IMATS Vancouver!

Hey guys! Today I’m going to talk about how awesome IMATS Vancouver was! It was so awesome getting to meet so many like minded beauty enthusiasts (even if a lot of them were pushing and shoving!). IMATS Vancouver was July 21 & 22 at the Vancouver Convention Center. I’ll talk a bit about the convention and then show you all of the goodies I scored below!

We stayed at a hotel in Richmond, not far from Vancouver (and way cheaper) so we had a little bit of a drive to the convention center, WHICH IS GORGEOUS. The center was right on the water and you could see all sorts of cruise ships coming and going. My fiancee, Chris, took care of our little waffle butt (don’t ask) so I was free to peruse the convention floor. IMATS Vancouver is MUCH smaller than L.A, but since we had our son with us, we were sort of glad. I get easily overwhelmed in crowds so I think Vancouver was a great prelude to IMATS L.A in January!

There were quite a few exhibitors there, but I was really only interested in four: Crown Brush, NYX, Makeup Forever, and Zuca. When we arrived, the floor was fairly empty, EXCEPT FOR THE MASSIVE MAKEUP FOREVER LINE. It was so ridiculous that I didn’t even try to get in. Chris jumped in line for me at some point but when a MF rep came by with a little card and telling everyone to write down what they were interested in checking out I decided to leave the line (I got an eye roll from her when I told her I had no idea what I wanted). The Crown Brush booth was one of the biggest and most packed. You got a little bucket and could “shop” around for what you wanted then hand it to a rep and they’d ring you up. I must have circled that booth 4 times and still only ended up picking up two things. Everyone shopping the booth were just really in the way, and like I said before, I get easily overwhelmed so I just picked up the two things that caught my eye (I had kind of pre-shopped online) and bounced. I ended up getting a contour brush (my e.l.f one just doesn’t make the cut) and a nail art brush set (SO HAPPY ABOUT THAT).

Now here is something funny. For all of the people at IMATS that were pushy and shove-y, there were just as many awesome, helpful folks. I went to the NYX booth which was almost as crazy as the Makeup Forever one, and had a little bucket of quite a few things. I was waiting in their not quite massive line next to this nice woman and we started chatting. She was a makeup artist from the Vancouver area and she was super sweet! We exchanged cards and I made a joke about being disappointed Sugarpill and LimeCrime weren’t there, that I’d just blow my whole IMATS budget there and she leaned in close to my ear and whispered “I heard Nigel’s Beauty Emporium has Lip Tars”. First, I loved that she assumed (correctly) that I would want to get my hands on some Lip Tars, and second that she kept her voice down, because I had heard a bunch of people wishing that OCC was there, I think everyone was trying to keep a stampeded from happening (not that it helped). I’m sure my eyes bugged out, because she started laughing and I asked her what the best non-annoying way would be to hand the stuff I had picked out was (the NYX reps were getting hammered by customers and I felt bad just ditching my bucket). I ended up putting 90% of the items back myself and then booked it to the Nigel’s Beauty Emporium booth. The line was CRAZY, but a lot better than NYX or Makeup Forever. They did in fact have Lip Tars and I was really disappointed to see they didn’t have Anime, the one that I would have strangled someone for. I ended up grabbing Feathered, Black, Harlot, Chlorophyll, and Belladonna (you can check them out below.)

Another thing of note should be Naked Cosmetics. I know of the brand from Xsparkage of youtube, but I had never really been able to check out their products. Well I hustled over there to meet Leesha (and made a fan girling ass of myself I’m sure) and afterwards got to talking Samiee, one of their Utah Reps. SHE WAS AMAZING. We chatted mostly about makeup, but there was some True Blood and travel talk in there as well haha. She gave me a little tour of their pigments and showed me her personal favorites (as a freelance makeup artist herself she showed me a great one for bridal clients as well as a CRAZY bright collection for fashion shoots). I loved meeting her so much, and she even gave me a sample of the Naked Advanced Skin Cream (you can see my review of it here.)

I also grabbed some Red Cherry Lashes and Chris surprised me with an IMATS Apron, lanyard, and bracelet. He did such a wonderful job of keeping our little dude chill, and all of the ladies at the Naked booth flirted with him! It was great getting to meet Chantel (the beauty editor of Makeup Artist Magazine and the Education Director for IMATS), she’s gorgeous and it was awesome that she was able to help me get into IMATS.

Unfortunately, I got hit with a wall of suck after we left day one. We headed down to the MAC Pro store in Vancouver and I was in and out pretty quickly because I wasn’t feeling too hot. The wisdom teeth are coming in and on top of that I had a huge sinus head ache. Just needed a nap I thought! Well, we got back to our hotel and napped FOREVER. But when I woke up I was worse. And in the morning I had a pretty bad head cold. So bad that we ended up heading home early. I would like to say that I was crushed, but I felt so terrible that the idea of plowing through the day with all of those people just did NOT sound appealing.

I had such a wonderful time at IMATS, from the exhibitors and getting to chat with people from companies that I loved to all of the speakers and mini classes they had going on, it was amazing. There was a Once Upon A Time panel and some of the actors walked the floors afterward, which was so crazy cool! Meeting Leesha from Xsparkage was kind of weird because she is who inspired me to blog and I was really nervous meeting her (that’s also pretty much all I talked about, HOW nervous I was, guhhhh). I also got to meet Sokolum 79 which was also really strange in an awesome way. I felt weird bothering them, walking up and being all “HIIIIII” haha but I suppose they are sort of used to it? Anyway! Below you can check out all of the goodies I was able to snag at IMATS, along with my MAC Haul. I will probably do a video haul of all of the stuff I got, just going over and reviewing it all at once might be easier than individual blog posts. We shall see!