Person --> Alien

Hi guys!

First of all, thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who participated in my mini-giveaway - the winners have been contacted by e-mail and the postcards were sent out on Friday, as promised!  It was awesome hearing from you guys and seeing who reads my blog.  :D  Thank you all so much for the support - you mean the world to me!

Next thing I want to address is - it's November, which means it's NaBloPoMo!  

In my...2?+ years of keeping this blog (and another 2, 3 years before that using LiveJournal) I've never participated in NaBloPoMo before, so I'm really excited to try my hand at it this year.   That means I'm going to be posting every day this month, and so I really hope you guys will keep up with me and come back here every day to see what I've been up to. :)

So last night was Halloween!  


Halloween in Spain - and France, too, actually - is...interesting and different, because it's not much of a deal here.  I made a video about my impressions of the holiday here, after I came home from Halloween festivities, which I will be posting to my YouTube Channel shortly - be sure to check it out!

Meanwhile, I thought I'd kick off NaBloPoMo with a post on how I transformed myself from, well, me, to an alien.  I'm really proud of my costume this year because it's the least expensive, best-executed, most fun, and probably most demure costume that I've had in the past few Halloweens.  So here goes - and please don't be alarmed if you see me doing things in an unconventional order/way, because there are no hard and fast rules to makeup, right? :P

Step 1: Pencil in brows

First things first - I filled in my brows with a pencil. My eyebrows are naturally kind of sparse, so I'm enormously insecure about them and I do this before leaving the house every day.

For me, "giving it up" with regards to boys doesn't carry the conventional meaning, but instead it refers to letting a guy seeing my brows au naturel. :P

Now, my weapon of choice is normally powder (I'd been using Body Shop Brow and Liner Kit in 03) with a really good slanted brush (I love my Sonia Kashuk one, which I picked up at Target on a trip to the States a couple years ago), but I recently dropped my compact on the floor, so I bought a pencil as a quick fix. I personally find that powders look the best, but whatever.

I'm using Kiko Makeup Milano Precision Eyebrow Pencil in 01, a dark grey.

Step 2: Line lips with eyebrow pencil

Remember how I said that I do things in an unconventional order and way? Well, here's the first example. Instead of doing my eyes first, I'm going straight to the lips because it's the focal point of my look. I wear glasses, which render most of the eye makeup I wear virtually invisible, so I always put emphasis on my lips and build the rest of my face around them to complement them.

So I took my eyebrow pencil (because I didn't want to bother with going out and trying to find a black lip pencil) and lined my lips with them.

At this point I was thinking to myself that I make a pretty fierce chola - all I need are some chungalicious ah-browns. :P

Step 3: Fill in lips with blue eyeliner pencil

Next, I filled in my lips with a sky blue eyeliner pencil - never let anyone tell you that you should always only use things the way they were meant to be used. :P This worked out really well because pencils last longer than lipsticks, and this product was slightly creamy so it was very easy to work with. You should always make sure your lips are very hydrated if you're going to completely fill them in with a pencil, though.

I'm using Kiko Makeup Milano Eye Pencil in 106.

Step 4: Go over black outline of lips again

Next, I reinforced the outline of my lips with my eyebrow pencil again, because the blue was very pigmented and was covering some of the black.

Step 5: Set lip colour with eyeshadow

To give my lips more dimension and to make the colour last longer, I set my lips with eyeshadow. This worked out really well, because my lips didn't fade all night even after swigging lots of beer and eating pizza. I put a navy blue in the corner of my lips and used a shimmery sky blue in the middle of my lips - they're from some generic, made in China palette I picked up from First Markham Place back home in Canada. I packed a lot of eyeshadow on with a foam-tipped applicator.

And thus, my lips were done!

Step 6: Eyeliner

Next, I lined my eyes with a long, exaggerated (for my eye shape) wing. I used a black liquid liner - Revlon ColorStay, which I've been using forever because I really like its applicator.

Step 7: Smoky eye

Then, I just did my go-to smoky eye.  I have really hooded eyelids, so even when I pack on tons of colour it looks like I'm not wearing a lot of makeup.  I just sweep a slate grey from my lashline up to just over my crease and blend it out.  Then I take a shimmery flesh-tone colour - so it's like a butterscotch-champagne shade for me - and sweep that over the top half of my eyelid and blend it into the grey.  I also put a very thin layer of the shimmery sky blue that I used on my lips on my eyelids.

The grey and flesh-tone eyeshadows came from an old compact I nicked from my mom - sh!  Don't tell!  It's from a Japanese brand called Pola, but they don't make this quad anymore because it's literally, like, ten years old.  I probably shouldn't be using it, actually, but I love the colours. :P

After that, I curled my lashes, but you can't really tell because my lashes are very short. >.<  If I didn't wear glasses/had contacts, I'd totally rock out a ridiculous pair of falsies, but I didn't bother.

Now for the (sort of) piece de resistance!  I framed my eyebrows with some pretty decals.  Originally, I wanted to use crystals, but I couldn't find any, so I used these cool nail decals instead.  I found these at a chino (that's a type of variety store in Spain that sells absolutely everything, and are typically owned by Chinese people, hence the name) for 70 cents.

For my outfit, I just wore a black dress and put silver duct tape on it in strategic, flattering places. Add antennae and - voila! :D

What were you for Halloween?