Sense of my Style: November 2010

Monday, November 29, 2010

The Romance of Jane Austen

The Romance of Jane Austen by prettystardust on Polyvore.com

South Beach fun

South Beach fun by prettystardust featuring gold jewelry

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Wild n free

Wild n free by prettystardust featuring white scarves

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Tea is for more than just drinking :) Brew 1/2 cup of unscented black or green tea leaves in 1 quart of boiling bottled water for at least 10 minutes. Strain the leaves and set aside. Cool the liquid and refrigerate. This solution will keep in the refrigerator for approximately 10 days. This tea recipe works for the following...
For Minor Cuts & Scrapes:
Apply the cold tea brew with a pure cotton pad onto minor cuts or abrasion. Leave the cotton pad on the affected area for at least 5 minutes. Repeat, and do not wash off. This procedure can be repeated up to four times a day.

Sunburns:
Apply a piece of cotton cloth that's been soaked in the cold tea brew to the sunburned area. Leave on for about 15 minutes, or until the burned areas begins to cool. You can repeat this treatment up to four times a day.

For Puffy & Fatigued Eyes:
Soak cotton pads in the cold tea brew and lay them on your eyes. Keep the pads on your lids for about 10 minutes. You can also refrigerate your used tea bags and lay them on your eyes.

For Tired Feet:
Soak your feet in the cold tea brew for about 15 minutes. This is a great way to treat your feet after a long day of standing, walking, or running. You can also try soaking your feet in a concentrated Peppermint Herbal tea brew for an aromatic soak.

Weekend finds

Love the finds I been looking at this weekend, scarf is Hermes, robe is Agent Provateur, and cami/panty from myla.com... have a good weekend!

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Lovely finds...

When looking online on http://www.selfridges.com/ you fall in love with great finds from across the pond. The royal Albert tea sets, chocolate chessboard, or the JO MALONE white jasmine and mint shower gel... love this company :)

Victorian Lady

Victorian Lady by prettystardust featuring a victorian dress

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Ooh pretty things!!

Vionnet Boutique has great stuff... I fell in love with with their collection.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Lady London

Lady London by prettystardust on Polyvore.com

Sunday, November 21, 2010

The simple fashion statment

I love the look of a luscious, warm and cozy scarf. I feel that simple accessory completes any winter outfit. I try to go for bright colors and patterns to make my outfit look fun and stylish. These are a few I really like from Loft.com

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Marion

Marion by prettystardust featuring a silk gown

Friday, November 19, 2010

winter trends I love right now

I really like the trends og glitter, sparkles and fur, and its great for a party or the weekend. The dress is from Miss me, other items from Bebe...

je'taime chic

je'taime chic by prettystardust featuring christian louboutin booties

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Miss Scarlett

Miss Scarlett by prettystardust featuring a platform pump

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

My rocker chic boots

These are crazy boots. A friend got them for me :) They are Jessica Simpson boots from Macys I believe...

Beauty Transformation: From Sweet to Sex Kitten

Perhaps it was Miuccia Prada who lit the fuse earlier this year, when she sent Victoria’s Secret models down her fall 2010 runway in Milan with va-va-voom bouffants to complement their capacious cup sizes; maybe it was the relentless ubiquity of Kim Kardashian’s fasten-your-seatbelt curves or a collective cultural genuflection to the majesty of Christina Hendricks’ zaftig Mad Men redhead. Whatever the spark, the bombshell—that overtly sexy specimen whose kittenish pulchritude was personified by ’60s-era Brigitte Bardot—is hot again. Witness, for example, the surge of hair volumizers and lash enhancers on the market: Right now, when it comes to beauty, bigger is better.

Platinum blond Jean Harlow was the first woman to be given the artillery-derived epithet when she blew audiences away in the 1933 film Bombshell, and the signifiers for drop-dead sex appeal have changed little since then. From Rita Hayworth’s famous hair-flip in Gilda to pretty much any of Scarlett Johansson’s cleavage-costarring red-carpet trots, the bombshell components are unmistakable: tousled mane, smoldering eyes, pillowy lips, and “try me if you dare” attitude. Forget microminis and body shimmer: This is sexiness with mystique, and it takes a grown-up kind of confidence to pull it off.

“Real glamour is timeless,” says Guess cofounder Paul Marciano, a man who knows a thing or two about the subject, having handpicked the likes of Claudia Schiffer, Carla Bruni, and Anna Nicole Smith to star in the brand’s ad campaigns over the years. Indeed, the “Guess girl” has become an instantly recognizable icon: Whether she’s flirting with a cowboy or cavorting in Capri, her image taps into both retro European film-star allure and sun-dappled Old Hollywood optimism. Marciano and I are sitting in a blossom-filled garden in Florence, Italy, where he’s launching the aptly named new Guess perfume, Seductive—a scent that opens with the “false innocence” of pear and jasmine before it goes in for the kill, like a classic femme fatale, with orris and cedarwood.

“My starting point for the Guess aesthetic has always been the Italian beauties of the ’60s,” Marciano says, waving his hand into the Florentine ether as if to indicate that such creatures are still abundant here—tasting gelato, frolicking in fountains, perhaps even standing rapt before the mother of all bombshells in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, which hangs in the Uffizi just streets away. “To me, Sophia Loren is the ultimate: sexual, but always classy; sensual, but intelligent. I respond to women like Bardot and Jane Fonda in Barbarella—those who appear to embrace their sexuality and enjoy life. I don’t get how a man can be attracted to that flat-as-a-table, skinny-as-a-stick look,” he says with a sigh. “I personally think that women should look like women.”

