Beauty Basics: Primers and Foundation, part 2

Some points to remember when choosing your primer and foundation. There are a lot of products out there, and depending on where you shop (or how you shop) you're going to have to know what questions to ask and what things you need out of a foundation. Salespeople at places like Sephora and Ulta are hit-and-miss, in terms of their knowledge of the products; and the folks at department store makeup counters will try and sell you the brand at their particular counter. And if you shop online, your knowledgeable salesperson is essentially Google...which can send you into information overload.

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Beauty Basics: Primers and Foundation, part 1

And now to the actual “makeup application” portion of the tutorial series :D Now that I’ve covered overall health and skin care, today I’ve got an overview of primer, corrector, concealer, and foundation. Don’t worry if you still feel lost after this one, if you’re utterly brand new to makeup. Next week I’ll go into a little more detail, so that you’ll be ready to head to the beauty counter (or online storefront) and start selecting your base-layer items.

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Beauty Basics: Skin Care

Makeup enhances certain features and minimizes others. It can also outright cover things up. But if your skin isn’t healthy, you’re putting paint over a poor canvas. Sure it looks nice if you get more expensive paints, and pay for the most costly tools and the training to use them; but wouldn’t it be easier if you just had the healthiest skin you possibly could? That lets you get better results even if you don’t spend a fortune on conceal-all makeup or spend an hour “putting your face on” each day.

These guidelines below apply to everyone, but only in the broadest sense. Your specific routine will have slight variations, and will change over time. The skin care routine you use when you’re 18 will not be the exact same routine you use when you’re 28 (or 38, or 58.)

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Beauty Basics: Overall Health

When you’re writing something, or drawing or painting, which is easier to work with and will give you a better result: a strong, crisp, clean canvas, or a roughened, possibly crumpled or torn piece of paper that feels ready to flake apart? Keep your body and skin healthy, and putting on makeup will be creating art rather than putting bright paint over rotted wood or cracked concrete. You’ll be happier with both the process and the finished result if you’re applying makeup to clean skin and a body that’s as healthy as possible.

If your body is generally healthy - and I don’t mean “not sick or injured” but “healthy and active” - you will move easier, you will breathe easier, you will have more concentration, you’ll be more energetic. This will all add up to you looking more alive, feeling better, smiling more, being more content, and…yes…looking more beautiful.

Right off the bat: this isn’t about being thin, or even necessarily “optimum weight”. This isn’t about eating a certain kind of diet, or avoiding certain foods or substances. This isn’t about having perfect skin or hair. This isn’t about doing zumba dance every week, or jogging every other day, or taking up yoga. Everyone will follow the same broadstroke outlines to be healthy, but specifics are going to be up to each individual to figure out, maintain, and adjust as needed. Because of that, this tutorial is going to be far more vague than successive tutorials…but it’s important to address. One definite upside to these tips is that they all have to do with your daily habits - and once you change your daily habits, the cumulative positive effects just keep coming.

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Beauty Basics Tutorial Series

When I was growing up, my mom gave me a great gift: once I was old enough to dress myself and brush my own hair, she pretty much let me handle those things. She did buy clothes for me, with gradually more input from me until she turned clothes-buying over to me completely when I was a teenager; but she didn’t lay out what I was to wear the next day, she didn’t put my hair in pincurlers every night, she didn’t braid my hair every morning or put it up (unless I asked), she didn’t tell me that I couldn’t wear X or Y with Z or say “don’t forget to wear a jacket with that” or “you have to always wear skirts”. My appearance was my choice, my clothing and grooming were my responsibility. She did this because she had almost-daily wars of the will with her own mom, who did put all her girls’ hair in pincurlers every night, yanked the tangles out every morning (not a gentle person as a rule), and decided what they’d wear. Mom was absolutely adamant that I would not go through that. The upside is that I have confidence in my own ability to pick out an outfit, match pieces up, and also, rather healthily, don’t give a damn about “being fashionable” or “looking cool”. The downside is that when it came to skincare and makeup…I was utterly adrift. I had learned only the most basic lessons - wash your face but don’t use regular soap; people are supposed to notice you first rather than your makeup; an item’s price doesn’t always correspond with its quality, especially the most expensive beauty products - but other than that, I was on my own.

