TOPAZ HORIZON

In theory, my column in the Manila Bulletin comes out every Friday (did you get yesterday's paper???). In practice, heaven knows when it actually gets published haha. It really depends on the news and the ads. Say, if something really amazing happens (it's always amazing, never tragic, since my column is in the fashion section), then my column gets bumped off. Same thing happens when a big ad comes along.
This is from our photo shoot of celebrity stylist Alyanna Martinez. The column came out in the January 31 edition. You can read it online here. Funny because the title of the piece is "Style & Beauty Authority" but online it says "Beauty & Authority." Wonder what happened there.

This is for my feature on Cristina Gomez, the elegant and refined social editor of Lifestyle Asia magazine. She is sophistication personified! Her shoot was fun and comfortable since we did the shoot at her brother's house. Iñigo had a lot of fun there. This feature isn't out yet so do watch for it!

KT, sweetheart, I'm sure you've seen Chanel's Resort St. Tropez Collection 2011. This particular cashmere mini dress with guipure details caught my eye:

The dress is GBP 1,652 or USD 2,600

On Clemence Poesy, ES Magazine

On Emma Roberts, Marie Claire Nov 2010 issue

On Jessica Alba, Elle Dec 2010 issue

I'm sure, Kate, you know why that dress piqued my interest. In 2007, you created the most fabulous flowergirl-and-bridesmaid dresses for my wedding. Yes, it's different and yet very very similar. Chanel's base is pink while yours is brown.

Bridesmaid Mariel (second from left) and the coolest Summit Media girls!

The flower girls and junior bridesmaid

I like what you did better. Yes, I prefer yours over Chanel!

When God made Kate Torralba and Rajo Laurel, He sprinkled extra talent on these two fashion designers, that's for sure! Not only are they two of the most celebrated designers in the country, they also sing! Check out the music video they made for Paperdolls and Wharton.



It's so cool. Kate and Rajo really hammed it up! The models, who look like they take Lipofuze religiously, definitely have that 60s vibe going. Now I always knew Kate can sing (she always sings at weddings and she has gigs at bars almost every week) but Rajo is a surprise! I was most entertained.

If you want to see the collection Kate designed for Paperdolls, click here and here!

Last night, OK! managing editor Lana Chan and I attended the Sex and The City 2 premiere at Power Plant Mall. It was thrown by Solar Entertainment and I had a lovely time seeing old friends.

You see, unless my job requires me to go out (for example, to an advertiser's event), I haven't really been socializing since I got pregnant. Three reasons: I'm terribly sleepy, I had really bad acne in the first trimester, and I'm more susceptible to infections and diseases. When I got pneumonia, for example, that happened a week after I attended an advertiser's event. So I'm pretty much cloistered lately.

So last night was fun. There was a plethora of style--I had fun checking out dresses, bags, jewelry, heels, boots, hairstyles. Really, I think I've been cooped up too long! Thank goodness for Facebook (and this blog!), people I haven't seen in months (some, years) were not shocked to see me pregnant. We were all pretty much up to date with each other's lives!

I didn't go in the theater to watch the movie, however. I always seem to get sick when I'm in a crowded enclosed space! So I bid my friends buh-bye and went off to Sango to buy my yummy husband his dinner. 
Vince and I have always loved Sango's burgers, but after two pregnancy-induced nausea fits, we haven't had any. Thankfully, last night, my nose was cooperative! When I got home, Vince just also arrived from work (and he was soooo happy to see me! So cute!) and we had a grand time munching away happily.

So that was my night! How was yours?

Oh, today was a fun day. Had a glamorous lunch at the Manila Peninsula. Such a lovely hotel, very old, very elegant. First time I ever went there (years ago but not that long ago), I was so impressed, I said very loudly, "Wow, ang ganda naman dito!" Na-obvious tuloy na taga-bundok ako. My hubby chuckles at this story and always says he should bring me to Vegas because the hotels there are out-of-this-world amazing.

