I lied, my bag is bigger because I can always put a book in there so I am constantly reminded that I need to study. So far this strategy is failing miserably. I don't remember who it was that asked whether I could do a 'what's in your handbag' feature but here it is. A century too late and I weeded through things so I didn't have an overwhelming amount of make-up in there.

My dad got me this brown bag thinking it was a bag for my laptop. Men really have no indicators for the function of fashion but I loved the bag. I'm not much of a bag person. I get one and use it to death (clothes on the other hand is a different story), so you're lucky my bag isn't tattered to bits. People around me always beg that I a. never carry a tattered handbag and b. get rid of my (in their opinion) stupid fishing hat. So I'm all scrubbed up for you.

Here's a top view of the goods. It looks empty doesn't it?



Well, your eyes tricked you. Here's the goods in my bag:

• My textbook. It's called Purity in Exile and I doubt you'll ever want to read it.
• Pout Translucent Powder. Saw it on sale for $5 at Pure Beauty and picked it up. Works very well and keeps the oilies at bay.
  
• MAC Lust lipglass. I'm on my way to finishing this one. I always carry it around since it's such a safe shade.
• Guerlain Kiss Kiss lipstick n Terre D'Amour. The most wonderful, light, moisturizing formula and the most perfect nude for my lips ever.
  
• A sample of Geurlain My Insolence. Not too overwhelmed by this but then again I'm all about the Lush Honey Washed the Kids perfume.
  
• A mirror. My mother gave me this and I carry it around in case of emergencies.
• Guerlain Terracotta Loose Kohl in Noir. It's surma that's lead free and almost as black. I wish I could find a cheaper alternative but I love the long lasting, smudgey, dark look I get with this one. Sadly, there aren't too many loose kohls besides this on the market. I can't find the Sally Hansen one anywhere to save my life. However, I do adore the Guerlain version and use it day and night.
• Lush Honey I Washed the Kids solid perfume. This is my signature fragrance and I will never be able to get enough of this.
• My wallet. Pathetically light and unspectacular.
• Ice Breakers Sours (berry flavour). I love the berry version but shied away from trying it because I associated all things Ice Breakers with that annoying commercial featuring Hillary and Haylie Duff. I love them, but that commercial was awful.
  

I was about to sleep when I ran across this article. I was looking for some desi-beauty news to inspire me and it did, only int he wrong way. As you might have figured from my maniacal rantings, I hate the whole 'let's make brown girls whiter and let's tell white girls they need to tan to be beautiful' outlook. And so as fate would have it, I came across some idiocy and I can't sleep until I work myself into a frenzy of agitation over this article where two British cheerleaders were told by India's Twenty20 cricket team that they were too dark to perform.


To be honest it's the cheerleaders' fault really. Didn't they know that to enter Indian territory you need to be at or above an acceptable level of dark-skinned-ness? It's the reason Indian embassy officials don't wear sunglasses while issuing visas: it darkens the skin of the applicant. Duh! I think all Indian embassy officials should be fired. How dare they allow the melanin-endowed to enter India? You know what, I think the melanin made the cheerleaders fool officials into thinking they were lighter skinned and then entered the country. See? Melanin isn't only ugly, it' evil too. This is why India's Twenty20 cricket team refuses to buy mirrors. They'll realize they have melanin in their skin too and who knows what the melanin will drive them to do.

In their effort to celebrate their translucent image of self, India's Twenty20 cricket team seem to have taken to courting the ways of the hydroquinone molecule. Truly, it seems to have inspired them to try to cause irreversible damage to India's image by attempting to destroy all things melanin.

image source: www.thisislondon.co.uk

While we have the countless rumours of Aishwarya Rai, Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta, and Shilpa Shetty(post Big Brother of course) being poised to be the first desi Bond girl, they never seem to pan out. However, it appears that we're finally getting a desi Bond girl. Here's where we throw confetti celebrating us spicy brown people.


