Lens review: Vassen Dori Green

Le-le-le-lens review time! o/

Some days ago I did a cosplay test with these lenses on and today I will review them! :D I've been itching to review these for days but the weather hasn't been in a cooperative mood...

These lenses are the Vassen Dori Green, although their color is not a true green but much more of a blue-green. Yes, this is exactly the reason why I wanted them!

Lenses in vials.

Base curve: 8.6 mm
Diameter: 14.5 mm

Water content: 42%

Life span: 1 year (I recommend 6 months)

The Vassen Dori Green have a base curve of 8.6 mm and –according to the bottles– a diameter of 14.5 mm. I can assure you that just by looking at the lenses in the vials you can tell that they definitely look bigger than average; the design is also printed very close to the edges, unlike on SeeShell Dizoneye Green.
Oh, and they have a shelf life (aka how long they hold in the vial's original solution if unopened) of 3 years instead of the much more usual 5 years.

Photos of the lenses in the vials, taken in
different room lights without flash.

The first time I put the lenses in the right one went in just fine but the left one stung like hell so I immediately took it off. I cleaned the lens and tried again and this time I could stand it in my eye, although I kept feeling that the contact was there and especially so when I blinked. It took several minutes (10+) before the "something's in the eye" feeling (my eyes kept watering) went away a bit and I was just constantly aware that I was wearing contacts – which wasn't pleasant. I kept poking the inner corners of my eyes and trying to move the lens around under my closed eyelid and such, it's bothersome. They are borderline okay to wear but seem to dry fast on my eyes; at least my vision isn't hindered at all and I don't see in a blur or have colored corners when I move my gaze.

But yeah, the comfort is disappointing because otherwise I really love these lenses. :'( I don't know, maybe it's just that I keep having dry eyes –aka bad eye day– when I wear them.. *shrugs* It's a shame because if they were more comfortable I would definitely wear them out more often...

One lens in.

Enlargement effect is obviously there but it's not overwhelming and it doesn't look freaky either, at least not on my eyes. I do suspect though that you might need to wear eye makeup with these lenses or they might look out of place.

...

......

But now, prepare for a crapton of photos!
You have been warned...

All photos are taken by me.

The first batch was taken outdoors, while standing on a balcony around 11:30, during a winter day when the sun –luckily– was showing. Yes, it's been super cloudy and gray for like the whole week, bleh..

In... 3, 2, 1...

...

Go!

As you can see the color is amazingly pretty!! <3 It looks very good on my light eyes and it doesn't look too unnatural either; they blend and fade nicely towards the center. The color is this blue-green shade that is absolutely gorgeous and I have to admit that based on color alone these would be among my favorite lenses!

Definitely great for cosplaying characters with this kind of rare eye color, like Heisuke from Hakuouki Shinsengumi Kitan or Eren Yeager from Attack on Titan.

Second batch of photos are still taken on the same spot and approximately same time, except that the sun had time to go hide under a group of clouds... which means that the light is less orange.

Flash photo outdoors.

The design is unique and very flattering – it makes me think of some kind of discreet stylized flower petals, but it's not too girly for us guys to wear either! ;) Personally I really like the design, it kinda draws the watcher's gaze towards your pupil with the small black lines going inwards. Very beautiful, me gusta.
Oh, and these do occasionally give my eyes a pretty halo effect! *w*

The last batch are all taken indoors under various lights; time approximately around 11:50. Still cloudy outside, for your information. Some photos are flash photos.

Flash photo.

 

 

Flash photo.

Flash photo.

Gah, I love these so much! ;w; Too bad I don't wear them often because of the lacking comfort; as I mentioned earlier it's just a shame that they dry pretty fast it feels like freedom every time I take 'em off and I always feel that I have contacts on when I wear my Dori Greens, damn. u_u

Aaah.. but I'd still recommend these for anyone who's curious about them; just make sure that you carry around some eyedrops if you plan to wear them for more than three or so hours!

Lastly, have some selfies I took from a slight distance – I even took more than the usual one only!

This one is taken outdoors, the rest are taken indoors.

Short summary:

Color: 9/10
Super awesome blue-green color that is hard to come by – I love it to bits!
Design: 8/10
Very pretty and unique pattern that seems to look like some kind of flower petals up close.
Opacity: 7/10 
The colored areas are rather opaque, but the lenses have a big-ish pupil hole so the center blends gradually into your eyes – it's a nice effect though!
Enlargement: 8/10
Big lenses, definitely.
Comfort: 3/10
Disappointing. I keep feeling that I have them in my eyes and they seem to dry a bit fast for me. :<
Naturalness: 2/10

Ignore the big size, unnatural color, design and... nevermind.

