80s night...aww yeeeaahh

Hi, everyone!! We're still alive! As I mentioned in a tweet not too long ago, I've been insaaaaanely busy planning my upcoming October wedding. It's almost completely DIY, and there is tons to do! Being only six weeks out, things are gettin' a little crazy. But I got the invitations mailed out today, which was a huge process, so a weight has been lifted now that they are in the mail. Whew!!! My fiancé and I are actually getting married at KameraWhore and VainShane's house! How awesome is that?! Their backyard has everything we were looking for...and it's FREE...and it's the home of some of the people I love most in the whole entire world! Couldn't get any better than that.


Okay, so what else have we been up to? Well, we had a birthday party to celebrate not only my 30th birthday but also VainShane's, whose birthday is only a few days after mine! He likes to remind me that I am older than him, so I just remind him that I am smarter. ;) If you don't know who VainShane is, I'm sure you at least gathered that he's Kam's husband, but he is also the guy who brings you Manity...where you can ask him any kinda random question you want to know about how guys think. (We'd love to have our first submission to this feature!)


Kam wanted to do an 80s theme for the night since we were born in 1980, and she made this awesome invitation with real pics of Shane 'n me as kids! 

We went out to eat with a group of friends at Joe's Crab Shack, which somehow fit the theme perfectly. Then we went skating at a good, old-fashioned skating rink! Ideal 80s pastime that I used to partake in quite often when I was a kid. What made it even more special was that it was the skating rink where my parents first met...so it was truly where my story began...I might not have a birthday if not for that "chance" meeting when my dad saw my mom and offered to help her skate. :)


We went pretty all-out with our outfits for 80s night, and we thought y'all might enjoy seeing a few pics from the evening. Almost makes me want to dress like this everyday because you can't help but feel totally and completely fabulous!! 

Strike a pose! We forgot the "Walk Like an Egyptian" thing...oh, well.

Aren't those the most awesome leg warmers?!

Kam being her usual artsy photographer self on the playground and me posing completely unwillingly...

Jenarcissist and VainShane

Teal mascara = love.

Best shot we got of my eye makeup...lol. It was so much brighter in person.

Clothes:


The cat shirt I am wearing is an authentic T-shirt I used to wear as a kid!! And Kam's shirt belonged to her dad and was even already cut at the neckline...chyeaahh. My tutu came from a funky thrift store (been looking for an excuse to buy a tutu for the longest time!). I've had my jellies forever and can't even remember now where I got them...I didn't buy them for 80s night; I wear them anyway! My leggings came from Delia's a couple years ago. Other accessories, like bracelets and leg warmers, came from Claire's and a local jewelry shop. I don't know where Kam got her skinny jeans, but they sure do look incredible on her!


Makeup:


I bought Make Up For Ever Mat Velvet + foundation to use when I do my wedding makeup, and that evening was a pretty good test run for how well it holds up! I did use a primer first, but it held up very well, even with it being hot and sticky. I had also bought Urban Decay's All Nighter setting spray for the wedding (Kam calls it "hairspray for your face" - haha!), and I forgot to apply it the night of the party. But I can tell you that it definitely does work. I won't say it makes your makeup look 100% freshly applied after several hours, but with my oily skin and living in a hot and humid climate, it helps the staying power and keeps oil under control better. Both products together should make a winning combo for the wedding. Even without the spray, my makeup still looked pretty good after skating. Anyway, I also used Lime Crime's discontinued Pixie Dust HD powder (e.l.f. and Make Up For Ever also have versions), e.l.f. Complexion Perfection powder, hot pink Hot Topic eyeshadow for blush, e.l.f. Eyebrow Kit in Medium, Lime Crime lipstick in Great Pink Planet, e.l.f. Mineral Infused Mascara on top lashes, Lash Splash teal mascara on bottom lashes, and a plethora of eyeshadows (Milani in Runway White for highlighter, Milani in Enchantment - the purple, Maybelline Sea Glass duo - the teals, Pout duo in Miss Fiji - discontinued brand - the blues, and the Hot Topic hot pink shadow). 


Oh, and you can't really tell from these pics, but my hair was, of course, in a side ponytail.


We had a great time! As usual, my best friend made me feel incredibly special. :) 

AND THE LIME CRIME CONTEST WINNER IS..........

So firstly, I thought I would tell you all about my day. When I woke up this morning...only kidding. ;) I don't wanna make you wait any longer; we feel terrible that it's taken so long to begin with to announce the winner of our Lime Crime contest...but we wanted to actually get together in person to randomly choose our winner...this is our very first giveaway contest here at the closet narcissist, and it is a really special moment for us!!!!! 


