YOU’VE BEEN MESSING UP. Big time.
BuzzFeed Blue / Via youtube.com
This Is The Most Fool-Proof Trick For People Who Suck At DIY Manicures
Can’t paint without getting polish all over your cuticles? No problem.
Lauren Zaser / Jenny Chang / Via BuzzFeed
People of the world who suck at DIY manicures, here is your solution: pre-glued nails.
They come in a pack like this and they cost $7.50.
Each set comes with 24 nails, so if you make a mistake, you literally just pick up a new nail and start fresh.
Rickys NYC
You'll use the same tools you've always used for a manicure.
The best nail file to use is a 150/180 grit, which means that the filing surface is fine enough that it won't tear the nail. You can use any nail clippers.
Lauren Zaser / Via BuzzFeed Life
Here's what to do: On a sheet of paper, lay out about 10 inches of double-sided tape. Then go through the box and find pre-glued nails that match the size of each of your natural nails.
Lay out the nails in size order, pressing them glue-side down on the double-sided tape. Firmly press down on each nail so it's really secure. If they're not fully stuck to the tape, you may have a hard time painting. In that case, stop polishing and press down harder.
The line across the nail marks the side that will face outward when you press them onto your nails.
Lauren Zaser / Via BuzzFeed Life
21 Ways To Sweat-Proof Your Makeup
A little sweat ain’t never hurt nobody—unless they were wearing foundation.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Spritz your face with makeup setting spray before and after applying makeup to keep it from melting off.
You can try Urban Decay's De-Slick Makeup Setting Spray ($30), which is used in this video, to help your makeup grab onto your skin.
Rub face primer onto your forehead and nose to keep it from getting shiny throughout the day.
In a pinch, you can pick up Monistat anti-chafing gel ($6)—beauty bloggers love how it mattifies the skin and helps your makeup last longer.
And dab primer on your lids before applying any eyeshadow to keep it from looking creasy.
If you can, opt for powder-based shadows in natural tones instead of cream ones, especially if you have oily lids
American Airlines Has Confirmed Professor Snape Works For Them
A photo of the wizard working as an airline gate agent first hit the Internet about three years ago. After all this time? Always.
Harry Potter fans never really recovered after Professor Severus Snape's heroic death.
Warner Bros. Pictures / Via mtv.mtvnimages.com
Yet to their surprise, sometime in 2012, the dour potions master was spotted moonlighting as an employee of American Airlines.
We didn't even know there was a Gate 9 3/4.
Though really, who else would you trust to keep your airport experience orderly?
27 Seriously Underrated Books Every Book Lover Should Read
You’ve read Harry Potter 12 times now. Put it down, and read these instead.
Thinkstock
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Told from the perspective of a race car driver's aging dog, the book is packed with so much heartfelt human insight. I still can't reread it without tearing up. It's a beautiful, wonderfully written book.
—Michele Smith, Facebook
Harper Paperbacks
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
Written by Stephen King's son, it's one of the best books of the last 20 years. The novel is a tightly wound, unnerving psychological thriller. It's absolutely stunning and goes so far beyond what is being published in that genre right now. It's the only book that's actually given me nightmares.
—Tressa Eckermann, Facebook
William Morrow Paperbacks
Why Cultural Significance Is The Best Job I Ever Had
“My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero.”
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
For many years — nearly 20 — I have lived far away from many of the people I love best. But we still feel close, because we write long, private, free-form letters. It's good practice for writing stories and novels, apparently. So when I was hailed as a genius for publishing The Wallcreeper and offered serious money to publish Mislaid, my first thought was, If I can do this, so can all my friends! Immediately, I started enlisting them.
Terror management theory (a psychosocial hypothesis) tells us that culture fills an urgent void in our lives. "Life in itself is nothing," as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, "an empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs." Participation in finer, higher things takes our minds off life's cruelty. Under TMT, writers are people who see a potential match between their abilities and literary culture's intimations that writing is one of those finer, higher things that transcend death — not literally, not as immortality, but as reasons to take courage and feel relatively cheerful. Like beautiful homes, cute babies, or noble careers helping others, books can make us feel like we mean something positive, and in gratitude we truly love them.
Even readers who never aspire to write books can read, write reviews, and participate in literary culture in other ways. Belief makes it all worthwhile, while seeing through to life's empty-cupness brings mourning, depression, and fear. When the lovely home is lost in a divorce, when the aging baby chews pizza with its mouth open, when experts determine that the noble career enabled dependence and learned helplessness — books will still be there for you.
Thus, while my belief that books matter is irrational, it is (with my other beliefs) vital to my survival. It tells me that certain books — like certain people, animals, places, processes, and experiences — are ends in themselves, worth valuing for their own sake, and that while many of these books are hundreds of years old, some are still being written…
…by me! That's what the experts say! ME!!! In literary culture, appointed experts decide which books make the cut, and some of them think my books are really good! In my own belief system, I occupy a position near the top!
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
And because virtually everyone I know well is a Person of the Book like me — starting with those few devoted letter writers, but with a conspicuous current trend toward exponential increase and a possible snowballing event; a novelist meets a lot of book lovers — they all seem to agree that I matter. My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero. Where will it all end? Recently, total strangers wanted to have a formal dinner party in my honor, like in the last (?) episode of Sex and the City where Carrie blows off those Parisians because she's too busy following Mikhail Baryshnikov around some art gallery. (I got out of it by dropping in preemptively for teriyaki in the kitchen with the kids.) A stranger offered me a tenure-track job at an Ivy League school! I was invited to the Edinburgh Festival! A photo editor asked me who she should book for makeup and hair! Cultural significance is by far the best job I ever had. In a pinch I can pass the time just sitting there congratulating myself.
My friends who, if they were to write novels as well as letters, could also quit their day jobs in favor of transcendence IMO, in no particular order: Avner (meaning Avner Shats, already a novelist, but I'm convinced he could make a living writing), Johanna, Ben, Chantal…
Yet who among them has what it takes to pull down a seven-figure advance? Who will be flying us all to his 50th birthday party at some huge, tacky spread in Baja?
Not a novelist, but a memoirist: James P. Graham of West Philadelphia.
Yes, Jamie, this means you. For too long I have retailed your anecdotes while misremembering them. e.g., "Crusty Mattress-Back" with its image of your putting on a bathrobe, driven to the semblance of nudity by your lack of a shirt without a leftist or anarchist slogan on it, rushing to explain to the policeman at the door how the dead 14-year-old came to be in your bathtub; the uncritical readiness with which he believed the truth — that she had been revived by EMTs, then wandered off to rejoin the very friends who thought to shock her into life by packing her in ice. Of her friends and the police, whose nihilism was the more obscene, whose ignorance more troubling? I will quote no one (spoilers). All I can say is, my god. Or "Adolf," the shy young Nazi with poor social skills. Why was he always hanging around the anarchist bookstore, of all places, accepted and tolerated even as he entered pro-Axis screeds into its collective diary ("Book of Unlove") in dense black Fraktur script? Granted, even Nazis have their limits, but did his annoying ways constitute sufficient reason for them to abandon him on the porch wrapped in a carpet? Was "mutilation of a corpse" truly the relevant criminal charge?
