Hello and WELCOME to a #31DayBellyDanceMakeup Vlogging Challenge!
Over the past few months, I’ve been very very busy working on the upcoming book, “Becoming a Belly Dancer: From Student to Stage.” I have been very focussed on the image creation, text, layout, and editing and so forth. Unfortunately, in the press to get the book done, I have let my blog languish. Now that we’re in the final stages of the book development process, I’m eager to get back to the basics and start sharing more content here.
I’ve been thinking about how to dive back into weekly blogging, and I thought to myself, why not spend the month of July putting the tips and tricks about belly dance makeup that we present in chapter 3, Personal Appearance. Performance makeup is one of the most important, and often overlooked part of the complete visual package. So each day during the month of July 2016, I’ll be putting on a new and different belly dance look! As a bonus, I’m going to stick to using only affordable makeup products in these demos.
Folks who have taken my costuming classes or workshops, have heard me break down visual appearance into these five layers:
1 – The body – This is your intrinsic condition, muscle tone, health, energy, tone, and all the other aspects of the physical body.
2 – Grooming – This is how you care and prepare your skin and hair. This includes all of your beauty regimens, hairstyle, makeup, and perfume.
3 – Costuming – This layer is my favorite, and includes the garments that you wear to perform in.
4 – Accessories – This layer includes all of the accessories that finish your look. Jewelry, hair accessories, and made-to-match pieces that are made out of the same materials as the costume.
5 – Props – Many dancers don’t think about their props as having an impact on their overall look, but the veil, wings, swords, trays and other balance props all have an impact on your overall look.
I have never done any vlogging before so this is a totally new and exciting project! Now that I’ve got a week of vlogs posted over on YouTube, I felt it was high-time to share this project here.
Over the course of the next three weeks, I’ll be learning a lot about the nuts and bolts of making and editing videos while I share with you my top tips for creating a belly dance performance face. If you have any questions or comments – please don’t hesitate to email me at davina@davina.us or message me via social media.
July 9, 2016
Dawn Devine ~ Davina
Developed in France, but sweeping the globe, micellar water is a soap-free skin cleanser and makeup remover you simply wipe on, and then wipe away with no rinsing. This product is pronounced variously as “Mice-Ler” or “My Celler,” but properly as “Me-sell-air,” (you earn extra style bonus points if you can add a lovely French accent.) Originally, this was a cleansing product designed for Parisian women who live with very hard, mineralized water. Parisian water is so hard, it makes it difficult to rinse away dirt and makeup and to really feel clean. It can also be quite harsh and irritating to the skin.
Lets get real, we are all living on a budget.
The store Ulta is one of my go-to places to shop for both drugstore and prestige makeup lines. Ulta has online and brick and mortar stores, so while it’s fun to go in and shop, I can often find items that are sold out in my local store, available on line.
After a bit of experimenting, I’ve fallen in love with quite a few of the Ulta brand products. Last weekend, I wore three of my favorites during performance. I use a multi-step lipstick application, and I adore using their Double-Duty Lip Stain as my base layer for all of my performance lip-looks.
A Few Faves from the Ulta Line:
new year – and it’s a good time to give your makeup collection and once over and purge the old, off, spoiled, or outdated makeup that might be lurking in your collection. January is the month that I really enjoy giving my makeup a good going through. I hadn’t bought anything new in over three years, so I KNOW I have a lot of products to purge from my collection. I pretty much need to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. 
In modern products there’s a little symbol on the packaging that looks like a little open jar with a time marked on it. This represents the Period After Opening or PAO. the M stands for Month, so you know how many months after the date of opening the product when the item will begin to spoil. It’s a hard truth, but all makeup does spoil. Pay attention to how old your makeup is, either by taking a dated photograph of when you bought it, making note in a makeup diary, or by labelling or marking the product.