Breakfast Scrub

Well it's only the best smelling thing on the planet.

Ever.

I couldn't not blog about this. I've probably smelt it 3874 times since buying it at the weekend. I've also held it up to my boyfriends face, my boyfriends brothers face and my boyfriends brothers girlfriends face and said "SMELL THIS, IT SMELLS LIKE PANCAKES".
And if I could unscrew the cap and virtually hold it up to your face, I would.

Yep, it's a body scrub that smells of Maple Syrup. To be precise it smells of Maple Syrup on warm pancakes in Vancouver. To be even more precise it smells of happiness.

This is £8 and personally I wouldn't care if it did nothing for my skin, I'd still slather it all over my body without complaint. Luckily, it's also a really good exfoliant and I would happily repurchase it.

I take a small scoop with my fingers and exfoliate in circles. This is a product that's perfect in a bath because it will fragrance the water too! It's a sugar scrub so will remove any dry skin but it's not overly harsh grains, like in Soap & Glory Flake Away which can sometimes be a bit full on. It's also very moisturising from the Shea Butter and will leave your skin feeling pretty darn soft (and smelling fabulous, have I mentioned that yet?).
Like all Soap and Glory scrubs, they've hit the nail on the head. 

If I could give you only one bit of advice in life, it would be to go into Boots and take a whiff of this.
Thank me later.

Natural Glow Make-Up

So as a part of college last week I did the hair, make-up and photography to produce a photo shoot on the theme of "No make-up, make-up". This is all about creating a natural look with flawless skin but so it appears the model isn't wearing make-up at all. It's commonly used in skincare adverts (sneaky). I thought I'd share with you the look I went for with a glow to the skin.

My beautiful friend Fen Barr was sweet enough to come model for me and how fantastic does she look?

skin 

I started with Benefit High Beam on her cheek bones, brow bone and her cupids bow. I also re-applied this over the foundation too to give a beautiful highlight to her skin. Fen naturally has such clear skin, so I blended two shades of Kryolan Ultra Fluid Foundation to give an even but not heavy coverage. I used Kryolan Derma Colour to cover any dark patches or blemishes and MAC Select MoistureCover concealer around the eyes.

I used the highlight from the Sleek Contour Kit to highlight areas of her face, although this has small glitter specks in so be careful when photographing this. I then used Nars Laguna bronzer to contour and add warmth back to her face.

Eyes

Keeping to the natural look I used natural matte eye shadows to add some colour and shape to her eyes and Urban Decay shadow in Virgin to highlight the inner corner and under the brow bone. I LOVE this shade.

I also took a natural matte shadow through her brows with a small angled brush and brushed a clear mascara through to hold them in place. I put some black eyeliner onto a very thin brush and painted inbetween her lashes to give a light natural defintion. To finish off the eyes I put a small amount of white eye pencil on the water line.

Lips

I used a lipstick in a natural shade that had a slight peach tone to go with her beautifully tanned skin and added a lttle MAC lipglass to the centre of her lips and blended out. This enlarges the look of the lips and a slight shine for a healthy look.

Products Used:

- Benefit High Beam

- Sleek Contour kit

- NARS Laguna bronzer

 - Urban Decay Naked pallet

- MAC Lip glass

- MAC Select MoistureCover Concealer

 - MUA White eyeliner pencil

So there you have it, who else loves this natural make-up look? I can't wait to try it on myself now.

Little Shop Of Horrors

Feed me Seymour

So the past week I have been super duper busy helping the cast and crew of my local drama company, BATS, with their production of the Little Shop Of Horrors. I thought I'd share with you some snaps of what was such a fun week!
 Normally doing make-up for shows can be so hectic it's a nightmare, but every night was fantastic and so much fun. The cast and crew were incredible and did such a brilliant job with the whole production. I've always been a huge fan of the music and the show so I took a night off so I could go see the it in all it's glory and I loved it.

As for the make-up, the first half is fairly chilled out with your standard stage make-up and a quick black eye for Audrey. It's after the interval where the real fun begins as people start to get eaten!
- Joy!

I'm not sure if I've ever actually mentioned this on my blog, but I plan to specialise in prosthetics. I just happened to become girly and fall in love with beauty make-up when I started my training. However my heart has and always will be devoted to horror. So you can see why I love this musical so much.

Feed me all night long!

For the comedic final number almost the entire cast had to be made up as "zombies". So much fun. Of course this was still stage make-up though so this was quick, easy but effective for the audience. For the (very) few people that didn't have incredibly fast changes, small latex pieces were applied.
Respect to Liam, a chorus member who let us cover his eye with a latex piece of an eyeball hanging out and still go dance and sing on stage, every night. What a babe.