Zara Adams is apparently a British actress who is half Iranian and half Pakistani and is supposed to be a Bond girl in the next movie. To me she's gorgeous and, maybe I'm biased after Shilpa's numerous chicken-related dramas in Big Brother but I really can't think of a Bollywood actress who would suit the role. I don't know much about Zara Adams, but she really screams Bond girl glamour to me.

And to keep it beauty and style related, apparently Archana Kocchar will be designing her wardrobe, making it the first time a desi designer has produced the western wear for the Bond movies. As soon as the movie trailers come out I will do a breakdown of her make-up.

What do you think?



image source: www.mi6.co.uk

Wendy and Leann Tagged me so I'm going to let you into my rather convoluted brain (remember the Egyptian princess thing? tip of the iceberg).

So here are six quirky things about me:

1. I never read a book or watch a movie from the begging to the end. I always start at the beginning, read/watch the end to make sure it ends ok and my favourite characters are alive and thriving, and then read/watch the middle to catch up an get the entire story.
2. I never open both eyes when I wake up. I always only open one eye and "extend" my sleep with one eye closed. Incidentally I might as well be a narcoleptic. I can sleep for longer than 30 hours without waking up and I can also somehow get a great power nap standing up.
3. I am deathly terrified of snakes. I sometimes scare myself so much when thinking about how scared I am of snakes that I check every corner of my room before I sleep to make sure there are no snakes hiding there even though I know it's an impossibility.
   
4. I look like someone everyone knows. Not really a quirk but just something weird. All my life people tell me I look "just like their cousin" or "just like their friend." I think it might be that I look stereotypically Indian but almost everyone I know has at some point said "you know you look like my... [fill in the blank]." It makes me feel very weird that I might possibly meet my doppelganger soon. Isn't there some foreboding saying about meeting your doppelganger and dying or something like that?
   
5. I think the left side of my face is beyond fug in pictures. In real it looks fine and I think that pictures give me a "freshly beaten up" look.
6. I'm terrified of losing my teeth. I obsess over them to no end and buy myself a little present every time the dentist ok's the health of my teeth.
   

The rules are as follows:
Link the person who tagged you. Mention the rules in your blog. Tell about six unspectacular quirks of yours. Tag six following bloggers by linking them. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

I tagged:
An Indian's make-up blog, I heart make-up, Some dances to remember some dances to forget, Make-up makes me happy, Eva diva's make-up bag, The anti-hair slave, Golden gluteus

I just posted about the Femina Miss India winners for 2008 and it turns out there's a Miss-India-Gate type controversy going on regarding Miss India Earth Harshita Saxena.


It seems to be a muddled mess. According to Mareen Wadia, the president of the Gladrags pageant:

"Harshita was in a two-year contract with us and as per the agreement she was not supposed to participate in any other contest without our permission. She now has won the Miss India Earth crown, which is a breach of contract,"

Well the plot thickens because Harshita places the blame on Gladrags:
"It was extremely unprofessional on the part of Gladrags to bring this up now as they have not given me any work in the past two years of my association. They did not give me a copy of the contract although they had promised to provide me the same. Since I had read the contract 2 years back I did not remember the exact dates. I tried getting in touch with the Gladrags officials to confirm the expiry date, however there was no response from them. Also I would have appreciated the fact if Gladrags would have approached me directly rather than me being informed via the media."

My take on it is that both Harshita and Gladrags are at fault. She signed a contract, so READ what it entailed. As for Gladrags, I do agree with Harshita, they could have handled it in a more professional manner and contacted her. After all, she's the one who signed the contract, not the rest of India.

What do you think:


sources: http://feminamissindia.indiatimes.com/, http://in.news.yahoo.com, www.msn.co.in

In recent beauty news, the Femina Miss India came to an end a few days ago. I really liked last year's Miss India Puja Gupta, but it will be good to see what these three accomplish. Personally, I have nothing against pageants but I read an article a long time ago about the grooming processes involved in 'creating' Miss Indias that really put me off. I swear I'm not doing this just to be against Miss India, but I have a hard time supporting something that requires the contestants bleach their skin. In any case, here are the current Miss Indias, Simran Kaur-Mundi (l), Parvathy Omanakuttan (c), and Harshita Saxena (r).



image source: www.newkerala.com

Thanks, Ilovecheese. I sent out a desperate comment on your blog, did my rounds on the other blogs I love and it all dawned to me when I read Saniya's. So I'm supposed to answer all this and so here it is.