And our winner is...Amanda!! Her brilliant entry is:

You might be a closet narcissist if...you insist to sit in the passenger seat rather than drive so you can leave the mirror down to admire yourself and the gorgeous makeup that you just put on because you know you look amazing.

(KameraWhore doing just that)

Congrats, Amanda! Thank you for so beautifully capturing the TCN essence! Please contact us here and send us your mailing address! We'll get your Lime Crime lipstick and Magic Dust shipped out ASAP. We'd absolutely LOVE to see a pic of you wearing your win. :)


We had to randomly choose the winner not only to be fair but because there were SOOO many great entries!! We were truly honored and thrilled that so many people entered - it's a testament to the allure of Lime Crime makeup, but also, y'all really captured the spirit of the closet narcissist with your entries, and we're like, wow, people out there really "get" us!! To know that what we are doing is resonating with people and striking some kind of chord out there...well, we can't even really put into words how thrilling it is for us and how much it means to us. We feel very fortunate to already have some loyal followers with a relatively new project here, and we want you all to know how much we appreciate the fact that you are reading our posts and becoming a part of the conversation! We squeal every time we get an alert that a new comment has been posted. We're not just doing this for fun, ya know (though it IS tons of fun for us!)...we're really hoping to make some kind of positive difference, and we hope we are doing that for each of you. :)


To those of you who didn't win, we feel awful, and we wish we could give all of you the prize. :( This is the hard part of doing a contest, and it doesn't feel great. BUT rest assured that we will be doing more contests in the future...in fact, we already have a couple in mind!!! ;)

Here it is, the big 3-0! (+ outfit)

flickr photo by David C. Clark

Okay, the photo is just me joking around about being over the hill. But today I turned 30 years old. There, I said it. I might as well get used to it! I've mentioned before that it was getting close and that it wasn't really bothering me. Well, I have to admit that although that really was the case, and I was doing fine for the most part, when midnight struck and it officially became my birthday, I had a panic moment and shed a few tears. When I got up this morning, I was still kind of in a funk. I kept telling myself I was being ridiculous, but I couldn't help it. I found a surprise gift waiting on the counter for me from my incredible fiancée who knows me so well (and loves me anyway...), and I got all teary-eyed from that...and then I REALLY started crying between that and turning 30. lol My dogs promptly came running over to me, as they always do when I cry, in an effort to comfort me and lick my tears away til I am laughing...and as I leaned down to kiss my beagle on his sweet little snout...he belched in my face!!! I started cracking up and knew then that I was going to be okay. :) 


I've had tons of calls, comments, emails, texts, all kinds of things today! I have felt really loved and special. And, as people keep reminding me, I have so much good stuff going on during my 30th year! So I am going to focus on that. As I have tried to put into words (though I'm not sure it's been successful), it's not that I feel like this is the end or that I am old. It's simply that it feels like time is going by way too fast. I'm afraid I'm going to turn around and suddenly be another thirty years older and wonder where the time went. The last thirty years have gone by so fast already. I wish I could push the pause button sometimes and just soak up all I can and savor every moment fully. 


And, if I'm being completely honest, I do fear the changes that my face and body are inevitably going to go through at some point. It's not that I think getting older means "ugly" or "bad" or anything even close to that. It's just that regardless of HOW I change, I will still CHANGE. And the change part is what is unsettling to me; I won't always look the way I look now, and that is so weird. Do you know what I mean? But there is only so much I can do about it, and at some point down the line when I realize I am truly aging, I certainly want to embrace it as the natural process that it is and not fight it. It's sad to me the extreme measures some people will go through to stay looking young, and most of the time, it's pretty obvious that's what they're doing anyway. I will still want to try to look my best but also just try to be happy with myself and remain confident. I have a sneaky suspicion that my confidence will only grow with age rather than diminish...and that is definitely not a bad thing! :)


KameraWhore and I have already decided we'll NEVER stop shopping in the Juniors department all the same!!! ;) So in light of that, here is the outfit I am wearing today. Someone told me I was dressed like a little kid, and when I found a picture of me at one of my childhood birthday parties, I kinda had to agree! Not that I think it's a bad thing. :) This is one of my favorite dresses from Marshall's with my favorite bunny tee underneath so that he's just peeking out the top. :) Sorry it's blurry; took like six pics, and they were all that way.

We'd love to know...how do YOU picture yourself when you're in, say, your 80s? The crazy, funky grandma? The graceful, chic lady? (This is something I have to think about before I can answer!)


