Playing Dress-Up With Your Face

So, I had this makeup competition yesterday, right?

Every year, Aveda sponsors a contest called The Edwin Neal II Full-Potential Award.
All students at Aveda Institutes are required to participate in three categories: hair cut, hair color, and makeup. Since I can't cut or color hair (well, I can...but somehow I doubt very much that it would turn out all that well), so naturally I chose makeup.

The rules went something like this: each participant must develop a theme, create an original look using ONLY Aveda makeup (and not that I'm saying anything bad about Aveda makeup...but it is not the easiest product to work with) based on said theme, draw a face-map of the look, write step-by-step instructions describing our techniques and the products we used, and write a narrative detailing our inspiration and how that is represented in our makeup. It was also "recommended" that we create a display to represent our theme at our workstation.

The top three looks would move on to the final round, on April 14th, to compete for a spot at nationals along with the winners in the cut and color categories. Last year, our institute won the whole darn competition, out of 44 other institutes. So...I guess this is kind of a big deal.

There were about 20 other competitors, eight of which were my classmates and friends.

I thought ya'll might be interested in some highlights of my look:

Remember how I was freaking out about finding a model?
My lovely cousin KC volunteered and saved my life.
This is KC before.

And this is KC after.


Close-up of the eyes, which took me an hour to do just by themselves.

My theme was Alice in Wonderland, the concept being a modern-day interpretation of Alice.

Here's a shot of the full look, including my display.
We gave KC a traditional Alice-band with black ribbon in her hair (I felt that this, being an integral part to the character of Alice, was super-important) to tie the wardrobe together.
I incorporated various images from different version of the story, including the Disney movie, the novel, and the newest Tim Burton film.

Topsy-turvy teacups, of course.


An amazing flower I found at Papyrus.
I felt like it looked it would definitely grow in the magical land down the rabbit hole.
In the Red Queen's garden, perhaps?

The result of all my crazy hard work?

Top 3, baby.

I'll see you bitches at finals.