Being in Superdrug for me is like being in a candy shop: they have soooo many brands and cover so much in the beauty, skincare and health area that is impossible to walk away! Their event was no different, all parts of Superdrug were well represented and I love discovering all the launches.
A good base is the key to good makeup, so I am quite fussy when it comes to foundation. Recently, as part of their SuperStay range, Maybelline New York has launched Better Skin, a foundations claiming to improve the appearance of dull, blotchy and uneven skin.
So, I put it to the test. Better Skin contains Actyl C, zinc, provitamin B5, magnesium, copper, flex technology (which adapts to skin movement, being tightness-preventing), glycerine (attracts moisture and makes skin look hydrated and radiant) and SPF 20, which is great to see in makeup.
Superdrug has become the first UK retailer to launch a nail printing service. The Fingernails 2 Go digital nail art kiosk allows us to quickly print anything (really, anything) on our talons.
I will admit – I wasn’t very familiar with B. Makeup before the lovely breakfast they offered to bloggers – and I was glad I found out; I am pleasantly surprised with their extensive range of makeup and skincare products.
And for the new season, they were launching quite a few crackers, some available now and later this year.
Ho ho ho. It is December and I feel I am officially allowed to say the C word without attracting some dirty looks (and the “already?!” expression n their faces). Obviously, I am talking about CHRISTMAS, silly.
Most people know someone who is a beauty fanatic and if you are not one yourself, choosing the right thing can be quite difficult. But fear not, So Many Lovely Things will give you an easy solution that is certain to cause a good impression.
I went through my favourite places for beauty buys and here are my picks:
A good all rounder for a great price. Studio products are great value for money. This Smokey eye kit, for £6, is certain to please. New Years eve eyes, sorted!
I love the Eyeko Skinny liner – it is my favourite and I use everyday. This double pack from QVC is excellent value for £14 and after trying you will certainly need a second (and a third – you won’t live without it, ever!)
Classic skin care brand Nivea pulled together a lovely pampering selection with Honey Face Masks, Body lotion, Pearly Shine Lip, Cleansing Wipes, Moisturising Day Cream, amongst others. For £15, this gift goes a long way. Available at Boots.
Post Chirstmas excesses will show on your face. Pull yourself together with this L’Oréal Port-Party Beauty SOS and be ready for the next one in no time! £10 from Boots.
A pretty bauble from Rodial, with its lovely Glam Balm inside. A tiny bit of luxury to plump those lips for that all important unde the mistletoe action! £14 from Harrods.
I love this book. Rae Morris’ classic Makeup: The Ultimate Guide will help you get the grips with makeup and look even more fabulous! Only £12.50 from Amazon.
The Sanctuary’s Best Sellers Collection is a great body indulgence kit with their classic scent. £15 from Debenhams.
Clinique’s Chubby stick Whole Lotta Candy collection means you will have three beautiful shades to choose from for the New Year’s party! £20 from House of Fraser.
Pretty doll eyes with YSL Baby Doll Mascara Set – to put it on and remove later! Find it at Boots for £24.50.
Must Have minis from Nails Inc – lots of shades to start well the year – fro nudes to neons – this will keep your talons colour going for a while! Great value of £23.52 from QVC!
Festive talons courtesy of Clinique’s Party Tips nail polish set.. Three pretty shades for sensitive skin for £20 from House of Fraser.
Discover Elemis’ great Tri-enzime kit with this 4 piece set, for only £24.12 from QVC.
OPI’s Fit to be Tied #2 has two beautiful nail shades and delivers glitter in the right amount. £18.55 from QVC.
Clinique’s classic 3 step kit is one of my favourites cleanse, tone and moisturise sets. Have a go with this intro collection and see for yourself. £20 from Debenhams.
The Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish Hot Cloth Cleanser is a classic – and is has a special edition for Christmas – £26.25 for 200ml cleaner and 2 muslim cloths!
