GMarket Korean Lipstick Haul Review

I decided it'd be best to just put all the lip product reviews of the lipsticks/ plumper into one post. I'll try to keep this short.

For all the products i have a picture of the product on half my lips and my normal lips on the other half. It should be kind of obvious so I won't sit here pointing out which is which.

1. Clio Art Lipstick: M020.
- This is a nude shade that I saw modeled in one of the pictures. The texture is creamy and the color is the color of my concealer, lol. The only thing is that I realized I didn't want a true nude color. I wanted something with a more pinkish tone- this one has a more yellow tone =/. Ah well, live and learn. It has this beautiful art piece on the front though, love the idea of putting art on these. ~$17 with shipping. If it interests you, email me at juicedmang0s@gmail.com. I can sell for $13 shipped in the US.

2. Clio Lip Plumper: #01

- I thought this would be more like a lip liner because it just looks like that. Instead, it's a sheer color and has a little bit of tingling. It didn't really plump anything, but I love how it comes with a sharpener! I finally could sharpen my NYX Jumbo eye pencils. I had been contemplating so hard whether or not to buy a sharpener. ~$15 shipped from korea. Not sure if this is worth it =/

3. Etude House LUCIDarling Lipstick: #5

- I LOVE the formulation for these. They're extremely creamy and do cover my natural lip pigment well. There is a faint pleasant scent, but I can't put my finger on it. I think it might be a hint of the peach scent from their peach line. At first I was skeptical because a lipstick with lavender seems hard to wear, but it's surprisingly wearable. It's more pink than in the swatch picture posted by Etude House. ~$9 with shipping.

4. Etude House LUCIDarling Lipstick: #8

-This color was not one that I was planning to buy. I had planned for the #6 peach color, but I thought about it and figured that peach might not look too good on me even though I loved how it looked in the tube. I'm so glad I got this color. It's supposed to be orange. I wear it on days when I feel a little quirky.

5. Etude House LUCIDarling Lipstick: #9

- I have to say I'm most disappointed in this lippie. This was the only one I had originally planned to buy, but it's suprisingly plain and boring looking. I still keep it to wear occasionally, but if you like it and think you would use it more then email me at juicedmang0s@gmail.com. I'd be selling it for $7 shipped within the US.

You can see how pigmented they are from my wipe.

6. Peripera Wonder of Lips Lipstick: #8 (I know the image says #1, but it's 8, I messed up! >.<)

- This lipstick is super creamy. The pink is a lovely gentle pink. The color is more like the non flash picture.
I would love this lipstick except for the huge amount of glitter in the lipstick. I prefer my lips not to be so full of sparkle. It has a nice gentle scent. Quite pleasant, not like the American lipsticks. ~$12 shipped from Korea. If you think you'd be interested in it, I can sell it for $7 shipped in the US , email me at juicedmang0s@gmail.com.

'Til next time!!

Peri Pera Nail Polish

I was looking around and I realized that I've completely forgotten to do reviews of my 2nd GMarket Haul. So I think the easiest to do would be the peripera nailpolishes since the pictures seem to be ready to go.

Overall, These were ok nailpolishes. For <$3/ bottle, I was definitely willing to give them a try. The brush is indeed much larger and if you take care, then you could possibly do a 1 stroke retouch of a coating. The part that may trick you though is that you may be thinking that you can get a perfectly applied manicure with just one stroke on clean nails.- not true. You have to do it a few times to get a non streaky look. I like this better than say E.L.F's $1 nail polish of course, but I definitely wouldn't do a haul just for these or anything.

And yes, the top is 2x the size of the bottle, lol.

I forget the exact colors that I got, but they were in the pastel range. I remember something about a 303, 801, and 901 possibly. The pink is a very very sheer color (Pk01?) which I was not expecting. I thought it was a different shade of pink because I didn't quite like the shades of the pastel pink they had, but I supposed if you want pastel pink then you have to use that color. (It's on my thumb). I gave it away. Overall, I think pastels may just not be for me and my skin tone.

Fish Round... Something

Hihi! Long time no blog. Been incredibly busy with stuff and yea life. But I HAD to share with everyone this one addition to my apartment. Hopefully it survives the year at least, I'll be so sad if it doesn't live until tomorrow.

I named it Fernando. It's a name I decided would be a good betta fish name, except, well as you can see it isn't a betta. I thought about it and betta's natural lifespan is ~2 yrs, and everyone has a betta now, so i decided to go with a black moor. There were two in the Petco tank and the other one was rounder and seemed to not swim as well. Since I wasn't sure if that was because it was fat or if it might be a handicap, I decided to go with the younger one that looked more active. Maybe it'd be harder for me to kill. The guy who was getting the fish asked me how big my tank was, and i didn't know how many gallons so he had me show him in comparison to the tanks they had there. Apparently they aren't allowed to sell you the fish if the tank's not a certain size or something. Mine was a little smaller than that (not by much) but i figured since i'm getting the tiniest, that i can change the tank to a bigger one once it grows a little bigger.

