Summer Nails & Giant Marshmallows

L-R: China Glaze Rich & Famous, OPI A Grape Fit, CG For Audrey, CG Re-Fresh Mint, CG Lemon Fizz

When I was archiving the posts of my old blog onto this new blog, I realized all of a sudden that The Soap Heiress used to be a fashion/beauty blog! Somewhere along the way it morphed into more of a travel/living abroad/culture blog and now it's very food-oriented, in addition to all of the above. It's funny how things change and take on a life of its own, right?

So yesterday I was doing my nails and I decided to show all of you my picks for the best nail polish shades for Summer 2011, since they look so great together. As pictured above, they are:

(thumb) China Glaze Rich & Famous: A bright, hot pink cream. This shade, as with many CG polishes, looks way more subdued in the bottle and much brighter on. It takes 3 coats to be opaque but is easy enough to work with.

(index) OPI A Grape Fit: I am so in love with this lavender cream! As with most OPI colours, this self-levels beautifully and is a dream to apply. The colour is also super pretty - fun and feminine but not too wild.

(middle) China Glaze For Audrey: Tiffany blue! They've captured the colour perfectly. I recently brought a friend to Sally Beauty Supply to buy this colour because she's been looking for it forever and she's very happy with it. This cream also applies very well and self-levels.

(ring) China Glaze Re-Fresh Mint: I had to pick up a mint green because this colour's so hot this season. This one, also a cream, is a bit streaky to apply, like many pastel colours, but after 3 coats it was perfectly opaque and even.

(pinky) China Glaze Lemon Fizz: I was looking for a pale yellow colour originally after hearing about Illamasqua's Load (gross name but such a cool colour). This was the closest I could find that wouldn't break the bank and I didn't have to have it shipped to me, which was great. It's such a gorgeous colour and it's ideal for the summer! It's sort of a butter yellow cream - well, maybe slightly brighter than butter yellow. Yellows are notoriously streaky and this one is no exception, but it looks acceptable after 3 coats, I think. I'd suggest waiting for it to dry completely before applying top coat or else it'll be even streakier.

Bonus shot - I was at a summer barbecue yesterday and I brought over the biggest marshmallows I have ever seen. They were literally a handful each, see (below)? Eating and roasting them was lots of fun, but I think I'll stick to the regular jumbo marshmallows because this product wasn't engineered very well. Our marshmallows would melt and get all goopy before the outside had a chance to brown, you see, so these are more for novelty.

*Huge thanks to Karl for the pictures! :D

This is Courage

Every time I think of and see this image, I ask myself if I’d be brave enough and strong enough to die for something I really believe in; I’m not sure I would be.

On this day (it says June 5th in the video but I think it’s North American time – it was June 4th in China) 22 years ago, a large group of university students and intellectuals held a protest in Tiananmen Square, because they were pissed off about the bullshit the government was pulling, because they wanted democracy, because they wanted a better future for themselves and for future generations.

So the Chinese government sent in armed troops in tanks to get rid of them. Many civilians were killed and imprisoned because they dared to have a mind, to think, to demand better from their government.

Some journalists staying at the Beijing Hotel managed to capture footage and photos of this man, who faced off with four tanks and exercised unviolent protest by blocking their way, even when they tried to drive around him. A name for this civilian was circulated in the press, but nobody knows if that was his true identity. The Chinese government has never been able to present this man to the public, so no one knows what happened to him after he got dragged away from these tanks – some say he was dragged away by comrades, some say he was imprisoned, and others maintain that he was executed by the government, along with many others.

I can’t tell you how much this famous image touches me. I didn’t discover the video until a few years ago, which had an even larger impact on me because I didn’t know that he kept stepping in the way of the tanks as they tried to steer around him and that he eventually climbed onto the tank to reason with the soldiers.

Many young people in China grew up having never seen this image image before because of censorship, but there are still tombstones as well as many disabled survivors around to prove it happened. A man who had both his legs crushed by a tank recently appeared in a memorial event in Vancouver and held a talk about it.

This is courage. This is strength. And this piece of modern history makes me proud to be Chinese.

Tasty Tuesday/Food Fail: Cafe Maxim's Patisserie

Dearest readers,

I hope you all had a fantastic weekend!  This is the first Mother's Day where I have a steady income and can actually afford to hold something of a celebration with Superwoman, so I asked her early on where she'd like to eat.

"Oh! I haven't actually thought about Mother's Day!" She said with an innocent flutter of her eyelashes before producing three Mother's Day special restaurant ads and asking me which one sounded good to me. :P  So we picked Cafe Maxim, because we were craving good desserts and they're known for their cakes.

When we told some family friends about our reservation, they groaned and berated us because, they said, for $38 a head before tax, there were much better choices in the city.  But we were really intrigued by the seafood pasta option, the all-you-can-eat desserts and the lobster bisque, so we went ahead with it anyway...

You have a song in your head & it's driving you nuts. What do you do?

If it's in my head & driving me nuts because it's so awesome, I'll play it a million times, go online to look up the lyrics if I don't already know them, and sing it until everyone around me gets really annoyed.

If it's in my head because I can't figure out the name of the song, I will ask around or Google whatever lyrics I can remember.

Funny but true: I had the melody of a song stuck in my head for a decade - I'd heard it on a variety show & loved it, but no one I knew could figure out what it was (I swear I'm not tone deaf!). It was SO frustrating. Then finally one day I managed to find (through Wikipedia) the exact episode of the show I heard it in, I found that episode on TuDou (Chinese YouTube), saw that segment, heard the song again, typed out a line of the lyrics and I found out the name of the song! After that I was able to find the music video on YouTube and a friend who I haven't kept in touch with even sent the mp3 to me because it turned out that she had it all along. :)

Ask me anything

Would you rather be the best player on a losing team or the worst player on a winning team?

Worst player on a winning team because then I can learn through osmosis. :)

Ask me anything

formspring.me

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/thesoapheiress