Review: G&G Shinny Green (Puffy 3 Tone) (+WataMote cosplay)

Tomoko Kuroki!

  Oh my god, it's been so long, I nearly forgot how to type. I did, however, manage to pull off a cosplay of Tomoko from WataMote (you don't want to know the full name. It means 'No matter how I look at it, it's you guys's fault I'm not popular!') She has green eyes, so off I trotted to buy some G&G Shinny Green (Puffy 3 Tone) circle lenses.

(No, that's not a typo. 'Shinny' makes me think of knobbly knees, and 'puffy' is my face in the morning if I accidentally sleep on it. :c)

Please note that the panda eyes are intentional and part of the cosplay! (Tomoko has too many late night playing otome games... :'D)

The green eyes of jealousy? (And two sets of eyelashes,
because whoever heard of curled eyelashes?)

GREEEEEEEN.

 The colour and design on the Shinny Green lenses is pretty great! I was a bit hesitant at first when trying to choose between these and Princess Mimi Apple Green, the other best-selling green circle lenses on PinkyParadise, but I was concerned that the limbal ring on the Princess Mimi ones was too wide, so not enough of the colour would be left. I'm glad I chose these. They have a pretty green colour, not too alien-like but definitely bright enough to show, and a little bit of brown round the pupil hole.

A comparison. I look a bit wall-eyed ('I SEE WHAT YOU DID
THERE. AND ALSO OVER THERE.' because I don't think my
right eye has its base curve quite right - lenses seem to slip...)

The enlargement is so-so. A little bit, but nothing too crazy and alienlike, just how I like it.

Comfort was great. I got a bit worried when it felt irritated when I first put them in, but they soon settled and I wore them for around eight hours, basically forgetting about them. Then again, the shoot was quite distracting, as it included making faces and mock screaming, dressed as a tired schoolgirl, while passing motorists laughed at me... .__.

Overall, fantastic. I would definitely recommend these for a green-eyed cosplay.

Whole costume! (minus blazer)

Review: Venus Eye Bright Red lenses from PinkyParadise

Lunatic Eyes?

 I needed some red lenses for my MCM Expo Spring 2013 cosplay of Reisen Udongein Inaba, Touhou's purple-haired bunny girl from the moon. Her special power is lunacy (Japan's moon rabbit? LUNA-cy? Geddit?!) and she has a pair of crazy looking red eyes to go with it. I own a pair of Venus Eye Aqua which I really liked and were comfortable, so I figured I'd give the red version a go.

 I bought Venus Eye Bright Red from PinkyParadise. The shot on the model were... very, very red. But then again, they're photoshopped to hell, so I do tend to take such things with a pinch of salt. Or an entire shaker of it.

Colour: 4/5
Colour-wise, yes, they're nowhere near as bright as on the model, but they are a pleasant, 'natural' looking red which is visible without looking like those weird Hallowe'en cheap ones.

Natural light. I really should get rid of that orange towel...

Indoor lighting.

Once again, it blends in well with my pupil hole and shows up fine.

Meanwhile, my special power seems to be
an inability to apply false lashes correctly.
Symmetry is for losers!

Comfort: 3/5 (4 after a while)
Not quite as comfortable as the Venus Eye Aqua, at first. When I first put them in, they shift around a little on my eyes and are slightly irritating, but it calms down after about half an hour of wear and then I don't notice them so much anymore.

When I first put them in, unlike with Venus Eye Aqua I can see a very slight tinge of red around my vision - I wonder if the pupil hole is smaller? Not really a worry though, it doesn't get in the way.

Overall rating: 4/5
Pretty colour, a little uncomfortable at first but otherwise fine.

Served me well at the Expo, thinking of doing a shoot for this costume soon...

I'm here to guard this door that totally
doesn't lead to Kaguya. Yes.

Review: Venus Eye, Princess Pinky lenses from PinkyParadise

The alien-like baby blues I never had!

   I am a longtime daily contact lens wearer, but this was my first foray into circle lenses. These are lenses from Asia with a black 'limbal ring' round the edge, which is supposed to make your iris look bigger and thus make your eyes adorable and sparkly and anime-like. Or something.

And so the fashion bloggers and Korea fanatics weep as they
meet their overlord in the king of ridiculously huge irises,
Mr Burns.

They're very popular, and apparently addictive in the same way as makeup. But to be honest, this aspect didn't interest me much. My irises are fine without The Fly transformations. What I really wanted was to be able to colour my eyes for cosplay. My irises are deep, tar-black pools of hatred and despair. None of those pathetic 'fresh tint~', 'clear shade~' style English lenses would be able to make a dent on their utter darkness, but be CONSUMED into their murky depths. In other words, I needed something with a nice block of opaque colour.

