no, i’m not an expert in makeup artistry. if anything, i’m just a regular girl who enjoys painting people’s faces, including my own. but i’m slooooooowwwly learning more and more about it. making a lot of mistakes, too, in the process. which is cool. i mean, great things start from small beginnings, after all. and it’s not like i’m tattooing misspelled chinese characters or dealing with vital organs. if worse comes to worst, you simply wipe the gunk off your face and chill. problem solved.

girly’s been asking me to make a video tutorial of how i do my brows. i never used to bother doing my brows until i started going for makeup lessons. and trust me, if there was anyone in the world who badly needed to do her brows, it was me. and yet i put it off until i realized i looked like an albino. so now, as far as makeup is concerned, it’s something i get pretty OC with.

i don’t have a problem sharing everything i learned from makeup class. hell, i even held a mini makeup class for these freaks just so they’d learn what i learned and we could all be gorgeous together. they can bleed me dry when it comes to squeezing out all the makeup theories i cradle in my head. i can sustain one-on-ones with them to infinity and beyond. HOWEVER (and i say this with emphasis), video tutorials is where i draw the line.

or should i say, was where i drew the line.

because believe it or not, i actually gave in to girly’s request to create an eyebrow tutorial specially for her on account that i cannot do so personally since she’s currently based in qatar, spelled without a “u.” it’s been more than a month since i said i would but it wasn’t until yesterday that i finally did.

and trust me when i say this: making video tutorials is fucking hard, man! coming from somebody as shy as me, it was a miracle i managed to wing it. albeit, barely. in two minutes i did an average of ten takes. simply because i got tongue-tied a lot. not to mention that i practically did the whole thing in english which, obviously, is not my first language.

if making the video and setting up the camera (that is, if an ipad counts as one) and lights were tedious enough, that’s nothing compared to editing it! it was agonizing listening to the monotony of my voice and watching myself in each and every take. it was like looking at an x-ray vision of myself with a compound fracture of flaws and a million minor deformities. i wonder how actors can stand watching themselves on an even bigger screen.

of course, it wasn’t just all about me. there was the technical aspect of editing too — highly technical in the lines of “what the hell am i doing and how do i go about this?!” kind of technical. you know what i mean?

so, yeah, the belated promised video tutorial is all done and dusted. this is basically between girly and me. but then i thought, since i did the whole thing anyway, might as well bite the bullet and expose the vulnerable side of me so we can all get a good laugh at my expense.

to my dearest friend girly, i know you’d still have a thousand questions for me after watching the supposed video tutorial but can you just viber me instead? and then maybe instead of executing me by firing squad, we can settle everything harmoniously, and privately, over skype?

i love you, though. consider this your ultimate birthday gift. valid for as long as you live.

xoxo