Later that night, I ponder his words over a colossal bowl of pasta. If this bold, vivacious embrace-life-and-liquid-eyeliner type of beauty is so much more closely aligned with what a real woman looks like than your standard runway model, then what would it take for a real woman—such as myself—to become a bona fide bombshell? While I’m not one to put anything out there—the necklines of most of my dresses border on the ecclesiastical—I can’t help but admire the warm, flirtatious sensuality of the Bardot archetype. Perhaps it’s time for me to heed the call of my own inner siren.

I decide to seek out an expert. For aspiring pinups, Hollywood makeup artist Alexis Vogel is the queen bee of bombshells: She created her devoted client Pamela Anderson’s signature look, and has worked her sexpot-Svengali magic on everyone from Latin lovely Shakira to Avril Lavigne. When she’s not making celebs photo- and red-carpet-ready with lashings of lashes or managing her new Alexis Vogel makeup range, Vogel heads a “glam squad,” which makes house calls to anyone in the Los Angeles area who desires a full-blown vixen makeover. (The sessions are so extensive she even goes through women’s closets and purges frump.) Her transformations—many of them posted on her website, Makeupbyalexis.com—are extraordinary. This is a woman who can turn anyone into a megawatt man-slayer. Thankfully, she’s available to take my call.
When Vogel and her team arrive in my room at Hollywood’s storied Sunset Tower Hotel, erstwhile home to über-bombshell Marilyn Monroe, she takes one look at me and issues her first decree: “We need to work on those eyebrows.”

“If you look at the Guess models, they all have strong, well-groomed brows,” she continues, abolishing my strays with a merciless tweeze. “A perfectly arched brow is your anchor. It’s probably the thing that’s most important to creating a finished-looking face, but also most often overlooked.”

After prepping my skin with a light moisturizer (“Save the heavy stuff for nighttime—otherwise makeup won’t hold”), blending my complexion to perfection with foundation and powder (“I never apply concealer until the end—most people end up not needing as much as they think they do”), and winding my hair up into hot rollers (“twist each section before you roll it—that way you get touchable, not-too-perfect curls”), she sets to work plumping up my pout. “This is how Pammy got her lips,” she says, enhancing the contours of my mouth with a neutral pencil. She applies a stain, a layer of pale lipstick, a dusting of powder, and yet another slick of lipstick, before topping it all off with a baby-pink gloss. “It seems like a lot,” she says, “but you have to build a house first in order to get a really full, unbelievable lip.” Her handiwork speaks for itself: Not only are my lips positively voluptuous, they also look deceptively natural—I don’t think a needle-wielding derm could do a better job.

When it comes to the eyes, mere smokiness will not do: This is a look that requires bold, retro, winged-out cat eyeliner, and lots of it, which Vogel lavishes on my lids with relish. She then masterfully enhances my green eye color by sweeping an aubergine shadow into the sockets and tracing a copper-colored pencil along my bottom lash lines. For the finale, it’s falsies galore: She piles on so many lashes that I’m automatically given the heavy-lidded come-hither expression of a classic glamour girl, simply because I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. By the time my hair has been unleashed from the curlers and Vogel has added the finishing touches (she’s so distressed by my wardrobe’s lack of boob-boosting dresses and stilettos that she lends me some of her own silver jewelry so I’ll look “fancy”), I am no longer recognizable as myself. I gaze into the mirror completely flabbergasted: Who is this Photoshop-perfect glamazon who stands before me? “See?” declares a jubilant Vogel. “There’s a bombshell in everyone!” And so there is.

As I pose for my “after” pictures, Vogel encourages me to loosen up and embrace my new alter ego. I feel like Ann-Margret in the 1966 film The Swinger, a good-girl writer pretending to be a sex kitten—and, like her, I start to ease into it. I remember advice given to me back in Florence by the latest Guess model (and, yes, Sophia Loren ringer), Alyssa Miller: “Becoming a Guess girl isn’t just about hair and makeup, it’s attitude. Be confident; walk like a cat.”

Sure, when I e-mail the photos to my boyfriend, his response—“Pardon me, Miss, can you point the way to the nearest Hooters?”—isn’t exactly what I had hoped for, and maybe I’d personally rather skew more Monica Vitti than Jenna Jameson, but I end up taking a lot away from my beauty boot camp with Vogel. Experiencing my own pinup potential made me feel surprisingly liberated. It also further increased my utter awe at the magical powers of hair and makeup: If I can be re-invented so completely, surely even some of cinema’s most epic beauties only reached their full potential through artistry such as Vogel’s. We’re all mere mortals, after all.

Not everyone can be an everyday bombshell (personally, I’m not so awash in free time that I can “build a house” for my lips on a regular basis), but it’s hard to deny the feel-good quotient that even just a sprinkling of fairy-dust glamour can provide. Since my encounter with Vogel, I’ve been regularly indulging in a sort of bombshell shorthand: a sweep of liquid eyeliner and a dab of pretty pink lip gloss are easy enough, and I’ve vowed to never let my eyebrows run wild again. I like to imagine myself at least incrementally closer to being the sort of woman who can enter a room with a thunderclap, like Anita Ekberg, or roll around in an unmade bed like a giggling Marilyn Monroe. Because even if I can’t quite walk like a cat, it sure is fun to prance like a kitten.

You can read more at Elle.com :)