And just in case you're an addict like me, here's some Instagram snaps to top it off.

 

 

 

Covering imperfections.

Just a short one today to carry on from my last camouflage make-up post!

So recently I posted about how I was learning camouflage make-up to cover tattoos. But of course it also covers discolouring, hypo-pigmentation, hyper-pigmentation, blemishes and some scarring.

Here's a picture (with no filter or camera tricks) of a covered hypo-pigmentation that I did this week.

Personally I think this came out really effective and I'm pleased with the result.
So of course I had to share it with you!

This was really simple and really quick, it's just done by using camouflage concealers (personally I use Kryolan Derma Colour) and matching the area to the natural skin tone and layering this up!

What do you guys think, would you guys like to see more posts on this?

Maybelline The Falsies

 It's Tanya Burrs favourite mascara...

I don't need to say more.

After reading so many good things, this week I picked up The Falsies mascara by Maybelline and finally gave it a whirl. And what a better time to do it than when it's £2 off at Boots, making it only £5.99.

Ps. does anyone else want to curl up and cry when this happens to their nails?

Mine is in "Black Drama" which is a darker matte black to the original, and it's shown by the lace detail!
I love that aspect of it, it's very black so perfect for definition.

The brush to me looked pretty scary at first. I don't tend to use plastic brushes so I'm used to the classic mascara brush wand. This seems to have spiky brush hairs at all angles - a little crazy. 

The stem of the wand is flexible as you can see by the indent which I do feel helps.

Maybelline call it a "spooned" brush which they've actually patented, to me that just means curved. Nothing new but it does work well with the shape of natural lashes and catches every lash. I feel this also adds curl to the lashes but not lots.
To me that's okay, I look for definition in a mascara but if you're after curl I'd recommend the No7 Exquisite Curl mascara. 

I feel it lengthens lashes pretty well and does add volume.
 It claims no clumps which I'd say is almost true. What is really good about it is that it does layer up very well if you want more from it! However it's important when using any mascara to not let the mascara on the lashes dry in-between doing this.

Creepy and up close before and afters!

As you can see it clearly makes a good difference. 

For £5.99 I definitely think it's worth a buy and I would recommend!

What do you think of The Falsies? 

Tattoo Camouflage

So at college this week we're learning to Camouflage Make-up, starting with tattoos.
I use colour corrective make-up a lot but this was my first time actually covering peoples' ink. Lucky for me my class is FULL of people with tattoos so I had tons of options to choose from.
I thought I'd share with you my first attempt at this and maybe one later when I feel I've improved?

For most camouflage make-up I use Kryolan Derma Color, here I have a 24 Pallet!

I started by colour correcting using a a Kryolan Colour Wheel. For example for the purple flower I started with yellow to cancel out the colour. I tried to correct the colours as much as I could until it looked a sort of grey colour, then went over with a skin colour to conceal. When building up layers I powdered in-between.

As you can see from the picture, I'm still struggling. Hopefully as I keep learning and practising, I can share with you when I completely cover one!

 If anyone has any tips, pretty please leave a comment!

:)

NOTD - Illamasqua Fragile

Nails of the day!

Very late to the party, I recently bought one of the limited edition speckle polishes by Illamasqua.
Mines light blue in the shade Fragile. Designed for spring, inspired my egg speckles, I'm in love.

£14.50 available in four other shades here.

I apply two coats for a full colour and I find it very long wearing. What I really love about the polish is that the speckles are glitter in a mix of sizes, but with the polish the glitter specks are matte. This gives a beautiful egg shell effect and is perfect for spring! 

I only wish I bought it for Easter.
Darn!

April Drama

It would be an understatement to say the last month for me has been traumatic.

I've been ill, in and out of hospital, came close to losing my job and to top it off, I broke my nose.

Yes, that's right, I broke my nose.

(a friend headbutted me whilst drunk dancing at a night club, it was hilarious - until I sobered up).

Alas, it is now been straightened again (ouch indeed) and it won't be long until I can return to blogging.

Sometimes life get's stressful and you wonder why you ever took on so much work. I think in my case you have to learn to see the funny side of things and try to remain positive. When you do that, everything works out fine.
I've heard bad things happen in three's. In which case I'm now excited for what's good to come.

I have an "Aprils Favourites" coming for you soon, and probably a haul post too! Since being under the weather I resorted to internet shopping and treated myself to some goodies, including NARS and Illamasqua. Yay!
This following week I'll be doing make-up for a local production of The Little Shop of Horrors. I absolutely LOVE this show and I'm so excited for it! If you'd like a blog post on that too, write me a comment :)

I hope April was a better month for you!
I'm not gone, I promise.