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Thursday, August 11, 2011

What I've been up to lately

Hey guys! It's been a while, I hope you all are doing well. Here's are some reasons (or excuses?) why I haven't been posting in the past week:

1. Setting up my mini home studio

home studio

One thing that I don't like my apartment most (besides it doesn't have 4 bedrooms, 3 washrooms and a garden haha) is that there is not much sunlight. It is well lit for daily living but not enough if you are a blogger who like to take pictures or if you have lots of plants. 

FOTD and makeup tutorials take a large part in my planning for this blog, so I have finally (after much struggle) decided to invest in a few equipments in the hope of taking better photos.  Each of these lights can hold up to 4 light bulbs, that means I can take super bright photo in the middle of the night. BUT I don't know when I can start using these light because I don't have the light bulbs yet! And this leads to the second thing that I've been occupied with.

2. Dealing with problematic online purchases

I LOVE shopping online, 70% of my shoppings (save for groceries and stuff) are done sitting in front of my trusty iMac and wearing my comfy pajamas. I've been very lucky that I didn't have a lot of problems in the past for damaged products or lost packages. Seems like I've used up all my luck and things are changing in a bad way. 8 light bulbs purchased with the lighting were gone missing in the package, had to ask seller to send those again. Received damaged makeup from another store, had to ask them for a replacement. 

I am not particular fond of ranting but I have to warn you: DON'T EVER BUY FROM makeupmania.com !! Yes, I'm that angry I have to make it all cap and in red. 

They are extremely unprofessional - to make a long story short, I placed an order, waited for almost 3 weeks and took me many efforts to contact them for an update on shipping status, they were simply unresponsive. And then I stepped things up to opening a dispute case on Paypal, finally I got a response from them. Their reason for not contacting me sooner was that the person in charge of customer service had left and they were short of personnel in doing so. While that might sound very convincing, they were regularly updating their website and facebook! I wanted to proceed with my order anyway, but then they made some unreasonable requests that made me decided to cancel it and have my money back in the end. 

To conclude, I am very very disappointed with their services and would not recommend this store if you have never ordered from them before. Maybe it was just my luck and there are many happy customers ordered from them and don't have a problem. But if you are planning to order from them for the first time, I would say stay away from them, stay away from the possible hassle. 

3. Reorganizing my kits

makeup palette

Trying to get more room for new stuff, I started to depot eyeshadows, blushes and lip sticks into palette. I was also trying to pressed pigments and mineral eyeshadows, but that is more difficult than I expected. The proportion of alcohol and binding agent (glycerine in my case) was completely wrong that I ended up with a dozen pans of eyeshadow pigments that would never dry!

I'll keep experimenting until I get it right, in the mean time, I would really appreciate if you could share with me your experience.

4. Makeup lessons

If you have read my first post, you may probably know that I am enrolled in a professional makeup class taught by a well known (locally at least) makeup artist. I've been waiting for almost 2 months and the class started last week (about time!).

As expected, there's nothing much going on in the first lesson. Most of the lesson was on the basics - something about the industry, what your kit should include, introduction to different types of makeup products.

Highlight was the last hour of the lesson - we practiced prepping the skin and applying liquid foundation on each other. I have never worked on other people before and I felt like I have never used a cotton pad, sponge nor brush before. The experience was completely different from working on my own face! I'm so looking forward to next lesson.

That's pretty much it, and I'll come back with a "real" post soon,


 
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