I couldn’t leave out the Naked 3 palette from Urban Decay, coming out on the 12 December for £37. Hurry!!!
Beautifully packaged MAC’s Stroke of Midnight eye kit in Smoky got me hooked. Smokey eyes paradise with Chillproof, Retrospeck, Gaelic Gold, Well Put Together and Carbon (my fave matte black eyeshadow). At £32, exceptional value for money.
Benefit’s Groovy Kinda Love gift set has their best sellers to keep you pretty – and all for £29.50 from Boots.
Sparkle! The Urban Decay Starlight Glitter set can help with that! £30 from House of Fraser.
Guinot has brought some lovely gift boxes this year, each one looking to fix a “problem” in a girl’s life.
Ready Set Glow will deliver complexion brightening tools; Damsel in De-Stress will pamper and help relief stress; Supercharged Youth Boost delivers a boost for ageing skin. They also have a male grooming gift set called Tied up, with a face wash, after shave and shaving brush! They are priced between £46 and £64 and can be found at your nearest salon using Guinot products or at the Salon Skincare website, amongst others. website
Reveal a younger you with YSL Forever Youth Liberator Serum set, £64 from Boots.
Lancôme’s Visionnaire is of my favourite serums – and this set has lots of amazing goodies to accompany it! It costs £82 from Boots.
This classic selection of half size MAC brushes is amazing – and a fantastic value too at £42.
And finally, a girl can dream…. fro £300 you can get the WHOLE Alber Elbaz collection for Lancôme at Harrods. Sigh…
Petrol in the water. Weird name, eh? Well, it is, but I can guarantee there is nothing weird about this nail colour.
After being very impressed with the durability of the Andrea Fulerton Trio nail varnish I wore a few weeks back (it didn’t chip, it survived the potato peeler and after seven days, it still looked so beautiful I felt bad to be removing it!), I decided to go crazy and bought three (!!!) other combinations.
I am, or course, wearing the aptly named Petrol in Water, and I cannot even describe how pretty it looks – three people, in one evening asked me what it was. It consists of a double ended polish with a dark metallic brown shade and an iridescent top coat.
I am truly in love – it will be very hard for any polish to beat this colour. The pictures don’t really do it any justice; with flash, the colour comes out as a dirty green-ish blue, but as the nails catch natural and indoors light, they come alive and really remind me of that one drop of petrol in the water that triggers a multitude of shades…
This teal/purple duochrome with subtle green undertones looks stunning, and depending on the light, it will be anything from peacock green/teal/indigo blue to purple. It has the most amazing colours, and it is very sparkly, without having glitter on it, so no rough texture.
Now, I wasn’t that keen on the application, as this was a similar experience to that with my other trio, Rainfall – still find the double ended brush a bit clunky, not wide enough, the darker colour is a bit thin, so coverage is not great and the drying time was a bit too long. Normally, this would put me off right away, but for this shade it was well worth it!
I really cannot wait to try the other two, but I think it will be very hard for a polish to top this one… Beautiful!
Another weekend and another nail varnish binge – I acquired another three… now have them, together with another good half a dozen, lined up for the next weeks. I really must organise myself, as I am going away for a month over Christmas, will have to take the fabulous shades to be applied while on holidays!
I fell in love with magnetic polishes after trying the Nails Inc. version, and as it is so pretty and an easy way to achieve a different effect on your nails, I decided to try other brands, and see how they fare.
This week, I am wearing the Saturdays Magnetism Nail Lacquer by Fashionista: Rochelle, stocked by Superdrug. This is the only brand I could find that offers a red hue, and I could not wait to try it.
It was quite hard to find, I visited three or four branches with no success. I decided to buy online, and was very happy to find out Superdrug offers free delivery!
My relationship with the polish started badly, when I found out it doesn’t come with a magnet. Surely, if it is a magnetic polish, it needs a magnet, but for this one, you are expected to fork out an extra £3 on top of the £6 retail price to achieve the effect. Not impressed. If they had many different patterns, I would maybe consider buying one, but the only magnet on the site is the “wave pattern” – incidentally, the one all the other brands give with each bottle of their polish, so as I bought the Nails Inc. and the Boots 17 varnishes, I just re-used one of the magnets on this polish.