Things I’m passionate about
Art
Make-up
Writing stories (I can hear you doing a Brian from Family Guy impression as we speak)
Running
History
Traveling
Dreaming up stories (I'm not even kidding about this. I LOVE to dream up stories and get lost in them)

Books I’ve recently read
Ummm... do textbooks count? Really, being a graduate student kills all fun reading time.
A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors (the most scandalous/hilarious history book ever)

Songs I could listen to over and over
Def Leppard: Pour Some Sugar on Me (this has a special meaning to me)
Christina Aguilera: Still Dirrty
Sean Kingston: Take You There

Traits I’m attracted to in my best friends
A wicked sense of humour
Simplicity. I'm not one for gossip and politics and cannot/don't know how to deal with that.
The ability to laugh at themselves
Wanderlust
Fans of either South Park, Family Guy, or Law and Order (all except CI, hate that one)

Things I say often
I'm not even kidding
Whatever
Dear god no!

Things I’d like to do before I die
Learn 27 languages
Visit the birthplaces of some of my favourite historic figures
Publish books on (historical) fiction
Own the entire DVD collection of the Golden Girls and Frasier (no one tops the golden girls; NO ONE)
Have an exhibition of my art work
Have my own make-up line

The cover of Vogue for April 2008 features LeBron James and Giselle Bundchen. It seems that LeBron James is the first Black man to grace the cover of the magazine. Simple enough right? Apparently not. There's been a controversy because of this cover.


The cover is being described as racist:
"magazine analyst Samir Husni believes the photo was deliberately provocative, adding that it 'screams King Kong.' Considering Vogue's influential history, he said, covers are not something that the magazine does in a rush."

However, the cover was supposedly intended to "celebrate two superstars at the top of their game."

I can't make up my mind on this. There is so much stereotyping and exoticising that I feel become internalized and accepted as the standard. Why all this philosophising and what does this have to do with desis? Well, I still see quite a few photos, high fashion or not, that when they refer to us desis there is still an extent of exotification. And while I don't think all of fashion needs to be PC per se, it could still be sensitive to stereotypes like in this case.

I just told my roommate about this and she told me I object to everything as a matter of principle. I don't care, I'm still objecting to this.



source: www.msn.com

I know I promised to put tutorials up, and I will in a couple of days. School and work are killing me rather quickly I might add. I will also comment back to you wonderful ladies tomorrow. In the meanwhile, I have to get this off my chest or I'm afraid I might line my lips with a black lip liner and fill it in with a frosted light lilac lipstick (for all those who are not in the know, this the make-up world's equivalent of the phrase "if I don't rant about this, I think I might kill someone"). Why am I this mad you ask? Well, here goes.

I was at a make-up counter recently (it shall remain unnamed) and I encountered very rude and pushy behaviour that just really repulsed me. Let me add that some sales assistants are gifts showered onto the make-up obsessed subspecies of the Human race. The ones that listen to your concerns and help you look for things you love pretty much occupy the role of priests and priestesses that lead us to our destined shimmery mauve blush. When this is not the case, however, it becomes a problem.

At the fateful counter, a woman in her mid 20s happened to come by looking for skin care and make-up ideas. I, in my ever-present curiosity, happened to catch their conversation. The sales assistant bullied the woman by telling her that her face crinkled when she laughed and that good skin doesn't "scrunch up the way hers did" when people laughed. She then proceeded to point out that if her skin looked this bad at the age of 26, she had no hope of looking halfway decent ten years into the future. Charming, and this is just the condensed milk version of it (that would mean short and sweet). The poor woman was flustered and intimidated and I don't know what she ended up buying, but she didn't leave the counter a happier or more confident person. In fact, her face just looked dejected when she left the store.

