May Favourites

Sorry that it is quite significantly into June and I am only just posting this, trying to get into the blogging routine.

from left to right: soap&glory sugarcrush buttercream, soap&glory sugarcrush body wash, nina by nina ricci, john freda hair mousse, body shop face exfoliator, l'oreal micellar solution, e45 cream and elizabeth arden 8 hour cream.

e45 cream and elizabeth arden 8 hour cream

May for many people including myself was a time of exams and deadlines and just a lot of stress in general. As per usual my skin reacted to this by having an absolute bitch fit, random breakouts but the worst had to be the explosion of eczema and general dry skin on my face and on my body. I am used to this occurrence now and tackled it head on with no mercy! E45 cream and Elizabeth Arden 8 hour cream became my staples for everyday skin care and I laid off the makeup or anything perfumed (which I normally avoid anyway) until it had all cleared up, these two products are life savers.

body shop aloe gentle exfoliator

This is a great exfoliator which is essential for my dry skin, but I have found that many exfoliators are highly perfumed and can be quite harsh in my sensitive skin, but this exfoliator has little fragrance and also calms down any redness. 

l'oreal skin perfection 3-1 micellar solution

I have almost finished the bottle of this, and I just think it is a great makeup remover and I genuinely believe that it does a great job of clearing my pores, especially on and around my nose. 

sugar crush body wash and buttercream

I guess this next one counts as skin care, it is the Soap & Glory Sugarcrush  Body Wash and body butter. I just love the scent so much it smell of really sweet lime and brown sugar, I feel like I become a lime cheesecake or a key lime pie every time I use it, I advise you to go sniff it next time you are in Boots and I assure you that you will be addicted to it! And the body butter is really moisturising and makes my skin feel amazing. Ooh and I love that the body wash has a pump, so handy!

john freda luxurious volume thickening mousse

In regards to hair care there is only one thing that I seek and that is volume, its not that I have very thin or fine hair its quite the opposite, I have a lot of hair and due to this it is very heavy and can sometimes just drag itself down flat to my head, which I something that I cannot stand. So for a while I have been using the John Freda luxurious volume thickening mousse which I think does a pretty good job of injecting a bit of life at the roots of my hair, I am impressed.

perfume

My absolute favourite scent of all, Nina Ricci perfume, Nina, has finally reached its peak time of usage, spring/summer. This perfume not only has such an adorable bottle but I am head over heels in love with the smell, I have used it as my one and only perfume for almost two years and I cannot get enough. And unfortunately I am running out, in fact this bottle is not long for this world (sob) and I do have many other perfumes that I could wear, but it just won't be the same.

makeup

My May makeup favourite is a bit of a wide generalisation, but I have been absolutely loving all things orange. I have take a photo of some that I have been wearing a lot of this month. As you can see they are mainly lip products but a sneaky nail varnish has made it in. I just love all these colours! There may be the odd coral in there but I'm counting them as orange. 

left to right: rimmel apocalips in luna, l'oreal glam shine stain splash in 501 bonnie, bourjois rouge edition in 09 orange pop up, topshop lipstick in infrared, 17 supreme shine lipstick in hot flash, revlon lip butter in tutti fruiti and juicy papaya and barry m nail paint in block orange.  

I just think that these shades are great for summer as they are so bright and cheery, and they really complete a summer day or night time look. I think they suit my skin tone well and look great on pretty much everyone.

I have also been loving ALL of my real techniques brushes they are just a dream to apply all of my makeup with, and washing them doesn't take half as long!

randoms

And a few random favourites to finish, a recentish purchase of mine was a gorgeous River island purse, now for some reason this extreme bright purse tickled my fancy and the more I looked at it and held it the more any doubts about it, being too bright or too out there, vanished and I was sold. In the bright sunny weather we have been having recently it fits in beautifully, very happy.

