An Etude House Love Affair

What follows is a long and boring story about skincare, so if you're not into seeing pictures of my face and bottles, I'd skip this post, hahah.

I've always had bad skin. As soon as I hit about 10, my hair went curly and greasy, and my skin wasn't far behind in breaking out all over the place.
I had no idea what to do, and neither did my mum, who has always had naturally straight hair and healthy skin. I was also pretty lazy and hated all the faff that went into cleaning your face "properly", insisted any soap stung my eyes, and didn't like drinking water. Also, I picked. Pick, pick, pick. In short, I was a nightmare.

As I got older, I didn't really do much to fix this. My family would buy me toiletries full of teatree (which I detested), witch hazel (which was quite nice but sticky), and various other lotions and potions that either didn't work, or I was too lazy to use regularly enough for them to work. Combined with what I now know is probably dermatillomania my skin was far from perfect.

Over the years the spots seemed to slide down my face, congregating on my chin, neck and chest, rather than the nose and temples of my younger years. But the damage was done, and like exercise the longer you leave it and ignore it, the harder it is to do anything about it.

Enter Etude House. My knight in shining armour and cute, frilly princess packaging. I discovered the brand via this very helpful journal entry by BehindInfinity, one of my absolute favourite cosplayers (along with the rest of TuxTeam) and general internet angel. I learnt a lot about skincare from that one post and it inspired me to actually try and do something for once.

I went to buy some of the products mentioned, and had to turn to the internet because they were all Asian brands that for some reason don't get sold in the UK. Ugh. Thankfully, Cosmetic Love are a pretty reputable online store specialising in Korean cosmetics, and actually have pretty decent prices for that matter. Rather than risk anything cheaper on eBay, I went for it, picking up a few extra pieces that I thought were cute or sounded good.

(side note: Cosmetic Love were great. They shipped everything out really quickly in as small a box as possible, and also crammed any gaps left full of samples. My eternal shopping love goes out to them and I would definitely recommend trying them if you're in the UK wanting to try some Korean brands.)

So, here's my current (and rapidly expanding) stock of things-I-use-on-my-face:

Chop Chop

This is old news now, because I'm a bad blogger, but I GOT A HAIRCUT! Finally!

I went to Hair and Joy in Hongdae, as recommended by pretty much ALL of the expats I know. I was told they had good prices, great English and excellent hairdressing skills (having trained in both Europe and Asia), which I suppose is actually the most important thing there.

There're fancy, stylish hairdressers in abundance in Bupyeong, a stone's throw away and all open until at least midnight that'll give me a good-looking haircut for pennies. But how to explain what I want if they don't speak much English? Ultimate stress, given my previous fear of having my hair cut. (Let's not talk about afro-gate)

So, anyone who knows me will know I do not take care of my hair. At all. My hair's CV in the past year or so looks like this:

- dyed red
- bleached
- dyed green
- dye top-up
- dyed red again
- dyed brown in an attempt to go back to natural (forgetting how dark my hair actually is)
- bleached at the tips
- tips dyed green

Green. Of course.

Here's me looking despondent about my awful hair and the rubbish "semi-permanent" dye from about 2 weeks ago.

And I had a haircut maybe only 5-6 times in that space for trimming deads. That's it. Safe to say, my hair was kind of frazzled, despite my original intentions to look after it in its dyed state.

Let's not even talk about the time I did my regular fringe trim (something I'd been doing myself for a couple of months) and got the level wrong. Sure, an oddly short fringe seems to be in fashion now but it sure as heck wasn't back then!

So yeah, it's a strange, miscoloured, frazzly mess. Not sure how it is my hair grows so oddly that I managed to get a diagonal ombre, but okay.

In the past 6 or months I've been trying to fix this, getting regular haircuts, banning colour, giving it conditioning masks and basically just trying to grow out this hellish state its in. 3 months into my time in Korea, and I was finally at my stage 1 goal:
Cut it all off.

Now, I don't mean pixie cut style. I just mean, hack off all that old colour, reset to default settings.

I tried it out with hairpins and didn't HATE it, and Nick told me to try it if, at the very least, it'll heal up my hair a bit.

I explained pretty much all of this to Jason (my assigned stylist, after a fairly painless phonecall the day before. I'd been asked who I wanted to see and pretty much went "anyone") and he went to work.

And that's how I ended up like this:

It's so short.
There's still a random bit of the lighter brown on one side because, again, wonky hair. Jason told me he'd fix this when I go back for a trim. But it feels a lot thicker, smoother, healthier, and it's almost all one colour. It still takes forever to wash, oddly, but it's a lot quicker to dry. One downside is that in all this humidity, it gets greasy MUCH more quickly. Or it's more noticeable anyway. I used to get away with washing my hair once a week, maybe twice if I got sweaty or did a lot of smelly cooking. But now it's almost every other day otherwise I look like Snape's offspring.

It was a great experience, the salon played lots of calming music and it's the most extravagantly decorated hairdresser's I've ever been to. Combined with the fact I often had 2-3 people working on my hair at the same time, it was a pretty luxurious experience.

The chop itself was very satisfying. I mentioned I was a bit scared, and after that, at every step before a big change, we'd have a break and I'd be asked if I was 100% sure I wanted to do it, shown how it should look when it's done and assured it would be fine. That's something really lovely that I haven't really had before. I've had lovely stylists but none of that extra reassurance.

I was going to take a photo of my huge pile of hair after the initial big cut (which I was shown to prove IT'S ALL GONE. FOREVER. SORT OF.) but they were too efficient and it was gone in the next moment.

When it came to paying (a bit lightheaded because, well, my head was...a lot lighter.) I genuinely had a moment where I just stood and blinked with surprise.
"What was that, sorry?"
"30,000 won"
That's just under £18. I usually pay £20-25 and that's a CHEAP cut. Most people I know spend £30-50.

I apologised and tried to explain so that they knew it wasn't anything bad. The response?
A cheeky smile and "Oh. Can I ask for more then?"

Nope, too late. I've paid and I'm happy. My next goal is to grow it out nice and long again, but healthy.
My other joy is the fact that it's opened a whole new set of doors for me re: cosplay, as seen below with a sort of Kiki's Delivery Service closet cosplay.

낙산 | Naksan Art Village

Continuing on from my previous post, we took a bit of a hike up to Naksan. I'm partial to a bit of street art, so this seemed ideal, mixed in with a bit of much-needed exercise.

The walk started off innocuously enough, with a lovely long mural next to an intriguing looking building in the ever pervasive trend of "industrial chic", egh. (Also, it was a lock museum. As in, a museum...about locks. Padlocks, door locks, safes...really?)

However, it wasn't long before we reached this:

Despite my laboured wheezing, I had enough time to appreciate the view, which just kept getting better. I have to say, the people that live here must be REALLY healthy. There's only one road up the whole hill as far as I can tell. Anywhere not directly on that road? Better walk, kid.