2010 Year in Review

I think this year was one of my oddest in beauty world. It was great but I really changed many of my beauty product purchasing this year. I loved everything that I bought but I feel that I bought from the same few companies over and over again this year instead of trying all kinds of new products. This year seemed to have a lot of repeating trends and patterns and I picked the ones that I loved and followed them like crazy.

My two favorite trends this year were the plaid craze and the Lady Gaga obsession. I was obsessed with A Tartan Tale from MAC and the entire Burberry makeup line just because of the plaid packaging. It is at the point where I don't even know if I could use the Burberry products because I don't want to ruin the plaid markings imprinted on the product. This year's release of Viva Glam Gaga just continued to feed my Lady Gaga obsession and with the addition of the lip gloss shade in the early fall, I could continue to feed the craze. Lady Gaga love went full circle with the late in the year releases of Bad Romance from Lippmann Collection and the shades Pokerface and Petit Monstre from the NARS Holiday collection. So it seems like this year I was very into packaging and names and this might have distracted me from other quality colors and products that just weren't wrapped up as nicely.

I was looking over some of my purchases from this year and I noticed a trend of three major brands: MAC, Urban Decay, and Clinique. I bought a huge amount of products from MAC To The Beach and Venomous Villians and I kept coming back to my local MAC counter for everything from primer to foundation to eye liner. I am normally a MAC addict but this year really took it over the top. This also was the year of Urban Decay eye shadows for me, I bought both the Naked Eye Palette and the Book of Shadows NYC and I can honestly say that I wear the shades from these palettes at least three to four days a week. I spend much of this year using through my giant collection of clinical skincare products but anytime that I had to replace products, I went right to Clinique. As happy as I am with all these purchases, I do wonder if perhaps I slanted my beauty budget too much towards those three brands.

I found that I had a great year for perfume in 2010, I bought my first bottle of Creed and just love to look at it on my bureau. My surprise of the year was the new fragrances that came out late in the year from Bath and Body Works. Previously, I had never purchased any perfumes from this company. But with the release of Dark Kiss and Secret Wonderland, I now have these EDTS featured proudly next to Chanel and Creed bottles. The fragrances from that company greatly improved in quality this year, making it another favorite spot of my mine when spending money.

I think this is the first year that I don't really know what I want to focus on in the coming year. I haven't really thought of any great beauty goals this year since I have been able to accomplish so much in the past two year with eye makeup application and finding the perfect shade of red lipstick. My only outstanding goal to get false eye lashes on correctly but with my history on this matter, I don't know that I will be able to accomplish this in only a year. I guess that I could call my goal for the upcoming year to open up my shopping and try new brands and products out instead of always going to MAC and Urban Decay. But somehow I doubt that that will really happen...

photo courtesy of MAC