The book that I have recently been engrossed in and have just finished is the 'Intimate Adventures of a London call girl' by Belle de Jour. Note: this book is not for the faint hearted or indeed the under 18's. This is the book that the 'Secret Diary of a call girl' with billy piper in is based on, now the tv program is tame compared to this book. However, instead of it just being pages crammed with sex scenes (a la fifty shades), it has a very endearing and intriguing character at the heart of the story as well as a great plot! I will be getting the sequel as soon as I can!

river island purse-£17 and book-£5.99 from amazon
(or free if you rob it off a friend like I did.)

And that's all of my May favourites, any ideas for blog posts or reviews are welcome! Thanks for reading :)

Mahoosive Haul: Part 2

Second and final installment will hopefully not be as long and rambley as it is only based on two little trips into town. By town I mean Manchester city centre.

I went in on Wednesday with several goals in mind, first being the awaited beginning of my MAC eyeshadow palette. So I bought the actually palette part first and due to the sheer amount of eye shadows I thought I should seek some help. The most wonderfully helpful man picked out 15 shades that he thought would suits my skin (fair)and eye colour (greenish), with my preferences of colours (mostly natural) in mind. He was so amazing and really made the experience enjoyable, he swatched all of the colours and wrote them down for me, for future purchase reference. 

left card: carbon, print, silver ring, brule, shroom, all that glitters.
middle card: sable, sumptuous olive, espresso.
right card: amber lights, texture, rule, swiss chocolate, embark, woodwinked.

The three colours that I chose were, sumptuous olive, woodwinked and espresso (which I will use to fill my eyebrows). I think that these are great to start my palette off with as they are ones that I don't have anything similar to already.

From left to right: sumptuous olive, woodwinked and espresso-£12 each

The only other thing that I picked up was another vest top from h&m which I ended up changing into because it was so warm and it looked so good with what I was wearing, win!

I then took a wander into Topshop next and decided to use the gift voucher my lovely flat mates got me for my birthday that I had been holding onto since March! I couldn't see any clothes that I particularly wanted, always the way when you have money, so I mooched over to the makeup. I picked up two great summer lipsticks in the colours Infrared, which I have been lusting over for ages and Tease. Infrared is a gorgeous bright orange velvet finish lipstick which will look so amazing on those sunny days we are all expecting, and Tease is a cute but bright pink matte finish, which says it is moisturising but I think I would need to use a lip balm.

From left to right: infrared and tease-£8 each

The next trip was an unexpected trip into town after seeing Dirty Dancing in the theatre (very good, but not as good as the film, no one can beat Swayze!) and I needed to nip into town to return a pair of jeans to New Look. I somehow ended up in Primark...long story short I bought a lot of stuff. I have been looking for a maxi skirt for so long now and it happened to be the first thing I laid my eyes on, it is in a jersey material which hopefully won't make me overheat too much, and is a gorgeous burnt orange colour, my obsession with orange continues. I grabbed more vest tops for the summer, a cream see-through sleeveless shirt and the most gorgeous, bright ombré blue shirt which look amazing on and I love!! I also picked up some little earrings which I already have in two other colours but I just love the style so much I got them in blue.

Clockwise from top left: orange maxi skirt-£10, white sleeveless shirt-£8, blue ombre shirt-£12, stripey vest-£4 and blue polka dot vest-£4.

I also picked up from Boots a No.7 Beautiful Skin Radiance exfoliator for normal/dry skin after a recommendation, to inject some life into my skin, tried it when I got home, it was so perfumed it made my skin burn, in the bin you go. Not good for skin sensitive to fragrance/perfumes.

So that's the end of my very long haul and I don't even want to know how much money I spent, but the purse has been well and truly put down so no more splurges for a while, boo.

A very late May favourites will be up soon, byeee!

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Mahoosive Haul: Part 1

So this post is going to be a bit of a collective makeup/clothes/beauty haul. This shopping was not all done in a day, it is partially an online boots order and three separate shopping trips. As it is so large I think it will have to be in separate parts.

So firstly after a very unsuccessful trip to Boots I gave up and went home to order online as stock is pretty much guaranteed. 

