Meta-blogging/Navel Gazing/Rebranding

I've been casually thinking about changing the name of my blog for a while. Not for any particular purpose - it just doesn't feel like it fits as well as it used to. Sure, I'm still cheap. That's who I am. And who doesn't like profanity? (Well, a lot of people, I suppose.) I'm not sure this label completely fits what I'm writing about these days or they way I'm writing about it.

It's not that it was ever inauthentic, but you may have noticed a decrease in the gratuitous use of the word "fuck." Or even the judicial use of the word "fuck." The swearing wasn't forced, but it was a writing persona, obviously. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, and now I'm getting a bit bored with it. Still, sometimes you just fucking need to say fuck to make your fucking point, right? (Okay, breathe.)

In addition, the focus of most of my posts when I started out used to be "buy this shit" or "don't buy this shit." Pretty straightforward. It's a little different now. I am still interested in avoiding needless spending, and not buying expensive things when there are equally useful inexpensive options, and beauty marketing, and the value - as far as that can be defined - of various products, but, like . . . you can buy whatever you want. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I suppose it's become a little more reflective and a little less prescriptive. It's also almost exclusively focused on beauty stuff now, which it wasn't necessarily at the outset.

So where does that leave me? Reasonable as Heck?

I don't have any better blog titles in mind, so for the time being CAF will remain. (Suggestions anyone?) I suppose I once had a "brand," but since I am less interested in having one now, that makes "rebranding" more difficult. Also, if I change the title, then do I have to change everything else? The URL? All my social media accounts? I'm getting bored and tired just thinking about it.

At least I can say that I am not getting bored with blogging in general. It's still fun, and it's still evolving, but what do you do when the contents don't feel like they fit the box you originally put them in?

Things I Haven't Changed My Mind About

I started this blog on Tumblr in late May 2012, so I guess I am coming up on a three-year anniversary. Seems longer! My original idea for this post was to go back through opinions I've shared here and see what I've changed my mind about. I mean, when I started, I had a handful of mostly drugstore products, and I had no idea I was supposed to be excited to get GOOD BRANDS like a Tarte lip crayon or a Benefit primer in my Birchbox. (I gave them away and now and then I think back and kick myself for some reason, maybe because I don't get cool stuff like that from Birchbox these days.) Surely now that I am a sophisticated and discerning makeup and skincare hoarder, my tastes have become refined and I can see the value in products that baffled me years ago?

Not so much, apparently, because when I revisited my old posts, it turns out that the main thing Old Me and New Me differ on is the amount of crap New Me owns, and the waning desire that New Me has to ever buy another bottle of nail polish (it's not gone, but it's slowly dissipating).

For instance:

• I still think Monistat Anti-chafing gel works about as well as any siliconey makeup primer I've tried.
• I still use Cetaphil lotion as eye makeup remover.
• I still love Wet N Wild Comfort Zone as much as any of my fancier eyeshadows (though now that I'm gone from grad student to whatever the hell I am now, it's a bit shimmery for daily use).

  

  SHIMMER

• I still think those knotted hair elastics are stupid.
• The red Sally Hansen topcoat is still my favorite (but I am trying to use up some bottle of inferior products before I buy any more).
• I still think e.l.f. is worth it if you approach it the right way.
• I still rely on tea tree oil for treating acne.
• I still use my Avon eyebrow pencil almost every day because it's my favorite, and it's down to a stub now, but I still haven't used up the first one. I bought 2 backups 2 years ago. That was not necessary.
• This Freeman Avocado clay mask is still the shit. Also those tubes last forfuckingever.
• I still have never got a setting spray to work, though I got some mini Bare Minerals foundations to play with, so maybe it will work with those?
• I still can't wear eyeshadow without primer, and I've have the best luck with the cheaper options. I just threw out half a tube of LORAC primer because I hated it. What a waste. Right now I'm using e.l.f. Mineral Eyeshadow Primer, which doesn't seem to exist anymore, but it's working pretty well.
• SCIENCE.
• My posts are still full of typos. Sorry, I try, but there's probably at least one mistake in this post. (This isn't my job, so I usually have to put posts together in brief periods of free time.)

Things that are slightly more complicated now:

• I still don't think that expensive finishing powders are going to change your life. In my post on them, however, I did sort of conflate finishing and setting powders, which is obviously makeup blasphemy. I'm slowly working my way through this Nars powder (below), which I use almost every day mostly out of habit. I honestly don't see much difference on my skin. Maybe for photos? I do still prefer the Maybelline powder I mentioned in that post linked above to all the more expensive loose powders I've tried.

Nars powder: a little grimy, but PAN!

