To do list

I mentioned yesterday that there were a few things that I wasn't happy with, with my test run on hair and makeup after such a long time not getting any practice.

I decided to write myself a list before I forgot. The things that I need to work on for next time.

Perhaps the silliest thing of all was that, in spite of actually looking at the hat before I started, I mixed up mirror images and photos, and did my hair back to front relative to which side of the hat should have been the bottom. It probably doesn't matter a lot, because it's probably not obvious to other people, but I know that I got it wrong. The fabric "flowers" on the hat are supposed to be near the bottom edge, but by putting the rolls on the wrong side, I forced myself to put the hat on the opposite side, meaning that the flowers were at the top of the hat.

The other thing about the hair at the front was that with the hat this far over, there was a rather empty looking space on the top. I'm pretty sure that it would look better with three rolls, so that the hat tucked against the side of the top roll.

The hair at the back was a completely separate issue. I tried to use setting lotion to put it into a single large spiral as I've done a few times before, but I was in too much of a hurry, and didn't get enough lotion into the hair to wet it thoroughly enough. I spiralled it and clipped it up with a sectioning clip before I did my makeup, but when I undid the clip, the hair basically just fell down in a frizzy mess. Next time, I need to either set it in a row of hot rollers so that I get a row of wavy spirals, tie it in a side pony and spray it so that it stays as a solid spiral, or put it up. I've done a Gibson Roll fairly successfully, I've worn a snood with some difficulty getting it to stay in, but I haven't managed to do victory rolls yet. I'm pretty sure that the hat would work well on top, between victory rolls, but I've got to try to work out how to get the rolls to stay in place.

Because I do makeup including a light touch of contouring between my breasts and highlighting over the breasts, I put my breast forms on before I start on makeup. I'm pretty sure that they ended up about half an inch too high today! An old rule of thumb is that, if you fold your arms, your breasts should be resting on your arms. If there is a gap, the breasts are too high.

Eyeliner is something that I'm still re-learning because of the change in my eyelids from the blepharoplasty. Before, whatever eyeliner I did would always be hidden by my lids and the liner would transfer onto the underside of the drooping part of the lids. Now, there's a reasonable width of lid that doesn't get covered, but I found from today's effort that I will have to do a narrower line than I tried today, as one side still got a little transfer.

I've also realised after looking at photos, that I need to work on both the length and angle of the flick at the outer end of each eye. With mascara applied and my eyes open, the flicks disappeared.

I also discovered two problems with my brows. One, the natural colour is darker and browner than my hair, and the only way that I could get my brows to look right with my hair was to add some brown through the length of the brows to hide the fact that the natural colour extends through less than a third of the length of each brow, thus toning down the auburn. It worked, but I probably need to reduce the darkness of the brows a little more by selective tweezing of the darkest hairs.

I also need to be more thorough in shaping my brows! After I applied my foundation, and drew on my brows, there were some rather obvious stray hairs under my brows.

Aside from that, the overall makeup application was fair but it was obvious that I was out of practice.

Two other things that I know that I need to practice again are walking in heels, and my voice. While I went out in flats, I briefly tried heels after I got home, and my ankles didn't want to flex far enough to walk properly. I could write a couple of years worth of blog posts about my voice. Suffice to say that on today's outing I whispered while I was out, as the only direct interaction was at a busy checkout where the nodding and shaking of my head to correspond with my responses meant that the vocal responses were actually superfluous.

Finally, there is the elephant in the room. At least, I feel somewhat like an elephant when I look at the depressingly large "spare tyre" around my abdomen. Short of buying a proper corset in my current size, there is no way that I can squash my waist in to be the size that I want it to be. :-(