Thanks for reading! o/
Bye bye ~

Levi's wig – Disasters and miracles!

 Back in line, dudes! Hello hello!

Fairly recently I decided that it was about time that I tackle my most challenging wig cutting mission so far – cutting my Levi wig. Yes, of course it's captain Levi from Attack on Titan, aka Shingeki no Kyojin. *badamtssh*

Levi levisi jo cossilistaani...

....

Oh god, where do I even start? 

I was so nervous, so scared of messing it up! The base wig was very different from what I was going for and I had never cut a wig this drastically before; it was a daunting task.

This is what the wig looked like before cutting:

It doesn't look anything like Levi's hair...

So, why did I even inflict this upon myself? 

Why didn't I just buy one of the zillions of Levi character wigs that are already out there?

The reason is that none of the Levi wigs were "right" for me – there was always something that bugged me on all of them, for one reason or another. Most times it was the color and if the color was what I wanted then the cut looked wrong or the wig looked obviously way too small (looked too short already on a tiny wig head OTL) etc. Oh and speaking of color – I didn't want a black wig. No no.
That's also the main reason why I settled on this one wig – it had the perfect color that I was looking for, aka a dark mix of brownish gray, almost black but still not black.

Yeah, so I decided to buy a non-Levi wig and make it into a Levi wig, with the help of my amateur wig cutting skills that are far from polished enough for this kind of shit. Yes, it was a brave act but oh so foolish. I was almost asking for disaster to crash down on me...
But with scissors in hand I didn't really have another choice except for giving it my all; it was a bit too late to give in give up my soldier's pride and just buy a character wig and have it arrive in time before Desucon Frostbite, which is already slowly knocking at the door. Yeah, you just got one of my Frostbite cosplays spoiled! :D

Show me your wefts bro!

I started by pinning up the layers that I shouldn't cut just yet so that it would reveal the wefts that were lower down and under. Then I just started cutting away, trimming the fibers short but not so short that the wefting would show. I felt like a wig murderer.

For some reason I completely forgot to take any more progress photos but I just kept cutting it shorter pretty much everywhere and only leaving some long pieces in the back because Levi has this taper cut thing going on.

At first the bangs were a freakin' hair curtain so I kept trying to thin them down and at some point I guess I entered barbarian mode without realizing and then, suddenly, the bangs were way too short. OnO;; AARGH! It's not the first time it happens that I cut something too short! *punches self in face*

At this point I was about to ragequit and just throw the whole thing in the trash bin and pretend that it never existed. It looked so bad.. or more like, the front was ruined but the back was successful – which was very frustrating because the back was much harder to do. OTL
But I didn't give up, even though my wig looked like an overrun squirrel at this point. It was so bad I could barely look at it, I swear. xD The wig had way too much fibers and just looked much poofier/fluffier than I wanted on the sides stupid mop! and this was driving me crazy – since when was a wig too thick anyway!? rofl my luck

I tried watering down the front of my wig and then it suddenly came back to life! ... or more like, it didn't look like a crow's nest anymore. At least.
Yeah, I mean to say that suddenly there was some light shining and the wig was whispering to me "psst, you can maybe still save me!". Oh boy, where are we going...
So I was fiddling with the too-short-and-looked-retarded bangs until I thought that "hey, if I get some wefts from another part of the wig and add them in the front it might look okay again!" and then I decided to give it a try, what did I have to lose anyway? Well, my wig.
Mind you, I had never worked with wefts before and neither had I planned to do it already now – yeah, I'm basically saying that I probably looked like this:

Because that's exactly how I felt when I was trying to undo a seam on a weft, so that I could get it out and reattach it somewhere else. This task proved to be horribly tedious and rage inducing...

Hey.

Something's missing...

(edits by me)

That's better.

Yeah, I entered rage mode very quickly because I couldn't even see where the weft seam was on the wig cap because both had the exact same goddamn color! 8C At some point I tableflipped and just cut out the few centimeters of the weft that I had managed to undo (the end of it was poking out) and rolled with it. I hand-sewed it in place and prayed that this little piece of hair would improve the looks of my wig and –as if by a miracle– it did. Omigosh yesss!!

