My Everyday Makeup

Everybody has their go-to everyday look, and mine barely ever changes. So lets go through the products I use to achieve my standard face!

So after the usual washing, cleansing and moisturising, all of which are done with not so special products, I start with the prep.

Primer
Benefit the POREfessional - £24.50

To be honest I only got a mini version free with a magazine, and a second mini one in the Benefit Christmas sample dealy. I love it though and when I run out I'll be getting a full size version. It completely smooths out my face, shrinks visible pores and also because of the colour of it I feel it makes my skin a more even tone. When you squeeze it out the tube its like skin coloured balm, but it goes on almost translucent.






Concealer 
Benefit Boi-ing - £17.50

The circles under my eyes are quite dark so I needed quite a high coverage concealer. I have this in shades 01 and 02 as I am pretty pale. I mostly use the 02 for blemishes and spots on my face, and the lighter shade is generally for under my eyes and a bit of basic highlighting. Judging from how much I left in the pans right now, I tend to use 02 more. Both of them give good full coverage and they are quite pigmented so a little goes a long way.





Foundation
MAC Studio Sculpt - £25.00

This is my favourite foundation I've ever tried. I used to have a MAC Face and Body and I liked the tone of that but it was quite thin and watery. For MAC products my skin tone is NW20, meaning its cool toned so I don't really have yellow undertones and I found that most high street foundations never worked for my pale cool toned skin. I could never find anything that was a match, everything ended up too yellowy so I decided to go for MAC again. This foundation has medium coverage and has quite a nice dewy finish, my skin is quite dry so I don't really like matte foundations, and it is the PERFECT match for my skin tone, love it!



Powder
Rimmel Stay Matte Pressed Powder - £3.99

Like I said before, I don't like a completely matte face so I only really use a bit of this to keep the shine away. The colour I'm using just now is peach glow which is maybe just a tad too light, but my powder in sandstorm has just disappeared, no idea what happened to it. I don't really see a huge difference in those shades though, so there's no obvious difference on my face. It's a cheap and cheerful powder, sets my makeup in place and stops me going shiny all day.





Bronzer
Benefit Hoola Bronzer - £23.50

There's a reason this is the UK's number one bronzer, it's fantastic. I use it mainly for a bit of contouring then I veeeeery lightly dust it over my nose forehead and chin for a bit of a glow. It's matte which means it's perfect for contouring, no little sparkly flecks in there, and it's such a natural colour. It's virtually impossible to look orange or too dark, unless you go completely mad applying it.






Eyeliner
MAC Liquidlast Eyeliner - £15.50

This is my holy grail eyeliner. Once it's on there, it will not budge, ever. If you're new to liquid eyeliner, I'm gonna be honest, it's a tricky one to use. It has quite a thick gel like consistency, but more runny, and if you apply it then go about your business, it'll transfer. Once you get the hang of it though it's an amazing eyeliner, I couldn't be without it. Can't believe I'm going to admit this, but every so often when I come in from work, I'll accidentally fall asleep without removing my eyeliner, and in the morning, still there good as new. Can be seen as a good thing I guess.



Mascara
Benefit They're Real - £19.50

As with most of the other Benefit products I use, I originally tried it as a mini version in the Christmas sample thing. Now I haven't been blessed with good eyelashes, they're not awful but there is hardly any length there. The thickness of them isn't bad but with stubby lashes it doesn't really make a difference whether they're thick or not I find. Enter Benefit. They lengthen my lashes considerably and give them a bit of bulk too, so even without my eyeliner I can just put mascara on and feel like I have flashy lashes.





Brows
Urban Decay Brow Box - £19.00

Before this little miracle in a box I used to draw my eyebrows on with a crappy cheap pencil. Why I didn't get this sooner I'll never know. Only in the past few years have I started filling my brows in. They need a constant upkeep as my dad has so generously given me his brows, so if I don't do them I look a bit cavewoman; mad, bushy, almost a monobrow. So I get them waxed and then fill them in with this bad boy. I have it in brown sugar which is the darkest of the two boxes Benefit have. Now I don't know how other people use this as I've seen people go powder first then wax to set, fair enough. But I trace over my brows with the wax then use the powder on top so it has a bit more to stick to. I mostly use the darker powder as it is pretty much a match for my natural eyebrows, but I do use the lighter one now and then if I'm going all out, and they still look pretty natural. I say natural, I mean not obviously fake. Everyone loves a bit of a dramatic brow.