I bought two prescription pairs from Malaysian vendor PinkyParadise. Title aside, I must give a warning for the Pink and Sparkly. Even a four-year-old in her 'fairy princess' stage might twist her mouth and say, 'That's a bit... much.' But they have a wonderful range of different colours at reasonable prices, many of which come in prescription.

It was very tempting to go nuts on the colours, but I held off and selected two pairs, blue and yellow, in my prescription of -2.75 on the left and -3.5 on the right. I got two cute little animal lens cases and two gifts, an eye mask and a Japanese pink... hair thing. It looks like Velcro and is very puzzling.

Venus Eye Aqua
'Venus Eye' sounds rather romantic and pretty, doesn't it? Anyway, here is a fairly dark and rubbish pic of my eyes with one on and one off.

Go go heterochromia!

See how dark my natural colour is? Yet it still shows up. Here's a better picture under daylight.

These were actually really comfortable. I didn't have any eye drops, so I only wore them for three hours, but I hardly felt them for that time, and I didn't experience any vision obstruction at all!

I then played with wigs and took some pics in indoor lighting. This is my chuu2wig for Rikka from Chuunibyou, and my orange wig for drunken oni Suika from Touhou.

Fear my completely average eye.

Watashi no Eyebrows ga Konna ni UNMATCHED Wake ga Nai!

The colour is always visible close up, and probably visible from the mid-distance in good light. Probably better under natural light though, as you can't see in much in the Chuunibyou picture. Yes, the orange wig one is lazy with black hair sticking out, I had a critical wig cap failure.

Overall, I liked these a lot. <3

Princess Pinky - Twilight Brown
I won't be reviewing these this time... the right one was scratchy and stung and moved around on my eyeball, not sitting correctly on it. Now, I'm pretty sure my eyes can handle contacts - they're the same base curve as my dailies and all. I also prepared it correctly, washing them with the proper solution and storing them in the right way. Also, when I tried the blues above, they worked fine. So I think the most likely cause is that the right eye's one was defective. A pity, since that's the one I need for Rikka!
I have contacted PinkyParadise, hopefully they can do something about it. :3

EDIT: PinkyParadise got back to me super quickly and are sending me a replacement for the defective lens! Very friendly and good service. Hopefully I can make a proper review for them later!

EDIT 2 - Revenge of the Edit: I made a review for the Princess Pinky Twilight Browns!

A health warning
Two days after my extremely brief try with the yellows and one day after the blues, my eyes seemed to react oddly to my normal daily contact lenses, going dry very easily, and things seemed a bit blurrier than usual. This was greatly worrying to me, as I hadn't even worn the lenses for long. I hope that this was unrelated and just bad timing, but if it's not, I will take a trip to the optician's.

Obligatory link to this blog post about possible permanent damage resulting from circle lenses. If you wear lenses, it is worth a read - these things can be pretty and interesting, but stay safe and use a good supplier!

The mute button. :x

'....'

 I am currently mute! I think some wizard stole into my apartment in the middle of the night, and now I cannot cast magic or clear my name if anyone says 'So I heard Jenny sucks, what do you have to say against these accusations?'

In honour of this, some half-arsed cosplay of the deaf-mute Shizune, from Katawa Shoujo. Man, my hair is long, I would have done better as Hanako.

(In fact, can this even be called half-arsed? It probably doesn't deserve even half an arse. Maybe a quarter, if I am lucky. I would happily settle for 'more arsed than white-top-and-jeans-L or ninja-headband-and-normal-clothes-Naruto.')

Anyway, apart from that, I have been resting, making weird, inhuman noises in an effort to regain speech, eating leftover chicken-and-sweetcorn soup and taking far too many Strepsils. Why do they taste so good? ;w;

Cosplay Diary: Bra top!

References for EVA 01's chest armour, and the final thing!

More work on my Evangelion Unit 01 cosplay, which has been on the backburner a while. Eva 01 has a few layers of armour plating over its chest, and my idea was to convert this into a bra top. 

For a base, I used some kind of cotton training bra meant for 12-year-olds to cover up their new mosquito bites with.

Cups covered with blue PVC (bottom half.)

Blue PVC, red PVC and some black rubber washers were used to cover up the cups.

Somehow my covering of the cups appeared to have eaten half the centre gore, because I have no idea what I'm doing. However, a little still remained, so I covered that too, and glued on a red glass cabochon to act as the Eva's 'core'. It's not very noticeably red - think the damage counters from Pokemon. But the intention was there...

An uncovered armour plate, made from interfacing, Rigilene boning
and definitely not my neatest stitches...

Finally, the external armour panels. I created a framework from interfacing and Rigilene boning. I then covered this with black cloth, then purple and green PVC, and attached them.

And the final result looks like this! Gratuitous filth incoming.

Bra on.

Bra off.

