Quest for Coral

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Settle in, because this is going to be an epic quest. Sometime in April, when I'd had about enough of the gloom, I decided I would declare this the Summer of Coral. It's kind of like the Summer of George, but on my face. I was going to find a bright coral lip product that I loved and wear the fuck out of it. I already owned some options, but none of them was quite right, so I started shopping. Here I've laid out all the lip products I now own that are coral or coral adjacent. There are some that turned out to be orange or orange-red, but if nothing else they provide a basis for comparison.

Here is the full array (lip swatches and more info for each below):

Left to right: Stila Lip Glaze in Melon, Revlon Moisture Stain in Cannes Crush, BareMinerals Marvelous Moxie Lipstick in Light It Up, Wet N Wild Silk Finish Lipstick in What's Up Doc?, Wet N Wild MegaLast Lipstick in Purty Persimmon, ULTA Automatic Lip Liner in Scarlet, Life's Entropy Lip Theory in Apoptosis, Life's Entropy Lip Theory in Recursion, L'Oreal Pop Balm in Caring Coral.

And here are swatches of all of them:

Swatches (left to right): Stila Lip Glaze in Melon, Revlon Moisture Stain in Cannes Crush, BareMinerals Marvelous Moxie Lipstick in Light It Up, Wet N Wild Silk Finish Lipstick in What's Up Doc?, Wet N Wild MegaLast Lipstick in Purty Persimmon, ULTA Automatic Lip Liner in Scarlet, Life's Entropy Lip Theory in Apoptosis, Life's Entropy Lip Theory in Recursion, L'Oreal Pop Balm in Caring Coral.

More below the cut, because I have a thousand photos and a million words to go.

The quickest/laziest waves (in which I try out a hair tutorial from xoVain and it is actually useful)

Disclosure: This post contains an Amazon affiliate link.
I don't know why I sometimes feel compelled to read xoVain when it usually just fucking annoys me, but I do. A while back, however, I found something good there: a use for some of that "beach hair" spray, which had me pretty stumped (I got it as a sample from Ipsy), and the fastest and easiest way I've ever come across to add waves that will actually last to my normally stick-straight hair.

You can see the original article here, and my own version of it below as further illustration. I wanted to add to the information available on xoVain, because I think the article there doesn't emphasize some of the major advantages of this technique. But I also want to be clear that this isn't an original idea I came up with independently.

I've posted before about techniques for curls/waves that work for me. For whatever reason, the kind of hair that I have just does not respond to heat styling. I mean, okay, I can make it even straighter, but it rejects curling with heat, whether from a curling iron, hot rollers, or whatever. 20 minutes max after curling, it's straight again, regardless of temperature or product. So the best luck I've had in the past is with putting curlers in overnight. I still think doing it that way has the prettiest results, but this method from xoVain will also work when I want some extra texture in my hair, but I don't want to wash it and then wait 8 hours+. This takes half an hour tops, and most of that time you can spend doing something else.

So this method has the advantages of: (1) not requiring any heat; (2) not requiring wet hair; and (3) being really fucking simple and quick.

It does need a specific product, though, whereas you really don't need anything but water and some rags to curl your hair overnight. For this you need a surf/beach/salt spray. You can google recipes for making DIY versions, but I haven't tested any of those, so I can't tell you how well they work. The one I have is Healthy Sexy Hair Soy Renewal Beach Hair. I could not figure out what to do with this shit when I got it. The package says that you can just, "spray on to damp hair and let dry naturally or blow dry with a diffuser for all over texture." If by texture they mean making your hair feel somewhat rougher and crunchier than usual, then sure. But it didn't do anything else for me. It may be that to use it as instructed you have to have hair that is already prone to waviness or something.

But it works great for making waves with dry hair twisted into buns! It's not utterly pointless! (Also it smells like old school suntan lotion. Yum.) I can't think of another product that will work quite like this: dries/sets extremely quicky, not goopy or sticky, etc. All you do is spray it all over your dry hair, twist your hair into 2-3 buns, and wrap an elastic around each of them. Wait 15-20 minutes (maybe longer depending on how thick your hair is), and then finger comb the waves. I have photos of the steps below the cut. (I am not, in fact, naked in any of the photos. It's a beige cami, okay?)

Has xoVain become Pinterest? (i.e. a cesspool of DIY bullshit that either won't work or will end badly)

Here's a good recipe for an eye infection. I mean, okay, do it once in an emergency, and then throw the fucking tube away. When the author gets called out in the comments, she claims that that is what she meant, but in the article itself, she says you can keep using the mascara for a few more weeks by doing this. MAKE UP YOUR MIND.