• I do have some NYX products that I like now, but I guess I'm still not super excited about any of them.
• I guess if I were to write my highlighting and contouring on the cheap post again, I might include more options for contouring/shading. Like if you have really cool coloring, maybe you don't want to use bronzer, because it could look too orange. I own NYX blush in Taupe, and I would likely mention that - though I almost never use it myself, because I still use highlighter much more than shading contouring products (if I'm going to do anything at all). These days there are way more products out there specifically designed for contouring, and I would still say fuck those, because you can just use crap you already own, like eyeshadow or concealer.

Things that have changed:

• I guess I got back together with lipstick, but I'm still not very good at wearing it, especially if it's very dark/bright and opaque. Maybe for an hour at home, but not if I am out somewhere where I have to talk or eat.
• A lot of the newer stuff I've acquired has been "higher end," but it's not because I necessarily think it's better. It's mainly because I'm trying to save money, which sounds like nonsense, but hear me out. I've bought very little makeup in the last 9 months or so, and what I have bought I've mainly picked up using my Birchbox points. So that means that even though I would really prefer a L'Oreal Lineur Intense liquid liner, I got the Stila liquid liner, because it was $0 with a few months worth of points instead of $9 at CVS. Other things I've picked up have been with gift cards I got for participating in consumer trials, etc. (I'm going to write a post about how to do that some time in the next couple of months). So the more expensive things have oddly enough been more affordable for me due to circumstances.
• All of the blue glass mugs that I had for many year broke. Fuck.
• I tend to include more of my own photos when I review something now, even though my camera is still shit. I just like reading posts on other blogs that include some photos, so I figure I ought to do it myself too.
• I'm not using any affiliate links anymore, even though some of my old posts still say they have them. They don't - I just don't have time to edit every single one. I'm not ruling out using them again in the near future, though.
• My hair isn't this pretty anymore. I should probably do something about it.
• Instagram.

So that was admittedly pretty self indulgent, but then so is this whole blogging thing, isn't it? It's nice to know that New Me is still Old Me, for the most part. I still haven't sold out to The Man or whatever (though if The Man has a job to offer me, he should definitely get in touch).

Musings about makeup hoarding and anxiety and stuff

I'm going to write a post soon about the process of sorting through my embarrassingly large hoard of makeup and on what basis I choose what to keep and what to get rid of (someone asked me about that once). Working through it has left me reflecting on why I accumulated all this crap to begin with. I'll have more to say about that in the upcoming post, but right now I just want to go ahead and blame grad school for saddling me with more makeup than any person who is not a makeup artist or a dragon who lives on top of some kind of giant sparkly heap of cosmetics under Lovely Mountain should reasonably possess. Certainly more than a person should have who is only just now kind of getting into lipstick and barely has enough eyelid space for more than one color of eyeshadow.

Hear me out on why grad school is one of the top factors to blame for my recent acquisitiveness and rampant consumerism (there are others, which I'll think about another time). In my experience, and in my observations of people around me, grad school seriously exacerbates people's latent pathologies/neuroses and brings out their weirdest behavior. Exactly what form it takes is different for everyone. It's much like any other prolonged, stressful situation in that respect, with the added bonus that the sorts of people who choose to go to grad school, and particularly those who pursue doctoral degrees, seem to be more prone to neurosis to begin with. In my case, I've always been fascinated by shopping/fashion/beauty, and I definitely had some hereditary hoarding collecting tendencies, and so this all came together in a compulsive need to own one of everything in every color. If you've been to grad school, you might be nodding knowingly, though many people spend their meagre grad school stipends on other, non-cosmetic, substances or develop totally different vices. If you haven't been to grad school, be satisfied with your life choices - or if you are considering going, do some research on anxiety/depression/mental illness + academia before you enroll.

Now that I've transitioned from grad school madness to post-grad school unemployment bleakness, I've cut down on the buying. I'm not trying to do some kind of "no buy" thing, because . . . that's still a sort of fixation on (not) buying makeup that doesn't work well for me. But the stress of unemployment is more of a general, hollow despair rather than an amped up, self-conscious anxiety, and it's hopefully temporary, so it's time to start sorting through the heap and move on to other preoccupations.

(I'm still having fun with the blog thing, though.)

Why I write so much about e.l.f. here

Simple answer: because they are cheap as fuck and so they fit my theme well.

It's not because I think e.l.f. is the best/most ethical company ever or that their products are consistently flawless. It's certainly not because I have some kind of stake in promoting them. I regularly write negative reviews of e.l.f. (see here, here, and here).