P.S. The Lime Crime contest winner WILL be announced soon, we PROMISE!! I know some of you are on pins and needles, and we're so sorry...we are both very involved in planning my wedding (only two months to go!) and have a million bajillion things going on!! We are going to get together tomorrow and pick the winner together. :)

An airbrushed blogosphere?

Something that's been heavy on my mind lately is this: I've read in multiple places online lately that many girls are intimidated by photos of bloggers and begin to feel they are "less than" in comparison. No longer are we as women just comparing ourselves to the airbrushed models in magazines; now we are looking to bloggers!! It seems that some of us can get so caught up in wishing we looked like those girls to the point where we stop getting anything out of their content. 

Something you need to keep in mind - people do not generally post unflattering pictures of themselves. I've even tried not to. We all want to present our best to the world whether we consciously think about it or not. No one looks great in every single picture that gets taken of them, so people tend to weed out the bad and only show the good to the world. Also, I'd be willing to bet that almost all the photos that make it into the blogosphere are edited in some way. You can change lighting, coloring, hair color, etc. if you're even a little bit computer savvy or even just have an iPhone...you can smooth out your skin...you can even make yourself look thinner. This can create just as much of an artificial view of beauty to readers as magazine models. People joke, "I read it on the internet, so it must be true!" Well, you need to take photos with a grain of salt as well. And even if the girl in the photo really is that skinny in real life, who knows what she puts herself through to maintain it...it may or may not be a healthy lifestyle, though I don't dare speculate that all skinny girls have a problem. Some gals are naturally skinny no matter what they do, and even if you're not, big deal...it doesn't mean anything is wrong with you. Sure, I love to edit photos on my iPhone and even posted a review of our favorite photo apps to help you look your best. I think, though, that you have to know where to draw the line between perception and reality.

I read in a tabloid that Jessica Biel has worked out for 5 hours a day at times and that Amanda Seyfried has been known to eat only spinach and seeds all day to compensate for her "slow metabolism." Now, who even knows if the magazine was truthful or not. But anyone caught up in that kind of thing is NOT really living. If you let comparing yourself to other women drive you to that kind of point where you're over-exercising and under-eating, there's a serious problem there. You think you're trying to whittle away your body, when actually, it's your life, your happiness, and your health that are whittling away.

I think probably all women play the comparison game. You might not even realize you're doing it. But while you're out running errands, you might be subconsciously stacking yourself up to every other woman you pass by. "Am I as pretty or thin as she is?" "She looks more successful than I do." "I wish I could pull that off." Sound familiar? 

Take blogs at face value, girlies. If you get too consumed with the comparison game while perusing the blogosphere and it's affecting how you feel about yourself, I say stop looking at the ones that bother you. (Hopefully, that doesn't mean ours, though as a closet narcissist, I suppose I should be assuming ours would fit the bill - har har har!) When I was a teenager, I'd pore over Seventeen magazine and wish I looked like those models; at some point, it became a problem because I couldn't stop wishing I were different. And not in the good sort of way where something spurs you to be healthier or make reasonable improvements to your appearance. In the bad way where you don't feel comfortable in your own skin and feel self-conscious about every little thing because you don't look like someone else. So I stopped subscribing. I stopped looking at them. Remember how I said in a recent entry that not wearing makeup in front of people is really all a matter of what you're used to seeing, and once you're used to how you look without it, you realize it's not bad? Same principle applies. If looking at pictures causes you a problem, stop looking at them, and your perception will change as you get readjusted to how you look. Once you start focusing more on what is real and what is important, maybe you'll find your perception of yourself is changing...and you'll realize you don't have to look like someone else; you can just be happy looking like YOU. Magazines tend to talk out of both sides of their mouths anyway; one page says, "Look at the extreme measures these stars go to lose weight!" and "So-and-so should stop tanning because she'll age too fast!" - and then you turn the page and see, "So-and-so, what happened to your tan?" and "Get slim quick with these tips!"

We'll leave you with a no-makeup pic of KameraWhore since I've posted a couple already in the past. And many of you may have seen this already, but Dove made a short film a while back called "Evolution" that shows the transformation a model goes through for a photoshoot and then all the computer editing that follows...and we'll close with that as well.

There's certainly nothing wrong with trying to look your best!! We do it, and we love it! But there's also a fine line of when it becomes detrimental to your self-esteem. 

I say, ASSUME you are awesome, and eventually you'll believe it! Because, after all, it's true! :)

Do you compare yourself or even feel bad about yourself after seeing bloggers' pics?

(This version of the video is actually in rewind, which I think is kinda cool.)