You see, Levi has his bangs kinda more towards the sides because of the parting and I had been cutting my bangs to hell and back to not have the way-too-much-hair syndrome. As I said earlier I cut them too short at some point, which led me to cut the middle completely out of bangs in desperation and then by adding that one extra tiny weft piece –to the side with the shorter bangs– the front suddenly looked okay and actually sparse enough to work. I wasn't even believing in it anymore.

So, what did the wig look like in the end?
I'll show ya!

le Levi wig!

Despite all the horrors I faced while cutting this sucker I think it turned out kinda okay in the end. :') It looks a bit wonky on the wig head but it looks better when I actually wear it or so I hope. Oh and the back is cut very short on the lower half and the upper half is longer, it doesn't really show on the photos though. Also, I haven't put any styling products in it just yet but I might do that for the soon-to-follow Levi makeup test!

That'll be all for this time!
Shiro Samurai out.

Turn a toy gun into a cosplay prop!

Hiya peeps!

On 8th October I went on a mission, as some might remember. Basically plowing through all four second-hand stores in town, in hopes of finding a toy gun to modify for Taregard Frir.
Luck was on my side and one of the shops had toy guns; luckily they were cheap, in fair condition and there was a bag with two and one with three. The bag with two guns had identical ones and the one with three had three different ones. I bought the bag with three because it had one with the style I wanted.

Gun bag! :D

The following day I took out the one I planned to use (for now) and went to spray paint it. I wanted to have some details in red so I first sprayed a part of the gun red.

Toy gun before modifications..

After getting a dose of metallic red spray paint.

It was fairly windy and around 0 °C so yeah, I was freezing my fingers off. When I deemed that it had dried enough I went back inside my apartment and put it very carefully on the newspapers I had been spraying on. What I didn't think about was that the paint wasn't 100% dry and so of course –after a few hours– when I moved it the newspaper had stuck to a small part of the gun and glued itself to it. FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUU-
I carefully peeled it off with my nail but of course some of the paint went with it. Blegh. :C So I had to go back out and fix that spot. And yeah, when I came back inside I was wiser than last time...

HANG THE FUCKER TO DRY!! >8D Boahaha!
(excuse my extremely dusty fan.. it collects dust so fast it's not even funny)

On 10th October I had planned to finish spray painting the gun, but... *gritting teeth* THE WEATHER DIDN'T WANT TO COOPERATE!! 8C Yeah, it was super cloudy and snowing/raining all day. All day. Not to mention that it was so moist outside that it wasn't even funny! D: I couldn't go outside spraying because there was no outside area close-by with a roof or anything to protect from the snow and rain – and I know from previous experience that spray painting when it snows is horrible because the snow will stick to your newly painted surface –while you wait for it to dry– and make this kind of "cracked snowflakes" on it and well, it looks fugly and might ruin your work. :C I couldn't spray outside and then run with the gun back inside either because my apartment is so horribly small and has shitty air circulation so yeah, I would probably have gotten poisoned from the paint fumes lingering around for the following month. xD Needless to say no painting was done that day and that also meant that I didn't get my gun prop done in time for Taregard's debut. Meh. Oh well, rather that than potentially risk ruining it as well as endangering my health...

Some days later I went ahead to put masking tape on the areas of the gun that I wanted to keep red – the rest was to be painted silver. It took a while to get the tape strips to be just the right width and shape that I needed; it's tedious to cut tape with such precision. xD
By this time it had started going below zero outside quite frequently too, which also meant that I had given up on getting the spray painting done. Yeah, I've had previous experience with spray painting outside in the cold and have the paint ending up looking fugly on the surface of the item because it kinda froze before drying properly. Not amused. >_>

Fast forward to somewhere very soon after Christmas 24th – I was at mom's place and had taken the toy gun with me. I had been thinking about finding something to fill the two holes in the gun where the screws were placed; if I didn't fill them in I would constantly have to be aware of what side of the gun I was showing to the camera because the side with the holes just looked shittier. I went to my stepdad and asked him if he happened to have any stuff that could work for this purpose and he told me that he had some brown silicone lying around that would do the trick. I left the gun in his care and a few days later when I went back home the holes were filled with brown wonder and it had dried too!

Gun with the masking tape and silicone-filled holes.

Close-up of the silicone.

The thing with silicone is that seemingly when it dries it sinks in a little and so the surface wasn't completely flat. I don't know if my explanation makes sense so I'll just draw you a crappy Paint picture instead to make sure everyone knows what I'm talking about. xD

So yeah, instead of having the desired B finish I had the A one. This meant that I still needed to put something on top of the silicone so that it would even out – I thought that white glue would do the trick.

