Outtake: Beauty Shopping in Turkey

The boy and I found a store with makeup in Bodrum, a week and a half into our time in Turkey. There were certainly stores before then, but it was the first we actually stumbled upon, and he gamely joined me in my browsing exploits. I picked up a number of nail polishes and swatched a lot of lippies but ended up only buying one (review to come!), but while I was playing the boy took some photos with my camera.

No makeup = ghostly Amy. This face = "this gloss is such a pretty color, but
why does it have to have glitters?!"

What a Beauty Blogger Considers "Traveling Light"

Is probably not what normal people do. But hey! At least I didn't bring my complete collection.

It's going to be hot and humid everywhere I'll be, so I brought base products that hang around for dear life: MAC Matchmaster 1, Face Atelier Zero Minus (to add to Matchmaster so that it actually, y'know, matches my skin––I'll try to review this for reals at some point), Meow Sleek Siamese Flawless, Make Up For Ever Full Cover Concealer 1 Pink Porcelain, and Ben Nye Neutral Set.

clockwise from top right: Meow Sleek Siamese (in my own jar),
Ben Nye Neutral Set (ditto), Face Atelier Zero Minus, MAC
Matchmaster 1, MUFE Full Cover 1

Off We Go!

I write this sitting in the Portland airport, waiting for my (redeye, ugh) flight to New York. I had the best of intentions for writing a pre-trip post, complete with all the beauty supplies I'm bringing with me, but ran out of time to take photographs (the whole thing is written, though, darn). I'll try to get to it sometime next week!

In case anyone doesn't already know, I'm going to be in Turkey and Berlin for a few weeks with the boy––sightseeing and researcher visiting in Turkey, conference presenting and birthday having in Berlin––after a week in NYC. I'll be back home August 14, but until then, I'll be keeping a travel blog, Still A Hungry Linguist, which you're welcome to follow if you're so inclined, though I'll be posting anything beauty-related on here. Reviews and such will probably slow down a lot, but I will try to post whenever I have something relevant! I'm just giddy at the thought of all the new brands I'll get to explore...

What are your travel necessities? Have you been to Turkey/do you have any suggestions for places to go? 

Merry Christmas!

To everyone who celebrates, Merry Christmas! And to everyone who doesn't, enjoy the last day of Christmas music for the next 10 months! (That last one applies to those of you who celebrate, too––I'm so looking forward to the absence of holiday tunes.)

Window display at Neiman––I mostly took it because look at the frog! It's so sparkly!

Fountain at Fashion Island on Christmas Eve

Chandelier and awesome ceiling at the Benson in Portland

One of the many, many decked out houses on Balboa Island

Nutcracker in our lounge

Things shaped like trees

Cranberry orange rolls at Great Harvest, center decoration at Pioneer Place in Portland

Christmas Tree in one of the lounges of our hotel

Baths: When you don't have to pay for the water, there's nothing better

Lush Sakura bath bomb

Bubble bath in our jetted tub on Christmas Eve with Philosophy Holiday Lights Aglow: it didn't bubble under the faucet, so my mother poured the whole little 1 oz container in, and then when I turned the jets on the bubbles just EXPLODED. Ended up turning off the jets because the bubbles wouldn't stop growing and they were about to engulf me!

I was giddy, absolutely giddy

I hope you all are having a lovely day, wherever you may be :)

New York Summary Post

I got the chance to go to several stores in New York that I'd not been to before, and sniffed a lot of perfumes. I thought it might be interesting/helpful to share my thoughts with y'all, should you ever be in New York and want to smell perfumes! For a thorough summary of perfume stores in the area, see The Non-Blonde's awesomely helpful post. And, so that you don't get overwhelmed with perfume rambling, I've included random pictures from the trip.

MiN NY
A little boutique on Crosby Street with a truly unbelievable array of perfumes. The boy and I went there and were the only customers, and we felt rather out of place, but the sales people were really nice and patient and let us wander and smell to our heart's content. I highly recommend stopping by there! I already mentioned Tauer Carillon Pour Un Ange as being an absolute gem, but it was far from the only thing we smelled. From Amouage, I liked Lyric, both the men and women's versions, and Dia Woman, and quite disliked Epic Woman. From Parfum d'Empire, I tried and liked Wazamba, Iskander, and Ambre Russe (though I would need to try them on skin to say for sure), and really disliked Aziyadé, which did the Amouage Jubilation thing and smelled like curry to me (and the boy as well). The fruit came out more when sprayed on a blotter than when just sniffing the bottle, but it was still entirely too spicy for me (I like spice, just not cumin and cardamom as a perfume!).

