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Vegemite and lip tattoos – Colin rides again

17 Mar

After the last post featuring my housemate Colin’s nipples, I have been deluged with requests, fan mail, bribes, marriage proposals, weird fan-art, and all sorts of messages and trinkets that I was supposed to pass on to him, but didn’t.

Some of the more savoury suggestions you sent in, dear readers, included things you wanted me to do to Colin’s lucious lips.  Which is why we are here today, to try out the lip tattoos given to me for Christmas by my babelicous Danish friend, Irene.

Here’s me with Irene, in Glasgow, December 2011, on our way to the Def Leppard/Motley Crue/Steel Panther gig.

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So Irene gave me, amongst other fabulous gifts, some lip transfer/tattoos.

As made famous by Jessie J

As made famous by Jessie J

They’re just like the temporary tattoos that we all played with as kids (I don’t still play with them, HAHAHAHAHAHAA).  You cut the tattoo to fit the size and shape of your lips, peel off the plastic, wet the tattoo generously with cold water, press it on then carefully lift away the paper backing once the tattoo is stuck to the skin.

Colin assumes the position

Colin assumes the position

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But I just didn’t think that was creepy enough, so I made his teeth pointy.

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These pointy teeth were created with…

yes, Vegemite!

yes, Vegemite!

… although if you want a longer-lasting pointy tooth, get some tooth enamel.  Otherwise, as soon as you stop baring your teeth and start flapping your gums as normal, you’ll end up looking like you need to see the dentist urgently.

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So the lip tattoo lasted for an entire evening.

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And it lasted quite well.  I thought it would crack and peel but it didn’t, it just kind of faded.  He got a good few hours wear.

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And it wasn’t any ordinary night that the lip tattoo survived; it was Roadtrip Three Reunion night, where Chloe, Colin and I enjoyed a splendid slideshow of all the photos from the holiday we took together a year ago.  She-housemate Zoe might not have enjoyed it as much as we did, but she was a bloody good sport about it, and that’s why we love her 🙂

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men with makeup: Colin

19 Feb

Today we explore another type of non-permanent body decoration: indelible-pen nipple-art.

Allow me to introduce you to my favourite male housemate, Colin.

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That’s us on the California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco, in March 2012.  And here we are in Vegas, with my doing a shocking job of the Amplifier octopus on his arm.

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Sometimes we like to swap clothes, which works for me because he’s Scottish and in a kilt 100% of the time.  It also works for him because I dress like a man from the 80s.

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And of course, like any friend of mine who’s ever been in the same room as me, a bottle of vodka and a Sharpie, Colin is an esteemed member of the Pen Fifteen club.

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Colin is such a good sport, in fact, that he didn’t press charges when I did this to him:

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As I always say, that’s what friends are for.

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PS Here’s a photo of me, Chloe and Colin playing hooker-card snap on the Strip, because I know she’ll be pissed at me for making it look like she wasn’t even there for Road Trip 2012.

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let me run something up your flagpole

17 Feb

Going to the football?  Here, let me sort you out.

Here’s me on Australia Day in 2009 – we had an excellent party in the hostel that year, all down to other resident redhead Aussie at the time – Ken – who paid outstanding attention to detail and got in everyone’s favourite Australian delicacies (Toffee Apples, Milo, Chicos, Cherry Ripes, Burger Rings – you name it).

Anyway – these flags are all done with cream makeup/facepaint that’s available on eBay for a couple of bucks per tube.  Not sure if you can see on my blue face but it’s flaking to buggery – maybe I had it on too thick?  Or maybe it was a dud batch of paint.  The blue corner of the South African flag on Alewyn’s face suffered the same fate, while the rest of the facepaint lasted pretty well (not only on his face, but everyone else’s who came within smearing distance!)

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And Dos Tonis, getting ready to celebrate LOUDLY for the World Cup in 2010 (?? – is it every four years like the Olympics??)

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I’m not sure what was going on with Chloe’s makeup here; from memory we were at a dress up party (Morgan’s birthday?) and at the last minute hastily threw together her costume; I think she was a flag.  The dress she’s in was a floor length stripey beach-ball number and her face was just painted with the colours I had to hand that kind-of matched.  Heehee.  That was the day I first had my hair cut into a mullet (April or May 2012) by Oban’s one and only Karlos; it has since gone from strength to strength (in length).

Anyway.  Not an official flag according to the UN, but still.

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is that… Alice Cooper?

13 Feb

No.  It’s Grant in makeup and a wig!

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Why so sad, Alice-Grant?  Is it because my plan to see your performance in Edinburgh on Halloween last year fell through, and you’re all bummed out because one of your fans never got to see you live on stage?  I was disappointed, too – Chloe and I were going to go as Wayne and Garth.  But it was not to be.

