Thrifty Makeup Secrets

I am by no means a professional makeup artist or even makeup junkie, but when I do bother to put on makeup, people often ask me if I'm wearing fake eyelashes or where I get my eyeshadow from. The answers to those questions are, respectively, no and Coastal Scents. I'll come back to the mascara part in a second, but coastal scents is for girls (and boys. I don't hate. but guyliner is still dumb.) like me who lust after MAC products but not MAC prices. I have this 78-color palette that I bought for about $20 but they have lots of variations if you want more or fewer colors in your palette or ones with shimmer, etc.

I've tried so many eyeshadows, and this one definitely bests them for how long they last and how intense the color is. Can I reiterate how freaking good a deal this is? $20 for this quality and quantity of eyeshadow? Steal of a lifetime.

As for the mascara, I am addicted to huge black exaggerated eyelashes, but the one time I tried on false lashes, it just weighed my eyelids down and made my eyes all squinty. Not hot. So I've done my research, kissed a lot of frogs, read a lot of online customer reviews, and my favorite mascaras are L'oreal Lash Architect (sadly, not manufactured anymore so it has to be bought online. Try ebay.) and L'oreal Double Extend- available in most any grocery or drug store.

I highly recommend getting the waterproof version. It's just better. No, I don't know why. It's slightly more expensive than a few other drugstore variety mascaras (like $10 or so if I'm remembering correctly, but I get coupons in the mail for l'oreal all the time) , but you get what you pay for. Remember, you're getting a mascara AND a primer, and the primer really does make all the difference in the world. I just do the primer and then two coats of the actual mascara and I'm all set. It's really not clumpy but I do keep a hi-tech safety pin around when I put mascara on so that I can separate my lashes as needed. It works a lot better than those dumb eyelash combs.

WARNING: Be so so so SO careful if you put a pin anywhere near your eyeball. Always keep the pin pointing straight up and down and never horizontal toward your eye to minimize chances of poking. I've poked my eye a couple times when I wasn't being careful and it's not fun. Luckily it didn't do permanent damage but my eye freaking HURT for like a half hour.

DISCLAIMER: This is not a paid endorsement, I'm just spreading the gospel of cheap but worthwhile makeup for those of us not interested in spending $14 on one eyeshadow.

Social ineptitude around celebrities, 1st ed: David Macklovitch

The singer of the wonderful duo Chromeo. I've blogged...no, written. I hate when people use blog as a verb. Or a noun. It's a stupid word. I've written about my love for him previously so go back and read that if you don't know who he is. He's not paparazzi/tabloid famous, but that didn't stop me from acting special ed when I met him a few weeks ago.

It was at the W Lounge in Salt Lake, where Chromeo was doing a DJ set/after party after opening for Big Boi at the Twilight free concert series (no relation to the vampire books).

I spent about a half hour trying to get up the courage to go talk to him, which is saying something considering the amount of liquid courage I had in me at that point. They finished DJ-ing and he was just hanging out in the club, talking to fans here and there like a totally normal person and not the god that he is. Remmington finally pushed me off the dancing stage and toward him as he was starting to migrate toward the exit. My suave and clearly infallible plan was to speak French to him since he is a phD candidate in French lit at Columbia, so that would surely set me apart from the rest of the adoring fans there that night as special, intelligent, intriguing, etc, inducing him to want to get to know me and eventually, marry me. Brilliant plan, right?

What actually happened is that when I got within five feet of him and he graciously stopped so that I could say hi to him, I conveniently forgot how to speak ANY language, let alone French. So I stood there for an undetermined period, gawking at him while I tried frantically to make my brain and my mouth communicate with one another, and he quizzically looked at Remmington standing behind me, who just shrugged and shook his head.

Finally I squawked out a "hi!" and stepped a little closer so I could mumble some probably grammatically incompetent French sentence about how great I think he is. He was wonderful, laughed politely and let me say a couple more sentences in French about how I wish I went to Columbia (huh??), blah blah blah, est-ce que je peux prendre un photo avec toi? THANK GOD FOR REMMINGTON'S IPHONE, because I did not have my camera on me.

Remmington and my other friend there, Ryan, both made fun of me for about a week after the incident because apparently I couldn't stop grinning like a moron or re-hashing it for a couple hours after it happened. Did he really have his arm around me? Did I look cute? I hope my French accent wasn't too terrible. How long did I really stand there awkwardly before I said anything? Wait, let me look at the picture again, are you sure I didn't have my sunglasses on? And so on... Needless to say he hasn't proposed to me yet, but I'll keep you updated.