glossier – MY LIPSTICK STAIN

If two albums I loved were people, what makeup would they wear?

April 2, 2017 diceyLeave a comment

Now that I’ve finally gotten myself a Spotify Premium account, music has once again become something which is actively part of my life (the way it was when I was thirteen) rather than just background noise the way it was for the past couple of years. One of the best investments I’ve ever made, btw. I listen to a lot more independent artists now and am discovering some of the best songs I’ve ever heard. At the risk of sounding pretentious, having so much music becoming easily accessible to me has made me a lot more selective towards what I choose to listen to. Why continue to fill my ears with payola-d, radio trash when there’s so much better stuff available? (In other words, I’ve become one of those people who reply to comments on Youtube about new music sucking with: “Good music still exists!! You just have to look for it!!”)

While I look for new music, I’ve also been reunited with older music that I used to love when I was younger and get to judge them with more grown up ears. Honestly, most of them are objectively pretty bad (I mean, I will still go HAM when 3OH!3’s Starstrukk comes on but you have to admit that it’s hard to defend it as being anything other than a pretty terrible song) but there are also some which I actually end up liking a lot more now compared to how I felt about it when they were new (I would say the R’n’B era was a great one. Honestly, I’d sacrifice every EDM DJ currently on the airwaves for Toni Braxton to have a big comeback).

One of the ways I measure whether a certain song or album is something I truly love and isn’t just something with a nice beat that I enjoy hearing is if it’s capable of bringing me into its world. Is it weird to say that I think some songs have aesthetics? A bland but enjoyable song is just that—something you hear—but a really good song is capable of making you envision things. These ‘things’ include makeup. So since this is supposed to be a makeup blog and not just a personal blog, let me talk about two albums that I really love and talk about what kind of makeup and aesthetics it brings to my mind.

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Who is the Cool Girl?

January 30, 2017January 30, 2017 diceyLeave a comment

You guys know how when corporations are trying to sell makeup to you, they’re not just selling you individual products but rather they’re offering an image and a dream. A dream of the kind of woman you could become if only you’d buy this contour stick or this eyeshadow palette or brow kit. I mean I’m not exactly breaking new ground here… this is something we’ve all known for a while. Women in the 60s were being sold the image of the youthful, skinny, bug-eyed Twiggy woman while in the 80s they were promoting the Amazonian supermodel. Back in the 2000s, I totally admired the whole stick-thin blonde It-Girl heiress wearing gigantic sunglasses and toting around an even more gigantic handbag with a tiny teacup Chihuahua in tow look. Starbucks in hand, of course.

There’s no questioning who was the woman we’ve been pushed to aspire to be for the past couple of years… I don’t want to mention the name because I don’t admire them so much but I don’t have to mention her anyway: you know exactly who she is. And in the makeup giant’s quest to make us want to be her, we’ve been pushed contour kits and liquid lipsticks and high-coverage foundation. Everything we need to achieve that exotic, racially-ambiguous Armenian look. But now I think we’re seeing a new kind of woman emerging—The Cool Girl.

So who is the Cool Girl? I can’t name any specific woman the Cool Girl is based upon. I guess she probably does exist, but she’s probably an artist or a writer or a magazine editor AKA not the kind of person the general public would recognize. It’s funny because the first time the term ‘Cool Girl’ came to my (and a lot of people’s) attention is through Amy Dunne’s iconic prose in Gone Girl (the book and the movie) where she basically laid it out that the ‘Cool Girl’ is a myth and a fraud, a front put up to satisfy men. So it’s funny that the term is now being repackaged into something that’s meant to be desirable and aspirational. Not that I mind all that much—I’m pretty much the opposite of a ‘Cool Girl’, but I find myself really buying into it. So here are some of the elements which I think make up the Cool Girl Look.

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The Real G.

October 10, 2016 dayangatul1 Comment

I’ll just get straight to the point – Glossier isn’t just a brand. It is a lifestyle.

Some even compared it to Supreme; the brand does not sell just it’s products, it sells the “lifestyle” it’s wearer believes it provides. The same thing goes to Glossier I suppose.

Am I only swiping credit cards on glossier.com merely for the brand and it’s products? Or am I splashing cash for the lifestyle it’s been marketing?

“The ultimate cool girl”, that’s how it is often described by bloggers and makeup lovers on beauty forums. Some worship it, some loathe it. I can’t tell which one I am, so I guess I split right in the middle. There are days when I love it to death, feeling cool and thinking of it as the best beauty brand of our generation (it’s not, I’ll tell you why in a minute); and then there are days when I’d hate it – knowing I’ll never look as cool or as hip as any of the “Glossier Girls” they keep pushing on social media.

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Into the Glossier Skin Tint.

September 19, 2016 dicey3 Comments

If you’re in the know, it’d be pretty obvious to you that we here are big fans of Into The Gloss and, by extension, Glossier. Well, as much of a fan as you can be for someone who’s never tried any of their products since Glossier doesn’t ship internationally. But after ages of longingly drooling over pictures of Glossier’s sleek, minimalist-chic products online, it was finally time to bite the bullet and, with money and third party help, get their stuff over here to Malaysia and try it out for myself!

Amongst their carefully-curated lineup of products, the one that I really wanted to try the most was the Glossier Skin Tint.

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