So there we go, my everyday products. There are some things missing like blusher or eyeshadow or any lip product but for most days I miss all that out, save for some lip balm.
Although on some days I will add a bit of eyeshadow, which is usually anything from Urban Decay's Naked 2 palette, or I will slick on a bit of lipstick, and if I do use any kind of colour on my cheeks it's Benefit's Benetint, which incidentally also looks amazing on the lips.

Feel free to recommend, ask any questions, but if not, I hope you enjoyed my list :) x

Finally, purple hair!

Hello again, doing a quick update on my current hair. So after I did the Crazy Colour and it faded to pale turquoise, I kept it that way for almost 3 months. Then the roots started growing in, and it started to look really awful.

So my birthday was coming up and my mum and dad said they would take me to the hairdressers to get my hair professionally done. I was thinking about getting some kind of pastel, maybe pale pink, but I wasn't so sure if it was possible as it would have to be bleached several times. 

I asked about it at the hairdressers and they agreed, would need to be bleached a lot to get it light enough to put pink over the left over green, so I needed a plan B, and of course that was purple!

I decided to get a darker purple than what I'd been doing myself, and also asked for a dark blue dip dye. It looks amazing and I love it, but trying to get pictures to all look the same has proven hard haha, keeps changing colour depending on whether I use my phone or my boyfriends, and also depends on the light too. So I'll put a bunch of photos up. 

Bleaching/dyeing my hair part 3

Hello again, sorry for the ridiculous period of absence. So, if you have been following my quest to bleach my hair to the incredibly pale blonde/white needed to then dye your hair pastel, you will see that I have been partly successful. In the last part I managed to get a nearly all over pale blonde, the exception being the stubborn mid section of my hair. I've realised the reason it was probably so stubborn is because I have dyed my hair so many times without stripping it or anything, so it's pretty much soaked in leftover purple and brown dye. ANYWAY, I'm gonna save some time here, I did one more bleach and there was little to no difference, so I got kind of fed up and realised pastel probably would just be a waste of time. So I once again decided on bright purple. This time I went with Crazy Colour Violette, which on the website is described as electric purple. The method I used was the same as the other crazy colours I've used, apply to damp hair. My hair is quite long now so I used two bottles I believe, and then I left it in for about an hour. Once again it took aaaaaaages for it to be washed out but eventually when it had, it was soooo bright.

As with all Crazy Colours I've tried it faded a bit after the few two or three washes, but the weirdest thing was the roots stayed quite a bright purple and the mid lengths and ends faded to a kinda blue, and then after a couple more washes, it had bits of green through it. It was strange but to be honest it looked alright!

Over the next few washes it continued to fade through blue till it got to a pastel turquoise colour, it was actually really nice but eventually the the roots started growing in and it started to look quite trashy haha, really dark roots and super light mid lengths, but if it was that all over I'd be quite happy with it. So a quick review of of the Crazy Colour Violette, turned out a beautiful purple for the first few weeks, stayed purple on the white blonde, and turned turquoise on the pale blonde. Faded fairly quickly too but faded to completely different colours.

Bleaching my hair part 2

Ok so in my last post I'd managed to get my hair to the pale yellow stage. The roots were almost white blonde, with the underside very pale yellow and the mid lengths of the top layer a darker yellow. So very patchy all over. Now when I did this bleaching and toning I'd left it a couple of weeks so I had to re do my roots but they came out fine, same as before. I used all the same bleachibg products and measurements as I did in part 1. After the bleaching the underside was as light as the roots so nearly there, but once again the top mid lengths were just a bit darker, you couldn't tell properly inside but in bright light it was quite obvious so I thought toning might help. I used Loreal Luocolour P01,with 25% developer. And this worked amazingly all over. I think it said to leave it on for 20 minutes, I left it for just a bit longer, maybe half an hour as I'd read from other reviews it can give a lilac hue to your hair as it is a purple based toner. The roots came out a platinum colour with a tiny but of purple, and the mid lengths went pure blonde, no yellow. Once again it was a tiny bit darker but still light blonde. So because I'd got it all very light I thought I'd go ahead and try the all over pastel dye. I had Crazy Colour in Lilac and I diluted it with a looooooot of white conditioner. Too much. I used the full bottle of dye and god knows how much conditioner. The roots once again turned a nice colour but it didn't affect the midsection. Gutted! Here's a picture of my roots, I really liked this.