I didn’t think tickets would sell out as fast as they did, then BOOM all of a sudden they were £140.  Damn the scalpers, damn them all to hell (but not the good part of hell where I will be roasting marshmallows with all my friends in due course – the bad part, for bad people who rip music fans off.  Hisss)

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Well.  As I always say, if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself.  Didn’t get to meet Alice Cooper?  Just paint someone else up to look like him and voila.  We are the masters of our own destinies, the architects of our own fortunes, the creators of our own fan-girl photo opportunities, are we not?

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What we have here, for those curious about the technicalities, is MAC Paintpot in Blackground (that bad-boy’s been getting quite the workout lately, but it really is good stuff), just painted on with a concealer brush.

Add a black wig – I found this one under the reception desk – and fingerless stud faux leather gloves.  Borrow a leather jacket from a Spanish guy called Sergio (if you can find one), and Bob’s your uncle.  Or Grant’s your Alice.  Or whatever.

Have fun, dear children.

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Grant’s skull nails (freehand)

7 Feb

So, this was what I was trying to do.

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My handsome, hilarious, charismatic friend Canadian Ian emailed me that picture, knowing I love all things skull and nail art.  I screamed and decided to give it a go, enlisting my favourite hand model Grant and his nice big neat fingernails.

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I started off painting the ‘ribs’ hand black with Barry M Nail Paint in Black.  For the hand with the skulls, I painted a big white spot with my white nail striper from www.sparkly-nails.co.uk, outlined with my black nail striper.  Grant commented that this was a bit of a 60s/mod kind of look, and I agree – in fact it reminded me of these nails from MAC’s Glamour Daze collection (late 2012)….

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…which I tried to recreate on myself a few months ago, long before I owned nail stripers, I was painting the black on with a regular (ie, too thick) nail polish brush so it was impossible to get the thin lines I was after.  So I improvised and only did three sides of each nail, I thought they looked pretty funky and graphic.  I like the combination of candy pink and black.

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And here are those nails in action, just for fun.

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Anyway, back to the skulls.  They then transformed into panda feet and something kinda Aztec, when I painted the teeth on with my white nail striper.

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Before finally becoming what I think is a decent copy of the photo up the top of this post!

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In the original picture she’s got nail stickers on her thumbs; here’s me with two different types of Nail Rock stickers on my pinky and ring fingers (for some reason they WILL NOT stay on my middle and index fingers on either hand). 

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So what do you think?  Do you find fiddly nail art easy or does it take you FOREVER (like me!)?

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Thanks to Instagram Queen Carissa for the snaps of my nails!

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men with makeup: David Bowie

1 Feb

If you’re super sleuthy and very observant, you’ll have picked up that I’m a bit of a David Bowie fan. If you need a quick reminder of what there is to love about the guy, check this out quickly.

I could bang on all day about his awe-inspiring, before-his-time approach to entertainment, image, performance, reinvention and alter-ego, but you don’t have all day.  Suffice to say he’s a bitchin’ rockstar from Mars.  People (or Martians) like David Bowie don’t come along all that often.  Lady Gaga is the only one who immediately springs to my mind as anywhere near in the same league of experimental, high-concept creativity.  And let’s face it, she is not shy about displaying his influence on her either.  Come to think of it, she’s got lightning bolt makeup in one of her videos, doesn’t she?

Let’s have a quick perve on his Labyrinth look.  That hair!  That crotch!

yes yes oh my god yes

There are a lot of David Bowie ‘looks’ I plan to recreate, but today let’s talk about the one that I sported for a dress-up party in July 2012.  The pub hosts a dress-up party every time it’s Friday the 13th in any month, and they choose a theme and everyone gets right into it.  The theme for this one was ‘hippies’ but I wanted to be David Bowie on his Aladdin Sane album cover, so I just went right ahead and did my own thing.

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Cool, huh?  Here’s how I did it.

1. Watch a handful of tutorial videos on YouTube.

2.  Go!

I used a really pale concealer pretty much all over my face as foundation, which was dense and tight and uncomfortable to wear, and I have since bought an Illamasqua foundation that’s pretty white, which I’ll be using next time I need to go super-pale.  Even paler than I already am, I mean.

One of the instruction videos I watched used sticky-tape to get straight lines, but I found it easier to go freehand  – using a lip brush and pink lipstick for my lightening bolt, and blue cream makeup for the blue accents, I just painted it on in long straight strokes.  Speed and confidence are your secret weapon when it comes to straight lines.  There is gold eyeshadow on my forehead and pink eyeshadow on my eye sockets to set the lipstick and stop it from smearing everywhere.

I had a half-assed go at covering my eyebrows using a gluestick, but this is an area of continued improvement for me.  Haven’t quite nailed the covered-eyebrow yet.

