Goals Week: Youtube Goals

So it's now day three of goals week and the focus of today is Youtube, and here they are:

1. Make at least one longer, more challenging video a month; for February it was my lookbook, for March doing makeup on Anna really threw me out there, and I have a couple of ideas for April that I’m really hoping come to fruition.
2. Be a more vocal member of the beauty community. Now I have my own channel, I understand how amazing a lovely comment can be, and for years I watched silently and never told my favourites how much I love them. I am determined to change this.
3. Make Youtube friends, and do a collab/swap/tag with them. I love Youtube but for the moment it really does feel like a lonely little place!
4. GET BETTER AT DESCRIPTION BOXES. ‘Nuff said.
5. Work out my banner/tech stuff and improve my editing/filming game. It’s gonna be challenging but fun, I can feel it.

Cor I am getting into this. Be sure to check back tomorrow for the next installment!

Goals Week: Fashion Goals

So it's day two of my goals week, a week dedicated solely to reflection and ambition and somethingelsetion and today's subject is Fashion Goals - here's a photo that never made it into my Paris weekend lookbook:

1. Go “thrift shopping” – i.e. get on the secondhand/vintage bandwagon. I know a couple of vintage places I’ve never had the balls to properly try out and my uni town is packed with what I’m told are surprisingly decent charity shops. I love the high street but I still feel I could switch things up more.
2. Get rid of the things that I don’t actually like/wear any more and give those things back to the charity shops (if the quality is still decent enough!)
3. Learn how to walk in heels. I am 21 years old and I still can’t do it. Shameful.
4. Be bold with my hair (I’m thinking be a redhead, at least for a while!)
5. Piercings: get more of them. I have been wanting my tragus and helix pierced for so long and I love the look of all white gems on silver, so I think those are the studs I’ll be going for.

So, those are my fashion goals - I of course will be keen to hear yours and I wish you a wonderful Tuesday!

Goals Week: Beauty Goals

So, it's the start of my last teaching term here en France this week and the perfect time, it seems, to do some pondering and have a little think about what I'd like to get done this year.

Today's subject is perhaps the most superficial of the bunch: my beauty goals. Cue stock photo of my desk (my desk is my favourite thing to photograph, what a cool person I am):

1. Experiment more with warmer colours. I love me my cool toned shades; if any brands were thinking of making my ultimate palette – let’s be honest I’m sure they all are – they could just make one with all taupes and I would fall to the floor with joy, but this love-fest doesn’t make for much variety in my makeup bag. Time to branch out and warm things up in here.
2. Actively rotate my everyday makeup bag, ideally every week/fortnight or so, to make sure all the makeup that goes unloved the majority of the time sees the light of day. I am getting better but I still think there’s room for plenty of improvement.
3. Work out a regular brow routine – ideally finding a threading lady that understands I don’t want to lose my brows all together but that I do went them to be more polished – and maintain it, by hook or by crook.
4. Try contouring. Just give it a good old go. I haven’t had much luck so far but I still believe, I still believe.
5. And my eternal, never ending life goal – make winged eyeliner my biatch.  I would love, love, love to be known as someone that has great eyeliner. A little too much in fact…

These are my beauty goals, I am stoked to hear about yours!

Bioderma: A Love Story

Me and Bioderma.

I thought it was never going to happen, I really did. No, beauty blogging world, I said. I am set with my Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish. I am good. I don't need a water that requires the use of wasteful cotton pads in my life. No thank you. Stop poking me with the bottle, cheers.

And then came the whole "double cleanse" routine, courtesy of our Goddess, Caroline Hirons, and that was it.

The facial equivalent of shampoo's legendary "rinse and repeat" genius move, the double cleanse is essentially the action of removing one's makeup with one product (like, for example, a micellar water) and doing a slightly deeper, generally muslin-cloth based cleanse with another.

It really does make sense: you don't want to be pushing makeup into your skin with heat and muslin, no sir. A micellar water just makes things feel so much cleaner, letting you go deeper with your proper cleanser. Great stuff.

And now on to the micellar water in question: Bioderma.