I will just say that it is such a shame that this sales assistant was such a jerk (there are other words that come to mind, but you will no longer want to read my blog if I said them). She was such a disservice to all the great sales assistants I have met in the past (one of whom I trust so blindly that I might as well worship her divine speech, and let me also add that I am not being sarcastic here just bluntly honest).

Just to let you know the situation on the breakdowns. These are formulated by me. I sometimes find out exactly what products were used from sites or Saniya send me some information, but the actual breakdown, the steps on what to put where are all my interpretation. I just want to let you know this because someone has been copying my post word for word and posting it on another site. It made me so mad because a) I put in the effort b) it makes it look like I got it from somewhere, which I did not. Also, all information I get from another site is also credited to that site. I just hope that in the future that certain individual will not look at my blog for updates on their site.

I promie to bring you some tutorials by Sunday. Am having a bit of a crisis here, so I plan to postpone my tutorials til Sunday and include not only one on threading but also post make-up looks I did on a couple of my friends (my photography by the way, I'm an amateur photographer). We will see how this goes.

Anyways, as for my wtf moment, here it is. Whenever I go to India, I gorge myself on Lakme. True, they have (un)succesfully segregated the wide range of desi skin tones in 4 categories. Let's not forget that their packaging is flimsy at times, but overall they have some great products. For example, their lipstick in Barely There is one of my all-time favourite no-brainer natural lipsticks. It's only natural that I'm hoping they would update their site with better swatches and allow customers to purchase their products online. Lo and behold, many years later i get one of my wishes granted. Lakme allows online orders. Time to bring out the low-fat, low-cal, low-carb, fully artificially flavoured cake right? Not really!

The prices on their website are outrageous. They charge 17 pounds for their Face Souffle. Translate that into American Dollars and it's, erm, a lot more than that. Who are they kidding? I mean, Sephora's on my speed dial. For that cost I'd rather get something from a department store. And depending on what brand it is, I'd probably have money to spare.

Gruelling Miss Indias

I haven’t ranted for a while and I don’t want to pull the wool over your eyes by letting you think I’m a sweet being. I believe that for a 3.5 minute interval on January 10th, 1987 I was a gentle and soft-spoken but that doesn’t really count since I was a toddler then. What am I going on about this time you ask? Well read the following article where the author talks about the way the Miss India pageant is structured.

Let me start off by saying that I am perfectly fine with pageants and while I wouldn't participate in one, I by no means find it demeaning to women. The tone of the article and the opinions of the author aside, I am particularly horrified at the way the women who enter are treated. I don't want to paint them as innocent victims without expectations who were lured by a sheep in wolf's clothing.

A sad trend that I feel is increasingly the case with the Miss India contestants is that they loose any individuality and end up looking alike. True, they are groomed, their food intake is restricted, everything about them is fine-tuned and end up looking like a more acceptable and tasteful version of themselves and we all strive to be "a better version" of our current state. None of these contestants is allowed to embrace their individuality. I know it's not a self-esteem camp where they learn to love their flaws, but in what realm is deciding not to eat anything, including fruits, because everything has calories normal?

What better way to make women feel beautiful than make them painfully aware that they are not comparable to an ideal and attack every part of them that is different? I think they've hit the jackpot, really. I can't wait until someone compliments me with the following: "Oh wow! You've put on weight around your waistline. I'm sure once you are on a strict diet where you eat approximately 400 calories a day your face won't look like a tubby kid's and your waistline will be wasp-like. You'll be so pretty then. But now now though, don't let that idea get into your head. You need to change." Honeyed words.

Now that I'm all on my high horse, let's bring it back to make-up. The article states that the following about the Indian make-up artist Cory Walia:

A personal preference and a level of comfort are what guide us in finding make-up that we feel reflects our personality. Personally, I have a comfort zone that is continually expanding because I find new ways to work with colours and textures. That in turn leads me to try out shades I would have never though of but essentially are an offshoot of my comfort-zone. That bit of soul-baring aside, I certainly would like to think a professional will treat me with respect and not assault me. Although maybe the slap will turn my cheeks red and help me find the perfect shade of blush. That's why he's the professional. I get it.