Application wasn’t great. The polish is quite thick, so coverage is good. But you need a lot, I mean an *awful lot* of varnish on the second coat for the effect to work well. I had to re-apply six of my ten nails, which never happened to me before, not even with white nail polish. If I didn’t lather it on, the waves were weak, either failing to appear, with gaps and irregular, just messy. I also noticed i had to move the magnet from side to side, so the effect would happen on the whole nail and not just the centre. Got there in the end, and I must confess I *love* the colour, and of course, the effect. It has average drying time, and it sets smooth and shiny.
And that is pretty much what I liked about his polish. It chips badly, and quickly. After two days, there were numerous chips on several nails. I had to remove and re-apply on FIVE nails, only three days after applying, as they were so bad I couldn’t bear looking at them. This never happened to me before, even with the cheapest of nail polishes.
Overall, I am quite disappointed, and I will not be buying any more Fashionista nail polishes in the future, Saturdays range or not. It seems that the celebrity endorsement is once again an excuse for a less than satisfactory product, and I am actually paying for the Saturday’s faces on the box. Nothing personal against them, but no thanks.
I am still to try to Boots 17 Magnetized Nail Polish, but a friend of mine who bought the green one told me it lasts well. Fingers crossed!
I came across the Andrea Fullerton range at Superdrug, on the same day I bought the Studio eye pencil set. I had never heard or seen them before, and they looked very attractive – from the packaging to the variety of products. The colours were particularly exciting, the combos looked great, it really had that “nail art” at home things going.
I was immediately drawn to the Trio Colour Layering System nail polishes, and fell in love with Rain Fall. The idea is that you can wear each colours individually or layer both for different effects. At 7.99, I decided it was worth a go, as the colour in the bottle was mesmerising – a metallic teal solid colour and a sheer iridescent blue/purple, shimmery and with green soft glitter flakes.
Application was ok. The teal nail polish is very thin, so coverage wasn’t great. I decided against applying two coats, as I would end up with more than my usual two or three (maximum – I hate thick polish!) coats in total. The sheer varnish was also easy to apply, and quite smooth considering the flakes. One coat didn’t impress me, so I applied a second one. I dried quite smooth, despite the flakes, and drying time wasn’t too bad.
The polish also seem to be chip and scratch resistant, as I was peeling potatoes (oh, the glamour!) and the peeler hit my nail straight on, with quite a lot of force, and even though I expected the worse, the nail polish was practically intact – so points for that – let’s see how it fares in the week!
As it is a double-ended polish, and the two small bottles are joined by the double-sided brush, it was quite uncomfortable to hold while applying the polish, as the bottle you were not using was still attached to the end of the “brush”. It felt quite heavy and clumsy, but not impossible.
Of course, the colour on my nails wasn’t the colour on the bottle. This doesn’t mean I am not pleased with it – I am, it is exquisite, and it varies quite a bit, depending on the light and angle. Most of the times, it is blue with green flecks. On bright, direct light (such as photography flash), it looks dark blue. On not so bright, natural light, it looks Egyptian blue; tilt it a bit, and you can see green flecks – not only glimmering but almost giving it some depth and texture. On darker light, indoors, it looks almost forest green with lighter green flecks. If you look at your nails sideways, you can best spot the plethora of shades this polish offers: you can almost see the teal coming through the shiny green flecks, and the blue/purple sheen as the nail curves. Beautiful. I thought the polish was aptly named, as it indeed reminds me of a tropical forest rain fall – or a mermaid magical seaweed (yes, you heard it, in my head’s fantasy land!)