Having spent four years consuming beauty blogger- and vloggerdom (mmm good start to this sentence, not) I remember the first people I ever heard mentioning this stuff was the Pixiwoo sisters and from there Bioderma seems to have spread like wildfire.

It really does look like a water, doesn't seem to have much of a smell to it and does a very good job of taking off your maquillage.

It beats all other eye makeup removers I have tried in terms of how little volume is needed to get the job done, but what I will say is that it still doesn't trump my old fave, Liz Earle, in terms of effortlessly removing everything, and I mean everything - with Bioderma, I find it looks as though my face and particularly lashes are squeaky clean but I wake up with tell-tale panda eye that means things clearly weren't quite as makeup free as I thought.

So why the love fest? And why have I just bought the biggest size?!

(To clarify, this is the travel size, repurchased for convenience on the road)

The answer is that it's just bloody useful to have around. It halves the amount of rubbing I have to do with my Liz Earle, which doesn't necessary irritate my eyes but rather fills them with white cream; it's also great for if my skin is feeling a little sluggish mid afternoon but I don't feel the urge to properly wash it again; and I think it's best for makeup boob recovery - the nozzle is perfectly sized for sticking a cotton bud in it, making sorting out mascara mayhem and liner lunacy a walk in the makeup park.

So, yes, I never thought it would happen, but four months on, and it really does feel like love.

Mad Beauty Haul

Hey beauties!

So this video includes a ginormous haul of everything I bought in January. It was a mad month. As a result February is going to be very depressing (don't get depression and turn to spending to cheer yourself up it does not work out well guys).

PRODUCTS MENTIONED

Naked Basics Palette
http://goo.gl/j0J0vY

Benefit Eye Bright Eye Crayon
http://goo.gl/xugGEC

OPI Matte Top Coat
http://goo.gl/j0J0vY

Essie Bouncer It's Me
http://goo.gl/6xpj1T

Essie Saturday Disco Fever
http://goo.gl/u5XsSi

Nails Inc Nail Polish in Victoria
http://goo.gl/zrMTbo

Bourjois 1 Seconde Gel Nail Varnish (my colour whatever it is no longer exists)
http://goo.gl/jr2JaF

Bourjois Magic Nail Polish Remover
http://goo.gl/mMpwOV

Une Cherry Lipgloss (actually like how this one looks on, so, what a nana I am)
http://goo.gl/ipmuUD

Bioderma Créaline H20 100ml
http://goo.gl/ZYbk53

Caudalie Beauty Elixir
http://goo.gl/hKFrBx

Travalo Perfume Dispenser (essentially the same as mine but Sephora doesn't ship to the UK)
http://goo.gl/OIryhM

Chanel Rouge à Lèvres in 57
http://goo.gl/ENuclx

Chanel Rouge Allure Velvet in 38
http://goo.gl/Hfjk0l

Benefit Porefession Primer
http://goo.gl/1ErFWv

Clarins Gentle Exfoliator Brightening Toner
http://goo.gl/zQ1eoV

Clinique A Different Nail Enamel in Concrete Jungle and Black Honey
http://goo.gl/MLkLIY

Diorlisse Ridge Filler in Apricot
http://goo.gl/VT1flF

Clarisonic Mia 2
http://goo.gl/v9Yc51

MUA mini haul + Bows and Curtseys look recreated

Hello lovely people of the internet!

As I've not posted in forever (apparently blogging regularly isn't something that comes naturally to me!) I thought I'd show you two things today: my MUA haul and my recreation of Ronnie from Bows and Curtseys's Mila Kunis look, which you can see here.

First off: the mini MUA haul!

God bless Superdrug for giving us such a great brand at such an unbelievable price. I think by now everyone in beauty blogging has heard about the cheap and cheerful wonders that MUA has to offer: most products are just £1, with the exception of their gorgeous palettes that are a still-unbelievably-reasonable £4.

Don't let the price tags fool you: there are some real winners to be had here. Let's start with the eyeshadows:

This is Shade 6, a really beautiful greeny-turquoise that you can find an additional review of here, by The (fabulous!) Sunday Girl. Its pigmentation really is pretty impressive - better even than some MAC and Urban Decay colours that I've come across, though it's not quite on a level with Sleek. Well worth picking up for just a pound, plus you get quite a lot of product - 2g in fact (MAC shadows are 1.5g). (Swatches are down below!)

