A Few Updates

I started a YouTube beauty channel. Yeah. I finally jumped on the bandwagon. However, I hope that I am putting a new, refreshing spin on the whole girl-interested-in-fashion-or-cosmetics-starts-a-YouTube-channel-that-she-hopes-everyone-will-love-because-she's-just-that-special thing. I've been considering doing this for a while because I don't think there are many vegan/cruelty-free beauty channels. That's a problem, people. So, I am going to do my best to remedy that. By the way people, I'm still in the process of building the channel, so it's not very pretty yet. Bear with me. It'll be pretty soon. I do have one video up right now. It's part of a projected series called "College Cosmetics." Warning though, I have been experiencing a few technical difficulties with the video. Hopefully, those will be resolved shortly. Oh, since Google owns YouTube, this comes with a Google + page, which I plan to utilize for minor updates as well as alerts of things. I'd totally love for everyone to go follow it! Add me to ALL your circles! <3

Also, heads up, I'm changing the name of this blog to "Vegetabelle" and the web address is going to be www.vegetabelle.blogspot.com . I hope that doesn't cause any problems for anyone! I know I've changed the name of the blog twice now, but I do not foresee any other changes in the future. I love the name vegetabelle. I think it's super-adoreable. I mean, it's like "vegetable" because it's about vegan stuff, and "belle," which is French for "beautiful," because it involves cosmetics and fashion.

I promise I'm not dropping the food section of this blog. In fact, I may even do cooking tutorials? I'm not sure. We'll have to see about that.

Everyone. I really need your feedback. If you like seeing my face and actually hear me talk and watch me demonstrate things, then I will continue with the beauty channel. If you people are like "meh, you've got a face for radio," then We can ll just pretend this never happened, and go back to blog-only.

Lastly, I would like to apologize for being so inactive recently. I am working on fixing that. I'm in a very project-oriented major right now for school, so that means not a whole lot of time to write or talk about my opinions on life, the universe, and everything. I'm super sorry.

If you have any questions or comments, PLEASE leave a comment for me. I love hearing from you awesome readers.

Runway Wednesday: Humanitarian of the Week

Today, my post has absolutely nothing to do with veganism. In fact, it has nothing to do with Animal Rights. I'm not even going to be talking about Environmentalism. This is, however, related to activism.

There are a lot of charities, and non-profit organizations out there, and sometimes it is hard to decide which ones to support. Sometimes it's even hard to know HOW to support the ones you want to. Especially with humanitarian-type charities, the problem is often very far away, or out of the boundaries of our finite eyesight. You can always donate money, but not very many people have the kind of money that they can just throw around to whichever charities they run across. Even when you'd like to donate money, it's often difficult to know which charities need it the most. I mean really, there are hundreds of thousands of cancer support charities, and while that is a noble cause, what about the charities that say, help feed starving orphans? Not many of us run across starving orphans every day, so that sort of things tends to be out of sight, out of mind.

I have recently discovered an organization that is the solution to all of those problems. Sevenly is a group of people who were trying to solve these same problems. They have now made it their mission "to harness the power of art and community to build sustainable awareness and funding movements that support charities in their efforts to change the world." This is a small organization comprised of artists and researchers who find worthy charities that need support, and they create designs for clothing that they turn around and sell to raise support for their charity of the week. Every shirt, tank top, hoodie, tote bag, etc. donates $7 to a specific non-profit. They have both guys and girls designs, and multiple styles and colors of apparel to appeal to as large of a target audience as possible. Every design has a story behind the art to show what inspired it, but each design is only available for 7 days. New designs are available every Monday at noon, but orders for the previous week's shirts are processed exactly up to that point. Once the time is up, the orders are processed so they never run out before the week is up.

Organizations they have worked with in the past include. . .

1Love - Helped put abandoned babies and toddlers into nurseries and provide with them with the necessities they need to survive.
Feed My Starving Children - Each purchase provided the money to feed a child in Thailand for a month.
The Sheepfold - Raised money to put abused women and children in safe-houses.
Somaly Mam - Funded a raid on a brothel in Cambodia to free women and children who had been sold into sex-slavery.

. . . And so many more.

This week, they are raising support for Autism Speaks, a charity that provides tools and therapy for children with severe autism that helps them learn to communicate with their families. The extra cool thing about it is that someone is doubling the money they raise for Autism Speaks, up to $180,000. Sevenly is also selling iPhone cases this week with both guys and girl's designs. Pretty cool, huh? Even if you can't buy something from them, they really appreciate you sharing the page on all your social networks. That way, maybe someone else can hear about it for the first time, and buy something to support the week's charity.

I am really hoping that I can get this week's design featuring the phrase "Live Loud for Autism."



I've bought 3 other shirt in the past few weeks, but since the designs are only available for 7 days, and I can't find an archive anywhere, I can't show you the designs. Maybe I'll just have to take a picture wearing them myself.

Anyway, I think that Sevenly is a great way to become aware of different organizations and charities, and show support for a myriad of organizations with Sevenly's amazing apparel art.

Does this sort of organization seem helpful to you? Are you interested in humanitarian non-profits like this one? Had you heard of Sevenly before? Give your opinion in a comment!

Update: I have added this to my Runway Wednesday series, even though I wrote this post a long time before the Runway Wednesday series started.

Animal Testing Poetry Reading

So, earlier, I posted the poem I had written about animal testing, "For the Sake of Progress." Well, I decided to do a video reading of it for an I Am Peta2 video for street team points. (By the way, if you haven't joined the Peta2 Street Team, you should. Its a great way to get active for animal, and you can earn free stuff!) Anyway, I decided to share my video here. Even if you're not the biggest fan of poetry, it would mean a lot to me if you all watch it anyways! Just think of it as me telling you a story that happens to rhyme and have meter. ;) Give the video a "thumbs up" if you like it, and feel free to share it on whatever social networks you use. (I think you have to go to the video's page on YouTube to share it.) The goal here is to expose people to the negative side of animal testing, and to get some traffic to the Peta2 website where people can learn more about animal rights. Thanks!