Anyway, the lunch was hosted by Pond's. They launched new concentrated serums of their whitening and anti wrinkle creams. I'll write more about those in my sadly neglected beauty blog this week. This post, meanwhile, will be about clothes!

This is me and my gorgeous friends Nicole Delos Angeles and Mariel Chua. They are soooo hot, right?

• Nicole is wearing a tank top, leather pencil skirt, bondage shoes and carrying a Prada bag. 
• Mariel is in a Kate Torralba tube dress, gold ballet flats and Forever 21 earrings (Forever 21 U.S. not the gaya-gaya store here). 
• I'm carrying my Longchamp bag (given by my friend in France, Aida). I'm wearing a Gingersnaps dress, which is a wee too short so I'll wear tights with that next time. Oh, and I love my new Kenneth Cole shoes. I bought them for Mariel's wedding and I'm breaking them in. Those purple shoes are satin and suede and super comfy! Love them!

My darling friends! Mariel and Nic were the very first people I voiced my suspicions about my pregnancy. We were lunching at Cibo on December 1 and I said, "Guys, I might be pregnant." They both squealed in delight. But I said, "I'm not sure yet so don't tell anyone." And you know, they didn't breathe a word to any soul--even to their significant others! That's friendship for ya. I don't deserve my friends really. I can't keep secrets at all!

Okay, I know I still have to continue my Uniquely Singapore Series but let me get these out of the way first. I had promised to announce some promos, events and contests and you may be interested to support them...

You can help out and rock out at the same time! Join my friend Kate Torralba and her other fierce musician pals tonight for Girls Go Tik Tok Rockin', an evening with some of the finest femme-fronted acts in town: TECHY ROMANTICS, SARAH of TAKEN BY CARS, DUSTER, UP DHARMA DOWN, TURBO GOTH and of course KATE TORRALBA!

Pass-the-hat and in-kind donations welcome! Proceeds go to typhoon victims via Rock Ed Relief. Kate will tell you more about the Tik Tok Pilipinas Campaign and how it can help mitigate Climate Change. This event is presented by KT Designs and Cafe Saguijo. In cooperation with Rock Ed Philippines, DAKILA Philippines, Tik Tok Pilipinas, Stylebible.ph and Jam 88.3 FM.

God bless you, Kate, for doing this. I'd love to go but I'm down with a really nasty bug. But I'll be sending my warmest thoughts your way!



These newlyweds are finalists in the Ultimate Thailand Explorers: Ultimate Travel Competition. Michael Paul and Jennifer have the cutest long-distance relationship love story ever! I, for one, don't believe in LDRs and then these two came along and my faith is restored! Reward their love by giving these two adventurers the ultimate honeymoon. And your good will may just win you $2,500, a Thailand travel package and HTC phones. Vote now!

I haven't gone to Thailand myself but Vince and I are planning a trip. Watched Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations visit to Chiang Mai and my mouth watered just looking at all the food he ate! Ya, I'm a food and culture traveler. Not a shopping person at all.

• Food bloggers! Share your best yummy discOVIry! Email it to fooddiscOVIry@ovi.com.
• Fashion and beauty bloggers! Share your most fashionable and beautiful discOVIry! Email it to fashiondiscOVIry@ovi.com.
• Tech bloggers! Share your best tech/gadget/game discOVIry! Email it to techdiscOVIry@ovi.com.

You'll have to create an OVI account first, though. Register here. Contest period is from October 27 to November 20. There will be 10 winners per category and each wins P1,000 Ayala e-GC. That's not a lot, if you ask me. Come on, Nokia, you're so rich, you can give more--perhaps P5,000 each?

Did you know you can now enjoy free downloads of Asphalt 4, Prince of Persia, and other premium games on your Nokia device? Ovi Store lets you download up to 10 premium games for free! These games have never before been made freely available, but you can download them for a limited time only! Too good to be true? It's possible now thanks to Nokia's partnership with Gameloft, the maverick creators of unrivaled gaming experiences. Game for it? Check out the Ovi store now!

I don't have an OVI phone but I do play Asphalt 4 on my Samsung Omnia, which I won in a contest and am loving now. Anyway, Asphalt 4 is such an annoying game! Cars... I'll never understand them!

