Warmer Sunnier Days = Happier Days?

I honestly don't remember what I was doing on this day one year ago, but I really don't think we had such an amazing weather, this time last year. The past 2 week ends have been absolutely amazing, and dare I say, almost warm enough to feel the heat of the sun, directly on your skin or in lightweight clothing. You could almost feel free to finally shed some layers and bare your feet. Almost, if only the F&F police hadn't been around. I'm not referring to Florence & Fred, the clothing range on sale at Tesco, but to the Fashion and Feet Police, friends, family or people from the general public or twitterland who have become beauty experts and are not afraid to express to tell you what is acceptable to wear in this weather.


You have finally some good weather, you can finally bare your feet but oh no, you can't wear flip flops, because your feet are not freshly pedicured and they have a bit of dry skin on the heel. You are supposed to book an appointment to the beautician, sort your 'minging' feet out, have your toes painted and then (apparently unpainted toes are a complete no-no for the F&F police) and only then can you have the confidence to bare your feet in public. You know what the British weather is like, it might be winter again and chucking it down by the time I've had that done. Like we didn't feel enough pressure with beauty magazines the last thing we need is people around you making you feel ashamed and ugly because your feet are not freshly pedicured. I've started the month, as pretty much every other month with a big dent in my overdraft, and having to budget for a new shower to be fixed and various other boring stuff. Are you suggesting I am not allowed to get my feet out in my lunch break, on the grass, ‘cause the last pedicure I had was about 4 years ago, in case it might traumatize the sight of some passer-by?


I love beauty, I even blog about beauty, it's my hobby. During my free time, and when I feel like it, I like to pamper myself because it makes me feel happy and good about myself. But it doesn't  mean that when I don't pamper myself, I should feel like a recluse who should be kept in doors, away from the public eye.

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Twittascope: the bane of my twitter life. How to stop it

Gone are the days when you browse a magazine to read your horoscope. Well you can still do that but there are modern ways to get your horoscope delivered to you: you can have your horoscope tweeted to you. Sounds like a good idea, no? This is what Twittascope is for. How great would that be, to wake up every morning and to have your horoscope tweeted to you.

What Twittascope really does and how it is perceived by some…


Problem is that in reality it doesn't work like that. What the programme does and what you let the programme do, when you 'subscribe' to the service is to let it tweet on your behalf, and to aaaaaaall your lovely followers the horoscope attached to your personal star sign.

Now my tweets are annoying enough as it is. I tweet way too much for starters, my tweets seem to gravitate mainly about makeup, I participate in a lot of twitter competitions, I am known to have a few rants, my tweets are not always uplifting (any more depressing sometimes and you would want to throw yourself out of the window after reading my tweets) and the list goes on... Now why would I, to top it all off, make things worse and grace my lovely followers with the horoscope predictions about Pisces? How is that tweet relevant to people from other star signs? It isn't relevant and very annoying at best.


The most stupid thing about the design of Twittascope, is that, because the way programme works (Twittascope doesn't send you a direct message with your horoscope or not even a @mention) you don't even see the actual horoscope you actually subscribed to. People subscribed to the service are not actually not aware of the tweets they're posting.


This is the timeline of my friend subscribed to the service. I am not sure where she is at the moment. Have a look at a timeline. If you read it quickly, you could be  forgiven for thinking that she is a bot. 
She’s not.




Now there are more important things that unwanted Twittascope spam I should be worrying about. I am usually OK with Twittascope, I follow so many people and it's hard to keep track of everything which is being tweeted. Every now and then though (and today seems to be one of these days) it's one of these pet peeves which resurface and when ask myself why people would want to subject their twitter followers to Spamoscope.


I am not the only one who is annoyed at Twittascope. And it's such a petty little thing in the grand scheme of twitter things that if you have Twittascope, your followers won't probably bother commenting on it. Today I would like to speak on behalf of all your followers who are also irritated with Twittascope spam and information about your star sign, but who are too polite to comment about it.






Imagine the following scenario. Imagine Twittascope works the way it should work and sends you a direct message every day with your horoscope in there. You have TweetDeck installed and you get a sound notification everytime you get a DM or a @mention. Your TweetDeck beeps, you get all excited and you think ‘oOOo a new tweet, Yaaaaaay’ and then you find out that it was only Twittascope tweeting you. Great :S  


Now imagine you tweet something you feel a bit shy about, or something a bit sensitive.  You feel a bit nervous about how people are going to respond to your tweet. But you take the courage to tweet and do it. Your TweetDeck beeps, and you think ‘OMG, someone has replid’ and then, then THEN, you find out you got all excited for nothing because it was just Twittascope DMing you. Pretty bummed no? You’d be quite tempted to unsubscribe from the service from that unpleasant experience, wouldn’t you?