Rather, it's because I've seen pretty extreme claims made about e.l.f. in magazines, blogs, other websites, etc. that fall at either end of the spectrum. On the one hand, there are people that claim everything e.l.f. makes is cheap, worthless crap. These people seem to have tried one or two of e.l.f.'s shittier products and dismissed the whole line. There are definitely some major duds in there, but critics of e.l.f. are usually more venomous about it than they would be about other similarly inexpensive brands, like Wet N Wild.

Then there are people who claim that there is absolutely no difference between e.l.f. makeup and more expensive products. They declare that e.l.f. products are Exact Dupes, often without demonstrating that any actual comparison has been carried out.

Personally, I'm interested in teasing out when there might be a qualitative difference between an e.l.f. product and something more expensive, or when e.l.f. products do or do not hold up well on their own. It's possible to get e.l.f. cheaper than just about any other brand, and so it gives me lots of inexpensive blog fodder as someone who does not receive press samples and is not independently wealthy. In generally I like to try to identify misinformation and misconceptions when I can, and it seems like e.l.f. attracts a lot of those.

So that's my story. If you're really interested in why some cosmetic products cost so much more than others, I recommend revisiting this post and this one and this one and this one (see #1). Hint: for the most part, it's not because the product itself is better quality.

Radioactive Cat Update

I posted back in July about trying to save some money to get my cat radiation. I thought I should update you all on that. Lucy got the treatment at the end of November, did not kill any of the staff at the clinic, was temporarily radioactive, and is now back to her old, curmudgeonly, corpulent self. Success! I had to save up for almost a year to afford the treatment, but it was still less expensive than two years of medication would have been. Good thing I have a backlog of makeup to post about here, since this damned cat spent all my money. And to top it off, she has not expressed any gratitude whatsoever! Brat.

Thanks to everyone who contributed by buying stuff from my blog sale. Every little bit helped, and I'm sure if Lucy knew you, she would bite you. Not as a gesture of thanks, but just because she's kind of an asshole.

Things might be slow around here for a while

I'm in the midst of packing to move and also trying to finish a major work project, so I probably won't be able to put together many big posts for the next week or two. I'll keep posting any cool links or good sales/deals that I come across, though.

Last day to enter the giveaway!

You still have lots of chances to win! More information and entry form here.

(Also, I seem to be feeling significantly better today, so I'm looking forward to writing some more substantial posts asap.)

Ouch

So I idiotically slipped on my stairs the other day and fell and hurt my back. Ouch. I'll be fine, but for now I'm hopped up on painkillers, which explains the lack of substantial posts around here. Luckily I had a bunch of links etc. queued up. Even typing this is a bit of a chore - is it coherent? Can't tell. I'll be back to more expletive-ridden reviews and such before long.

Until then, have you entered the giveaway?

A failed quest

In what I'm sure was an excellent use of my time, yesterday alone I went to three CVSs, two ULTAs, one Walgreens, one Bed Bath and Beyond and one Meijer looking for that fucking limited edition Maybelline Color Tattoo (Seashore Frosts). Nothing. I mean I found a bunch of the displays and all of the other colors, but not that one. Boo. So I guess that's not happening.

Anyone so lucky as to find it? Is it worth it? I'm not searching any more, because I have better things to do. And no car. It's mostly the car thing, let's face it.

No buy!

Okay. Deep breath. I'm going to do what in the beauty blogging world is called a "no buy", I believe. It means that I have made an agreement with myself to not buy any more beauty/skincare/haircare products for 1 month, starting now. Hopefully I will extend it past 1 month, but one step at a time.

I mean, partly, big fucking deal, because lots of people go months without buying this kind of shit. I don't need a pat on the back or a cookie. But this blog is supposed to be about not wasting money, and I have become pretty bad at that recently. When you're looking for deals to post all the time, it's hard not to take advantage of them. But the main reason I'm doing this . . . well there are a couple. A major one is because I'm moving in August, and I need to stop accumulating more shit that I'm just going to have to pack up, and I need to stop spending money so that I can save up for whatever I need for the new place. The other main reason is that I have a backlog of things to write about for the blog, so if I keep buying more, I'm just going to get buried even deeper.

Red dye reminders

Must remember: Red-dyed hair is always horrifyingly bright for the first couple of days. It will calm down. Maybe it won't be so obnoxious after I shampoo it for the second time later today.

I also need to remind myself that one box is not enough for all of my hair next time, because there are are spots that definitely aren't as saturated as others. I think they will blend in better once the flaming red fades slightly. They probably aren't noticeable to anyone but me, right now, since they are mostly on the underside of my bangs.

I have to go out tonight. I'll just put on a lot of fucking makeup and pretend my hair is supposed to look like this.

Ugh

I feel like putting on eyeliner has become a whole different chore in the just the last year.

Be prepared for your fucking 30s, young makeup lovers.