The ugly truth behind the glitz and glam

Went to Envy's launch party last Friday at Loft. The Envy team is made up of my dearest ex-colleagues (whom I miss like HELL seeing at the office, when I trudge in looking like I had just been run over by a truck more than a hundred times and have work piled up in my inbox, waiting for me. They manage to make the day less shitty, god bless their fashionable souls). Anyways, if you think this blog's title is meant for their launch, HELL NO, the event was a fabulous success, full of glamorous people, it was all glitz and glam (congratulations my luverrlies for a job well done after all that hard effort!) The title is rather, for what happened BEFORE the Envy launch at Maison.

Let's go back to a few hours before the party. This is what Mira forwarded to me (and other guests) in my Facebook inbox:

Don't know what to wear tonight?

Dress to be envied ;)

We want you to work what you got, be ORIGINAL and be as STYLISH as you can be. An ENVY night doesn't happen often and first impressions count, SO DRESS TO IMPRESS!

So, I don't know about you but when you get something like that in your inbox, you start to pespire a little. Yes, Envy is an edgy fashion mag so you know you're supposed to look hot, but dress to impress? At that point I looked at my outfit of choice (black tank, high waisted shorts, chunky, three-layered gold charm necklace and chunky black heels) with such disdain, if it were human it would have run away to a corner and cried from low self-esteem. I have to admit, I spent as much time thinking about my outfit that night as about as much time as Mariah Carey ponders if she should bare her cleavage in a music video (which we all know, is really not that long).

I was going to get ready from work - the launch started at 8pm and my office hours end at 6.30pm. Which didn't exactly give me much time to primp and prune (and tweeze and shave). So I had to make do. But the one thing I wasn't going to sacrifice was a trip to the salon beforehand - wild horses on viagra couldn't drag me away from the magical hands of my hairdresser in Ampang even if they tried. Plus if I had gone with au natural hair that night, people at the launch would run away screaming in the opposite direction, or avoid eye contact, in fear of turning into stone. So I left the office a weeeeee bit early (just a weeeee bit, in case my boss reads this) and zoomed back to KL. At that point I was making good time, thinking after I got my hairdid I could go home, take a good shower and maybe actually pick a dress-to-impress-outfit from my overflowing luggage-closet.

Nope, didn't happen.

My hair took longer than usual - my hairdresser must have been having an off day because I told him I wanted "VOLUME" but instead he gave me flat-at-the-top-but-frizzy-curly-at-the-bottom type of volume, which of course made me look like a poodle. He insisted it was meant to look that way, but seeing I was almost in tears (I was holding my hair with a glazed look plastered on my face), he proceeded to set things right and make me look human. Thank god I liked the end result. And as luck would have it, I was already late. It was almost 8pm! My masterplan was not going according to err..plan. Yasir was already on the way back to KL from work (I was going with him to the launch) and people were starting to text their "where are yous". Shit. Time for Plan B.

Which, was a mystery to me, because I didn't exactly have a Plan B. So the quickest solution I could think of was (GASP) : get to the nearest public toilet and change. PUBLIC TOILET. It had come down to this. I rushed to the nearest Petronas (on the way to Yasir's house where he was waiting in his car, the poor boy) and proceeded to transform myself from tired-looking to glamorous-looking-sort-of. So there I was, getting ready for an uber glamorous fashion magazine launch in a stinky Petronas station public toilet. As I struggled to get out of my jeans and slip on my shorts in a dirty cubicle, I almost laughed out loud hysterically. I was sweating. My legs still needed some shaving. I looked like hell. Maybe I even smelled a little. Dress to impress, my ass.
Speaking of ass, someone's ASS left a mighty fine 'souvenier' in the toilet bowl of the cubicle I was in - this time, I really did scream as I lifted the lid, thinking I could take a quick leak. NAAAAAAAAASTY NAAAAAAASTYYY NAAAAAASTYYY.

So after said scream and getting the hell out of the cubicle, I proceeded to complete the most important part of my outfit - my face. Bending over the sink I slapped down some serious black eyeshadow on each lid because at that point I didn't care. Plus, looking edgy means sometimes looking weird. I found myself feeling uber relieved there was no one around - Thank Gods, as we Malays would say. But of course I messed up my eye makeup (naturally) and guess what, NO TOILET PAPER! HOORAY! My liquid eyeliner was the saviour for the day - just layer it on to cover up your mistakes, girls. Works like a charm. And all the while as I was applying my heavy eye makeup, I prayed to god that no one would walk through the door, because if they had they would have DEFINITELY thought I was a ho getting ready for a client.

Ladies and gentlemen, after all the sweat, blood, tears, messy eyeshadow and nasty-shit-in-toilet-bowl, I present to you the outcome:



No full-length photo yet, but will upload one when I get my hands on Shikin's camera! Not bad eh? Where other girls would have just given up, this chick was determined to look fabulous, stinky toilet or not. I deserve a pat on the back, if I do say so myself. Who would've thunk just hours before, I was all sweaty, smudgey eyeshadow, in a public toilet and now getting my glam game on.

This goes to show that looking all glam'ish' is just an attitude. And THAT, my fabulous friends, is the truth ;)