Well, that's that. Regular programming commences tonight. Or tomorrow. I'm kinda sleepy... need to rest. Must get well before my 33rd birthday!

The reason I got to be in Singapore in the first place was because of the first ever Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards. Nuffnang is an advertising platform for blogs and I've been a member of Nuffnang for less than a year but already I've enjoyed a lot of things from them: bags, trips, educational excursions and income, of course! If I weren't so busy, I'd be more involved in all their activities. Hmmm, perhaps I'll start doing just that...

Anyway, back to the awards! I'll just be posting fashion shots here, okay? I think you'll enjoy those more! That's me and my fellow Summit Media friend, Franny Haw.

Nuffnang was founded by two really fun guys, Timothy Tiah Ewe Tiam and Cheo Ming Shen. Or Tim and Ming. Don't ask me to pronounce their full names! In just two years, their little online venture has become a lucrative advertising business straddling four countries, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and Australia, and with almost 100,000 bloggers registered in the Nuffnang community.


Ming said, "Bloggers today are getting recognized for their work, invited to events and offered product or service trials--all in a bid by companies to woo the Internet generation." Ten thousand blogs were nominated and about 60 blogs made it to the finals. Nope, Topaz Horizon didn't make it; that wasn't why I was there--I came as a member of the media so thank goodness for my job!


Anyway, after meeting the finalists from the Philippines and reading the blogs from the other countries, I am really beginning to think of taking this blogging thing seriously! Some bloggers earn thousands of dollars. That's insane money for just typing away your thoughts. Journalists--usually following a strict code of journalistic ethics--don't even earn that much. I'm not complaining, being an earning blogger myself, but I do have reservations about financially rewarding bloggers who are not guided by journalistic principles. Just because your blog is popular (usually through controversy) does not mean it's the authority on certain issues.


Ming understands this and says, "Bloggers need to carry the responsibility that comes with the power they have over society's opinions and day-to-day decisions. We hope that through Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards, bloggers will realize the importance of quality content in blogs. Tonight's winners are great examples of blogs which attracted a huge following through uploading quality content."


So congratulations to the 12 winners:
Best Blog Shop: Bonito Chico
Best Food Blog: I Eat, I Shoot, I Post
Best Fashion Blog: Lady Melbourne
Best Parenting Blog: Childhood 101
Best Travel Blog: En Route
Best Celebrity Blog: A Jolly Affair
Best Entertainment Blog: Kenny Sia
Best Geek Blog: Mr. Gadget
Best Hidden Gem: The Doodle Blog
Best Original Blog Design: Xia Xue
Most Influential Blog: Xia Xue
Region’s Best Blog: Xia Xue


And did I mention the fabulous prizes? Anywhere from top-of-the-line Canon cameras to a whopping SGD 5,000 from Pringles! That's PHP 169,971.75 (USD 3,573.43), people!

I did enjoy the glamorous awards night and I laud the efforts of Nuffnang to honor quality content--I do hope that they will truly recognize quality content more than just popularity but I don't want to talk about that. As for my opinion on advertising on blogs, well, let me get through this entire series first before I talk about that! More tomorrow!


More awards night photos here. I would like to thank Nuffnang and the Singapore Tourism Board for this Uniquely Singapore Series.

This is a post script of sorts to the previous post. Just had a meeting with Mr. Wilson Yuloque of Pioneer Films, the distributor of Twilight Saga: New Moon here in the Philippines. I told him that there's a cardboard Edward in Megamall and that girls are lining up to have a photo with him. It's pathetic but look who had a fun time with it! (Oops, bad hair day!)Mr. Yuloque found that hilarious. I guess it's hard to believe that Rob is such hot property these days that he nearly got run over by a taxi as he was fleeing crazed fans recently. Anyway, Mr. Yuloque said he just came back from Cannes and was at a party with none other than R-Pattz himself. He told me that:

• Robert Patterson is very tall (cardboard Edward is not life-size), very funny, very polite, very clean and smells really nice. So to that rumor that the guy doesn't shower and is filthy, well, it's not true!
• In the whole of Asia, Filipinos are most crazy about Twilight. Yup, it's the Philippines, not Japan, that is Twilight's biggest Asian market. The franchise--book and film--is making crazy millions upon millions (of dollars!) from us Filipinos.
• There are only 50 original film posters currently available in the Philippines and OK! magazine now owns one!

