DIY Lip Gloss / Lip Balm - What Not To Do

So it turns out that after going through my lip stuff collection, I realized that I had quite a few lip glosses/balms that I loved for a while and then somehow couldn’t bring myself to use for one reason or another.

One of these was a red lip tint from my local health food store that is a perfect dupe of Clinique’s Black Honey lip tint but at only a fraction of the price.

I loved the product but hated the tube – it’s super thin and there was something wrong with the twist up function which meant that whenever I accidentally twisted up too much, I had to push it back down into the tube…

Another was a almost clear orange Anna Sui lip gloss that I’d gotten as a Xmas gift. It was ok to use, but a little on the sticky end, so I tended not to use it too much as I prefer a little colour on my lips…

So given that it turned out I’d used up quite a bit of each, I had the brainwave of combining the two….

Big mistake…

I’d scraped the lip tint into a container and then simply unscrewed the cap on the lip gloss and proceeded to put both in the microwave on high for 2 min so that they would both be of a nicely runny consistency so that I could mix them together easily.

The mistake was that I’d factored all this in with the idea that it should have worked…all except the fact that the ‘foot’ of the lip gloss cap was actually a very thin plastic ‘spatula’…it melted clean off in the heat and there was a pungent smell of burnt plastic coming from the microwave…the applicator was now not much more than a short stick….

So…lesson learnt, and from now on I will make sure to check the containers before trying anything like this again…

Symbolic/Sentimental Things I’ve Given Away

Every so often, it seems that I get this odd urge to get rid of stuff that have some symbolic/sentimental meaning to me...

For a while I had been obsessed with the idea of wearing pretty sparkly flowers in my hair, so I’d convinced my parents to get me this hairclip at a hotel gift shop during our last visit to China. I soon unfortunately learned the hard way that there was no way it could stay in my naturally perma-straight hair….

I fell in love with these earrings as soon as I saw them at Myer, prompting me to ask my mum to get them for me for my 23rd birthday. I wore them at my birthday party to go with the blue dress I’d also gotten as a gift from my parents. Pretty much never wore them after that as I’d reckoned without the fact that my ears get super sensitive to non pure-metal (gold and silver only) and uber-heavy earrings…

Gorgeous starry huggies that were a gift from my best friend – unfortunately, there was no way for her to tell what kind of metal they were made from….

I am a sucker for all things rose and all things Guess – so I jumped at the chance to buy these during the Xmas sales…again, they fell victim to the unreasonableness life presented with the blue earrings…

I used to be way obsessed with Angelina Jolie, sword, and crosses, so I jumped at the chance to buy this pendant when I saw it was on sale in a catalogue…

Was also really chuffed when I later found out that she wore a necklace just like it…

I pretty much wore it to death, and then realized it had been sitting around like a lonely lemon for 5 years, when I figured that it should go to someone who might actually give it the love it deserves…

Penelope Cruz / Maria Elena Ruby Ring

If you pay very close attention, in the scene where Maria Elena and Cristina are taking photos at the fountain in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, there is a red ring on Maria Elena’s right index finger which got a few seconds of screen-time.

After doing some searching, it turns out that there are a few decent pics around which show Penelope Cruz wearing the ring.

I thought initially that it was given to her by some jewellery store to wear in their ads…

But it turns out that she wears it a lot off duty too…

So a little more searching revealed that she always carries the ring with her as a sort of good luck charm as it was given to her by her grandmother.

N.B. On a personal note, I have a square ruby coloured silver ring of my own that I got as an impulse buy last Christmas, before I found out about Penelope’s…

It was also pretty neat when I remembered that Juniper, one of my favourite storybook characters from primary school, in the book Wise Child also loved rubies and was known for wearing a ruby ring…