So I've Fallen Out With Suncream...

...But there's some other SPF formulas that I'm loving right now.

The sun has (finally) started to show it's face in Manchester, and it's actually been almost too hot. When I went on my annual trip to stock up on suncream I decided to stray away from my usual traditional suncreams and my P20 options in favour of some newer formats and I'm really impressed.

The format that I've been enjoying the most is one that been around for a while: oil. I like oil-base sun protection because generally they're even more moisturising than the traditional cream/lotion based formulas and they're basically goof-proof when it comes to white-casts and streaky application. The oil I've been enjoying this year is the Golden Protect Protective Oil Enriched with Shea Butter from Garnier's Ambre Solaire range. This is a light, non-greasy formula that is water resistant and moisturising on the skin. It comes in multiple sun protection factors, personally I generally go for a factor 30 across the board. I also like that this formula has a subtle sheeny finish to it that gives the skin that glow that we all want in the summer.

Nivea have a brilliant range of sun protection products and the one that really caught my eye was the Protect and Refresh Cooling Sun Mist. This is a super fine formula that is applied to the skin via an aerosol spray can. At first glance I thought that this product would be the perfect answer to the problem of topping up facial SPF throughout the day without disrupting makeup but I was a bit disappointed to find that the directions specify that you can't spray this directly onto the face. I'll still get enough use out of this since it's nice and refreshing on the skin for reapplication but I'd love to see something along the lines of this that is completely safe for use on the face.

The last sun care product that caught my eye this time around was Nivea's Lip Care Sun Protect SPF30. Again, I love Nivea's sun protection range and they're also known for their lip balms so I figured this was a pretty obvious choice. The formula is light but nicely hydrating and the scent/flavour is nice but not overpowering as well. I even really like the packaging with the pop of summery yellow and it's a great one to slip into your handbag.

February Favourites

Another month down and it's been a good one for new discoveries. I have quite a few things to talk about this month so lets get right down to it.

I'll start with one that's possibly a bit obvious: in my post about the new releases to the Urban Decay Gwen Stefani line, I made my feelings towards the Lipsticks in that collection pretty clear (click here if you missed it!). I have gone back and picked up the shade "Rock Steady" (resisting hard on the other shades - surely buying them all is a little extreme?) but it's the shade "Firebird" that really has my heart. It's an awesome deeper bright pink and it's super comfortable and so unique and my other lipsticks have barely had a look in this month. Seriously, love.

With a bold lip I've been going for something a little less in-your-face on the eyes and I've been gravitating to the Love of Colour One and Done Shadow Stick in the shade "Champagne Problems". I got this in my Birchbox this month and LOC is an in-house brand at Birchbox and let me tell you, these shadow sticks aren't messing around. They're £8 each and they're pigmented, long lasting, creamy eyeshadow sticks and you'll be hearing more about this brand in an upcoming post. My only complaint? There's only 2 shades available in the UK right now - LOC, please release more!

Another Birchbox win this month was the Spectrum Collections Tapered Finishing Brush. This brush retails for £7.99 and it's a really lovely brush for contouring the cheek bones. I love that it's so colourful and even though it's only £7.99 full price it feels really sturdy and nicely made. For those of you that want vegan friendly, cruelty free brushes these are also synthetic bristle brushes.

Ive been getting back into using setting sprays. I went off them because the only ones on the market were a bit up there in price and for me they didn't do an awful lot - Ive had the Urban Decay De-Slick Setting Spray in my collection for years. On a recent trip to Boots I saw that the L'Oreal Infallible Fixing Mist had come over to the UK and it was in my basket before you could say "setting spray". I'm still not sure if it's doing much for the longevity of my makeup but it does make my base apply a little nicer as it gives some slip and I've been using it every day since I got it.

And finally? Hair masks. I've not been into hair for ages but I'd been wearing it up off my face a lot for a few weeks and noticed the ends were feeling a bit brittle and not as soft as they normally are. Depending on how much time I have in the shower I've either been reaching for the Swell Ultimate Volume Masque or the Philip Kingsley Elasticizer in the "Geranium & Neroli" scent. I personally prefer the effect of the Philip K option, it's a bit of a faff having to dampen the hair, put the mask in and then leave for 5-10 minutes before shampooing but the effect is great.