Overall, quite pleased, the effect is really pretty, and the colour, although as not as much as in the bottle, mesmerising nevertheless. The quality of the solid colour polish could be better, as I would need a good three coats to use it solo, and the brush easier to manage. Not sure if I will buy more, there are some truly amazing colour combinations, but I had very high expectations for this one, and it fell a little bit short.
I have also bought other two magnetic nail polishes from different brands and colours, and cannot wait to try those! I will, of course, post all about them in the next few weeks!
I have more eye make up that I could possibly wear in my lifetime, even if I were a spider, with eight blinkers. Still, in my world you can never have too much of (almost) anything so I could not resist when I came across this 7 eye pencil set by Studio, in Superdrug.
Usually, I am a bit sceptic about cheap make up, especially those in a “Christmas gift pack”, as I’ve had plenty disappointment in the past with poor pigmentation and durability. For £6.99 (and also part of their buy 3 for 2), it sounded like too good a deal to overlook, as it is less than £1 per pencil and the colours were appealing basics.
Just to have an idea of how good (or not) they were, I tried it at home one night, after work, pretty much on top of my worn out, basic day eye make up.
The pencils are really soft and the colours really bright, even though they are not super solid when on the eye, and the shimmery ones reflect light well. I also like that the colour have rather cute names, such as “silver moonbeam”. Application was easy, the pencils glide smoothly on the lid, and following the instructions inside the box to emulate the suggested design was quite easy, taking me well under ten minutes (even though the photo on the cover of the pack is definitely not done with the pencils in question) . The green and blue colour seem to mix quite a bit, and although when side by side they are quite similar, separately they are distinctive.
Durability was standard – I went on doing my usual things at home, and it seem to stay put, but losing intensity quite rapidly. I tend to think that if I had prepped my lids properly, as I do before applying make up to go out, they would have held better. Still to see if it passes the “night out” test.
I also used the green one to draw on my face, as a pumpkin stalk coming out of my orange eye make up for Halloween, and application was easy and it lasted well.
Overall, a pleasant surprise; a good purchase that won’t break the bank with a very versatile colour range. I found great it also came with the eye-opening basic white pencil and the classic black, which are always welcome in any make up bag. Dare I say, the black is quite close to my current MAC black liner (Smoulder Eye Kohl), and even though it is not a like-for-like swap (the MAC one is, in my view, far superior in quite a few aspects), it seems to be an acceptable budget alternative.
I might check out more of the Studio products available at Superdrug, they have a Eye Create Large Look Book (£9.99) and a Lash Set (£14.99) I quite fancy!
Super excited about my nail colour this week. Bought almost two weeks ago, I’ve been burning to try it on, so I am very happy that I finally gave the Barry M Instant Nail effect – Foil varnish a go. Being sceptical about the “true metal” look offered by many nail polishes, I wasn’t disappointed. Plus, I found it to be good value, at £3.99 from Superdrug.
I am now sporting “foiled” gold talons. I didn’t have a great experience with several gold nail polish in the past (they were either glittery or just metallic with no real golden pigment), and this one, even though it is not as if you applied liquid metal to you nails, it has got the shine of the inside of a foil sheet, slightly muted. It reflects light well, and it looks great! I think they got it right calling it “foil”, as I could relate the colour with the inside of foil sheets (if you ever encountered gold foil in your life, that is).
Still, I am very pleased with the result, as it is quite rare to find metallics that have such a good coverage. Application was, and I am not going to lie, not that easy. It was ok, but the polish is a bit thick, it kind of requires that you apply quite a bit for a uniform coverage and even though I was super careful, taking probably double the time it usually takes me to apply nail varnish, I can see slight brush marks and tiny bubbles on one nail.
Despite of the fact that the way it sets is not perfect (I am quite pedantic with the finish of my manicure, I HATE marks, bubbles, bumps, even if of microscopical proportion), I might re-apply for next weekend, as it would go great with the outfit I am planning for a big night out.
I also bought some nail foils, which I have never worn before, and I am really looking forward to trying them on! I have been on a very experimental mood lately, so watch this space!
So Many Lovely Things 