Hooray! Here is the LIPGLOSS GEEK!

Hi! My name is Mary and this is one of my first ventures into blogging. I am a software engineer by day, makeup junkie by night.

I wasn't always into makeup, however. I grew up in a household where the usage of makeup was discouraged by my conservative Vietnamese parents. Makeup was something only to be worn by grown women. Even so, my mother herself didn't wear much makeup. For much of my childhood, all she owned were 1 or 2 tubes of drugstore lipstick and 1 small thing of drugstore blush. In school, my closest friends didn't wear much makeup either. Money was also scarce when I was younger, so I didn't have money to spare for non-essentials like makeup anyway. My beauty routine consisted of cleaning my face with Noxema at night, a little bit of Chapstick during the day, and THAT WAS IT. So when I finally reached adulthood, I was completely clueless of the world of beauty.

I started dabbling in lip glosses during college, picking them up on-sale at stores like Bartell's (Washington state's own chain of drugstores), Rite-Aid, or Target (where I worked as cashier). Lip glosses were affordable and hard to mess up. That was pretty much it for me during the first two years of college, though.

In the summer after my junior year of college, I was interning for an out-of-state company, where I was making very good amount of money. I suddenly had disposable income (although I was technically supposed to save it all for tuition), so I started exploring a bit more in the beauty aisles. I added a moisturizer to my routine, then tried buying more eye cosmetics. The eye cosmetics ended up being a failure, I never really did much beyond that since then, aside from a few drugstore products that never really got used.

Until now. It all started last winter, when I walked into my local Sephora (in Palo Alto, CA) to buy the Phyto Phytophanere hair supplements. I was suddenly amazed at all of the products available.

It started innocently. First, it was a couple of Clinique skin products to address some face issues. Then I discovered the greatest beauty product sales lure--the Gift With Purchase. Whoever thought up of this concept is a genius, because it really does work. I'd buy products, get some more for free, try them out, love them, buy some more, etc. It got addictive. Most of my purchases were from Sephora, Beauty.com, Beautyticket.com, etc. It helps a lot that I have a steady job and can afford to support my habit.

Now my bathroom cabinets and drawers are literally stuffed with my beauty conquests. Most of them haven't even been used yet (lol).

So why start a beauty blog? Like many women out there in the blogophere (I can't believe I said that), I love makeup and I love talking about it. There you have it :)