There’s a bit of contouring done at the collarbones, temples, cheekbones, jawline, sides of the nose, chin-bum and above the cupid’s bow/top lip.  For that I used a cheap dark brown bronzer followed by an apricot blush to blend the edges off.  I still wanted the contouring to be quite exaggerated, as in the original David Bowie picture the contrast is quite high.

David Bowie does not have a generous mouth, but it’s more generous than mine so I relocated my lower lipline for the evening with a nude lipliner, and filled in my lips with a beigey-goldy lipstick.

Mullet is stylist’s own.

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Stay tuned for more Bowie album cover re-creations, coming soon.

 

 

 

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artists I admire: Kevyn Aucoin

26 Jan

I owned Kevyn’s books, Face Forward and Making Faces, years ago, when I was back in Australia and first becoming obsessed with makeup.  I’d taught myself a lot from practice, trial and error, and reading magazines.  But I was at a stage when I was acutely aware of how much I didn’t know, and I was hungry for more technical knowledge and inspiration.

I can’t remember how I first came across the name Kevyn Aucoin.  Probably at the library.  I would have read every makeup book they had, but I couldn’t tell you now about any of the others.  Kevyn’s were all I needed at the time, and there was a lot I liked about those books.  His philosophy and attitude to life, not just to makeup, came across as incredibly positive, inclusive, open-minded and altogether exciting.  He seemed to see the value and beauty in everyone and everything, and his books generously share all he knows.

These two books have so much in them; incredible transformations, technical tips and tricks that are so well illustrated and explained.  Even though I read these books years ago, so much from their pages has stayed with me.  I remember Kevyn writing something about running a mile if you’re hearing the words “always” and “never” being used in a beauty-facist kind of way.  I like the idea that absolutely anything goes, and being open to all of it will teach you how to do things you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.  Even if something is a mistake or doesn’t work the way you want it to, in another scenario it’s just the look you’re going for.

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Hell’s bells, he’s only gone and made Gweneth Paltrow look exactly like James Dean.  Nice work, Kev.  That picture first appeared in FaceForward (published in 2000 by Little, Brown & Co.) – does it further blow your mind to know that it took him 15 minutes to create that portrait?

Like me, Kevyn was completely self-taught, and unlike me he was seriously amazing at what he did.  Now I’m at the stage where I’m looking seriously at gaining a qualification, because once again I’m feeling like there’s so much I don’t know I don’t know.  Seriously.

Oh Kevyn, not a day goes by without me putting eyeliner underneath my top lash line, thanks to you.  Try it for yourself; once you get used to it, it’ll revolutionise mascara for you.

I also highly recommend getting on Amazon where you can pick these books up for a song, second hand.  Even though I have copies of them back home in Australia I justified buying them again the other day because they were only a few bucks each.  And I’m falling in love all over again.  As Gena Rowlands says in the foreword of Making Faces (published 1997 by Little, Brown & Co.)…

“There are so many things in the world that you have to face that aren’t so pleasant, that being able to learning something and have a little fun and feel better about yourself, all in the time it takes to get from one page to the next, is a special and wonderful combination.”

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men with makeup: Olli Herman

24 Jan

This blog is about makeup, and this photo is of a man wearing quite a bit of makeup.  So the relevance is tenuous, yes, and I’m happy to admit I just wanted to post a photo of me with the lovely Olli Herman, of Finnish glam rock outfit Reckless Love.

That’s us out the front of the Cathouse in Glasgow, after their gig in October 2012.  A lot of people, upon seeing this photo, don’t realise at first that he’s a bloke, but he’s all man in real life, oh yes.  Even with all the fake tan, eyeliner, long blond hair extensions, lip gloss, coconut-scented hairspray, bronzer, false eyelashes, skin-tight velvet trousers etc etc etc.

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A few things you can take away from today’s post:

1. Men in makeup are hot.  There were a lot of screaming women at that gig. Men in makeup are also manly. There were also a lot of rough, tough, tattoo’d, bearded, leather-wearing metal men there who were taking it seriously.

2. Anyone can pull anything off, so you should just wear whatever you want all the time, and don’t worry about what anyone thinks, because it actually doesn’t matter.  Regardless of what you look like, there are always going to be people who think you look good and people who don’t think you look good, but if you like how you look, who gives a shit what anyone else thinks anyway. Go see Reckless Love just quickly for a crash course in confidence; they’re amazing and very, very entertaining.

3. If you want makeup to show up in photos, you really do have to trowel it on.  I thought I’d gone a bit wild on my own eyeliner that night, but next to Olli I look relatively bare-faced!  Haha

Also, you have a right to know that I was wearing a pair of fingerless pleather studded gloves when that photo was taken.  Details are important.

“My style icon is anyone who makes a bloody effort.” – Isabella Blow

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