Glue recently added.

So I basically just put some Erikeeper white glue on top of the silicone and played the waiting game. I had waited a few days between applying the glue to make sure that the silicone was 100% dry. After this was done I waited for the weather to be "warm", aka around 0 °C or above so that I could go out and try my luck at spray painting again.
On 7th January the weather seemed to be kinda okay (I couldn't check temperature anywhere so I had to guess) so I took my gun, the silver spray can, some rope –to hang the gun from– and went outside. As soon as I got outside and started spraying it seemed to be okay.. until about one half of the gun was painted and the spray can died. 8C Okay, it didn't die because there was still obviously paint left in it but the presser just stopped responding altogether; I kept pressing it down, twisting and turning it and I even took it off to check if anything was wrong but it looked fine! Dafuq man. :S
I ragequited after a while and went back inside; inside I thought that maybe if I took the black spray releaser thingy from my other spray can (a dark red one) and put it on the silver one then maybe it would work. I quickly tried it inside and it seemed to work like a charm and so I hurried back outside again! :'D As soon as I got outside I pressed the sprayer down and OH MY GOD IT WORKED!! 8DD ................. for one second. Fuck. 8C I noticed that the exact same thing happened again, except that this time the presser made this kind of slight air-is-coming-out sounds but no paint came with it. I looked closer in the "mouth hole" of the thing and noticed that the paint was slowly seeping out in its liquid form; I also took off the whole presser thingy and noticed that some more liquid paint had flowed up under it!

Presser taken off just to illustrate, but on this pic I had already
wiped off the liquid build-up. (Hasakitsuki holding it)

I went back inside, wiped off all the paint that had bubbled up from the can and decided to see if the presser would return to normal if I waited a few minutes and then painted indoors. After some minutes of furiously hammering pressing the black button down it suddenly came back from the dead and it even sprayed to boot! Ohmaiglab! What wasn't so wonderful was that the spray ended up on the apartment's bathroom wall, oops. Let's keep that a secret... *innocent whistling*
I went to fetch some old newspapers to protect the shower/bathroom floor and then I could FINALLY paint the rest of the gun. I just did one thick layer (should have done thinner layers but I was too impatient for that shit lol) and hung it from the string to dry in the shower curtain holder thingy. I then exited the apartment to go do some other stuff because I swear my apartment has the most horrible air circulation/ventilation/whatever and the paint fumes were so strong that I felt sick. I opened the air vent to maximum and left for some hours; when I came back the gun was still sticky but it was at least dry enough so that I could spray the areas that I had missed previously. I left it to dry again and went to squat at Jäätynyt Enkeli's place to wait out the paint fumes.

Painted gun hanging to dry in the shower...

A few days later I came back to check up on the gun – it had dried completely. I took off the masking tape and crossed my fingers that the silver spray paint hadn't bled in under the tape and on the area that was to remain red. Luckily it had stayed red almost completely and only some minor touch-ups were needed.

Just showing the spots that need some touch-ups...

So since the whole gun was already silver I couldn't be bothered to tape the whole shit so I just took a pencil, the red spray paint, Hasakitsuki's hands and a plastic bottle. So she sprayed very little and veeery close on the bottle and meanwhile I quickly dipped my pencil in the spray liquid –while it was still wet– and painted the spots red.

To finish it off I borrowed some black hobby paint from Jäätynyt Enkeli and painted some other areas black to make it 20% cooler.

Waiting for black paint to dry.. (it took approx. 40 min)

I painted both sides black and it was really tedious. The paint didn't act like the paints I'm used to – it felt thicker and well, much more rubbery. I had to paint very slowly (dip the brush in the paint after each time I painted a dot the size of the brush tip) and use much paint to get a nice result or all the brush strokes would show, even though the surface remained kinda bumpy. It was seemingly some akrylat-latex (that's in Swedish) paint.

I left the gun to dry over the night hung it from the kitchen lamp and on the morning it was all done! Looks much cooler than when it was just all black and it wasn't even hard except annoying with the spray can derps to give it a make-over! :D

LOOK AT MY GUN, MY GUN IS AMAZING ~~

You might have noticed that on the last photos there's still two holes at the red part of the gun – I didn't remember them, because I put the tape over long before I thought of filling them up, and so I forgot that they were even there during the whole remake process; a little miss on my side. I plan to cover them up later.

Taregard's gun is finally done, w00p w00p! o/
Shiro Samurai out.