How to stop Twittascope tweeting on your behalf…


If you have Twittascope and feel concerned that you might cause erm.. discomfort to others and want to stop the subscription of the Twittascope, you can follow these easy steps:


1. Log on to http://www.twitter.com/
2. go to SETTINGS
3. go to APPLICATIONS. What this page will do, is to display all the applications you have authorised to work with your twitter account
4. Scroll down to TWITTASCOPE, and then press REVOKE ACCESS.


Thank you to lovely Kat aka @KittyFairy for the instructions.


So what do you do if you're really annoyed with Twittascope spam? If you mainly use TweetDeck, well you are in luck. You can add 'Twittascope' in your filters and be done with it. If you use web twitter, other than that speaking to the person twittascoping to the risk of ruining a twitter friendship for such a petty matter, there is nothing you can do, other than sucking it up, grin and bear it, and read the spam, day after day after day. Another option you now have is to say: 'OMG have you see this post about Twittascope? *hint* *hint* hope that they will get the hint ;)


Happy tweeting everyone. Peace ^_^


Hey, do you want to read my Twittascope for today? :P

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** UPDATED ** My unluckiest beauty product purchase

Saturday 14 May 2011

Following my blog post, I was extremely honoured to have had a reply from Andrea Fulerton herself. I have posted her reaction into a separate post but also wanted to preface her statement on here.

Hello Liloo and ladies,

Firstly thank you for your constructive and very honest comments. I am of course mortified that these problems have occurred and sincerely apologies for any upset or disappointment caused. At launch we realised that the wrong brushes has been placed in some of the Trio bottles however I was assured this had been rectified and clearly this is not the case so again thank you for letting me know.

As for your comments on the formulation I tested if over two year with Europe's top manufacturer and we are looking into this [to see if a 'rogue' batch is out there]

Words can't express how disappointment I am to read your comments and I am working with my team to ensure this is all put right as soon as possible.

Best wishes
Andrea

Following Andrea's statement, I really wanted to make one edit to my original post and wanted to change its title. My post was formerly called 'my most hated beauty product'. I have now wanted to call it 'my unluckiest beauty purchase'. I feel extremely honoured and impressed that Andrea Fulerton saw my post, took the time to read and wished to respond to it. I don't know of many companies who care so much about their products, who would want to get back to their customers, especially after the brutally honest review I have left. Please find below my original post, untouched.

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Saturday, 9 April 2011, a day which lots of us in England will  remember as a truly glorious day. The sun and the warmth we had today  has just been unbelievable and too good to be true. It felt like  Summer. Wait, it was even better than Summer. I had been waiting for a  good occasion to review this product. A day when nothing could spoil  my mood and I could write in a calm and diplomatic manner about a  product which I hate to the core didn't impress at all.


Did it work? Nope. The minute I  start thinking of this product, the minute I get all wound up inside  and want to throw plates on the floor. In fact, it is probably fair to  say that no other beauty products has wound me up so much that these:


Introducing the ANDREA FULERTON Trio Colour Layering System (£8.19  for 2  x 4.4ml)





What it says on the box:

A unique and genius new colour layering system giving you the creative  freedom to choose from 48 shade choices to suit your mood or occasion!  This space-saving, double-ended bottle of nail varnish contains a  different colour at either end. Choose from either of the two colours  or layer them over each other to create a unique 3rd colour or effect.

The idea is genius and the colours are lovely. When I saw in the giant  Superdrug in Sheffield, I fell in love. I wanted to buy the whole lot,  but I decided to be sensible and buy just 2 (thanks goodness) and  limited the damage at £16 worth of products. At this stage it is worth  mentioning that the most I would generally buy in a nail polish is £5,  so spending £8 in a nail polish was a rare indulging treat.








