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L. A. Colors

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?

Westfield London, A Review

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A couple of months back I made the trip to one of London’s newer shopping complexes, Westfield, for the first time, and I thought that I’d write a review for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t been but is thinking of paying a visit.

Apologies for crap photo. The problem with having two bottles with black writing on them and one bottle and one box with white writing on is that you can’t get it all to show up together on camera.

It’s been open since 2008 but I hadn’t visited before because it would take me over an hour and a half to get there on public transport. The route includes the Central Line, which is probably my least favourite tube line. Also, west London is by no means a familiar area for me, although maybe I was exaggerating slightly when I said to the friend I travelled with: ‘We’re south-east Londoners, coming here is like going to the other side of the world’. There are plenty of shopping centres much closer to where I live – The Glades in Bromley, the Whitgift Centre and Centrale in Croydon, and the Lewisham Shopping Centre…in Lewisham, obviously, as well as a multitude of high streets. I also usually go to Bluewater with my family for a day out at least once a year, as it’s quite easy to get to by car. My visit to Westfield was focused around seeing my friends, trying out a couple of restaurants and cafés, and of course visiting Inglot, whose only store in the UK is at Westfield. I was also interested in visiting Beauty Base to see if they still stocked Milani, and the Make Up Store, as I’d never been to one of their shops before.
Westfield has the worst layout of any shopping centre that I have ever been to. In my opinion, Bluewater is pretty much perfection in layout terms, being round. You go in, pick a direction, and go around in a circle until you’re back when you started. Then you go upstairs, or downstairs, to the other floor, and repeat the process. Then you leave (I’m not the biggest fan of shopping, so I appreciate efficiency). But Westfield? WTF? I mean look at this map. Just look at it. You’d hope that with a layout this random, they’d have plenty of maps around the centre. No. There were a few interactive information points dotted around, on which you could search for the store you were looking for, but not nearly enough. I had to queue to look at one!

With a few mostly-make-up related exceptions, most of the shops at Westfield are the same as those you’d find on most high streets and in most malls, and I wasn’t very impressed with the branches of the chains that I did visit. I think The Glades has a bigger H&M and possibly a bigger New Look (it’s recently moved lot and I haven’t been there since). There is a section specifically for designer stores, The Village (oh hello ironic name) but we didn’t bother going down that way.

I had pad thai jay at Busaba Eathai for lunch, which was delicious and quite reasonably priced considering, and then later on had half a lemon tart and half a mixed berry tart (my friend and I ordered two and then had half each so we could try both), at Le Pain Quotidien.

So what did I buy? Well, there is no longer any Milani stand at Beauty Base (sad, I want this lipstick), but there is a giant section of the aisle devoted to L. A. Colors nail varnishes, for 99p each. I managed to restrict myself to only buying three. I couldn’t remember whether I’d read any good reviews of the brand so I decided not to risk any more than £2.97. The purple is ‘Tropical Breeze’ (bit of an odd name for that shade, I think), the wine red is called ‘Plum Wine’, and the pink with blue duochrome effect is called ‘Shocker’. My bottle of ‘Plum Wine’ was a slightly different shade to every other bottle on the rack, which was odd. I haven’t tried it or ‘Tropical Breeze’ yet, but I have worn ‘Shocker’ twice now and I love it. It’s so lurid.

I did almost actually drool over the eye dusts at Make Up Store, I found the green one that Zoffe used for this look and I promise you that it is even more amazing in real life and I want it. However I showed yet more remarkable restraint, sticking to my eye product buying ban. Go me! Then I broke this ban rather spectacularly last month, when I bought three Sleek palettes. Oh well…

After Grey gave the gel eyeliners a good review I decided that I would pick one up in Inglot, and after much deliberation, I decided that red was a bit too impractical for someone like me who doesn’t have a lot of red clothing to match it with, but I still wanted something bright, so I went for the almost violet, but definitely blue number 83 as the purples were either dark or lilac.

I will write reviews as soon as I’ve properly tried and tested everything!