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RD308

Today after grabbing lunch (and a coffee) with a friend from Glee (yay Glove! I wish we'd remembered to take a picture...) I meandered around the Omotesando and Harajuku areas. Omotesando is a large main street lined on both sides with stores, cafes, and coffee shops. It's a shopper's paradise and would have been a more pleasant stroll if it weren't for the heat.

As I walked down a side street, looking for The Roastery, I passed by a Shiseido pop-up promotion for their new line of lipsticks all themed around the color red.


Inside, they offered to match you with your perfect shade of read through a weird "mind number" personality analysis.


Here is a sample of what I walked away with (there were some advertisement pamphlets which I just tossed): a sheet that says what my Mind Number Red, my Inspiration Red, and my Counseling Red are, paper lips with the Shiseido logo, a one-page description of my personality and how to care for myself based on my Mind Number's personality, and three small samples from their 16-color collection.

Let me explain.

Your Mind Number is calculated by adding the years of your birth year, month, and day together (e.g. 1+9+9+4+9+7) and then adding the resulting number's individual digits together (3+9), and then adding THOSE two numbers together (1+2). So my Mind Number is 3, which corresponds to their lipstick coded RD503, Bloodstone. It's supposed to improve my "intuitive power". Other tidbits of my lipstick-themed personality include: "As you are a nice person, you are directly influenced by the environment and the people around you. Sometimes you get irritated because you do not get along with someone" and "A Mind Number 3 person likes to think about various things".

Your Inspiration Red is literally just looking at all the lipstick colors and picking one you like.

Finally, you sit down with a consultant, and they pick a shade that they think would suit you--in my case RD308, Toffee Apple. They apply a sample with a brush so you can see what it looks like:


Please ignore how sweaty and gross I look.

It was nice lipstick, not that I can always afford a $28 lipstick, but I promptly wore it off by drinking this:


and eating this:


because when one is in Harajuku, one eats a crepe.



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