Shade 7 is a pearl (as are all the shadows I have for you today) and it's a lovely darker, foresty green. Weirdly enough, The Sunday Girl has reviewed this too - her reviews came up two days after I bought these, how spooky! I prefer the pigmentation and texture of this to the last - it's not as chalky (not that Shade 6 is overly chalky) and it's slightly easier to get a nice strong pay-off.

And last but not least is my favourite of this selection, beautiful Shade 12. Now, on paper, this sounds like a dupe for MAC's Club - it's a duochrome with a brown base and green pearl running through it. I don't have Club to compare it to, but from painstaking research I reckon this isn't a million miles off - and it's at £1 it's worth a try if you don't want to fork out for Club! (Prettymaking has a comparison of Club vs. another high street shadow if you'd like to see swatches.)

Here are my amateur swatching efforts!:

Top to bottom: Shade 12, Shade 7, Shade 6

And on another camera setting that seems to show them up a bit clearer:

Left to Right: Shade 6, Shade 7, Shade 12

These are just three not particularly generous swipes each, with no primer or foundation underneath, to show you just how pigmented they are. Bargains!

I also purchased the much-coveted Heaven and Earth palette, which has had the blogosphere a-chatter for a little while now:

What can I say? This has to be one of the best value palettes around and the colour range is just gorgeous for all us neutral-lovers. I initially ummed and ah-ed about getting this one, given that Sleek's Storm Palette is already in my collection, and a firm favourite too, but this one is definitely different enough to merit a purchase. All I would say is that there are no mattes, unlike the Storm palette, but these are nevertheless a gorgeous collection of well-pigmented colours. My favourite is the warm goldy copper (last colour on the right in the top row). It'll make blue eyes look stunning.

I may well end up doing another post dedicated to this palette alone!

Finally I bought their Bronzer Shade 1, the palest.

Compared to my other MUA purchases, I'm not as crazy about this bronzer as I am the eyeshadows (this may be because I am a slave to eyeshadows but have only recently got into bronzer). This looks really beautiful in the pan - while I'd love to try a bronzer without sparkles in it, this one is really pretty and though it's darker than I originally thought I could pull off, it's not orangey and I do like how it looks on.

This, unlike my lovely birthday present Collection 2000 Bronze Glow in 01 Sunkissed, does seem to show up in photos! Hurray!

In fact, I used it in my homage to Ronnie's homage to Mila Kunis's Golden Globes makeup, along with a selection of colours from the Heaven and Earth Palette.

Here are my photos, please know that my new camera and I still haven't quite seen eye to eye on what makes a good makeup picture, and are trying to adjust to each other:

Okay, my rookie face pullng doesn't help either, I'm still very much new to this!

Here's another camera setting that makes me look shiny but does show the colours slightly better:

I will learn the art of face pulling, I will!

The colours are a bit faded here, apologies!

Here are some photos from my old faithful webcam, because I feel like I look less weird in these?!

And that's all of my photos! Woo, I bet you're relieved. Oh, I am in my PJs and dressing gown, in case you were wondering. It's traditional stressed-exam-period-student garb.

Products I used:

Face: 

Collection 2000 Lasting Perfection Ultimate Wear Concealer in no.2 Light

MAC Matchmaster Foundation in 1.5

Benefit High Beam highlighter

Eyes:

MUA Heaven and Earth palette - I used the lightest colour as a brow highlight, the second lightest all over my lid and a mixture of the browns in my crease and on the lower lash line - in real life the warmth of the browns, some of which have a purple frost to them, makes my green eyes look greener!

MAC Fluidline in Waveline on the upper lash line, set with a navy from the Sleek Bad Girl palette

Revlon Grow Luscious Mascara - my mum thought I was wearing false eyelashes when I Skyped her in this makeup! So sweet :)

Cheeks:

Benefit Benetint

Bourjois Blush in Lilas D'Or

MUA Bronzer Shade 1

Lips:

Benefit Benetint Lip Balm

Well that's all from me! I hope you have a lovely day guys, and that you enjoyed this post - see you soon!