My Autumn Beauty Boosters

So the mornings have started to get quite crisp round these parts lately and the sun seems to be setting earlier and earlier every day and that can only mean one thing: autumn is well and truly on it's way. Autumn is my favourite season and I'm looking forward to snuggling back into my chunky knits and boots. So now the weather's settling down and the light is starting to fade a bit, here's my autumn beauty edit:

 In the summer I actually took a quick break from my Oskia Renaissance Cleansing Gel in favour of a more creamy cleanser, but now it's cooling down I'm back to using this more in the evenings as a nice pre-bed-time treat. Another skin treat I've coming running back to now the summer's saying its goodbyes is the MV Organics Rose Plus Hydrating Booster. It's a deliciously rose-scented oil that hydrates the skin well and it's another bed-time beauty boost.

I always like to go a bit darker as autumn comes in and two lipsticks I'll be reaching for a lot more will be Illamsqua "Growl" and MAC "Rebel". I've also been wearing Fleur De Force's Lipgloss in "Starry Starry Night" a lot lately but my top dark-lip pick this autumn is the Rimmel Kate Moss Lipstick in "107". I've resisted for a few years but I finally caved and it's such a beautiful colour.

If I'm not feeling a dark lip the eyeshadow palette I always come back to in the autumn is the Urban Decay "Smoked" Palette. Unfortunately they've since discontinued this and released the Naked Smokey which doesn't compare really, but you can pick up a lot of the shades in "Smoked" from UD's permanent range, my favourite is "Mushroom", a metallic grey-brown that makes a great neutral smokey eye.

For hair I like to go to town with the texture in autumn. For general volume I love the Color Wow One-Minute Transformation. It's a product I love all year long for giving my fine, flimsy hair a bit of volume at the roots. I also like a good sea-salt spray to give the ends of my hair that laid-back lived-in look. Autumn is the season for wooly hats and scarves and I think nothing goes better with a wooly hat than some messy texture in your locks. (And I know I'm not the only person who has those emergency hat days when autumn comes around).

And finally, for nails, while I'm not normally a nail polish girl I can get behind one of two nail trends that seem to come back every autumn. I love a dark or metallic nail once the days start getting shorter. I think it might be because darker nail polish formulas seem to be easier to apply than the pale/pastel colours that come back every spring and summer and a darker/metallic nail is a lot less maintenance. Whatever it is, it's a trend I can get behind and a couple I'll be cracking out this year are Essie "Bahama Mama" and Tanya Burr "New York Night", nice vampy red/purple shades are my favourite.

A Therapie Skincare Duo

I've been dying to get my hands on some Therapie products ever since I first heard about their Himalayan Bath Salts, they're hailed at giving you the best nights sleep ever and while I definitely don't have any trouble in that category, a girl loves her sleep. I did actually think that they were a bath/body brand until I heard about a serum that she'd made for LilyPebbles' mum, and as soon as I found out about their skincare range I was all over that.

So today wont feature the bath salts (but good things come to those who wait) and we'll be focussing instead on a couple of their skincare bits that I picked up recently.

Something I've really been loving trying out lately is serums, and Therapies Cherish Skin Repair Serum is a bloody good one. It's got that almost oily texture that I love and we wont even go into the smell because I could possibly right a novel in ode to the scent of this product, let's just leave it at lush. For me this product does sit on the skin for a while before it sinks in so I'd call this a PM serum, while the sits-on-your-skin feeling isn't for me in the morning, I love a product that I can really work in for overnight.

This serum is really hydrating on my skin to the extent that I could go moisturiser free in the morning if I fancied (not that I do) and leaves my skin feeling refreshed and plumped by morning. It also works equally well used as an overnight oil on it's own as it does as a serum under your regular night cream. My only complaint is that I think the essential oil content may have cause a break-out on my chin upon first use, but I'll have to keep using it to make sure that this product is the one to blame (I've been testing so many things lately that it could be one of a few).

A nice one for the AM is their Restore Aura Spray, it's a spray mist that's super refreshing for the morning and again I love the scent, it's super zingy and will definitely wake you up. I will say if you only have a budget to pick up one of these products, I'd go for the serum as the mist is a princess product if I've ever heard of one. The mist is so fine that you end up having to spray quite a lot before you feel a difference on the skin. Can't say wether or not I'll repurchase this yet but I will say it's comparable to the Caudalie Beauty Elixir but it's actually a teensy bit more affordable.