So the overall conclusion is I think it needs one more bleach and tone, primarily on the dastardly middle part! The Loreal Luocolour is amazing, I would definitely recommend it for completely taking away brassy or yellow tones. I've also been using Provoke Touch of Silver which keeps the roots a great colour. The purple has pretty much all washed out and I've been left with a slight green tinge which is just unfortunately how the purple fades.

Hopefully just one more post to go till I get it a nice white blonde everywhere! Here's how it looks just now.

Bleaching My Hair part 1

After doing my hair a million times to try and get my desired purple, I decided to maybe try a different colour. Right now, I've still not dyed it after bleaching, but I'm either going to do a pastel lilac or maybe a light pinky purple. Something like these.

So, having incredible dark brown hair, the first thing I had to do was bleach it. I watched a lot of tutorials online on how to do it, and found reviews for the best bleach. I settled on the crazy colour bleaching kit, the reviews were good but it did say there wouldn't be enough bleach for hair past shoulder length, so I bough an extra sachet of powder and developer. The kit was good, it came with a mixing tub and a tinting brush, the tub was tiny so I used a bigger tub I had, but I did like the tint brush. So I mixed up the 50g of powder and 100ml of developer, which is 30 vol (9%), and also mixed the same amount of the extra I bought which was all in all 100g of powder and 200ml of developer. That did my hair length fine, which is about boob length. Now here's the stupid part, I sectioned my hair into 4, bottom and top and respectively left and right, and just went ahead and slathered the dye on, bottom half then top. But I didn't account for my virgin hair, which is about 2ish inches. So after I'd left it on, literally about 15 minutes after the roots were very light, like a banana yellow and the midsection was still dark. I left that on for about an hour, maybe a bit more and went to wash it out. While wet it looked hardly any lighter, but when it was dry, the roots were so light! And not even a weird ginger colour, still quite yellow but if my hair was all that colour it wouldn't be so bad buuuuuuuuuuut, I'd done it stupidly and had half yellow half ginger hair. The midsection was very orange. Oh and the ends were light because I had ombre hair before, so it looked pretty weird.

The annoying pink patch is actually glow from the tv haha, but yeah that was the extent of the difference. But after one bleaching it had lifted a lot of the dark out but made it fairly ginger. So I left it a day and then bleached the midsection. Once again was kinda stupid and started bleaching the underside, which turned out lighter but overall after a second bleaching it once again lifted the darker orange and made it slightly more yellow. This picture doesn't show much of a difference because of the bathroom light but it wasn't too bad.

So that was part one, I'd managed to get it lightened, but I still have a long way to get it blonde enough to pastel over! Gonna do part 2 soon, after another bleaching and also toning, so stay tuned!

Crazy Colour Hot Purple review

So in my quest for nice dark purple hair dye, I came across Crazy Colour. My cousin used it on me about 3ish years ago and I think she used Violette, but I quite like the look of Hot Purple so I thought why not!

There was a deal on at Sallys where I could buy 3 bottles for £12, I only bought 3 of Hot Purple which now I realise is silly, anywho, on we go!

It only comes in one bottle, no having to mix any developer or anything so it was fairly easy to apply. I used the full bottle on my whole head and left it in for about 45 minutes.
It looked quite blue on my head and washing it out, the water was kinda blue but the end result was pretty much what I was looking for. It stained my pillows blue for a few days before I washed it again and it lasted about 8 washes before it started to fade. The picture on the left makes it look a lot more pink that it was, it doesn't look like that on my phone haha.