The first thing which let me down was the packaging and you need to be aware of this. You know the same way as they don’t fill up a packet of crisps or a pot of yogurt to the very top for safety reasons (that air is needed, bring your packet of crisps in a plane and you’ll see what I mean) the same is true for this  layering system. Be aware that when you remove the polish from the box, you end up with a much smaller bottle than you expected:





 



The first one I bought was SMILE IN A STORM. You have the most  gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous micro pink glitter which I totally fell in  love for and which I had never seen before and your usual gunmetal  polish. Now if I could have bought the pink glitter top coat on its  own, I would have, alas it was not available on its own.






Put it bluntly, I just cannot believe that Andrea Fulerton and the  team thought it would be acceptable to release this product and demand  money for it. Let's start with the brush: absolute scandal. We're not  talking about a few stray hairs here, we're talking about a fully  slanted brush, as if it's been chewed by rats, or used to clean the  floor or been cut by a bad hairdresser's. That's for the micro glitter  part.



  



Bad luck? The brush on the gunmetal side is no better. I mean  un-be-lie-va-ble. Just typing this makes me want to bash my keyboard,  I am so bloody wound up  arrrrrrrrhgh nbv/lafd?LJBeaflbL/LKB Fycadelpk.





I realise that my photos are not the best to show the  brushes. I did set my camera on 'macro' and took tons of photos but I  just cannot for the life of me capture it.





Wait. It gets worse. Now for the formula. Man, I've been buying lots  of nail polishes in my life. From £0.49 polishes, to a bit more  expensive polishes. But hand on my heart, I've never ever seen a such  a thick gloopy mess ever in my life. It's just too thick, it just  won't apply (what chances have you got anyway with a brush like that  anyway) and it will never never dry. Now you're supposed to wait till  the first coat has dried to apply the lighter one. What are you going  to do? Wait till for 3 hours for the first coat to dry?


What upsets me the most in this, even more than the absolute scandal  that someone would release this useless trio layering system (it's not  trio anyway, there are 2 things in there, so for me it's a duo thing)  is that the light colour of 'smile in a storm' is just stunning and  that it's a crying shame.


Now for HARD DAY’S NIGHT Layering 'Trio' System. You have the most  awesome coppery gold colour as the light colour to layer over the most  stunning electric midnight blue. You see in the shop and you got to  buy it cos it's just too gorgeous for words. Look at the gold here:







For this one, I was 'lucky'. Both nail polishes on this combination  sported a normal brush, until you start to apply them. The formula was  exactly like 'Smile in a Storm', the thickest gloopiest messy formula  ever. You have to be the most patient person ever to apply this. 


Everytime you pick up polish from the bottle, the brush picks up way  too much products and deposits itself like glue. I bet tarmac is  easier to apply to your nails than this. How on earth has this product  been able to pass quality control. I also need to mention the label on  this product. Now I would expect something which cost £8 to have a  label which looks a bit more decent that this.






Now for the last straw for 'Hard's Day Night'. The combination doesn't  work as a layering system. Total shambles. The coppery gold is too thick to apply on top of the midnight blue and is not sheer enough. I did my best to apply the thinnest coat of gold, alas it just wouldn't work.






Index: gold on its own
Middle finger: blue on its own
Ring and little finger: gold layered over blue


 


Many cosmetic brands try to widen the range of products they have, for example, brands who start doing nail polishes, whilst their speciality is eyeshadows, or false lashes and I wouldn't ever expect a company who offers so many products, on top of their main attraction / speciality to wow me. But for a company which specialises itself in PRECISELY nail polishes, I just find it appalling.


Andrea Fulerton: your idea of layering system is a genius. Your colours are gorgeous and I love the concept. But you need to throw everything away, as in EVERYTHING away and start again.


* n.b: I realise the title of this review is very strong, but the products wound me up so much that I couldn’t find a diplomatic phrase which yet could summarise my feelings around the product. ‘Hate’ *is* a strong word, but then again, the products provoked a rather unique feeling of frustration. I have waited nearly 6 months to write a cool, calm  and collected review, yet the strong feelings re emerge as soon as I try to put it on ‘paper’.

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Rant for petite posh pastel perfectly p*ssed off nails

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If you are a die hard fan of Eyeko, you might want to turn away now. I have had a truly horrible day today, and today might not the right moment to have a rant when I am all fuelled up and worked up, but I need to let it out. 