High Street Heros - Other Beauty Bits

So for the final installment of my High-Street Hero's series, I thought I'd touch on hair, nails and body. As usual I've bunched these categories together because they tend to be the beauty categories that I neglect a little bit and so I didn't have enough favourites from any of them to put together dedicated posts for them, but I still didn't want to miss them. So without further a due:

A product that I've been repurchasing for years now is the VO5 Heat Protect Spray, i just love this product as it's light, smells nice, protects my hair and isn't something that going to break the bank every time I find myself needing to make a repurchase. I have tried other heat protect sprays in the past and have liked them, but I always go back to this one. Bonus points for the spray-mist application method.

While I've recently developed a love for the Bumble & Bumble Hairdressers Invisible Oil Shampoo, it's eye-wateringly expensive for a shampoo, and so I like to rotate it with the more budget friendly L'Oreal EverPure Shampoo. I've been through multiple bottles of this now and I really like it. It doesn't contain any sulphates so it's great for my coloured hair and is less irritating on my skin (if anyone is currently suffering from horrific back acne I'd suggest looking at your shampoo because my skin has gotten to much better since switching to a sulphate-free shampoo).

For once I've only got one conditioner in my shower and that's the OGX Argan Oil Conditioner, it's just so nourishing on my hair and it's smells nice without being over-powering. I do like to do a hair mask on the weekend for a suped-up hit of hair hydration but day-to-day this does the trick perfectly.

A hair favourite that fills me with sadness is Batiste's Hint of Red Dry Shampoo, mainly because it's been out of stock for the last 4 months and I've had to go without it for such a long time that I'm worried it's in the process of being discontinued. It's my favourite dry shampoo and it's great for hiding roots if you're as bad at getting to the salon to have your hair re-coloured regularly as I am. Come back into stock soon Batiste! I need you!

For those with naturally wavy hair, I'd recommend the Naked Style Devine Curls, I picked this up on a whim and it became a favourite pretty quickly. This is the only hair styling product I ever take on holiday with me as it gives my naturally wavy hair some real curl that I love. It works in any temperature so I can use it when I'm at home too, I wash my hair, blow dry my roots and then scrunch this into the ends and let them air dry and I get some really nice curls from it.

And my final hair favourite is Ion Volume Dust, I'm not too sure how available this product is but I pick it up from Sally's and Salon Services (thank you mother for being a nail technician so I can get insane deals on beauty products). If you pick this up anywhere it's a great dupe for + Fluff Dust and it's basically one of those powders that you work into your roots to get volume.

A couple of Soap & Glory body favourites are their Heel Genius foot cream. A minty foot cream that absorbs into the skin quickly, it' designed to be applied and then worn under socks overnight but as I can't sleep in socks I use it on the weekends when I'm just hanging around the house (most of which is time I spend working on these posts actually) and it leaves my tootsies feeling nice and soft. My other favourite from them is their Pulp Friction body scrub. I've tried lots of other body scrubs in the past but I always go back to this one because it really is my favourite. The squeeze-tube bottle is a great delivery method and the formula is quite creamy so it sticks to your skin in the shower and makes for an easy exfoliation job. Also, the scent is amazing.

I thought I should include a nail polish favourite in this post because while I don't usually bother painting my finger nails, my toes nails are always painted and my favourite budget polish brand is definitely Top Shop Nails. They're so affordable and the formula is great and even better? The colour selection is insane for a high-street polish brand. Much love.

And finally a scent favourite. Now perfumes pretty consistently fall outside of my £15 budget for this series of posts so I had to think slightly outside of the box and then I realised there's a budget scent that I use constantly! The Soap & Glory Body Sprays are my scent-purchase of choice for work just because no-one wants to be using their £100 perfumes for the office now do they? I do often get compliments on their "Glam-A-Lot" scent but I also like the "Mist You Madly" fragrance.

And there we have it. Slightly shorter than the other instalments with just 10 products in this post but like I said these are categories that I struggle with. Back to my regular posts next week!

A Space NK Moment

2014 marked the first year ever that I have done a grand total of nothing to celebrate new years, why? Work. I'm a complete grump when I haven't had my 8 hours and so when I heard I was working a 10 hour shift on NYD, I promptly cleared my schedule for the evening before. So when my first-week-of-January pay check my bank, I figured a new-years treat was necessary. So lets take a look in my shopping basket.

So the product I was most excited to try was easily the Oskia Renaissance Cleansing Gel. A blogger-hyped product that per bottle works out a tiny bit cheaper than my beloved Emma Hardie Amazing Face Moringa Cleansing Balm? I just had to try it, and it really does live up to my expectations. The thick gel consistency is reminiscent of a balm cleanser as rather than foaming on the skin like most gel cleansers, this one turns almost oily in texture as you work it into the skin, making it easy to massage in for as long as you like. I use it as a second cleanse (so make-up removal, and then this) and work it into dry skin before removing with a damp flannel (wash-cloth - for any Americans wondering what a flannel is) and it leaves my skin clean but not stripped. It's another smells-amazing cleanser that has earned it's place in my cleanser cabinet for the rest of the foreseeable future.