After washing it good few times, it started to go a bit blue and some bits are a tiny bit green, so I have a turquoise dip dye which doesn't actually look too bad, but I think I might try Violette again and see if that is a bit more true purple. Right now I have my weird blueish hair to sort out.

Anyone got any suggestions on purple dye? I'd like to hear peoples thoughts. 

Barry M Gelly in Passionfruit and Mango!

I love these Gellys! I got these two for my birthday plus a light green which I think is called kiwi, not used it yet.

I was supposed to post this before the last one I did, and now I'm annoyed its not chronological, but here we go!

The red is Passionfruit, the orange is Mango. They're both so shiny, only needed two coats, one would have been alright but it can be a bit streaky, so two it is! 

Quite summery colours but it is nice to have bright nails when the weather is getting crap! 

Barry M Raspberry and Gelly in Guava

Went into Boots the other day and it was buy one get one half price on Barry M, woohoo!

It's getting hard to find colours I don't have, but I found a Gelly in Guava, one of the newer ones I think. And then there was a normal nail paint in Raspberry. I realised the only red I have is a glitter and a new Gelly called Passionfruit.

The Guava is so bright and shiny and the Raspberry is a nice darkish red, subtle and sophisticated both flattering and go quite nicely together!

Schwarzkopf LIVE Color XXL Ultra Brights Purple Punk review

I've had purple hair on and off since about 2009. I first got it done when I was at my mums hairdressers and it was done over a layer of blonde through my hair so the top layer went a dark plum colour and the bottom was an amazing kinda royal purple (?), is that even a colour. It was closer to blue than it was to pink and didn't have any red tones in it. I loved that, and the bottom colour is what I've been trying to find without going to the hairdressers. Everything else I've tried always is a plum pink colour, always got red tones in it. This was it back in 09.

So, onto the review. I finally saw this purple punk, and it looks an amazing colour on the box. Before I dyed my hair I had the whole ombre thing going on so I was aiming for dark purple on the top and bright purple on the ends for a dip dye look. 

You've to use this on damp hair, and rather than faffing about with the creme in a tube then the developer bottle, there was only one tube to deal with. It came out an electric purple, so bright, but my god did it stain everything it touched! Make sure you wear old clothes and stay away from everything!

I covered my whole head, and I think I left it in for about half an hour, maybe a bit longer and rinsed it all out completely. It takes a while to get it all out. When it was dry, I was a bit disappointed, it didn't make any difference to the top section of my hair, but to be fair it did say it would be best on bleached hair. I did think it was give it a bit of a tint in the light but nothing. 

The bottom section I really liked. It looked nothing like it did on the box haha but I still liked the colour. It's more of a pink purple and really really bright. The box said it's only temporary and lasts 6-8 washes. I'd say that was about right. It faded quite gradually but then one day I realised it was almost a peach colour and just looked ombre again. 

Overall, I wouldn't but it again, not purple enough but if I was going for a pinker colour then I'd definitely go for it.

Barry M Gelly Blueberry!

I saw this colour today, and even though I'm going through a glitter phase, I had to get it. Such a cute pastel colour, which I don't have a lot of. And I have no blue pastel!
I used this in my last mani, using it on my ring finger with some sparkle over the top, then I decided to put my holo topcoat to see what it did and it was amazing.
So I ended up taking all the Goldmine glitter off (which was a complete pain) and putting this on my other nails, complete with holo topcoat.
The topcoat makes it go a shimmery cornflour blue, and in bright light it's super sparkly. I'll put two photos up, one with flash and one without. I just love it.

Barry M Gold Mine

Haven't posted in quite some time, since I've got a job with later hours I've not had much of a chance to do cute nails, but I went out today and got Barry M Goldmine, Denim and Gelly Blueberry.
So I decided to do Goldmine on all my nails except from my ring finger, which has the Barry M Gelly Blueberry on it, and I also used OPI Servin' Up Sparkle and placed a few of the larger hex glitters at the bottom as well as a one coat over the top.

Pink Silver Glitter!

