Empties One

Something I've mentioned here on the blog befor is the Clean and Clear Deep Action Cream Wash which is a super affordable creamy cleanser, it's light and wakes you up in the morning and can be removed either with a hot, damp wash cloth or simply splashed off with water. This is my go to cleanser for traveling as traveling with flannels can be difficult.

I have quite a few empties from Soap & Glory, the first of whic being their Heel Genius foot cream which is a product I've (again) mentioned on here before. It's great for those with super dry skin on their feet. I have also used up a Soap & Glory The Righteous Butter and a mini of the Saop & Glory Butter Yourself, I love Soap & Glory body butters as they're super moisturising but they sink in well. I love the scent of the Righteous Butter and would repurchase this one, however the scent on the Butter Yourself wasn't my favourite and I won't be picking up another of those. I also love the Sugar Crush range and have noticed they've released this scent in a body butter and so I will be picking up one of those as soon as I can! It will be unsurprising to know tat I've used up a Soap & Glory One Heck of a Blot, as I've said on multiple occasions, this is my favourite setting powder and I definitely need it now that we're having a mini heat wave in the UK!

I'm a big fan of dry shampoo and have used up a full size of the Batiste Blush dry shampoo. I love the scent on this but it does leave a white cast so I use this more as an over-night dry shampoo on occasions where I know I'm not going to have enough time to wash it in the morning. My favourite dry shampoo ever is the Batiste Hint of Colour Vibrant and Red I would buy it again but it's proving difficult to find! I hope it's not been discontinued as it's a great dry shampoo and it's good for covering up roots.

I finally finished up my Benefit It's Potent Eye Cream, which was the pot that just kept on giving, it's a nice eye cream but for the money I've found some since that I like even better. Although I'm keen to try their Puff Off eye cream.

A candle I've used up is the Yankee Candle Paradise Spice, it's a cinnamon scent that's nice and warming, would repurchase but I have so many other candles that I'm burning right now that I can't justify another candle purchase until I've used up a few.

Indeed Labs Hydralyron is one of my favourite serums ever and I will definitely be buying another one in the future. At the moment I'm trying to use up the rest of my Sarah Chapman Skinesis Hydratin Booster and as soon as that makes it into an empties post, a Hydralyron will be purchased.

I've finished the GHD Heat Defence Spray but I much prefer the Vo5 Heat Protect Spray I just prefer the scent and it's an affordable product that works. Another product I don't see myself repuchasing is the MAC Fix+ I've had this for year and only just finished it as I'm not really bothered with it. I've been using it as a hydrating toner but it doesn't do much for my skin at all.

And then finaly: the Dove Invisible Protection Anti Perspirant a boring but oh-so necessary purchase. This is the only deodorant that I buy now as it's hydrating and smells nice but it does something to prevent sweat patches. Which I suppose is as good a thought to leave this post on as any, see you on Wednesday!

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.

The Perfect Palette Tag

Best Packaging - Urban Decay Vice 2

When I think "best packaging" I'm really thinking "prettiest packaging" and the Urban Decay Vice 2 Palette is definitely the palette in my collection that comes to mind for this category. It has the mixed purple plastic and the gem stone UD logo in the middle which is beautiful. However It's also quite practical. I'd never need 20 shadows when I'm traveling so it doesn't need to be thin in my opinion, but it has a lovely big mirror that you could do your whole face in and a button-press closure so it won't open randomly. I also love how spaced out the shadows in this palette are, it really helps to limit pigment-transfer. Unfortunately, it was also limited edition (sorry, my bad!).

Best Colour Payoff - Urban Decay

In general, the majority of my eyeshadow collection is Urban Decay just because their formula is lovely and their products are reasonably priced for a higher-end brand. Urban Decay offer lots of eyeshadow palettes with 10-20 shades for £30-£40 and their single shadows are around £14 which is cheaper than many other brands and their shadows are consistently pigmented and easy to blend.

Most Versatile - Urban Decay Smoked

I'll admit, I don't use this palette as much as I should, but it's a real gem. Two rows with five shadows a piece, a row of neutrals, a row of smokey colours. What more could you want? You can use the lighter neutral shades to create a day look, the black and the liner to create a cat-eye or smudge-y liner look, or add in some of the colours to really mix things up. Also, this palette contains the shade Mushroom, my favourite ever eyeshadow shade!