Here's the cutie! I'm planning on adding a filter in tomorrow and some decoration/ cave as well. Not too much stuff, but just a little to keep it from too much boredom.

I'm Going to Give Myself Cavities

     So,..I ended up with a real hankering for making cupcakes. I should tell you that while I enjoy the occasional sweets, I prefer salt over sugar in my diet. If you told me that I could only choose to either eat salty foods or sweet foods for the rest of my life, I'd pick salty.

     This particular baking episode was brought on by me making a pumpkin pie for my aptmate's "Oktoberfest" celebration - no alcohol, just fondue and sweets. I followed the Paula Deen recipe that  has rave reviews. I must say..I got really freaked out. If you know me, then you know that I'm not the greatest of bakers, no matter how much I love doing it. Usually my stuff comes out weird. So when I saw how liquidy that pumpkin pie filling was I really panicked and was close to crying for fear of having ruined an event. The filling was also magically 2x the amount that I needed, which really confused me since I followed the recipe to a T, except maybe skimping out 1 oz of pumpkin mash (they only come in 15 oz cans!). The result- something my aptmate called "Pumpkin Pudding". I was horrified to say the least. I dumped the rest of the filling straight into cupcake tins and baked them alone. BUT, the next day, after refrigeration, I tried the pumpkin pie for breakfast, and it was absolutely delicious!!! I love it so much more than the storebought pies because there's a strong pumpkin flavor there. I could probably do without so much sugar, but still, sooo much better than storebought. I read the reviews online and many people say that there was a lot more filling than needed. Supposedly this is because of the different depths of pans that everyone's using. Apparently the store pie pans that have the crusts in them already are much more shallow. Whew! So it wasn't me!! And the pudding texture- well this is supposed to be a lighter pie, but now I regret not fighting my aptmate harder. I know that the pie needs time to set, but she just wanted to dig right in to a warm pie. GOSH! Making it seem all like my fault.

     So that's what started my pumpkin pie craving all up again. And now I want to bake it again, except this time, to make it less liquidy and a denser pie, I might cut out the half and half, or just use half, cut out the butter (it's pumpkin mash, it won't be too dry), and maybe a couple eggs. And the attempt after that, I might even cut out the cream cheese (gasp!). But I do prefer a denser, less custard like pie, plus cream cheese is a lot of Calories.

     But onto my baking expedition yesterday. I got a hankering for baking cupcakes, that coupled with my strong desire to still try out the chocolate icing from Cakes to Celebrate Love and Life  drove me to madness- well almost. So I pulled out a box of Duncan Hines yellow cake mix- it was on sale this week- and went to work. Making cupcakes from scratch is a little more time consuming, and it was late, so I just went with the box to make sure. Plus my roommate loves yellow cake. 

     The result? I had to make the chocolate icing with granulated sugar cuz I forgot I used all the powdered sugar up last time...I tried to blend the sugar smaller, but yea..,no dice, don't try it. It was terrible. The flavor of the icing itself was heavenly, I'll definitely do it again when I get some powdered sugar. Definitely. Remember, granulated sugar in icing = no. It might work as a sub in certain other uses, but don't try it in frosting.

     Duncan Hines is great, it gives a denser cupcake than some of the other ones. I hate biting into a cupcake and finding that it's so fluffy that the cupcake falls apart. Cakes, I like fluffy, but not cupcakes. There's something about eating a cupcake and being upset at how it doesn't satisfy you because there's like nothing there.

And pics, 

Lipliners: Sephora Red vs L'oreal Crayon Petite

Well, with red lipsticks you have to have red lipliners. I originally got the L'oreal at my drugstore, but decided to also pick up the sephora one when I ordered (to make $50 for free shipping).

The L'oreal, true to it's name, smells like a crayon. It bothers me a bit. This is an automatic lipliner and the color goes on smoothly with no problems. It feels a tidge "stickier" at first but that goes away.

The Sephora Red lipliner is a cute 3". People have expressed how upset they were that it's a brick red as opposed to just a red. Well, I've taken a picture, and see for yourself, which is the brick here?! This lipliner glides on very smoothly with non of the slight stickiness I experienced with the L'oreal. And it doesn't smell like crayons.

