Yesterday I checked out the Make Up Forever Pro Road Show at the freaking gorgeous W Hotel Miami. Cool people, great discounts, and reusable tote bags. I’m super excited to impress my check out lady and possibly some fellow grocery shoppers with my tote.

The name being so vague, I first casually walked into ‘The Artistic Advantage’ class with David Hernandez half of the way through not expecting to miss much. Well it was amazing of course, yet another lesson on why not to be a know-it-all pessimist.  My favorite demo involved adding a pigment to a ton of this product called Blister Effect and dapple/dizzling it from the lid down the cheek. After it dries it can be peeled off. I miss this kind of editorial experimentation!

After that my former instructor and Burn Notice makeup artist Erin Koplow did some TV/film demos. She started out with some pretty normal ‘female detective’ stuff and then moved into showing some bruising and gashes and such. She showed off this amazing array of fake blood in variations called Thick, Liquid, and Coagulated. Who else has been waiting for a brand to understand that each stage of the blood-letting process has it’s own subtleties?

I was too busy shopping to get any bloody pics unfortunately. Sorry.  It was a lot of work. They had you manually fill out graph paper of the products for order. With pen and dash marks. Then they totaled you on this two-inch thick Dell laptop with crud in all the cracks before stapling the receipt to your graph packet to be sent to the studio in New York. This, in a day when I can get my Amex scanned off an IPhone to buy a hotdog from a street vendor. Make Up Forever, I love you, but do yourself and a thousand trees a favor and get an upgrade.

The Make Up Forever Pro Road Show will be in Austin on Oct. 8-10 and Atlanta from Nov. 12-14, both in W Hotels.

I guess now that Bin Laden’s dead, Kim Kardashian’s married, and the rapture has begun though a series of earthquakes and hurricanes, it’s time to blog again. Not that I’m committing. To anything. Ever. Just saying, it seems like a fine time all things considered.

It’s been hard to wrap my head around anything except the baby thing these past months…. or year. Hard like impossible. I don’t even judge anyone’s eyebrows anymore. I took the tweezers to my own for the first time in months and was like ‘Ow! This shit hurts.’ It’s a sad state when you can actually and deeply relate to the guests of ‘What Not To Wear’. Listen Stacy- There’s no reason NOT to wear sweat pants if the only place you’re going, for like the week, is Target.

The modern do-it-all work-mother-play sexy-time woman does not wear throw-up splattered sweat pants and a sad, greasy ponytail out of the house though. I tried. I made myself crazy ironing on two hours sleep in between pumping milk out of my breasts ad nauseam, corresponding with brides, and attempting any method to get my poor, sweet colicky baby to stop crying and sleep already. Literally crazy. Calling my mom and asking her to fly cross-country for the next day because I didn’t think I’d make it that long crazy. It was bad.

A few times I tried to rattle off a quick blog entry during a naptime, but things like paying bills, bathing, and uploading pictures to Facebook took precedence. Then it became a thing. A hovering thing. You know the hover. I ended up not making face. Not for myself, and for few others either. I’ve definitely thought I sucked, have not been exquisite any day, have rarely been properly pretty, and have not seen the humor in anything.  So there wasn’t much to blog about really.

But it’s been a year. And I’ve received so much positive encouragement, sometimes even bordering on demand in fact, that I get back to the blog , I’m starting to believe again. Believe that it’s not about doing it all; it’s about doing your all.  Whatever the hell that’s supposed to be, I’m not always sure, but I do know my all includes MakeFace. I’m no modern woman on the go, but except for a mild setback involving wine, scissors, and my bangs last week (I know, so cliché!), I think it’s about time I started making some face.

What do you need in your all?

Ps-My image below of motherhood as a sweet, dancing in the prairies and singing to the trees paradise is a total lie. This may be the one day I made face over the past year. (But my daughter is amazing and worth everything in the world to me.)

You know what’s really scary? A super colicky infant who strongly prefers to sleep only while being held. Terrifyingly exhausting. So, my hopes and dreams of an October filled with Halloween posts must be reconciled to spotty, half-assed attempts at making face.

Picking up my little one’s prescription for Levsin today (yes, we’re resorting to drugs, please don’t judge-I don’t like it either) I passed the Halloween aisle filled with various drugstore type costume items. A hot purchase every year are those massive eyelashes that have glitter or bright colors on the end. These lashes somehow seem to be an integral part of any female costume. Sometimes they are the entire costume themselves. What is that about?

That’s my blog.

You know what’s fun on Halloween? Something super gross. Being scary is in the true spirit, but being really really gross is a tight second. These are my top suggestions for super gross costumes:

1. Fat taken from a liposuction job.  Could even be someone specific’s fat from a specific part of the body. Hum… tapioca in clear plastic wrap?

2. Vomit, a classic. There are so many ways to make vomit really so go with what feels most authentic. Cardboard toilet seat hat takes the look to the next level. Or you can just wait and see if it becomes your costume by the end of the night.

3. Junkie is always a fun one. A friend of mine was ‘Heroine Sheik’ one year. He put track marks on with one of those dinky little kits with red, black, and white makeup and wore a sheik headdress. I thought that was clever, but any kind of junkie is cute. Lots of scabs add a nice touch.

4. Inside a porta-potty. Some cardboard, some cotton, a food coloring concoction… Eew!

5. A bed bug. Gross AND timely. Like an elementary school play costume, some carefully glued felt and a few pipe cleaners should get you started.

I guess you could wear the cat ear headband again. I mean, unless you work in a bar, the Snookie costume probably isn’t a good Halloween day look.

If you’re trying to stay away from the headband cop-out, but don’t want to get so creative you’re having to tell people what you are all day (or drop any serious coinage) here are a few wholesome and easy Halloween tricks for your daytime office obligations.

1. Red scarf around curl-set hair, makeup-free face, some type of denim ensemble = Rosie the Riveter.

2. One large hoop earring, a scarf around the head and a drawn-on mustache = Pirate.

3. Plastic fangs, a drizzle of blood out of the mouth, and some black eyeliner = Vampire.

4. Grunge eye makeup, a white tee, lots of accessories with metal and leather and the like, dark shaggy hair = Joan Jett

5. Over-alls, red tee, red baseball hat, moustache = Mario

6. Teased hair with scarf or headband, fingerless lace gloves, red lips, pearl necklace, leggings = Classic Madonna

7. A scary rubber mask or somewhat original wig is totally a cut above the cat ears. Because I love it… Gangster Braids Wig