The Caudalie Beauty Elixir is a super hyped product in the beauty-blogging hemisphere so naturally I'd been wanting to try it for a while, along with the Laura Mercier Foundation Primer so when I found the two products packaged up in a set that had ended up in the 50% off sale I had to give it a go. My mother did think I had lost my marbles slightly when she saw the "Best of Space NK" Christmas Cracker Set popping out of my delivery box but it was too good a deal to pass up. Along with the aforementioned products there was a mini Life NK Ultimate Unwind Body Wash, a Rococo Nail Apparel nail polish in "V.I.P Creme", a mini of Oribe's Supershine Nourishing Cream and a Lipstick Queen Big Bang Illusion Gloss in the shade "Cosmo".

Now you'll have already heard about the Lipstick Queen lipgloss in my "Three Ways to Valentines Day: The Dinner Date Edition" post last week, but it really was love at first swatch. With the exception of MAC's Dazzle Glass and Cremeshene Glass forumlas, I've never really been a lipgloss girl. But this was a turning point for me. The texture is smooth and almost balm-like on the lips, and with a sheer, sheeny slighty sparkley finish it makes a good fuss-free lip product that I've been wearing pretty much everyday since I got it.

While I'm a self-confessed non-hair-enthusiast, I surprisingly found the Oribe product lovely as well. It's a low maintenance hair product for the girl who likes some nourishment in her locks. I just work a pea sized amount into towel dried hair, blow dry and I'm done. It give that freshly-dyed shine to my hair and leaves it softer than I thought colour-damaged hair could ever be. It does leave the hair a little bit sleek looking but I think for a casual jeans-and-jumper day it's nice.

The Caudalie spray I'd been so interested in turned out to not be my favourite (check back on Wednesday for more info on that), the bottle produces a lovely fine mist that applies to the face wonderfully but the product didn't seem hydrating enough and was a bit too minty smelling for my taste. I'm not really into nail painting so the Rococo nail product will probably end up being passed on to a friend and the Life NK shower gel is a rather standard product (I still prefer my S&G shower products). I still haven't quite made my mind up about the Laura Mercier primer. It's a lovely formula that I'll definitely be cracking out and using up but for the price difference I think I may end up sticking with my Maxfactor Facefinity Foundation Primer when it's time to repurchase.

So Space NK's UK online store offers free delivery on orders over £60, and since I'd already spent £50+ I figured I'd drop a couple of sale products into my basket since the delivery charge would have taken me up to the £60 limit anyway. With this I picked up a mini of the Daily Fix Bath Soak and the Drift Away Milk Soak (Both form the Life NK range) and the Space NK Smoky Rose Candle, all for half price. The Space NK candle looks lovely on my bedside table, the packaging is lovely and sleek and the scent is exactly what you'd imagine, a rose scent with a hint of smokiness to it. While the burn time is great for a small candle this does mean it's a slow burner so the burn isn't as even and I can imagine that quite a lot of the wax will end up being wasted, but it kicks off a good scent never the less.

The bath products are another nice-but-pricey product, The Daily Fix Bath Soak is my favourite of the two as the scent is more to my taste but for calming sore muscles which is what the product claims to do I much prefer the Radox Muscle Soak Herbal Bath, the scent on the Radox isn't quite as nice but the effect is much better and at £2 for 500ml vs the Life NK's £6 for 150ml, it's a no brainer.

A cheeky add-on to this haul is the Sarah Chapman Skinesis Hydrating Booster, which I did purchase at Space NK, but in store rather than online with the rest of the products mentioned in this post. I went to the Manchester Beauty Chat Live a couple of weeks ago and picked this up as your entry fee was redeemable against purchases made on the night (there was also an epic goodie-bag for anyone who spent £50 or more but, again, more on that in my post on Wednesday). As I've already mentioned, I'm a big fan of Hydraluron and bloggers site the Sarah Chapman as a more sohpisticated, less tacky version. Oddly enough, I actually find it to be more tacky on my skin and, while it's a nice product, I still feel the loyalty to my original hydrating favourite and will definitely be repurchasing that over the Sarah Chapman when I run out.