This week’s Friday Five will be brief because I’m currently in St. Louis for my 20th high school reunion weekend!
1. Spring Caribbean Friday Night Dinner: last week we went to our third FND at the Natural Gourmet Institute, and it was so delicious (and beautiful) yet again!
I totally did not plan this week’s Throwback Thursday to coincide with my 20th (YIKES) high school reunion this weekend—it’s a happy accident. This week’s #tbt is my ninth grade school photo, circa 1992.
Wow…I LOVED that shirt, though I can’t for the life of me remember where it was from. I must have thought I was so clever for matching the t-shirt underneath to the subtle coral-colored embroidery detail on the collared shirt. Ninth grade was the first year I started wearing contacts, but I still had my braces until the spring of that school year. It appears that I might actually be wearing a touch of lipstick; if I had to hazard a guess as to what it was I’d say it was from a Clinique free gift with purchase. And I definitely hadn’t discovered eyebrow tweezing just yet.
Onward…to my reunion weekend!
Because I’ve recently acquired some organic makeup goodies, including Vapour Organic Beauty samples and Birchbox’s Limited Edition New Naturals box, I decided to challenge myself to do a green beauty look for date night with my husband this past Saturday. I did actually turn out to have just about everything I needed to create a full face using natural makeup!
Here are the products I used:
1. Zoo Cat Real Mask: yep, it’s time for another edition of “my husband hates these so much!” (For the record, my Resting Sheet Mask FaceTM is what disturbs him more than the masks themselves.) This is my first foray into sheet masks that look like things other than straight up Hannibal Lecter, and because I’m a Certified Cat Lady I started with this cat mask. This one is from my Memebox sheet mask haul a couple months back and it cost me just $1.95 because of a sale the site was running. So creepy/fun!
This week’s Throwback Thursday? My eighth grade school photo from 1991.
I don’t look substantially different than I did in my seventh grade school pic, nor do my fashion choices appear to have changed much within the year. The biggest differences are that I got my braces and that I apparently gave up on trying to make my hair do anything special.
I don’t remember wearing so many plain ol’ t-shirts to school! My school (a Midwestern prep school) had a pretty stringent dress code, but I guess as long as t-shirts were free of logos or slogans they were fine. That gold chain necklace I’m wearing has my baby ring dangling from it—a tiny ring with an even tinier diamond chip in it that my parents got when I was born. I of course never wore it as a baby or even as a child, but I guess a baby ring was some kind of tradition back then. I still have it on a chain, too! I think I’ll pull the necklace out and wear it today, for nostalgia’s sake. 🙂
Over the past year I’ve been making a concerted effort to clean up my beauty and skin care routine. While I’m not even close to phasing out all products containing potentially toxic ingredients, I’m now much more conscious about researching prior to buying. The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database is essential to my own research. I highly recommend you download their free Healthy Living app on your phone—it allows you to scan bar codes while shopping to find out how the products are rated.
When I learned that Birchbox had released a limited edition New Naturals box containing mostly full sized ingredient conscious products, I just had to have it in my hot little hands.
1. I voted in my first presidential primary! Apparently this is the first New York presidential primary in quite some time that actually mattered. I was very excited about voting, and treated myself to my first iced coffee of the year afterward. It was a happy occasion, though my chosen candidate lost (which I pretty much expected).
You guessed it, this week’s Throwback Thursday pic is Seventh Grade Me, circa 1990 or 1991.
Ahh, there are those big red glasses I know and love! Seventh grade was my first year at a school that was all-girls at the time (two years later we merged with the boys’ school that was literally next door). The school had a pretty strict dress code, though it apparently wasn’t strict enough to forbid wearing plain old t-shirts. I guess I thought wearing a t-shirt that matched my glasses would be look nice; at least I tried to jazz things up by rolling up the sleeves a touch. I’m more than likely wearing a plaid pleated skirt with this tee. Fortunately the photo was taken before I got braces later that school year. I clearly attempted to do something with my hair—I guarantee that tiny swoop has a ton of hairspray in it…my baby fine hair has never been one to cooperate.
In last week’s Friday Five I mentioned that Sephora‘s semi-annual VIB sale had just begun. This time around the beauty megastore offered us VIBs 15% off everything in store and online, which is nearly impossible to resist. While I could have gone crazy and ordered All The Things, I ended up placing a relatively modest and restrained order.
So here are the goodies I ended up with:
1. New sunglasses for spring and summer! I picked out these two pairs at the Burlington Coat Factory in Union Square. The top pair is by Guess and cost $14.99, and the bottom pair is by Nine West and only set me back $9.99. Score!
