Eyeliner

Please forgive the strange expression, this eyeliner was so hard to photograph!

Experimenting with cats eye style eyeliner today. I always have flicks but rarely do I do the full cats eye shape, I love it but it takes more time than I usually have for my makeup. I always thought I was incapable of doing it right, but I took the time to do it carefully and methodically, pressing a gel with a flat ended brush right up against the lashes and then finishing off the line with a sweep of GOSH liquid eyeliner. Looks quite nice I think.

Quick Cinema FOTD

Origins liquid lipcolour review

Place holder post for review.

Colour "Really Rosy" applied over my bare lips. Moisturising, non sticky, fresh and minty. Quit pigmented, my natural pigment is very low. No other makeup on in this picture. Sorry about that!

YSL Singulier Dior Addict Lipstick

You can totally tell how bad my hayfever is in these photos XD

Anyway, some long overdue reviews. 

YSL Mascara singulier (waterproof version) is fantastic. It's the lovliest mascara i've ever used. At first I hated it because the brush spiked me and the formula was wet and useless. After a while it became amazing. I'm used to the brush now so I don't spike myself in the eye anymore. Buy it. It's wonderful, my eyelashes are awful but with this I can actually see them!

I choose Dior addict lipstick in shade "Millie" which is a mauvey colour and I love it because it's perfect to stop my lips looking so deathly. I think it's the colour they would look naturally if I had any sort of pigmentation to my skin. Goes on smooth, doesn't dry out my lips like my precious MAC sweetie does, lasts a surprisingly long time for a soft lipstick.

I've gone without make up for two days now...

and I'm not lazy about my makeup. I feel hideous without it. So then, what changed? I hear you cry, and where can I buy this for myself!

The oddest thing is that the past few days wearing no make-up I've had people come up and specifically tell me how well I look, how nice my skin is. It's like an alternate universe!

Trying to figure out what on earth I've done to make my skin even in tone and shrink my pores all of a sudden I came to the conclusion it was a combination of things.

1. Massisvely sun sensitive I've started layering factor 50 face protector (boots soltan) over my clinique dramatically different moisture gel. I have oily skin with patches of desert and rapidly forming early wrinkles and this seems to have done wonders.

2. I've been a good girl and taking my antihistamines properly. I have allergies, all the allergies so i'm supposed to take three antihistamines a day, this gets tedious and expensive, sometimes I'm naughty.

3. I've been "power eating". Determined not to get sick during my final school placement I've been eating a lot of different kinds of nuts and seeds, oat crackers, dried fruit and cheese for lunch instead of normal sandwiches. I'm vegetarian so to up my protein i've chosen to eat more beans and pulses. Normally I get sick immediatley on entering a new school, I have a poor, damaged and ravaged immune system, this time I'm really REALLY trying to give it a boost!

Here's the mandatory photo then,  sorry for the yellow tinge, the lights here are so odd! Without makeup on I can see the couple of freckles on my jaw. I hate them because it doesn't seem a sensible place for freckles!

 

 

Me this morning after a long walk in the heat and surprisingly un-shiny!

Oracles of beauty - the little pink powder

Well done if you've already guessed what I'm about to discuss, those little tubes and pots of brightly coloured pink, ripe with the promise of revealing hidden secrets. Like the real oracles of ancient greece however I'm inclined to think of their predictions as deliberatley vague to provide the illusion of mystery.

All right all right I'll get to the point. This outbreak of colour change "shifts to the most perfect pink for YOU" products that simply refuses to go back to the mists of the 80's from which it crawled. I hate the way they use science, not complex science mind you, science we've all done in our fabulous free education, to attempt to baffle us into believing many ridiculous things, as I shall demonstrate below...

The products all claim to use "the pH in your skin" to adjust their colour. We will start by dissecting just this one claim. Let's assume that this is correct and the products do react to pH, by no means an impressive feat, red cabbage and Phenolphthalein can perform this circus trick and with their clear to pink spectrum it wouldn't surprise me if the chemical in these products was of similar origin or makeup.

Let's have a closer look then, pH is a measure of acid/alkaline. 7 in the middle is neutral. Stomach acid being the strongest acid at 1 and bleach the strongest alkali at 13. The general idea - that we got from school anyway - was that alkalis (at the levels most people would come into contact with) were far more dangerous than acids. Our skin is slightly acidic at pH 5.5. Looking at the way Phenolphthalein works i'd wager whatever chemical they use is very sensitive to slight variations around pH 5-6 with the pink darkening towards the more alkali end.

Indicators are a fairly basic, but visually impressive science and i'm not averse to their use as an exciting and entertaining product, I love science, I love pink, these are normally something i'd be all over. But no, what I don't like about these products is the way they heavily imply that whatever pink it turns is your OMGSUPERSECRETMOSTPERFECTESTJUSTFORYOUSPECIALSNOWFLAKE.

The product changes colour, it reacts to the pH in your skin, pH has nothing to do with tone or what suits you, the lipstick/gloss/blush CHANGES COLOUR - that is awesome in and of itself, I don't need to be told that it knows what suits me better than my own eyes do, I'm not going to buy it for fashion advice, If I buy it at all it's because it uses science and changes colour.

Lush Jackie Oates review

I enjoyed Lush's previous tint offering in light pink, but it was far too dark for my skin and I had to water it down with moisturiser so much it was hardly worth the effort. This new ivory colour is much better. I still mix it with my factor 50 to make the colour more like my real skin though, but as suncream is something I wear every day that isn't a problem, it's just combining two steps in one.

I still powder over this as I find it does next to nothing to stop oil breaking through.

It's not unreasonably priced at 7.50 but that does make me question lush's claims that you can use it straight as a foundation. The formula is a very thick cream, and in such a small jar (the same size as their lip scrubs) I wouldn't want to use it straight for a whole host of reasons. I mix a dab (on the end of one finger) in with a dab of sunblock and find that it gives skin tone improvement over my whole face.

While I do like this product i'm not sure if I would repurchase, my card details went missing in the big lush hack that occured a few months ago now, I bought from them in november and was not at all impressed to find out they still had my card details and information stored in february, It took 40 days for me to get my bank card back after the big fiasco.

Having finally got my card back and thinking everything was fine now, I bought this little pot in store a few days ago. Later I found that my card had been flagged as "retain" to shops, meaning that it had been flagged as stolen by my bank. Thinking the cash machine would tell me what was wrong was a mistake, the machine ate my card. Santander are now sending me a new card, but it will take 10 working days and will be sent to my parents address (I live away from home at university) meaning I have to travel across the country - without a bank card - to get it back.

Now, obviously i'm a bit miffed that my bank flagged my card as stolen when I didn't report it stolen, and then didn't seem to have any idea why the machine ate my card when I called, but once again i'm stuck with no access to my money because the banking world doesn't think Lush can be trusted with card details and when I have to commute to work no fancy bath product is worth sacrificing my card for.