Have any of you tried white eyeliner? It’s my new fave for spring right now.
It wasn’t long ago that I was searching for something new to do with my look. Confession: I did get the highlights, and some of you also encouraged me to try white eyeliner—and I love it!
My fear was that this would look weird, basically. And it does a little. But good weird. Like a little surprise, but a pleasant one. I’ve been really into white shoes as well, so I feel like these pops of white could be part of my current uniform. The older I get the more drawn I am to the idea of a uniform, anyone with me?
But back to the liner. Jane Iredale is my go-to when it comes to natural liners, so I was very excited to try their white. It did not disappoint. What brand of liner do you wear?
I’ve tried it a few ways:
1. Inside liner. I don’t know that lining the inside of one’s eye is ever really the best idea, natural or not, but I still do it on occasion. This is a fun daytime look, as opposed to the inside black line which always screams night out. In this pic it’s done a bit more extreme than I do it, but a lighter touch is almost imperceptible while still looking fresh.
2. Cat eye line. This is a fun, modern take on this back-in-vogue style. Again, what I really like about going white here is that it’s great for day (though nice at night too, because the white really jumps when it catches the light). I wear mascara when I do this, otherwise it can get a little washed out.
3. Lid shadow. This one is probably the easiest to pull off. I’ve tried just using the liner on my lid and then smudging it a bit so that it’s a matte, blended white. But I’ve also mixed it with RMS luminizer which looks more like this pic. Highly recommend!
What new makeup tricks have you been trying? And is white liner in your repertoire?
Welcome to part two of a five-part series about our favorite foundations. Last week we told you about our current favorite minerals foundation. Now we’re onto a liquid. (Psst: There’s another liquid on the way! They’re both so nice we decided to do liquids…twice!)
Vapour Organic Beauty Soft Focus Foundation
I feel compelled to share the how-we-met part of my love story with Vapour’s foundation. Here goes: In late November I had the pleasure of speaking at a spectacular natural beauty event here in New York with a gaggle of inspiring women including Tata Harper, whose skincare we’re obsessed with, and Spirit Demerson, whose Spirit Beauty Lounge carries many of our favorite brands. Spirit had with her the lovely Anna Webber, a talented makeup artist who works with naturals and was on hand to help a roomful of women play with Spirit’s products at halftime.
I was feeling a little zonked and my skin was not exactly crystal clear (always awesome when you’re sitting in front of a roomful of people talking about beauty), so halfway through the day, I asked Anna to touch up my face. We chatted a little about color choice—even though I’m pink she advised me to try something neutral or with a little yellow in it, because pinks can look chalky after a while—then she reached for a frosted bottle of Vapour’s Soft Focus Foundation.
She gently padded it into the skin in the center of my face, under my eyes and on my forehead, then topped it off with something called the Instant Skin Perfector, presumably blending the two together. I say presumably because I had my eyes closed (a weird reflex for whenever anyone gets close to my face) but when I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror? Boom! A refreshed, dewy, even complexion.
I bought the product on the spot and wondered out loud if I’d be able to apply it as well as Anna had. I was delighted to find that it goes on like a dream and is pretty much idiot-proof! You need very, very little, and I just do the old apply-to-center-of-face-and-blend-outward thing, using my fingers.
And best of all? The ingredients are not only nontoxic, they’re also really skin-friendly, which means when you’re wearing it, your skin is being fed good-for-you ingredients, as opposed to being suffocated with silicone, mineral oil and other crap.
Have a look: Camellia Sinensis Oil Oil* infused with Boswellia Carteri (Frankincense)**, Ocimum Sanctum (Tulsi, Holy Basil)*, Nelumbo Nucifera (Lotus Flowers)*; Helianthus Annus ( Sunflower ) Oil*, Lecithin*, Cera Alba (Beeswax)*, Silica, Essential Oils and Natural Fruit Essences, Tocopherol (Natural Vitamin E), [+/-: Titanium Dioxide (CI 77891), Iron Oxides (CI 77491, 77492, 77499), Mica (CI 77019)]
You can get it from Vapour’s site, or from Spirit Beauty Lounge.
What’s your favorite liquid foundation?
Lately we’ve been on a bit of a makeup kick. A couple of weeks ago I got a little emo about my relationship with makeup, and your comments were deeply moving and thoughtful, then I told you about our favorite new blush (slash lipstick). Next, we challenged you to give us your best, glammest clean-cosmetics face, and then Alexandra asked you to share your makeup horror stories with our friend Melissa Dahl.
Now, we’d like to tackle the most basic basics—the stuff we use to hide our zits, even out our complexions, and fake a good night’s sleep. In a word: foundation.