I loved the last glittery Barry M polish I got, which was the Amethyst Glitter, so I had a quick browse and thought the pink silver glitter looked awesome.
Didn't even have to use a coloured base coat or anything because the glitter is dense and packed really close together. Two coats was fine but I went with three just to make it extra glittery! The colour is amazing and the texture is different to other glitters too, not as rough or gritty.
I'll put up two pictures, one with flash and one without, they both look awesome!
Any suggestions for which Barry M glitter I should get next?

Barry M Amethyst glitter!

I've been seeing this nail paint everywhere and absolutely loved it. Unfortunately I've had be careful with my money and decided not to get it till now. It was so worth the wait, definitely one of my favourites I own, favourite glitter one for sure.
I've got Barry M Bright Purple on underneath this, and to be honest after one coat of the glitter it looked gorgeous, but I decided on a second one just to make it more sparkly.
I'd recommend it, super pretty!

Multicoloured leopard print!

Haven't done my nails in quite a while as I was working in a restaurant over Christmas and wasn't allowed to wear nail varnish, but hurrah, I can now go back to having pretty nails!
So I decided I fancied failsafe leopard print, but instead of neutraly colours, I added some colour to it, and it looks super cute!

The colours are Cyan Blue by Barry M and Silver Foil, also by Barry M.
Still haven't got round to getting dotting tools but I just used a bobby pin and it worked pretty much the same.
Need to do my right hand now and I can't be bothered. Knowing me I'll just forget to do it and wander about with one done hand. Oops.

Nail art with tape!

I've been seeing a few of these cool manis online but didn't think I could do it as I don't have special nail tape.
TURNS OUT, you don't need special nail tape, sellotape works fine, so I used just that.
It's a bit finicky because you have to cut the tape up and try and get them roughly the same width, and when the tape is that thin it gets stuck to stuff and you can't find it. And the worst thing was when the sellotape took off part of the silver base, so I had to use a blunt toothpick to fill it back in, so it looks a bit messy.
All in all though, I love it, looks so simple and pretty, I also decided to just put glitter on the ring finger to break it up a bit.

The colours I used were Barry M Nail Effects in Silver Foil, Barry M Indigo and for the sparkle it's OPI's Servin' Up Sparkle.
Also I don't know why the picture isn't upright the way I took it... weird.

Blue sparkle!

I love glittery nail polishes and I barely have any, so I got a pretty blue topshop one and couldn't wait to try it.
The glitter in this isn't just like the fine little flecks in my Barry M ones, there are slightly larger hexagons in there which are super sparkly when they catch the light.
I included a blurry photo too because I like how the light hits the glitter.

My base colour is the Barry M retro collection in blue, and the glitter is a Topshop nail polish by Louise Gray called Junkyard.

Penguin nail art!

I haven't had much time to sit and do my nails recently, so now I've got a bit of down time back I decided to do some sweet ass nail art.
This is definitely one of my favourites because it's penguins!
It was pretty tough without nail art tools, I need a dotting tool, that would have been easier to do the eyes rather than using a toothpick, which sucked!

Anywho, here it is. Like I said, I used a toothpick so it's a bit messy.

Hope you like it :D

I apologise for my absence!

I've had some big stuff going on and haven't had time to do many fun things.
I'll try and get more stuff up as soon as possible, need to get a few more ideas too!
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated :)

Galaxy Nails

So I've seen gradient and galaxy nails a lot and thought that the galaxy nails looked amazing.
They look so arty and impressive but it's incredibly easy to do, there are tutorials everywhere which like gazillions of different colour combos. I actually have a pair of cosmo print leggings from New Look so I drew inspiration from them.

The colours I used was a Barry M black base, and then I just randomly sponged on Retro Blue, White, Berry Ice Cream and Cyan Blue from Barry M and also a shimmery turquoise with no name by Miss Sporty and then just a coat of Servin' Up Sparkle by OPI.

My favourite marble nails!

This was the third time I'd had a crack at marble nails and they just turned out so awesome. Thought I'd go for a blue theme as I have an assortment, but then the silver jumped out at me and thought that'd make it sweet.

The colours are all Barry M. Foil Effects Silver, Indigo, Cobalt Blue and Cyan.