This past weekend was the 5th annual The Makeup Show in NYC! It’s an annual convention where everyone who is anyone in the world of cosmetics comes to showcase their products to makeup artists and beauty editors. This was my first year attending, and I was totally carried away by everything there was to do!

See that guy above? He was being painted at the MAC Pro booth along with another male model. The artists were hard at work, and by the time I left just about every inch of him (and his little undies) was covered! In the meantime, two MAC artists, Keri Blair and Romeo Jennings, demonstrated the latest trends from their runway experience.

I also got to see those amazing Paperself eyelashes that I wrote about a while ago in person! The designs are so amazingly intricate — I totally want to try them someday!

It was so hard not to spend a lot of money at the show. All of the vendors give discounts and many offer special sets that you can’t get in stores. Some brands are professional-only, so you won’t find them in stores. I really liked Naked Cosmetics products — they are heavily pigmented powders that you can use as eyeshadow or mix with clear bases to create custom lip and nail colors.

I stopped in the bathroom on my way out and saw a model who had been head-to-toe body painted frantically scrubbing the color off of herself. She explained that she had a flight to catch and that the people who had painted her up hadn’t offered to remove the art afterward. I wished her luck, and suggested that she ask one of the vendors for help — in a room full of 70 cosmetics companies, someone had to have makeup remover, right?