Fleur's Lip Launch

When Fleur De Force announced that she was releasing a makeup line I headed straight to feel unique and signed up to the waiting list. In her videos her lipstick has always been something she gets right and I just had a feeling that the lip products in the range would be something worth trying. While the eyeshadow quads looked nice they weren't really unique to me and I decided against picking them up but maybe I'll give them a go if she releases some more unique combinations in the future as they did look nice.

While they're currently only being sold on FeelUnique.com the price £6.99 each price point puts them as a high-street product for me so I thought it would be fair to include them in skint-tember and for the money they seem to be really nicely though out products, I can see myself possibly trying out some more shades in the future.

So I just picked up two shades to begin with, and the shades I have are "Starry Starry Night" and "Written In The Stars". I like how she's got a clear theme with the product names but I do think that it will be hard to continue with the "star theme" if she goes on to release more products but I like the amount of thought that's gone into the products. I picked up a light shade and a darker shade to see if there was any difference in the formula and from what I can see it's a nice consistent range and both the lighter and darker shade show up glossy and opaque as the mentioned in the description for the products. The packaging is also nice, a gun metal top and doe-foot applicator and the "Fleur De Force" logo on them, and the lipgloss tubes reflect the colour of the product inside which I like.

In terms of the actual formula, the glosses are thick on the lips and you can feel them during wear but they are a smooth texture rather than a super sticky gloss. The thickness gives them a decent lasting power on the lips and they're comfortable and moisturising on the lips rather than sticky feeling. Fleur describes them as "somewhere between a lipgloss and a liquid lipstick" and I can see why she'd use that description, they're glossy in finish but are also opaque on the lips and don't need too much building-up. I will mention with the darker shades, I did experience a slight bit of bleeding with "Starry Starry Night" and that's not something I get very often with lip products so if that's something you struggle with I'd keep that in mind.

By Terry Ombre Black Stars - The Review

So let me kick things off by saying, these are some very pricey eyeshadow sticks. I finally caved and bought myself a couple just to see if they were all that the bloggers have been saying they are, and honestly? I'm not sure.

From a format point of view they are beautifully packaged in gold with a band around the base of the shadow stick indicating the colour so if you have multiple shades it's easy to differentiate which is nice. They are also a twist-up format which negates the need for one of those jumbo sharpeners which again works in the products favour.

My First Ombre Blackstar purchase was "Misty Rock" and this shade alone is no-doubt worth the money. It's beautiful. While many of the high-street brands are coming out with comparable products, I haven't seen a Misty Rock dupe among the aisles of Boots yet. Mistry Rock is a light pink-y shade with a gorgeous silvery sparkle-y iridescence to it that give it an almost wet-look on the eye, but it's still pretty and very subtle and fresh looking which has been lovely for the beginning of spring (in other news, Manchester is finally seeing the sun for the first time in what feels like years, but I digress).

Had I just purchased Mistry Rock and done this review on that shade alone, this would have been a rave review, but having loved that shade, I also picked up "Brown Perfection", which comparatively was slightly disappointing. Don't get me wrong it's still a lovely product, I just don't think it has the uniqueness that in my eyes makes Misty Rock worth the money. The medium-deep bronzey brown makes a lovely liner shade but if you try to smudge it all over the lid it sheers out so quickly. While you can apply Misty Rock from the stick and smudge it with your fingers I think Brown Perfection needs a brush so that you don't blend all of the colour away too quickly. Brown Perfection looks lovely when you use it, it just takes a bit more work.

There are a couple more colours in the line that I've been eyeing up but I'm definitely going to have to swatch extensively in store before I commit, seems like the lighter shades are easier to work with than the darker ones to me but I'll update if I find any different.

My Makeup Storage Solution. (For a Medium-Sized Collection)

When I first got properly into makeup, a problem arose pretty quickly: Where do I store all of this?

Seems like a pretty easy question to answer on the surface, but as my collection grew out of a make-up bag, and then out of a small box in a drawer, I was finding it more and more difficult to store my makeup in a space and user friendly way. So I hit the drawer board pretty hard and eventually I cam up with this solution: A drawing desk. For me, a drawing desk was the most obviously wonderful way to store a bigger-than-average-but-not-completely-excessive kind of collection. I haven't got the typical blogger/vlogger huge collection, so a massive dressing table and the ever popular Ikea Alex Drawers were a bit more than I needed, but in the same token, a standard dresser or Muji Acrylic Drawers were a little too small. I got this drawing table from Dunelm Mill about a year ago for a really reasonable price. There was a traditional style dressing table in the collection but the drawers were just too small and I'd have never been able to fit all of my makeup in them, however the drawing table has all the space seen in the picture to the right, plus a very comfortably sized drawer underneath that homes my backups and some products that I don't use very often.

I use a cutlery divider to divide up my products into categories, and then slide palettes in both beside the cutlery divider and in the smaller partitions hanging from the inside of the top of the drawing table. I then have a small tin with a small bottle of moisturiser to mix in with foundations on days where I want less coverage, a small bottle of hand sanitiser (my favourite is the Soap & Glory Hand Maid one), a lip exfoliator, a pencil sharpener and some miscellaneous small tools (tweezers, lip brushes etc). The top of the drawing table has a flat surface on which I store a makeup mirror, two pots for brushes (one for face brushes, one for eyes) and then a smaller pot for eye/lip liners, brow pencils and other pencil shaped products/tools.

Then in the cutlery divider itself, I divide products into complexion, cheeks, eyes and lips. So foundation, primers, concealers and setting sprays in the front, blush, bronzer, powder and highlights in the middle. I keep lipsticks, balms and glosses at the back and then eyeshadow, eye primer, pigments, small palettes and mascaras live down the side.