OOTD: Christmas Vintage

Hiya, guys!

It's the last day of 2014, and while I struggle to sleep at this wee hour of the day, here I am writing a post.

Here's a fun fact about me: I love to dress up. Whenever I get the chance to dress up for something, be it for a costume-themed gathering or a party, I kinda tend to go all out. (Want proof? Read here and here.) The reason behind it is that those occasions are far in between, so when an opportunity comes, I go all out. Of course that is subject to a few limitations, such as not going for a look that I'm not confident to pull off or being careful not to upstage an important person in that party (ie. a birthday celebrant or the bride in a wedding).

Anyways, two weeks ago I attended the Christmas party in my new school. It was the first party that I attended in a long time, at least for the one that needs a little dressing up because the venue was at a hotel! There were a few challenges for deciding on what I should wear for that party, ie. the masquerade theme (Must. Look. For. A. Mask!) and color coding -- black for third year students like me.

The (almost) entire law school community. Photo courtesy of the college's BarOps director Panky Obbania

So what did I wear for the party? Click 'Read More' to find out.

Fortunately I found this gorgeous black and gold dress in my mom's closet that miraculously fits me perfectly. (Hello, stretch material!) This particular dress has an interesting back story: my mom's school ran a donation drive for the victims of typhoon Yolanda last year, and this dress got its way in the pile of clothes meant for donation. She thought that the dress was too pretty to give away, so she decided to fish it out of the clothes pile and brought it home.

Whoops, pardon the bulge...

For the record, she has not worn this dress ever since she brought it home. That makes me the first person to wear this dress.

Photo courtesy of my classmate Katrina Petil

The dress is already 'dressy' (fine, busy!) to begin with, so there's not much styling to think of, even if you plan to go for a certain look. In my case, I opted for a 'vintage' look because the dress is, well, vintage. To do that, I just paired the dress with black heels and my usual accessories -- silver hoop earrings and watch.

A photo posted by jesselle (@navyisthenewpink) on Dec 12, 2014 at 8:27am PST

Now here's where I went all-out -- the hair and makeup. Since I'm going for a vintage look, I went for that glamorous Old Hollywood look, red lips, lined eyes and all. (Seriously, though, is there anything more vintage than the Old Hollywood?) This tutorial from Lisa Eldridge helped me achieve this look.

As for the hair, this fairly recent tutorial by Ingrid Nilsen helped me out. I used the first hair look, although I used tiny black elastic bands (also known as rio) because I found at the last minute that bobby pins do not help make the tiny buns stay (or maybe because I did my own hair without any help).

So there's my look for the recent Christmas party. When was the last time you dressed up for an occasion?