I'll be making a cropped jacket of some sort so the straps and underbust strap (which are all uncovered at the moment) won't be visible on the final cosplay.

I'm pretty happy with this though! My only worry is that the bra is a little small. This means I can't really jump around excessively or I will risk a nipple cheerfully poking out over the top, which would be pretty disastrous. I think I might wear plasters over them like last time I cosplayed, just in case of such wardrobe malfunctions - it would still be pretty bad, but less so than the alternative.

Double dressup - Expo and Hallowe'en!

Mini top hat, yaaaay!

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote - been busy with starting work. But I thought I might as well chronicle my recent dressup adventures.

Firstly, the London MCM Expo 2012, I cosplayed as Mio from K-ON!, because I am fairly fond of her outfit in the ED, 'Don't Say Lazy'. I completely ran out of time while trying to make the dress, so I ... went as Lazy 'Don't Say Lazy' Mio. :'D I basically put together a top and a skirt instead. I still had everything else though - turquoise stockings, armwarmer and mini top hat.

The Expo was pretty fun all in all - got to check out Hitman: Absolution, pick up a little chibi Asuka figurine and watch Anders catch all the Pikachu-onesie cosplayers. Even got to check in on Kenny - oh most adorable of lazy, derpy-mouthed cats - on the way back. :3

The week after that, uni friends were holding a Hallowe'en party! I'd never been to one before. While it would have been fun to make a costume, I wasn't really up to it and wasn't expected to anyway so I bought mine.

Red Riding Hood! I'm not 'little' though, despite what some freakishly tall guests said. ;___;

Stockings were grievously harmed in the making of  this costume.

I bought cheap stockings and a suspender belt, intending to maul them a bit for a more 'escaped from wolf' look. They actually began destroying themselves from just... wearing them. Toes sticking out on the left foot? Yeah, that happened within about 10 minutes - my toenails made short work of them. Basically I had several holes and two ladders before my scissors even touched them! China quality, guys.

There was a slight worry that we had not been told exactly to dress up... but luckily, yes, some other people had done so, with varying levels of effort. Will had a fairly fabulous pregnant-with-Satan's-baby costume with black curly horned wig, fake glitter eyelashes and pillow-baby. The entire look was completed with a beer. :'D So classy. And so it was pretty fun hanging out in the kitchen or watching some completely incomprehensible black-and-white horror movie. 'Are those zombies having sex?'

After four beers, I was feeling completely healthy, despite my empty stomach. And then, I had two fateful Jägershots. My streak of healthiness continued for about half an hour more of wandering around, poking a drum kit and keyboard playing.

Then, very, very suddenly I was in the top floor bathroom, cycling between:

• Purging the offending liquor into a toilet
• Sleepily clinging to the floor, refusing to let myself be peeled off it
• Begging tearfully to ... not be left alone on the floor. Yep.

Add to this that I was still in costume, and I conclude that I have probably looked better in my life. Luckily this all went unwitnessed by most, I could still walk and remember mostly everything, Ramie called a cab and Matt (who had the misfortune of witnessing the above meltdown) managed to get me back home okay.

But I don't like the smell of aniseed anymore. ;__;

Cosplay Diary: Collar v.1

  My current project is making a cosplay of Evangelion Unit 01, except in a more human form. I have a concept art, but it's rather outdated, so I've been meaning to make a new one. Maybe next time!

First step: the neck piece, based this on the orange area which covers 01's throat.

グオオオオオオオォォ！！

  My first attempt at this used the basic idea of a neck corset - a rigid collar, more common in fetish stuff than anywhere else. But by god, in the process of researching plasticky materials I think I've seen every latex and PVC item in the world ever. Seriously, I think nothing could surprise me now. I've seen things.

o___o

o________o

  Anyway, I created a framework from Rigilene plastic boning (not steel boning, or it wouldn't bend!) and interfacing, and added a zip so that it could zip up at the front. I also added a comfy black fabric lining to the inside.

The framework underneath, with boning along the top and bottom edges as well as at intervals vertically.

Edges covered with black cloth, to avoid an ill-timed plastic bone to the jugular.

 I then sewed a covering of black cloth and orange PVC, and attached this to the framework. Results are as follows:

My verdict - it is passable. I can wear it, and I have learnt a lot from making it! The downside, I would say, is that it's fairly thick (required for that much reinforcement) and slightly loose - to have it perfectly form-fitting in a non-stretch material, and then to wear it around a con, would probably cause me to vomit spectacularly over a bunch of bootleg anime merchandise.

Perhaps if I have time, I will make a collar v.2, using stretch fabric for the lining and relying on friction and minimal boning to keep it up. That way I could make a more form-fitting collar, but I risk it falling down, whereas this one never would... I'm not sure which would be better. I guess experimentation will tell!

But I think I'll fix up other stuff first. Next stop, the bra!