Lana, our Managing Editor and the Twilighter in OK!, is absolutely in love with the poster.

Me? I'm in love with my shoes. They're Delicious from Anthem at the Power Plant. They're 5 inches high and just utterly comfortable. I think I'll wear them all week. Oh, end of the week is when my beauty giveaway ends. Make sure you join!

I love this Kate Torralba dress. It's a backless halter with deep pockets hidden in each side of the tulip skirt. It's a housewife dress--sexy, comfy. My husband definitely agrees with the sexy part!

Anyway, my favorite part of the dress is the print. I call it the Stepford Wife dress because look at the pictures!And though you may find it ironic that a career woman like me loves a dress like this, you'll be more surprised to learn that I can cook, wash, iron, mend, sew, polish, scrub, and do a lot of housewifely things very very well! After all, I was trained since I was 5 years old to be a wife (yep, my parents had but one ambition for me) so I can keep a house and manage a career, too. Stepford Wife!

Dear heaven, I've forgotten about these pics! Was going through my Facebook yesterday and found some photos of myself--some unflattering (which I will not post here!). Oh well, that's what happens when you're not ready for the camera... or even if you are and you just happen to be having a fat day!

Let's do this chronologically, shall we...

Additional pic from the Kerastase event a couple of weeks ago. My pose is rather awkward, isn't it? Must be the camera and the shopping bag I was carrying--they were kinda heavy.

Wine Night! Every month, Kat Dy, Red de Leon, Nicole Delos Angeles and Nichole Reyes and I unwind and catch up over bottles of wine. I can only handle white wine actually as I'm allergic to red. I'm the one with eyeglasses. With each Wine Night, more and more people are added! I've met fascinating and weird people, true, but Wine Night is never boring as a result!

Christmas with my Sales family. Vince and I are on the top row, center. We're a happy lot! Lots of kids! Super noisy, super chaotic, super lots of gifts!

This was taken last September. That's me in the short brown dress. My staff and I went to the province of Quezon and we ate and ate ate. Crabs the size of dinner plates, prawns as big as your hand, fresh fish each more than a foot long. And that's just one meal. That was a food trip that went beyond what we can handle.

Oh boy, I look so Chinese here. This was taken summer of last year. Nichole and some other media friends and I just attended the Marc Jacobs store opening and since there was no food (why do the organizers of fashion and beauty events always think we women don't eat? Or that we're all vegetarians?), we converged at Cibo and ate and ate and ate. Anyway, I love my bangs and my turquoise ring!

This was March 2008, I think. My friend Kate is about to open her store in Greenbelt 5 and this was her party. I'm wearing a Kate Torralba tube dress with the loveliest cherry blossoms embroidered all over the front.

I have no idea when this was taken but based on my hair and the fact I no longer have braces, I'd say late 2007. I had just learned how to mix drinks in a crash course by L'Oreal Paris.

A paparazzi photo of me at my wedding in April 2007. This was just before I stepped out of the Jaguar (loaned so generously by my sister-in-law's mother-in-law) and all my friends and bridesmaids were telling me to relax. Do I look nervous? No, baby. I was in the zone at this point!

Ooh la la. Me and my friends Mariel Chua and Jigs Mayuga at the Preview Ball 2006. My skin was soooo bad but Jigs--L'Oreal Paris Chief Makeup Artist!--fixed me up good. Gosh, I miss those legs!

Oh my, this is Preview Ball 2005! I am wearing a Kate Torralba sheer shirt with colored beading plus matching tube top and super short shorts. In 2005, I had no cellulite and I still had a waist so thank the heavens for this photo! I can show it to my kids one day and say, "See? Mommy used to be hot!"