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2013 Make-up Favourites

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1. Collection Lasting Perfection Concealer

I don’t have a close-up picture of this because the packaging is so worn looking. The one annoying thing about this product is that the print wears off the plastic and onto your hand/make-up bag/other products. Beyond that, I have no complaints. It lives up to the hype around its concealing ability, and it’s cheap as chips. It’s not as good at concealing my dark undereye circles as my Lily Lolo concealer, but it is a lot quicker to apply. I bought it to take to a festival as I couldn’t be bothered fussing around with powder, but I’ve carried on using it on days when I’m going to work in a hurry to save a couple of precious minutes!

2. Bourjois Color Boost Glossy Finish Lipstick

I’m going to give these a full-length review with swatches and everything but for now I will say that this are fab. It seems like almost every brand has lip crayons out right now and the quality and pigmentation varies drastically. These are extremely well pigmented, and they have SPF 15. I completely adore the shade ‘Red Island’ and have been looking in every Superdrug/Boots I can in an attempt to find ‘Plum Russian’, so far to no avail.

3. Aromaleigh Penelope

I went through a massive pastel obsession in spring 2013 and was rummaging through my mineral eyeshadow stash and testing out lilacs when I found Penelope, one of the Pure Eyes Lustre eyeshadows. I’d all but ignored it before but I quickly fell in love and it became one of my go-to products. When in doubt, I wear Penelope. It’s currently in the Aromaleigh weekly sale!

4. Barry M Wink Eyeliner Pen

I bought this on a whim because it was in the Boots bargain bin for £1, but I’m quite impressed. The first eyeliner pen I ever tried was from Maxfactor, and was also my first ever liquid eyeliner. Sigh. I’m not sighing because I’m sentimental, I’m sighing because it was really crap. Poorly pigmented – basically, it was grey – and it dried up in about a month. I’m happy to say that Barry M’s Wink is much more pigmented, but unfortunately after a month or so’s use the tip got damaged and now I can’t get a precise line out of it. There’s still product left, so I was happy to discover that is almost perfect for tightlining – the tip is easy to press between my eyelashes and it lasts. I’ll probably buy a pen with a smaller nib next time but this is great for now.

5. Seventeen Lacquer Liner

My favourite liquid eyeliner is by Bourjois – Liner Pinceau. It has a proper brush, not one of those stubby foam things or one of those weird super-thin brushes that are the same width from base to tip. We were very happy together. But while I was using up my last bottle, I was tempted to try this Seventeen Lacquer Liner. Wet look eyeliner, I read. Yes please! And it is delightful, properly black, and shiny. The brush isn’t quite right, but after a few goes I got the hang of it. When I opened up a new bottle of Liner Pinceau, it seemed not quite black enough, and I missed the shine. I guess I’ll just have to keep buying both.

6. Fyrinnae Pixie Epoxy

If you’ve never heard of this before, it’s basically glue for eyeshadow. It’s designed to hold on loose powders but is great to use with pressed powders too. It makes glitterbombs like Urban Decay’s ‘Midnight Cowboy Rides Again’ actually wearable. I got this in 2012 but didn’t get the hang of it until late 2013 because I paid too much attention to all the application advice that warns you only to use a tiny bit. It turns out that yes, only a very small amount is needed, but I need need quite a bit more than as little as possible! I suggest you start with the smallest amount you can, but try a little more next time if it doesn’t seem to be working very well. Now I’ve worked out exactly how much I need to apply, I’m really happy with it.

7. LA Colors Jumbo Eye Pencils

These are only £1 in Beauty Base at the Westfields and they are great. The white, ‘Sea Shells’ makes a fantastic base for just about everything, and I regularly use the purple, ‘Bikini Time’ (yes, these do have the worst names ever) as a base for purple eyeshadows. I have two more that I haven’t used much yet – the black, ‘Sunglasses’ (seriously, worst names!), and another purple, ‘Tropical Bliss’.

8. Sun, by Gorilla Perfumes at Lush

This is one of the happiest things I’ve ever smelled. It’s basically sunshine in a bottle. Citrussy and floral at the same time. Because of the mimosa, it smells quite like the Sakura scent, which is used in the Sakura bath ballistic and the Rub Rub Rub body scrub, but most sunshine-y. I’m sorry, I’ve never tried to describe a perfume before. It’s probably best if you just go smell this…

Special mentions go to all of last year’s favourites. I still love them all, except Lush Cosmetic Lad, because it started giving me spots.