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Protecting your content: image blocks

With all the recent rampant content theft, people are looking for ways to protect their content. While it's not impossible to block someone from coming to your site, manually viewing every page, and saving it to their desktop where they can copy and re-use the content...there are ways to force them to view and save each page individually, rather than scooping up your pictures from Google Images or some other search engine. There are two relatively minor files that give the site owner a lot of power over who can access their content, and who cannot: the .htaccess file, and the robots.txt file. All webmasters should learn how to use these files, even if you only learn the most basic operations. A lot of the various security plugins will create or edit your .htaccess file...but it's possible to edit this file without installing any plugins to your CMS or blogging software. It's a lot easier than people think - it just takes a little getting used to.

You will need to be hosted on an Apache server environment, and you'll need to be able to upload files to your webspace using something other than your CMS software's interface....so if you're hosted on Blogger/Blogspot, this won't work for you, as they recently disabled FTP uploads for all clients. You'll also need a text editor such as Notepad, or an HTML editor that has a "code" mode, like Dreamweaver or HomeSite. You have to edit these files in plaintext mode, not in design mode or a WYSIWYG editor like MS Word.

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Repotting Eyeshadows: one person’s process

...or, actually, repot my shadows. Phyrra asked on Twitter if I’d ever taken pics of the process. I hadn’t - hadn’t though about it, actually - but that got me thinking. And hey, more content that may or may not help someone else out at some point.

I repot all my shadows that I buy - not because I dislike the original packaging, but because I want everything to be in the same size jars for purposes of neatness and ease of storage. (Yes, I’m that weird.)

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PSA: Wear your sunscreen

It’s getting warmer, we’re all shaking off the winter lethargy and getting out and walking several times a week. (Or we’re going to say we are. Shush.) But don’t forget the sunscreen! Even if your chosen foundation has an SPF factor, chances are that it’s not enough protection - so grab your sunscreen of choice and add that to your daily routine.

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Using color correctors

If your face has age spots, overly large freckles, birthmarks, rosacea, scars, acne…and let’s face it, who among us doesn’t have something that stands out in ways we don’t quite love…you’ve got some choices: cope, conceal, or correct. While the beauty market is flooded with products for eyes and lips and cheeks, and of course foundation is readily available, the most readily-available option is cover-up…not correction. This is the age of Photoshop, of quick and easy red-eye correction in digital photos. So why is it not as easy to find corrector options? Many times you can get better results with a color corrector than with any cover-up option.

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An ‘Exquisite’ Mistake

Someone, hearing that I was interested in two of the colors from the Bare Escentuals Be Adventurous kit, offered to trade me for their unopened pot of Exquisite. So for the price of a few brushes that I wasn’t going to use - and postage - I got a pot of Exquisite.

It did not look the yellow-gold shown in the photos of the kit. It looked more like - forgive the indelicacy - baby-diarrhea yellow-brown. The same color as cheap “brown” mustard. And it was a “glimpse”, to boot - which means very little pigment. (Given the shade, that might be a good thing…) Since I have additives from TSS and jars of mica powder from Coastal Scents, I decided to see what I could to do salvage this.

I tried adding Violet Interfine, thinking that since purple is a complimentary color to yellow the result might look acceptable - kind of like Hot Spot (which I adore), but with a bit more brown. I didn’t measure, just mixed in a dollop. It did add a little bit of the interfine, and lightened the color so there wasn’t quite so much yellow visible; but it still wasn’t all that great. So I added a dollop of Sunstone - a darker golden-orange mica powder. While the color was no longer quite so disconcerting, there still wasn’t much effect. Not too surprising, since it was essentially a pot of mixed mica powders with a small amount of actual pigment in it. Applied wet, it adds an interesting glaze layer. While I don’t know that I’ll use this super-often, I can apply a thin layer over dark brown or black liner pencil and add a little flash to a given look - and I have managed to turn something that would have been pitched or forgotten, into something useful.