Makeup tutorial for a friend (you know who you are :P)

Products I usually use - Chanel White Essentiel makeup base in jade, Christian Dior Extreme Fit liquid foundation, Kose liquid eyeliner, Loreal kohl pencil, NARS The Mutiple in Copacabana, Shiseido Maquillage four-color blush and Vaseline.

I'd suggest buying middle-end products first, because you're a beginner. Get a liquid foundation(I heard Revlon makes really good ones) that matches with the color of your neck because the point is to create a flawless complexion, not look like a ghost in pictures. Sounds simple but this is actually one of the hardest things to do, ever. It could be years before you actually find one that matches with your skin tone completely. My tip would be to try it under the sun.

A makeup base is by the way, optional. I use it mainly to produce a 'glow', and the green in my makeup base will serve to tone down some redness on my skin. Maybe you could use a sunblock? I used to think the SPF 15 provided in my foundation is enough, haha, turns out, it's not. I read too many beauty mags lol.

Alright! Here goes nothing. Needless to say, you HAVE to start with a clean face. I can't even bear to think of how yucky it will feel to rub foundation onto oily skin. Ewwwww! Anyway yeah, common sense la. Before you apply the foundation, make sure your skin is moisturized enough! Otherwise, your foundation would look like it's cracking and you wouldn't want that, cause it's really ugly. Happened to me several times before. :(

I'd recommend applying foundation with your fingers because it's such a hassle to be using a brush, or a sponge. Plus, I like how much control I have when using my fingers. The warmth produced by your fingers will make it easier to blend, at least that's what I think. Apply downwards. Applying it upwards will make obvious your pores and imperfections. That's what I heard la, because I've never actually applied it that way before. Same goes to your makeup base.

Second step for me is to apply liquid eyeliner. I always skip the eyeshadow now. I like making my features stand out, not be colorful and girly and all that junk. Hark back. For this, you'll need a practiced hand. Don't even bother with a pencil eyeliner. The end result won't match up to what its liquid counterpart produces. For a beginner though, I'd suggest getting a cheap pencil eyeliner. Draw it on your eyes first, follow your lashlines. You can pile on the intensity if you want by then drawing it to be thicker. Always make sure it's thicker on the outer corner. Then, just draw the liquid one over what you've pencilled on, simple as that!

As for the kohl pencil, don't draw it all the way to the inner rims of your eyes. Start from the outer corner and stop at the middle. I heard that doing this would create the illusion of bigger eyes. Then, dab some highlighter or silvery eyeshadow in the inner rims of your eyes to make them pop.

Surely, your foundation will not feel sticky to the touch anymore after you've done up your eyes. If it still does, then chuck your foundation lol/don't layer it on too thickly next time. Yeah, anyway, now's the time to apply whatever powder, be it pressed or loose, on your face. I'd say skip this altogether if you don't have an oily face. If you do, then the Laura Mercier translucent loose powder is your best bet. The blusher comes next. This is a must, I think, to prevent looking all washed-out. Sweep your brush upwards towards your hairline. One tip that I've learnt is to not apply it on the apples of your cheeks but instead, apply it like an inch below your eyes, then sweep it upwards. It will produce a slimming effect!

Now we come to the highlighter. Don't use a completely white one, cause it looks a bit fake. The perfect highlighter color is my NARS one, but a good alternative would be a soft and very light pink one. Make sure it's not too shimmery though. Apply it on the bridge of your nose, at your browbones and anywhere you think the light hits. Apply a little bit in the middle of your eyelids to make your eyes stand out. Just remember to blend, blend and blend.

As for your lips, just go with whatever color you like! You don't really need any skills to apply lipgloss. If you don't think that you can stand stickiness on your lips though, get a liptint instead. But there are some lipglosses on the market that won't feel uncomfortable and sticky, namely the Dior Addict Ultra Gloss and Chanel Aqualumiere. These two are the best I've tried so far, even though the former isn't very long-lasting.

WOOT! EXAMS ARE OVER!

Still a little tired...living off 2 hours of sleep for the past week...and a whole lot of REDDA BOOOOOL! Back to bed. MUAKS. I miss you dearest!

An average day :D

Hmm, woke up this morning and headed to Uni for a MUOSS meeting. Well 3 actually, one's for Orientation Week (Week O of Semester 1 in 2010), the other's for Night Market (Week 4 of Sem 1 2010) and the final meeting which lasted 3 HOURS is for our fortnightly (and final) Central Comittee Meeting, or as we call it CCM. Won't go into too much details, but I'm in-charge of a NEW event for Orientation Week, called FUN IN THE SUN!!! (echo...) It's an event where NEW students get to mingle around with OTHER NEW students (Lol...) and well CHILL OUT! We're serving sandwiches and beach volleyballs/frisbees/rugby balls/limbo sticks/holla-hoops/etc.etc.etc. will be available~~~for them to play with obviously... The 2nd event (Night Market), I'm in-charge of PERFORMANCES, so like stage stuff etc. MEH... And that's it for the meeting!

On a different note, a dude named Ken, contacted me via email regarding tune ups for HIS C230. I've found a new buddy! I'm so gonna meet up with him when I'm back in KL. He's from KL too! HAHAHAH! BUDDIES PHOR LIFEZZZ!

AND OH BTW, GOOOOOOD LUCK DEAR FOR YOUR EXAM TOMORROW! GO KICK SOME ASS! I KNOW YOU CAN! I BELIEP IN YUUUU! MUAKS!!!! GAMBATTE!!! I've ran out of things to say. Hehehehe.

Another break

I'm taking a break from blogging, in view of the exam season. There might be updates, but sporadic la, until the 27th of November, that is. :P

P/S: Skype = best invention for LDR couples.

P/P/S: Kose's(one of my favorite beauty brands) latest collection, Esprique Precious makes me want to forget my resolution to stop spending money on unnecessary makeup products. =.=" Too pretty!

Equality..........................?

HARRISON BERGERON

by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

---

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh" said George.

"That dance - it was nice," said Hazel.

"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.

"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."

"Um," said George.

"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday - just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."

"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.

"Well - maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."

"Good as anybody else," said George.

"Who knows better than I do what normal is?" said Hazel.

"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas who had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."

George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."

"You been so tired lately - kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."

"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."

"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean - you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set around."

"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it - and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

"I'd hate it," said Hazel.

"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"

If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.

"What would?" said George blankly.

"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?”

"Who knows?" said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

"That's all right - " Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."

"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me - " she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen - upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God - " said George, "that must be Harrison!"

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

"Now - " said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."

The music began. It was normal at first - cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while - listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.

And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.

"Yup," she said.

"What about?" he said.

"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."

"What was it?" he said.

"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.

"Forget sad things," said George.

"I always do," said Hazel.

"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.

"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.

"You can say that again," said George.

"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."

---

"Harrison Bergeron" is copyrighted by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1961.

Website http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

Tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

Will tweet diligently. :P

P/S: Thinking of forcing baby to get one. It's fun!

My autobiography

1. Where did you take your profile pic?
In Coffee Bean, DPC.

2. What exactly are you wearing right now?
My stinky pyjamas. :P

3. What is your current problem?
The finals, because I have zero motivation to study for it!

4. What makes you happy most?
Shopping, duh.

5. What's the name of the song that you're listening to?
Meet Me Halfway by the BEP. :)

6. Any celeb you would marry?
James Franco and Daniel Wu. Hope they won't mind sharing too!

7. Name someone/persons with the same birthday as you:
No idea.

8. Ever sang in front of a large audience?
Yes. Embarrassing!

9. Has anyone ever said you looked like a celebrity?
Yep, some Singaporean celebrity that I've forgotten the name of.

10. Do you still watch kiddy movies or kiddie TV shows?
Yes yes yes, why not?

11. Do you speak any other languages than English?
Yeap, 'broken' Mandarin and Cantonese.

12. Has anyone you've been really close passed away?
No.

13. Do you ever watch MTV?
That's the only channel I watch, haha!

14. What's something that really annoys you ?
Bad grammar.

Chapter 1
1. Middle name: Pei.
2. Nickname(s): Yvonne, Vontee etc.
3. Current location: The living room.
4. Eye color: Black, I think.

--------------------------

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Chapter 2
1. Do you get along with your parent(s): Too well! :P
2.Are your parents married/separated/divorced?: Married.

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Chapter 3: Favorites
1. Ice Cream: Chocolate and vanilla. Baskin Robbins>Haagen Daas!
2. Season: Winter!
3. Shampoo/conditioner: Schwarkopf.
4. Favorite Thing: Hmmmm, not sure?

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Chapter 4: Do You..
1. Dance in the shower? - Ashamed as I am to admit it, yes I do lol.
2. Do you write on your hand? - No.
3. Call people back? - Uhuh.
4. Believe in God? No!
5. Any bad habits? - I sleep in too much, and I peel my lips a lot.
6. Any mental health issues? - Haha, you tell me. :P
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Chapter 5: Have You..
1. Sprained stuff: Yes.
2. Had physical therapy?: No.
3. Gotten stitches? : No.
4. Taken painkillers: Yeah, almost every month.
5. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling: No. I mean, no thanks.
7. Sworn in front of your parents? Plenty of times.
8. Had detention? Uncountable times, during secondary school.
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Chapter 6: Who/What was the last
1. Three people who texted you: Baby, Joanne and Chris.
2. Person you called: Baby!
3. Person you hugged: Mummy dearest.
4. Person you tackled: Never done that?
5. Person you talked to on MSN? Baby, lah!
6. Thing you touched? : Keyboard.
7. Thing you ate? McD!
8. Thing you drank: Water.
9. Thing you said: Enough of the song, I'm sick of it!
10. Friend you saw ytd : None.