Ralph Lauren at the Beijing Olympics

It's the opening of the Beijing Olympics today! Granted I'm not much of a sporty person myself (my idea of sports is walking/shopping), I can't wait to see the opening. Not only because the performances at the opening ceremonies are always really amazing, but also because I can't wait to see the outfits of the US team! I always have the impression that the opening outfits are very old fashioned and not very flattering. But this time, designed by Ralph Lauren (how much more American can they get?), it should be much more fitted and elegant. In the mean time, let's take a look at the Ralph Lauren Olympic collection.
Usually I'm not too excited. They're almost always very touristy and looks more like an advertising campaign than anything. This hat is no exception. I can totally picture an American tourist with a big camera wearing it.
The polo with the Chinese characters saying Beijing is ok. But I can't help but think that these two tops are something I can grab from a tourist shops in Beijing. You know, the tops with the name of the city emblazoned on it, that can be found in any tourist shop in any city... this is especially so for the red top.
They do however, have something a bit more subtle, like these two polos. They're quite cute, but then again nothing that out of the norm for a RL polo. So where is the happy medium between too touristy and too subtle?
These tops. I'm loving these RL polos. The trimming and the stripes are genius. They are patriotic, very Olympic yet stylish. For one thing, I'd actually wear these out in public- even after the Olympics!

Let's see if RL maintains this happy medium for the opening ceromony.... in 8 hours!!

Image Source: Ralph Lauren

08 Trend: Gold Eyeshadow -Pure Gold

In an attempt to 'live young', I looked into fashion magazines for this season's beauty trend in search for eye shadow ideas, as opposed to my usual eye shadow style (the few times I bother with eye shadow;) Read: brown. If you read every magazine out there for a few months, you would realise that they feature eye shadow of every colour so I ignored the obviously magazine-styled ones, like many shades of green, yellow and blue, and have decided to accept the classy trend: the gold eyeshadow. There are two types. The first one is pure gold.

As you can see, pure gold basically means just plain gold all over the eye lids. The looks above are from the Chanel F/W08 runway show. Obviously I don't recommend you actually taking this look literally in real life.

Another show that had all gold eye shadow was the Bottega Veneta S/S08 show. Here, it looks simple and elegant -perfect for day and night.

A closer look on the eyes. While it looks very effortlessly applied on, I'm sure we wouldn't be able to replicate it quite as well in real life.

The way I'm planning on trying out this look is to first adjust by dabbing a tiny bit of the gold just at the inner corners of the eyes, so it will look as it does in the image above. Just a tiny dab to add a little something to the otherwise plain (but equally elegant) look. After trying it out a few times, I'll move on to try the all-gold look (like in the other Bottega Veneta images, not Chanel!)

So I headed to M.A.C. and found this colour: Goldmine. The makeup lady applied the colour all over my eyelids and honestly, it looked more like sparkly yellow than the pure gold in the Bottega Veneta show. But since it usually takes me a very long time to accept new makeup colours on myself and I wasn't bothered to search for the perfect gold, I just picked a Goldmine up. It's something for me to look foward trying on my next quiet night out.

I'll blog about the other gold eye shadow look soon! Thoughts about this gold look?

Image Credits: http://www.elle.com/, http://www.style.com/