Re-existing

Well, LJ has become too difficult to use. I got swallowed by Tumblr for a while, and most of my active fandom-related stuff is currently over there. But there are some things it's just not any good at, and straight journaling is one of them, so I guess my home for that is here (DW) now. At least, I paid up my account again.

I think I have this set up to crosspost to LJ, so if anyone is still listening over there, they'll see what I have up here. If not, no great loss, I think. But it seems a shame to just abandon a ten-year journal, so at least it's safely archived here.

(no subject)

Having reached the critical midlife crisis age of four decades, I have begun inspecting one of the last remaining things I have always done a particular way solely because of my upbringing. I refer, of course, to being a painted whore make-up and hair dye.

I was brought up in a household that held no truck with make-up of any sort, or indeed hair styling products or antiperspirant (deodorant and perfume were okay, in moderation). My paternal grandmother did, and did her best to school me in the womanly arts of lipstick and nail polish when I was a wee girl in knee skirts, but she and my mother must have had a confrontation about it sometime in my late single digits, because she stopped a few years before I hit puberty. So the only make-up I ever learned to apply as a youth was stage make-up for dance and theatrical recitals.

Some of my mother's prohibitions fell away early. You really have to wear antiperspirant in Houston in the summer; deodorant alone does not cut it in this heat. I came to the conclusion that she was right about most hair styling products on my own in college. I started picking up scented lotion and various forms of body glitter when they started showing up at Pagan festivals in the oughts. And while I have never gotten the hang of lipstick per se, I've carried around various sorts of tinted lip balm that serve roughly the same purpose for several years.

I stopped biting my nails about three years ago, and used nail polish as both a tool and a bribe for myself. If I didn't bite my nails, they'd be long enough to paint; if they were painted, I couldn't bite them because the polish tastes nasty. To my surprise, this actually mostly worked; my nails are terribly flexible and prone to delamination and breakage, but they are now usually to the ends of my fingers. I still stick them in my mouth a lot, but I don't chew on them. And I have a surprisingly large collection of nail polish colors, including a spectrum of greens from bright to dark. I couldn't just adopt convention, after all.

Upon the occasion of my 40th birthday and an examination of the lines at the corners of my eyes, I decided that it was at least worth exploring eye makeup as a prospect. This has been complicated by the fact that my eyes are deep-set and slightly hooded; eyeshadow has a tendency to migrate into my eyelid crease, and so far I haven't found an affordable eyeshadow primer with an ingredients list I would willingly put so close to mucous membrane. So far, I have had limited success at eyeliner, although I am told that practice will help there. I did, however, discover Aromaleigh's mineral eyeshadow by way of their myth- and fandom-inspired collections and purchased a gob of their samples, mostly from their Serpens collection because of course dragons. (Now that they've completed the collection, I should order the other samples.)

At any rate, since part of the point of my return to this corner of the social media market is to do some actual journaling, I will be posting my thoughts on some of those eyeshadow shades, as well as potentially various colors of nail polish. Those of you looking for deeper thoughts, feel free to ignore these as you wish.

Aromaleigh Serpens Eyeshadow Review & Commentary, Part 1

The first three colors in the set I've tried on myself were Nidhoggr, Shimchong, and Coatlicue.

Nidhoggr is a metallic bronze-brown with brassy highlights in the bag. On me dry, it's just a plain cool-ish medium-brown with a bit of metallic sparkle; applied wet (I'm using a glycerin & rosewater blend as the moisture, but plain water should work just as well) the bronze/brass metallic aspects come to the fore. I like it, but I don't love it. I'll definitely use up the sample (a sample bag is enough for about ten applications depending on how much you use), but so far this isn't on my list to order more.

Shimchong is a very light salmon-pink with a gold shimmer in the bag. On me dry, it's all but invisible except for some green-to-aquamarine sparkles and a subtle gold shimmer; the base color spread thin is a remarkably close match for my skin tone. Applied wet, the pink base is more apparent, but so is the gold, which becomes something closer to rose-gold. (The website claims that there's some violet in the shimmer as well; either it doesn't show up on me, or it just looks pink against my skin.) I didn't expect to like this much at all, since I'm not a fan of pinks, but I was absolutely wrong. It's a lovely highlight shade on me, and I will almost certainly be ordering a regular jar at the end of the testing cycle.

Coatlicue is a soft rose-red with a tonal shimmer in the same hue in the bag. That's pretty much what it looks like dry on me, too, except that the rose darkens a bit and the shimmer takes on some gold highlights as well as the rose. Applied wet, the rose base hue darkens, the rose shimmer takes on more of a magenta hue, and the rose-gold shimmer comes more to the fore, making this a bit metallic, almost coppery. I'm on the fence about how I feel about this one; I have enough reds in my skin tones that adding more doesn't always look good. I have the feeling that this is a great shade, but not for me. On the other hand, I have a shade of nail polish that I think it would look great with, and layering it with Shimchong got me some interesting effects. I'll have to try it with a few other highlight colors, I think.