I’ve really enjoyed reading other bloggers’ 2013 favourites, here are those I liked the most:
gh0stparties
Do Not Refreeze
Stay Beautiful
The Beauty Milk

Have you written a 2013 favourites post? Leave a link in the comments! Up next: 2013 skincare favourites, a harder one to write!

Pastel Purple, Hot Pink and…Neutrals? May Favourites

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I thought I’d succumb to blogger cliché today and share with you my recent clothing and make-up obsessions! I’m almost always obsessed with items in shades of purple and hot pink, but last month I stepped outside my colourful comfort zone and explored the possibilities of neutral eyeshadow!

I normally only wear neutral eyeshadow when I’m meeting new people and feeling shy, or when I’m attending an event where I want to look professional, so it felt kind of weird to wear the champagne-y Midnight 15, from the Urban Decay 15th Anniversary Palette, to a close friend’s birthday party! I didn’t want to be my usual garish self, because we were going to a fancy hotel for afternoon tea, and I wanted to look elegant. Don’t worry, I’m still me, I was wearing a bright pink dress, and Midnight 15 is glittery. It’s not as massively glittery as a certain other UD eyeshadow with Midnight in the name, but it’s still glittery enough to require Pixie Epoxy to stop fallout. I also made it a bit more interesting by putting a little Half Truth (a blackened purple, if you can’t see it clearly) in my crease, and I also wore thick black eyeliner, though it was a little thinner than I usually apply it.

This is fast becoming my favourite Urban Decay palette. Also this month, I was getting ready for work one day and feeling experimental, so I used Flow on the lid and M.I.A. in the crease. I loved it, and my manager said I looked really nice, so I will definitely try that again. More typically for me, I wore Omen a couple of times with a little Blackout in the crease. The only colours I haven’t tried yet in this palette are Chase, Evidence and Deep End – I think the last two look stunning but I don’t have many clothes in those colours. I’m hopelessly obsessed with matching my make-up to my clothes.

Of course, I couldn’t wear neutral eyeshadow without some sort of colour on my lips, and this month I’ve been all about shades of pink. For work, I’ve been wearing this ancient Maybelline Watershine lipstick in Raspberry Cream in an attempt to finally use it up, but I’ve started to genuinely like it! My lips are so pigmented that Raspberry Cream is almost a ‘my lips but better’ shade.

Outside of work, I’ve also been wearing the brighter lipsticks pictured, Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow (a very bright pink), and Lush’s Decisive (definitely a pinkish red on me, but your mileage may very as lots of people describe it as a cool red). Both of these are really long lasting and high quality.

I’ve been obsessed with lilac nails, mostly thanks to this little bottle that I got in a Colour Unlimited set at Christmas. It’s a beautiful shade and I’m afraid I’m going to use it up soon as I’ve been wearing it so much. I was a bit disappointed when I first tried L.A. Colors’ Flurry, because the lilacy base colour barely shows up. But it makes a great glittery top coat, especially over the Colour Unlimited lilac. Another lilac that I’ve been loving is Aromaleigh’s Penelope eyeshadow, an absolutely gorgeous and pigmented product.

Finally from the make-up favourites, Clinique Redness Solutions Daily Protective Base. This is a green coloured primer that I find too thick to use all over the face, but it works really well applied to the skin by my nose, though it took a lot of practice to get it right!

Onto clothes: I’ve been wearing this skirt to work a lot as it’s long and office-appropriate, but also quite light and floaty, great for the warm weather that we’re currently enjoying here in London. It’s a hand-me-down from my Mum, retro M&S. It’s probably from the 1980s going on the tininess of this size “14”.

This jacket was a hand-me-up from my sister. It’s funny that I’ve taken to wearing it so much because she used to practically live in it, though she styled it in a completely different way. I find that it works really well over pretty dresses, top and skirts, and I pin badges and brooches to the lapels to match my outfit. It’s also a lot easier to photograph than that skirt, as you might have guessed!

To be honest, I was wearing all of these quite regularly during most of April too! Should probably wash that jacket. What colours have you been loving lately?