I ordered a few Real Techniques brushes, I already own a few and I love them I so really wanted to extend my collection. I got the core collection, the expert face brush and the shading brush. These again lived up to my expectations and I use most of them everyday.

the expert face brush-£9.99, the core collection included the buffing brush, the contour brush, the pointed foundation brush and the detailer brush-£21.99 and the shading brush-£7.99

I had been eyeing up the No.7 beautiful skin bb cream for a while so I got that in the shade fair, for normal/dry skin as I have quite dry skin and nobody wants a patchy face. This is by far the best bb cream I have tried or owned. It just makes my skin look like an improved version of itself and feels nice and light when it's on, so big thumbs up to No.7. And as it was a 2 for 1 on No.7 products I ordered some pointed tweezers to tackle those hideous short eyebrow hairs that you have to leave to grow a bit before removing. Overall happy with this part of the haul.

bb cream, normal/dry skin in fair-12.99 and the pointed tweezers-£8.00

On Monday I traipsed to the Trafford Centre in Manchester with the main aim of hitting Selfridges (yay). So when I arrived I generally had a browse as I haven't been to the Trafford centre that often. After establishing that the Debenhams did not have a MAC counter, a concept foreign to me, I made a beeline for Selfridges. 

I went straight to the MAC counter and described to a very helpful girl what I was looking for and my skin type (foundation with medium to full coverage, skin dry with quite an unevenly textured complexion...sounds attractive, just means that my skin is not smoothy smooth like a bambino's). She suggested the studio sculpt foundation and the mineralise foundation. I asked to look at the Studio Sculpt, so she proceeded to match me to a colour, biggest benefit of high end makeup! She took off the makeup I had on (loreal lumimagique did not like this foundation at all, will have to give it another go for a fair trial) and matched me to NC15...pale!! I then expressed some interest in the face and body foundation as I'm going on holiday and the water resistanceness was appealing. She attempted to match me to a colour until she exclaimed that I was too pale...that's right folks too pale for MAC, how awkward. She gave me a sample of C1 in case I get a tan. 

studio sculpt foundation NC15-£24.00

I then wandered about a bit and found myself at the Nars counter oops, and somehow managed to find myself being matched to the Sheer Glow foundation, to which Mont Blanc was seamless to my skin, fabulous! This is not the lightest colour either so it's a good foundation for us pale ones. I then somehow started talking about primer and she recommended the Nars primer (what a surprise) at the time it sounded like a great idea! So I  then also purchased the Pro-Prime multi-protect primer. I've used once on top of my liz Earle skin repair moisturiser for dry/sensitive skin and I did look a little like I had dipped my face in oil, dewy doesn't even cover it, this did then show through the foundation and caused it to slide about, again I need to give it another test. 

sheer glow foundation-£30.50 and pro-prime primer-£25.00

On my walk out of the shop I picked up some ghd curl holding spray so hopefully when I curl my hair, the curls will have a bit of a longer life span.

After making quite a dent in my purse I left the makeup area and went to forever21 for some summer clothes shopping. After trying on what felt like a hundred things I bought a cute pair of patterned shorts, which makes a change to the many denim pairs that I own. Then  for my summer staples, I picked some loose vest tops that could just be worn with anything over the summer. The mint and white candy striped vest is my favourite and is what I actually wanted my background of my blog to be, but alas I couldn't have. 

cannot remember the prices of these for the life of me, but collectively they all cost about £35 

I grabbed another vest top from new look as well in a really wearable blue colour that I thought would be great for summer.

Because I can't help myself I popped into Boots and Superdrug. In Superdrug, I was mainly looking for MeMeMe makeup as it was a pretty big shop, unfortunately it wasn't stocked (it doesn't seem to be anywhere anymore, please don't tell me it's gone for good?!) I still managed to pick up Real Techniques blusher brush, a cosmopolitan blending sponge, which is so much softer and nicer than the Models Own ones which hurt they were that firm, I also got a eyebrow shaping brush to try and tame my crazy brows.

And finally from Boots I didn't get anything too exciting as there was no high street/drugstore makeup how disappointing, just picked up a hair bun doughnut thing, a wide toothed comb and a big hair clip to try and reduce any damage my hair encounters over summer due to my dip dye abuse my hair has undergone.

So this ends part one of this saga the next and final segment will be up soon!