They're both relatively easy to remove- although not so easy that they would come off all the time on you. The L'oreal costed me about $8, and the Sephora, $3. I can tell you that I'll be putting the Sephora under my lipsticks. I prefer to keep my lipsticks on the more neutral side, and the L'oreal just takes it too far over to the warm side. It made my MUFE Artist Intense Lipstick in #44, a slight cooler toned lipstick turn obviously warm colored. Which confused me and led me to believe that I didn't like the lipstick as much as I actually do.

I wanted to check to make sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me, so here's the comparison of the two lipsticks layered on top of the two lipliners. Sure enough, just a leeetle bit more brick with the L'oreal.

The Search for Red: Make Up For Ever #44/32 & NARS Shanghai Express/ Fire Down Below

So you may know that i've been on the quest for the perfect red. For some odd reason I never bothered trying out the lipsticks that I had researched online that mentioned colors that were good. Something about how they looked in the tube that didn't satisfy me. They didn't look red enough, they were all brown, or orange or whatever. With the emergence of Make Up For Ever's new 50 lipsticks, I decided to use Sephora's return policy to my advantage. Since I don't currently have a car, going there to test out the lipsticks is hard, not to mention awkward with all the sales people watching. So I decided to order them online and if I didn't like them, return them. Normally I'm against this type of thing. I have the "if you bought the wrong item/ color and use it, suck it up" mentality, the store shouldn't have to lose profits just because you made a mistake. but in this case, I considered it a special time since I had no way to get to sephora to try the colors out. I don't recommend doing this every time you want to try something out. It's just not nice. Go to the store and swatch instead.

So I got 4 lipsticks to try out. Make Up For Ever Rouge Artist Intense #44 & #32 and NARS Shanghai Express and Fire Down Below.

I dislike the NARS tube a bit because I think it's too easy to turn the tube. What if I accidentally turned it when I don't want to?

The MUFE are Satin texture. I was really upset with #32 because I had wanted a lipstick that would give my lips a light/ gentle/ sort of baby pink effect. Instead, it just looked like a shiny version of my natural lip color in a tube.

The #44 is a lovely red. I would say blood red, but it's not quite a blood red. It looks like a true red in the tube, but when swatched on paper, I can see it's actually a little on the cool side. I think it's described as a brown red on the site, but I'm not sure. The texture is not drying and it didn't seem to feather. Of course with all these strong lip colors I worry anyways that they get smudged or something.

NARS: these lipsticks are matte and therefore ever so slightly drying. This can't be helped though due to the properties of a matte lipstick. I feel like it feathers ever so slightly- barely noticeable.

Now you may be wondering what's the difference between the three red lipsticks. Let me tell you, it's really hard to tell when they're swatched on the lips. Shanghai Express is lighter- has a little less rich color than the other two. It's cool toned and more similar to the MUFE one than the Fire Down Below.

The MUFE one is more of a cherrier red than the Fire down below. It has less brown so it's more vibrant looking. Fire Down below is the darkest of the three, but with the little extra bit of brown it's probably the most wearable for everyday life in the morning.

Shanghai Express is again, less intense than Fire Down Below, less brown, and more on the cooler side. It's lighter in color and pops a bit more.

Even though Fire Down below looks really warm toned on the swatch in comparison, when I put it on my lips it turns a bit cool toned when viewed in natural light. All the colors change a bit depending on lighting. Strange how I have fluorescence lights and they all turn a bit yellow.

I can see where people get the idea that red lipstick lets your teeth look whiter. For me, it doesn't look so much whiter as more intense, probably from the contrast.

Turns out I can pull off all three shades equally well.

I'm at a dilemma because I can't pick one!! I decided that I don't want Shanghai Express. I want something that gives impact. The Fire Down Below is more natural a bit.  The step of brown makes it more wearable for daytime. The MUFE pops ever so slightly more (due to less brown and mostly likely the satin finish). I like the matte finish of NARS as well because I don't have to worry about it slipping/ sliding as much.

I like them both equally as much!! the MUFE is $19 and the NARS is $24, I know I should take the NARS back because of the pricing, but I do like having that lipstick that's a little more wearable. What to do... what would you do?

If it's all the same to you and you don't care about slight color differences or finishes then I do recommend the MUFE #44 over NARS Shanghai Express, only because they do look similar and MUFE is less drying and cheaper.

It was REALLY hard to get the color differences to show on camera for the lip swatches. Originally I had swatched them all separately, but then looking at them later I couldn't tell which was which, so I just did one with them all together. The picture only shows the lipsticks in indoor/ flash light. In natural light they look more cool toned. Apologies for the sloppy application, but I originally did a lot of combinations, so no point in perfectly applying them.

MUFE Rouge Artist Intense #32 (irl it's a tidge more coral)

MUFE Rouge Artist Intense #44 (Imagine a color between the two swatches- I know, not helpful)