The Eyes Have It

I spent Sunday happily engaged with my best friend, Ms. Cake, in sampling, testing, and sharing a gigantic heap of Black Phoenix imps and NYX eyeshadow pigments. First, though, she had to play several rounds of Foosball with my 5 year old, a cutthroat Foosball player.

It got so that I had a different perfume oil approximately every four inches up and down both arms. We had a can of espresso to sniff to try to clear our palates, but eventually the cacophony of smells was overwhelming. So we switched to eyeshadow.

This was fun -- a number of months ago, some pathological wave came over me and I managed to convince Ms. Cake that what we really needed to do was order and split a full set of NYX loose eyeshadow pigments offered up for sale in two batches on the discount website HauteLook. The deal was something like for $55 each we'd have about 100 eyeshadows between us and could divvy them up. As it happens, we have completely opposite coloring. I wear gold tones and she wears silver. So we got them, and they sat in bags, along with a heap of little jars and spoons and mixing medium and magnetic palettes and whatnot that we'd ordered from Coastal Scents in order to be able to press our own eyeshadow pans. See, it's not just makeup, it's CRAFTS.

With the "help" of the 5 year old, we traded gold tones for silver tones, as applicable, and for those colors we both thought we could use, we split the powder between containers. So now instead of 50 (or however many) jars we each ended up with a number of full jars of certain colors and another 30 or something of partial jars. So now I have approximately a million little jars of eyeshadow pigments jammed into a little cabinet I use for makeup, in every color you can imagine. Just click that NYX link and see the assortment of colors and their often wacko names (Lemon Drop for bright pink? 3 Wise Men? WTF?).

So what have I worn on my eyes this week?

Why, NEUTRALS, of course! Monday I used Urban Decay in Virgin and Naked to create a gently shadowed pale eye with black liquid liner. Tuesday I splashed out with some gray, using Urban Decay Gunmetal with Wet 'n' Wild Color Icon jumbo pencil in a charcoal. Today I went with Wet 'n' Wild Nutty and Brulee, two real workhorses in my collection, with a touch of gray liner. I went wild and added the smallest touch of bright violet liner in the outer V, which added with the gray gave a nice toned-down blue-violet.

I've also acquired a new batch of BPAL testers, so will be playing around with those in the weeks to come. Naturally, that means I've been keeping to my usual scent wardrobe of Blue Morpho, Aelopile, and 51. I really live the life, don't I?