that side when I was applying my brow products.

Seriously, I only came to realize this in the past four or five years, so when I say that it took a while, it really did take a while.

Anyway, scale of 1-10, how even are your brows?

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen