In which I pretend to be a style/food blogger

The good news: it's not another nail post
The bad news (?): it's not a beauty post at all

It's annual Dine Out Vancouver Festival time, which means a chance to try restaurants that might be a little out of my price range under normal circumstances. My friends chose MARKET by Jean Georges, a restaurant in the downtown Vancouver core serving classics with a twist (the fact that it is attached to the Shangri-La hotel hints at the level of fancy).

For $38, we each had a 3-course dinner from a set menu. Here's what I had:

Tuna tartare with avocado and spicy radish and ginger marinade

Slow-cooked steelhead trout with truffle mash potato and brussel sprouts

Warm chocolate lava cake with vanilla ice cream

The steelhead was my favourite of the three; it was super moist and tender but I think it was a little underseasoned. I wasn't really wowed by the starter or dessert, although my friends seemed to enjoy tartare much more than I did. Based on my experience, I probably wouldn't return, but it was a nice excuse to dress up and be ~fancy~ (see below)

Thanks to J for taking the photo!

I've been in love with this cream lace shift dress from Aritzia for forever, so when I saw it for sale at 50% (it's a big deal for Aritzia, trust me) I snapped it up right away. It's rare that I have a very specific outfit in mind when I buy something and it turns out looking pretty okay, but I guess charcoal leggings + tan ankle boots can do that for anything.

Dine Out Vancouver is going on until February 3, 2013. See the full set menu for MARKET here.

Essie Chinchilly

If I think of fantastic Essie shades that everyone knows and loves, Turquoise & Caicos comes first, followed closely by Chinchilly. This grey-leaning taupe always looks super chic and flattering on me, and its slight edge of purple puts it above "boring neutral" status. Can you tell that I really like it? Chinchilly is without a doubt one of my favourite polishes in my collection. My closest match is Revlon Colorstay in Stormy Night, but it's several shades darker and has more purple than Chinchilly. It also lacks the milkiness that I really love in Essie polishes.

Hopefully the purple tinge comes across in my photos, because I have seen photos where it looks like just a pale gray.

Probably one of the reasons why I was surprisingly quick to buy Chanel Notorious: because it's practically Chinchilly in blush form!

OPI Skyfall Mini Set (sneak peek!)

Lucky me, my amazing friend Sarah gave me the James Bond Skyfall mini set by OPI for my birthday :> I really like the rich colours and and variety of finishes in the Skyfall collection (12 shades in total), so I'm very happy to get a taste through these four minis.

Swatch posts coming soon!

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Alternate titles: A Sort-of Review of Guerlain Lingerie de Peau; The One That Got Away

Last month, I decided to make my foray into ~fancy makeup~ and buy my first high-end foundation (yes, really.) After doing a lot of blog lurking research, I was determined to snag Guerlain's Lingerie de Peau, loved the web-over for its weightless feel and my-skin-but-way-better finish (it was even given an A+ by Temptalia!) So I asked the Guerlain rep at Murale to help me find a shade match for Lingerie de Peau. And here's where my first-ever bad-makeup-rep experience starts (not because I've always had great makeup counter experiences, but because I rarely visit them.) Recap:

• rep puts on super-hydrating serums to prep my face but does not wait for it to sink in, and applies foundation on immediately after, causing the foundation to look cakey, "unsettled", and rather unflattering
• repeats this process several times with the same results; am starting to worry that the repeated makeup removal will irritate my skin
• I realize none of the foundations she has been putting on me are Lingerie de Peau
• when I ask for it, she picks up a bottle which again is not Lingerie de Peau; I have to get off my chair and find the bottle for her
• finally, she applies Lingerie de Peau and it actually looks great on me
• I ask her to finish my makeup with Meteorites in Teint Beige since I was thinking of buying them as well; she applies Perles du Dragon
• insists on completing my look with a lip colour and before I can even protest, applies a lipstick straight from the tube to my lips

I guess it should speak to how impressed I was by Lingerie de Peau that I bought it even after the whole ordeal, or maybe it was some kind of initiation ceremony for the right to hold that lovely glass bottle in my hands. Either way, I nursed an irritated lip/mouth area from hurriedly removing the lipstick for a few days before I finally opened my new purchase.

Ahhh just look at that beautiful glass bottle. It has some weight to it, which feels good in the hand and lends to the luxurious experience of using it. Underneath the black plastic cap is a pump that was easy to control. I applied it with the #56 foundation brush from Sephora's Advanced Airbrush set, and wow, my skin looked so naturally amazing and even better than when I had tried it in Murale. It truly applied and felt light-as-air on my face. For reference, I'm roughly NC20 in MAC and Lingerie de Peau in Beige Clair 02 was a perfect match.

2012 Favourites

Is it too late for a 2012 retrospective post, given we're two weeks into 2013? I also said I probably wouldn't do one, mostly because I moved from Tumblr to Blogspot in 2012 and didn't have a full year's worth of content yet. but! I realized I could look back on a lot of non-beauty 2012 things too. I think usually people do a monthly favourites post? Here's some of my favourite things from last year (in the most random order possible):

butter London polishes

Due to a really awesome Coterie sale, I was finally able to indulge in a longing for butter London nail polish that I had nursed for quite a while. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a slippery slope, because now I know for myself that it is a fantastic formula with some very unique shades and I want more. For my birthday/Christmas, a very sweet friend gifted me with several of my most wished-for shades, so look forward to more butter London swatches soon!

LUSH BB Seaweed

One of my most favourite masks ever, I fell head over heels for this little pot of nourishing seaweed from LUSH. I am trying out other LUSH masks at the moment, but I have a strong feeling none of them can top how freshened and healthy my skin felt after using this one.

Wreck-It Ralph

You have no idea how excited I was about this movie when I first saw the trailer. Your favourite video game characters having a life outside of the game? Beloved villains in a support group? Um yes please. I loved everything about it and you bet I will be buying a copy when it is released. It has done so well in theatres that it's believed Disney will soon confirm a sequel.

China Glaze High Def

Naturally, my first post of 2013 will be a nail polish post ;)

China Glaze High Def is from the 2011 Tronica collection featuring all holographic shimmer polishes. The blues in my collection tend to fall into navy, bright blue, or dusty blue territory, so this deep periwinkle shade really stands out. This is what I mean by polishes that look different in the bottle than on the nail, by the way: it applies lighter and periwinkle-ier than the bottle colour suggests.

Compared to butter London's All Hail The Queen, the holographic shimmer is more prominent and the "rainbow effect" is more visible when looking at it under bright light.

Here's a super bright flash picture so you can see the rainbow-ness more easily! For a serious holo rainbow though, check out swatches of the China Glaze OMG collection (swatch post from Scrangie here). I'm not big on super holographic polishes like OMG, so High Def is just right for me.

Tell me your favourite holo polishes in the comments! :>