Best for Travel - The Balm, Balm Jovi

If there is a palette better suited to travel than the Balm Jovi Palette from The Balm, I need to hear about it, because I don't think it exists. This palette contains 12 shadows, a powder blush, a powder highlight and two creamy lip-and-cheek products and is insanely compact. The palette contains a mirror in which you could do your whole face and aside from foundation, concealer, mascara and brows, it has all the bases covered. The mix of eyeshadows is perfect, theres 4 matte fairly neutral shades, and 8 wearable colour options that range from shimmers to metallics to satins. This is the only palette I took with me for my month-long trip around Europe last year and it saw me through the whole trip for eyes and cheeks (although I did cheat a little and bring along 2 lipsticks).

Biggest Regret - MAC Quad - Brule, Gleam, Shale and Sketch

This was a really had question for me, because even things in my collection that I don't use often now have had their days of being my most reached for make-up product. The only one I can say I felt even mildly disappointed with was my build-it-yourself MAC quad, and that's mainly because I could see the sales assistant was getting annoyed at my indecisiveness and didn't give myself enough time to think it through. While the shades I picked are nice, Gleam is a neutral shimmery shade with straight-up glitter in that falls down as soon as you apply it, and Shale is so sheer and hard to work with that it looks like I use it all the time despite me having used it very little in the year that I've owned it. Sketch and Brule are nice shades and are pigmented and easy to work with, but I barely reach for the quad as I'm always having to bring in shades from other palettes to complete a look as the other two just don't work for me.

Best Colour Names - The Balm, Balm Jovi (again)

This is the only palette I have that has themed names that seem thought about to me, so I had to double up a palette and award Best Colour Names to the Balm Jovi Palette. Most of the shades in the palette are named after things that are music related, and as a Music BA Hons graduate I really love the theme for this palette.

Least Used - Urban Decay Book of Shadows NYC

Where do I even begin to explain why I don't use this palette anymore? Firstly, this was the first big eyeshadow palette I ever bought, so this is the old Urban Decay eyeshadow formula, which is no where near the formula they're putting out recently. The palette contains four shades that (Like Gleam from my MAC palette) have big chunks of glitter in that fall down your face either on application or throughout the day, leaving you looking like a glitter bomb exploded on your face by the end of the day. Additionally, the packaging on this palette is so huge that I can't store it with the bulk of my makeup, and so even the shades that are nice barely get touched as I don't think to reach into the depths of my drawers looking for it.

Most Used - Soap & Glory Lid Stuff

This is the palette that goes in my daily (work) make-up bag along with a single of Urban Decay's Mushroom eyeshadow single (my aforementioned favourite) and a few coloured eyeliners and serves as my daily eyeshadow pick. It's small and compact and has all the shades I reach for on a regular basis, three mattes and one shimmery shade, it's all I need to go from the office to the bar and can deliver no matter what eye look I'm feeling. Love.

Sarah Chapman Facial Oils: Morning VS Overnight

Despite the title of this post, I'm not going to say which of these products is "better", it's just factors to consider if you would only like to buy one and would (obviously) like to get the one that's best for you. In this post I'll explain the minor differences between the two oils so you can decide for yourself which one you'd prefer.

Morning:

Collageneer®, Juvinity™, Kalpariane®, Timecode™, Rosehip oil, Vitamin A Palmitate, Gatuline Intense®, Ultra filling spheres™, Antileukine®, Hydrasourcing (am+ps), Passion flower oil, Seabuckthorn oil, Boabab oil, Borage oil, Argan oil, Nyamplung oil.

Overnight:

Vitamin A, VCIP Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Lipobrite®HCA-4, Coenzyme Q10, Renovage™, Dermaxyl™ Oligopeptide, Alpha Lipoic Acid, Abyssinian Oil, Meadowfoam Seed Oil, Hemp Seed Oil, Melon Oil, Baobab Oil, Jojoba, Jasmine, Rose. 

So while the Morning Facial was marketed as a lighter, daytime appropriate counterpart to it's overnight equivalent, the two are very different in the inci lists. I personally enjoy them both. The AM version is a light oil, I personally don't apply it right before makeup just because it can add a bit of a slip to the face that can mess with your foundation a bit so I normally apply it, let it sit for 10-15 minutes and then go in with the makeup.