We’re going to do this in five parts, and the first one might raise some eyebrows (or crossbows!). Be gentle with us, and hear us out, because numero uno in the series is….
Laura Mercier Mineral Powder SPF 15
“Huh? Laura Mercier? But her line isn’t natural or organic—is it?” Heck no, but her loose minerals contain the same ingredients as almost any other mineral powder on the market, and hers is our current favorite. In fact, it’s the only reason we ever go to Sephora anymore! (No offense, Sephora—it’s just that your stores confuse people about what’s truly natural and what isn’t. Also, the perfumes make us kind of heachachy.) Like many other minerals lines, this one does contain bismuth oxychloride, so if you react badly to it, then this one probably isn’t for you. What we like about LM minerals are the colors and how finely ground they are—it just makes for a nice light touch, but with the same strong coverage minerals provide. As always, you must be very careful not huff the stuff. (One solution? Mix it with your moisturizer or face oil.)
What’s your favorite loose minerals line?
Come back Tuesday for the next!
Image of a pretty girl putting on powder (CC) from Flickr
Ever since I heard about Kjaer Weis’ line, I was excited to get my paws on it.
A lover of beautiful packaging and high-performance natural products, I’m never so pleased as when the two combine for a really appealing aesthetic experience—which this most certainly is.
I say “slash lipstick.” Technically this little stunner is, as the title suggests, a cream blush. But I’ve clearly been playing with naturals too long because it never occurred to me that this product might be intended for my cheeks alone. That’s because thanks to other nontoxic lines like W3LL People and RMS Beauty, we’ve gotten accustomed to putting whatever, wherever. So this morning, looking a little ghostly in the mirror, I decided to put what I thought was a lipstick on my cheekbones. Turns out I had it backwards all along, and boy am I happy I figured that out.
As soon as I smeared on an index-fingertip-worth of this cream blush in Sun Touched I looked, well, sun touched. Not in a bronzer kind of way but in a “I spent the long weekend at an ashram in the Bahamas” kind of way.
If you’re a cradle-to-cradle type—someone concerned with the entire lifecycle of a product—you’ll be happy to know that these lovely metal cases are refillable, the refills are cased in recyclable paper, and the ingredients are 95% certified organic. Here’s the ingredient list for my blush:
Aside from carmine, which is widely used in organics and naturals but is not suitable for vegans because it comes from crushed beetles, the ingredients are as squeaky clean as it gets. I love it, and am thrilled to have a new lipstick blush to play with.
It’s currently sold exclusively at Space NK but we hope we’ll be seeing it on our go-to retailers’ sites soon, too.
It’s that time again, folks! As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been preparing to announce a new challenge. The Nancy Drews out there have probably already figured out that this one is about makeup (ding ding ding!), and once again, there is a prize!
Consider this the opposite of the no-makeup challenge we launched in September. That one was a huge hit: We asked you to brave a naked face outside the house, and you all looked absolutely fetching while doing so. Now, we want you to do the opposite:
We want you to go wild with your clean makeup! What does that mean, exactly? It’s totally up to you. Maybe it means putting on eyeliner for the first time in your life, or wearing a bright pink lipstick, or doing a face as bananas as the Black Swan’s. All we ask is that you have FUN with the challenge, and take at least one risk. It’s your going-out face we’re looking for, not your doing-groceries face. You decide what’s bold for you, then take a picture, and send it in.
One of you will win a $100 gift certificate from the amazing natural beauty store Spirit Beauty Lounge. Spirit Demerson, its founder, is incredibly knowledgeable about nontoxic beauty, and she carries many of our favorite products (makeup included). Because there’s no way in hell we’re going to judge your pictures, we’ll be picking the winner out of a hat.
The rules: You gotta be wearing makeup. We encourage you to wear as much nontoxic clean makeup as you can. You don’t have to go shopping to do the challenge; work with what you have.
Instructions: Send your picture to nomoredirtylooks (at) gmail (dot) com, with GLAM FACE in the subject line. Please include your first name, city of origin and, if you feel like, tell us what products you used. We need all pictures by end of day, Sunday, March 6th. We will post the results on our site shortly thereafter, as well as on our Facebook page.
Pretty please: Help us spread the word! Tweet it, Facebook it, scream from the rooftops, and tell your friends to get on board with you, too.
The reason for the challenge: To show that clean cosmetics can be glamorous as conventionals, and to explore how much fun makeup can be beyond its functional qualities. We love makeup as a zit-hider, complexion perfecter, or undereye-circle eraser as much as the next girl, but this challenge is about having fun.
Who’s in?
