acquisitions: Tom Ford Shade and Illuminate palette

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Tom Ford Shade and Illuminate Intensity 01

I really like the way cream products blend naturally into the skin, and have been wanting a cream contour for a while. It’s great to hold off acquiring, so when you do finally go for it you get just what you want, and haven’t wasted your funds on stuff it turns out you don’t like. This also helps [me] to justify selecting an expensive option, as this certainly is.

Tom Ford Shade and Illuminate Intensity 01
Tom Ford Shade and Illuminate Intensity 01

If I’m only going to have one contour cream, I’m glad this is the one. I like to mess around with creating/enhancing/transforming the architecture of my face. I have the palette in Intensity One, the lighter shade, and find it wonderfully natural and subtle. It’s quite transparent, and–great for makeup amateurs–hard to mess up, in a way. The highlight cream is similarly subtle. I do have other highlighters, cream and powder, and none are so finely milled and undetectable as this. When it comes to face products, undetectability is my main priority.

Chic packaging doesn’t hurt, either.

I feel like finding a paintbrush akin to the one designed to go with the palette [prohibitively expensive], and seeing how that applies.

Watch brilliant makeup artist Lisa Eldridge using it here in an androgynous look, which I am so going to try. And here it is being used for a sculpted Kate Moss look.

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upgrades: new shoelaces (laces are so cheap!)

An inexpensive way to brighten and refresh your shoes? New laces! More to the point, contrasting laces.

For standard, flat, sneaker-style laces I recommend Converse laces, which come in a few lengths and many, many colors. ~$2!

For sturdy, round, boot-style laces, check out Doc Marten’s. ~$3!

[Make sure to get the correct length]

before & after:

pumas before
pumas before
pumas after
pumas after

 

converse before
converse before
converse after
converse after
docs before
docs before
docs after
docs after
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and after
and after
and after
and afer
and after

 

See what I mean?

(Which color would you go for with the doc martens? Tough call, right?)

N.B. New white laces tend to make broken-in shoes look especially tired.