As I was in the middle of an eyeko project (I was in the process of swatching all the 4 four nail polishes I had and make a little collection post) I wanted to double check the prices of the nail polishes. To my horror, I found that all the polishes (tiny bottles of 7 ml) are now sold at £5 (very recently previously priced at £3.50)


Now bad enough the absolute rip-off scandal about commissions, but now this sudden increase and without any warning? Now it would have been courteous to be advised of the price raise, and then I could have stocked up on polishes as I absolutely ADORE the polishes to bits (well the 4 I have tried anyway)


Then, to top it all up, we have their new policy on delivery.

UK and EU orders will be delivered FREE of charge by Royal Mail standard service if you have chosen FREE SHIPPING. This type of order won't have a tracking code available and claims for loss or damage cannot be entertained. 
We would highly recommend the use of registered shipping for all orders. Registered shipping to UK costs £2.50 and Europe costs 5 EUROS.

Maybe the rise in price of the products is to cover free delivery? It doesn't seem fair to me when all the polishes have gone up by £1.50 each to pay for a “free delivery”. And then, they strongly recommend you not to choose the free delivery service as they will refuse to accept any responsibility if it gets lost. Are we being screwed or are we being screwed here or what?

I once bought some concert tickets with normal first class post delivery at £1.50, where there was a similar warning about refusal to take responsibility in parcel gets lost. Other service available was Next Day delivery at something like £7. Of course there was no way I was going to pay for a concert ticket, worth £12 and pay an additional half of that in postage. So what do you know, I never received the tickets. Fortunately I was able to have another re issued and was able to go to my gig.


If you didn't know before 'eyeko' in Japanese, means 'love'. What's the Japanese for 'taking the p*ss'? Because I think this would be a more appropriate name.

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Speechless Saturday (well nearly…)

Good job, those women tried the product on both eyes, imagine the uneven effect *cough*
This was supposed to be one of these ‘wordless wednesdays’ à la lipglossiping and bicky, but I just can’t help saying something. On these photos it actually look like the AFTER picture was the BEFORE picture and that the ageing/wrinkles were added afterwards. I mean, look at the woman on the picture right above, who gets overlapping hanging skin like that just located in the inner corner. Never seen anything like it before in my life.


Radialabs: you’re letting yourself down. Your pictures are so unrealistic that it really puts me off.

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It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife

My name is liloo and I am a twitter addict. I love it so much that I did the unthinkable and got rid of facebook. I could try to explain how I love it so much, but could never express it as beautifully @judy_jay did in her fabulous “year of life as a twit”. When apocalypse happened last August, and my computer died along with a lifetime of unbacked up data, twitter was of the things I was missing the most when I did not have a computer. But there are ‘a couple of’ things I certainly won’t miss about twitter. In fact, these have evolved into some sort of twitter pet peeves.


FormspringI am trying to be all zen and find a mature and articulate way to explain the plague which is formspring automatic feed onto twitter but this is proving a major challenge. The concept is good, but formspring is the kind of leisure activity people would indulge in when they are bored. So the result is a gigantic flood of questions and answers in your beloved twitter timeline. What I am asking myself: when people ask questions on formspring, don’t they get a notification message whenever this person updates their page, or answer one of the questions submitted to them? Imagining this is the case, and that you do indeed get an email whenever this person has answered a question (not necessarily the one you asked), can you imagine waking yourself up to 64 email messages saying ‘makeupgod had answered a question on formspring, would it be yours by any chance, click here to find out?’. You would automatically disable the notification system right? (Chances are also that if you’re really fascinated with that person, you’re going to check their formspring page direct without being prompted to do so) Well, with twitter you can’t. If a person has gone all the way to link their wretched formspring account with their twitter, well there’s nothing you can do, unless unfollowing which is a shame really.


Youtube Activities Automatic FeedThe first people I started to follow were makeup artists on youtube, then I started to follow people who watch all these videos. I have met lots and lots of people through youtube. Also through time, my subscription list has massively expanded and I am subscribed to more than 200 people, that’s a lot of videos to watch, comment on, rate, and favourite. I take my youtube activity very seriously and I have a reputation to comments lots, and a leave a huge splodge of comments. I need to ‘deal’ with my youtube subs box twice a day, otherwise I can’t keep with the new content of all the lovely people I follow on youtube.

Imagine everytime I commented on a youtube video, subbed to someone, rated a video, this would be automatically fed through twitter and you would see this in your timeline:
'I rated this video http://www/ five stars'
'I have just favorited http://www/'
'I commented on http://www/. I particularly liked how you outlin…’
Annoying much?

