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Gigi Here! Color intrigues me. When I paint, I love creating unusual shades. I do blame my cosmetic addiction to this. Don't ever think of pulling me away from a makeup counter before I am ready. After you hear my tale you will see why I am in love with e.l.f. Studio Line Eye Transformers!

As a young child, my parents brought a hundred paint color strips from a hardware store for me. I was delighted. As my friends and I played one day, I had them cut the strips apart with me and use a heavy glue to paste them to the side of the house. We created a huge mosaic. Can you blame me? I made the best use of them although my parents weren't quite as thrilled as they scraped off the glue and pieces of vivid paper.

Gigi here, Alas, no Catholic elementary school tales for you today, just some incidents which may be of interest about nails and nail polish. It is a well known on this site that I devoured a gross of candy lipsticks as a toddler. My parents should have put me in rehab at that time, but they didn’t yet recognize my obsession with cosmetics and color. I used to love watching my mother doing her nails, generally in a classic red. Even the toxic scent was exhilarating. I was probably high from it. At age five, she asked if I wanted to try the polish as well. Did I want to try? I salivated down my shirt! I applied it as accurately as my small hands could as she sat smiling, but it was tough to stay inside those lines—they didn’t have big, wide black markings like my coloring books. Unfortunately, perfection had not been achieved. My mom asked me to let my nails dry while she went to check on dinner.  Out of disgust for my mistakes, I licked the polish from each nail and started again, lapping away the errors. The next thing I knew, I was staring at my pediatrician! Then there were childhood times playing the game Monopoly with friends. When a player took too long, I was bored and put the red houses on each nail to resemble polish, as it had been banned from my life. Eventually someone would cry that I wasn’t fun, tell her parents, and the game broke up.

Gigi Here!

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference."
 
The truth always rears its ugly head. Deep breath here: My name is Gigi and I am a Palettoholic (please applaud here). "Palettoholism" is an addiction, an obsession with eyeshadow palettes (think "Fatal Attraction:" Put yourself in Glenn Close's place but insert palettes where Michael Douglas would be - and skip the rabbit scene). Place a few bizarre shades in a plastic or metal container and I will purchase it. I'll look at the compact, frown, and throw it in my basket anyway. It began with my love of painting and color and intensified when my dear mother bought a beautiful Revlon shadow compact for me at age fourteen. My mother, my own loving mother, was an enabler.
 
The Revlon mix was so amazing that I scraped out every bit. My friend gave me a quad from another company. Should I tell you this? I used that one from ninth grade until college. No, I didn't spit in it (TanteJoan - we'll discuss the mascara later) but I should have expired or gone blind from a deadly bacterial infection. Please don't keep your eyeshadows around for years - eye cosmetics should be tossed before all others. And why don't I follow my own advice?
 
Withdrawal from Palettoholism isn't pretty. I have to take it one day at a time. If I leave a drugstore without purchasing at least one palette, my hands shake and I have body tremors. I sweat profusely and my personality turns into Cruella DeVille from "101 Dalmations." I am highly agitated and often have hallucinations of rainbows and Jackson Pollock paintings.

Gigi here,
Welcome to another page from my life. I was a majorette in high school and also one with a community band and then became head color guard for my alma mater in my senior year. It was an honor, but band camp was a humiliation and test of character. That's a kind description. We spent a week in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania each summer, in a place which once held prisoners during WWII!
The walls were tar paper, there were two toilet stalls with half doors for seventy girls which sometimes did not work, running cold-and-colder water if it ran at all, and no showers. The little lake next to the mess hall remained at about forty degrees - that's where we bathed (clothed).  Air conditioning for sizzling days and heat for when the temperature dropped drastically at night? Are you kidding? The part I truly hated was that the insects must have been injected with steroids as they were massive, true "Creatures from the Black Lagoon," ones for which you could buy leashes to walk! I am phobic over many of these evil creatures, especially spiders. In Heaven I plan to ask God if spiders were truly necessary on earth.
One day I was sitting on the ground with the squad choreographing a dance routine we would perform with small flags. A color guard began to sob from mild sunburn and I had to send her to the nurse. And then another began crying that she was homesick. A third squad member burst into tears and I was becoming more than annoyed. Drama queens don't impress me. I asked why she was sobbing and the response was, "Because the other two are."  I could have strangled them! What stopped me? Hell, first. And then our band director would have had to choose new squad members and football season was about to begin. We were missing two senior squad members and, finally, out limped Jayne the Clueless with a friend, legs completely swathed in toilet paper. She explained that she used a double-edge new razor on dry leg skin and bled like she had fought in a war (the snazzy comfort-strip triple blades weren't around then). Her explanation?  "I didn't know to use anything before shaving."

Gigi here, One of my New Year's resolutions is to give you beauty and health tips from my life which will make yours easier.  If I wrote a novel about my pre- and post-surgery eye woes it would never be published.  It would seem too bizarre to be real.  But it was.  Now that I'm feeling better, I have to take it in stride and, honestly, the ridiculous parts are nearly comical (emphasis on "nearly").  But may you never experience this type of humor. 

My horror story began with the specialist who first  intended to do cataract surgery, the start of my problems.  He was a tall man, so egotistical and condescending that two nurses had to hold his swollen head down to enable him to enter the exam room.  He sat and coldly recited a litany of statistics on what could go wrong.  He touched on the fact that the surgery was generally harmless now but that one in every half million patients suffer nerve damage annually, possibly resulting in multiple problems.

I needed the surgery STAT.  Teaching without being able to see my students' faces was a challenge and it was medically dangerous to go on without an operation.  What if I could not find another specialist quickly?  Plans formed in my head on how to deal with Dr. Frankenstein at our next meeting.  At the least I would eat a clove of garlic, top it off with onion, and breathe heavily with my mouth open when his face was in mine. I considered slightly moving his rolling stool from behind him so that he found his next seat on the floor.  And then I had another great use for the water bottle I would carry in my purse.  While he was writing his notes at the counter, I would christen the stool.  His meticulous white coat would be wet in the back and I was anxious to see his expression.  But I did none of the above, as I found another surgeon with a much more pleasant manner and, evidently, less skill when he does cataract surgeries.  I am patient 500,001 with nerve damage which generally doesn't occur.  I guess I'm special.

Dr. Frankenstein (or, Dr. Frank for short) made an impression on me by one thing he said.  He pointed a long finger and warned, "If I learn that you ever use Visine again, I will have nothing to do with you."