Conservatory Garden in Central Park

Travel Beauty: Part II

I'm home again, which means a return of semi-regular posting! Yippee. I had a really lovely trip, which I will talk more about soon, but right now I am barely coherent and very sleepy, so will instead throw some pictures at you. This post covers the non-liquid beauty items I brought with me (aka, the things that were not easily accessible to me during my layover; those that were can all be found in Part I), as well as all the things I purchased on my trip (which I define as being "after I left Eugene", not just "on the East Coast", since I got some stuff in Portland before leaving).

What I Brought

Brushes: I picked up the Real Techniques Starter Set (purple) and Core Collection (orange), but switched out a couple of the brushes for others in my collection, so I ended up bringing, left to right, top to bottom: RT base shadow, RT crease, RT accent, Sonia Kashuk crease, RT brow, RT contour, Ecotools concealer, RT detailer (which I used as a lip brush), RT buffing, elf Powder, and RT blush brushes. The cases that the Real Techniques brushes came with are really handy for traveling, but a pain in the butt for everyday use––it's so much effort to get the brushes back into their elastic bands! Definitely preferable to stick them in another container when not traveling.

Mid-Trip Update

Greetings again! I finally got around to uploading some pictures so I thought it a good time to ramble some more at y'all.

Here's me before the wedding:

Normal and OH SO EXCITED

Dress from JCPenney ($36), shoes from Kohls ($16), and lipstick was Rouge Dior in Favori Red ($32, so yes, it cost twice as much as my shoes. I have my priorities, alright?). Full review of the lipstick to come, but I hope this picture shows some of its beauty!

Travel Beauty: Part I

My flight is delayed an hour out of DFW, so I figured why not write a blog post?! About the liquid items I brought with me, since those are the ones I have the easiest access to. Please forgive the crappy photos; I obviously did not bring anything approximating a lightbox with me (nor can I go outside to snap in the sunshine). I'm also in too much of a time crunch to bother linking to everything, so this is a (refreshingly?) link-free post.

Perfume

I chose to bring just perfume sample vials. It appears (and by appears, I mean smells) like my beloved Sonoma Scent Studio Forest Walk leaked some in transit. So now everything in my baggie smells like forest! Which is great, but I would rather I smell like forest. Ah well. At least I was already planning on buying a bigger vial! I brought one Guerlain, Derby, which I am wearing right now––I think it's too heavy to wear while flying, but I dabbed some off before I left which helped. I adore the chypreness of it, but I forgot that airports are always way overly warm. All others are Sonoma Scent as well: Cameo (to wear to the wedding, 'cause it's classy as fuck [just like me, clearly]), Velvet Rose (probably should have grabbed Champagne de Bois instead, but it's too late now!), and Jour Ensoilellé (which is what I should have worn for this flight stuff).

New York Shopping Ramblings

I've got a ton of posts heading your way in the next few days/weeks, but I thought I'd start the deluge with this one!

I had a marvelous day of shopping in NYC on Sunday and managed to pick up a few products as well as sniff some perfumes, spot a makeup celebrity, and get a makeover. Herewith, some musings on the stores and my experiences:

We went to Bergdorf Goodman first, since it's home to Le Métier de Beauté and a Guerlain boutique, as well as a slew of other beauty and fragrance counters. The beauty section is on the lower-level, and the design is rather different from typical department stores, with lots of smaller rooms (connected by open archways) which made the shopping experience much more intimate. The LMdB counter is right at the base of the escalator going down, so that's where we went first; the saleswoman was nice enough, if a little distant, and I ended up picking up a couple of items: Corinthian eyeshadow, the Queen of Taupes, and a Lip Crème (Fraise!) for L, my shopping companion.

We then walked around the store and checked out some of the other counters (though not Clé de Peau, since I cannot afford anything at their counter). I made us stop by the Guerlain boutique, which supposedly has the full range of their fragrances (300 in all, though from the looks of it, they're not all displayed) and cosmetics. I sprayed the pure parfum versions of L'Heure Bleue, Mitsouko, and Nahéma on blotters just for kicks (and to see if the two former smelled noticeably different from their edp formulations; to my untrained nose, they did not, which I'm going to say means I don't have to order the parfum version from The Perfumed Court, at least not until I get really obsessed with fragrance, if that ever happens!*), though I think I should perhaps have stuck with the edt of Nahéma, since I quite disliked the parfum. I also sniffed the bottle of Vol de Nuit, though I was starting to suffer from some olfactory fatigue by that point, and also swatched a few of the Rouge Automatique lipsticks (Guet-Apens is in my future!) and tried the Kiss Kiss gloss upon L's recommendation, only to deem it, as usual, "too sticky".