Why do people feel they need to link their youtube account with their twitter account? Share their tastes? Umm..
I don’t know about you but this typical tweet “I rated this video http://www/ five stars” does not give me an indication of someone’s taste and is so vague it does not really invite me to click on it. I would need to click on it before knowing what it's even about. For all I know it would be a video about how to lace a shoe, or something which is not my interest.

A more intelligent, interactive, & engaging way to do it would be the traditional way, a tweet like that for example. (Sorry if this sounds a bit patronising, these are just examples):

"Woah, you'll never believe your eyes, check out goldie's red queen mask > " http://www/

" A smokey eye like you've never seen before. This girl (glitterdollz7) is just purely amazing "http://www/"

"Not too sure about the lipstick, but wow, everything else is just pure awesomeness http://www/ "

I know it sounds a bit more commercial but you get the gist…

Click me
"Brilliant, http://www/" >> Who do you think you are? Do you think you’re that important that I am going to click on every link you post? Put some effort into it. At least, tell me what the link is about. Just a few characters would do. We all follow lots of people. People who think that others will just click on their link cos they wrote http://www/ and nothing else have a very inflated sense of importance. I know what you are going to say, “ it very much depends on who the offender is and if it’s a celebrity then it’s not the same” Well, I am pretty sure when Demi Moore alledgely tweeted about susan boyle, she didn’t just plonk the web address with no explanation.


Abandoned @mentions and @replies
We’re not on twitter 24/7. If someone had the courtesy to reply/react to one of your tweet while you were away mowing the lawn, sleeping or whatever, and have been absent from twitter for a long time, will you please please check they have done so? If your twitter programme is failing you, good old http://www.twitter.com/replies will give you all the information you need ;P


Drama attention seeking tweets à la Facebook“ I don’t think I can do this anymore”, “That’s it now, I might just as well give up”, ‘I might have to take the most important decision of my life tomorrow”
Give up what? Do what anymore?
I can understand there are only 140 characters to explain but why don’t you try to explain a bit, instead of waiting for people to come to you and ask you what’s wrong?
So if you're emotional like me, you get all worried, (after all if you were not bothered about that person, you would not follow, right?) and go ask ‘aawww, what’s wrong chuckiechuck, are you ok?” And it turns out that ‘ yes, they are ok, yes everything is fine. The ‘giving up thing’ is just trying to peel onions will long nails and that the most important decision of their life is what they are going to have for their tea, :S


Obscure Lyrics Tweets which don’t look obviously like lyrics, therefore leaving the world wondering what you’re on about. We’ve all done it, we have a tune in our head, we want to sing it and share it. Someone writing this ‘summertiiiiiiiiiime, (…) easyyyyyyyy’ would automatically scream to me that the person is singing to me. But if someone quote some lyrics out of a song which I don’t recognise (I mean, it’s a free world, we do what we like but yano) and the lyrics are a tad gloomy, ‘I just want to die right now’, I am going to be thinking ‘ aww no poor little sweetie pie, what trauma is he/she going through. I must tweet back to say something and find out what it is. And it turned out that it was just lyrics of songs, pff

I am not perfect, far from it. I am just human and besides I am French (Oooh I love blaming my Frenchness for lots of things) and I am guilty to commit quite a few sins:

- Over sharing in general and sometimes TMI (too much information) tweets
- Kilometre Long tweets. I’ve developed a mild addiction for http://www.twitlonger.com/ , oopsie. It’s a genius programme though for long tweets. But I agree, it defeats the purpose of the main attraction twitter, short burst 140 characters tweets.
- Treating twitter as a conversation tool. I follow A. My friend B also follows A. I have a conversation with A, and B has got to endure the whole thing.
- Depressing and mood spoiling tweets. As a half empty glass type of person, this is a sin I’ve committed many times. I’m working on it.
- Over negative and rant moan rant tweets. Umm, I am not proud of that one either. I’ll try to limit them to a maximum. Err, hold on, isn’t this post a massive rant in itself? :P
- Endlessly retweeting contest giveaways (I’ll try to reduce that, and just participate every now and then to stuff I am super excited about and not the first pen which is given away. Umm, this might not be the best time for me to announce I will be doing a giveaway soon J haha

Are there things on twitter which spoil your fun? Let me know. I’d love to hear :)
Happy tweeting x
@tsunimee

P.S Some pretty cartoons to lighten my rant a little ;)

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