The Evening Facial is a slightly heavier oil but it still sinks in nicely. I apply it as the last step in my evening skincare routine and really massage it into the face and give me skin a real treat. The smell is very relaxing for the eveing, where the morning equivalent smells quite fresh and works for me as a wake-me-up kind of scent.

Kiehl's Midnight Recovery Concentrate - The Review

I'm sure a few of you notice that Space NK had £10 off when you spend £60 with them online this week, so as a beauty lover with a love for a bargain, I ordered myself a few things that had been on my beauty hit-list for a while, one of them being the Kiehl's Midnight Recovery Complex.

So it took me a few goes to work out how to use this product. It say's nothing on the bottle nor the box! "Apply to a freshly cleansed face", what good is that? So not knowing where to use it in my routine I tried it first in place of a serum which worked nicely, very hydrating when paired with a moisturiser and provides a little bit of slip for the cream products. But then I saw that the front of the bottle mentioned the oil content and used it as an oil step, on top of a hydrating serum without a moisturiser and it's lovely. I personally think it works as one of those serum-in-oil formulas where you can just cleanse, tone, this and be done, and who doesn't like a does-it-all product? And the smell is like a less intense MV Organics Rose Plus Booster, rose-y and sweet.

And so another oil makes it to the skincare hall of fame. I would do an updated favourite oils post, but my collection is no where near complete yet and so it would only need updating again in a few months time.

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.

SFP For Dummies

As a fully-fledged member of the paley-and-proud club, it might be unsurprising to hear that I am an absolute SFP fanatic. My sun-worshipping mother seems to question where she went wrong with me every summer when she finds me in the garden, reading a book, under a towel... Sorry mum! But the good thing about being an SPF freak? Getting to know what formula's you really get on with, and since the weather in the UK is looking pretty nice lately, I figured I'd dedicate a post to my not-so-secret obsession. Here's 3 of my must-have SPF formulations.

The first SPF I apply on a summers morning is my facial SPF. My current favourite facial SPF is the Kiehl's Ultra Light Daily UV Defense SPF 50 PA+++ UVA (long name there) which, despite the name, does provide the user with UVA and UVB broad-spectrum protection against the suns rays. It's a super light formula that you can use alone or on top of a regular moisturiser and it doesn't have any weird smells/colours to it. Being the super pale girl I am (seriously, the back of my hand is essentially the same colour as the white tube the product comes in) I can't really comment on whether any of these products leave a white cast as a white cast never shows up on my skin, but with the light feeling of this product, I can't imagine it would. If the Kiehl's is out of your budget, try the Piz Buin Allergy Face Cream, it's SPF 50+ (so, again, very high protection) and while it's a little heavier and greasier on the skin than the Kiehl's, it's at least half the price and still sits well under makeup.

For my body I like to double up on the SPF. When I'm getting ready to leave the house, I'll apply a generous amount of Riemann P20 Once A Day Sun Protection to all of the parts of my body that may be exposed to the sun during the day. It's a watery oil-y texture that can feel a little film-y on the skin when first applied and does take a good few minutes to sink in (so i'd apply this, do my skincare while it dries and then get dressed) and it's waterproof, sweatproof etc and will stay on all day. You can get it in a whole load of factors so I usually get a low-medium 20 and then a high-very high 50 to cover my bases and switch out depending on the levels of sun exposure. I like this because it's waterproof, so on holidays if I'm in the pool or whatever I still have some protection at all times. Although I'd never rely on a "Once a day" formula completely.

The thing with SPF is that it multiples the time that you can spend in the sun without getting burnt naturally by the factor you're using. This means that if you get burnt in 10 minutes, an SPF of 20 would mean it would take 200 minutes, so 3 hours and 20 minutes of sun-time. This in mind I like to take something to reapply throughout the day with me so I don't end up looking like a beetroot. For my on-the-go SPF I love dry oils like the Calypso Dry Oil Clear Protection, they're easy to apply and because they're a clear oil, they never leave a white cast on the skin, meaning you can layer them up without worrying. The Calypso one smells lovely too (like coconuts and holidays) and it's super cheap in most places too.