EOTD: Red White and Gold

I have wanted to do a look like this since I saw this look on Siryn's blog. How awesome is it? She is so cool haha. Anyway here's my (simplified) version:

Products used:

Too Faced Shadow Insurance
Nyx Jumbo Eye Pencil in Milk
Sugarpill Tako (lid)
Hi Fi Shadow in Hot Rod (crease)
MAC Vanilla Pigment (inner corner)
E.L.F Custom Eyes shadow in Ivory (browbone)
Sleek Dip-It liquid eyeliner in 264 Gold
Black mascara

Hope you like it!

Swatches & Review: Soap & Glory Lid Stuff in What's Nude

I've got some swatches of a really nice palette for you today, Soap & Glory's Lid Stuff quad in What's Nude.

This is a really nice palette for everyday/wearable looks, and one thing I especially like is that 3 out of the 4 shades are matte. This makes them more office appropriate for most people, and won't draw attention to any lines and wrinkles around the eye area.

The four colours are Vanilla; a matte creamy highlight shade, Pink T; a matte pinky beige slightly darker than my skintone, Mudhoney; a matte medium greyish brown, and Aubersheen; a shimmery/sheeny taupey brown.

Swatches from L-R: Vanilla, Pink T, Mudhoney, Aubersheen.

The shadows all have a really nice texture and are very pigmented. The mattes are nice and soft and blend fairly easily, something which you don't often find in cheaper/drugstore brand eyeshadows. Mudhoney would work as a subtle eyeliner, but I would perhaps have preferred a darker brown for this use. However you could use this as an eyebrow powder or in the crease, so you have a few options.

Overall I think this is a really nice product and I would definitely try more Soap & Glory makeup products. Lid Stuff retails at £10 and is available from Boots.

MAC Chocolate Brown Pigment: Possible Dupes?

I know how popular the MAC Pigments are, and while they are a fantastic product, I believe there are many other companies that make loose eyeshadows of comparable quality, at a much lower price. MAC Pigments currently retail on their UK website for £16.50 for 4.5g/0.15oz of product. I thought I would look through my collection to see if I could find a dupe, or anything very similar, to Chocolate Brown Pigment, which is one of my favourites. It's great to find a cheaper alternative whenever possible I think!

I picked out the closest things to it I could possibly find, but it wasn't as easy as you might think!

From L-R: MAC Chocolate Brown Pigment, HiFi Cosmetics Yuletide Carols, Barry M Dazzle Dust in 53 Chocolate, Sue Moxley brown from Famous palette.

As you can tell, they are sort of similar, but nothing quite matches it. I thought I would've found several dupes for it as I have a lot of browns, but these are the closest to it, and side by side they do not look alike.

Yuletide Carols is more bronze-toned, perhaps a more yellowish brown. 

The Dazzle Dust has a much darker, blackened base, despite having a similar chocolatey brown shimmer. 

The Sue Moxley colour is much more taupey when swatched, with more grey tones. It also has a chunkier texture, with less pigment.

So, sorry I couldn't find a match for MAC Chocolate Brown for you, but I hope that helps you if you were looking at any of these as a possible dupe.

Review: Look Beauty Double Hit Lip

LOOK Magazine recently came out with a makeup line, which is available in Superdrug. I found these in the White Rose Centre branch, but have not seen them in any other shops so far. 

Here I have two of the shades, Red Alert (shade 4), and Berry Blast (shade 1).

This product caught my eye as it looked like something I haven't seen before. They are called the Double Hit Lip, which is a lipstick, with an identical coloured gloss at the other end of the tube. On the outside of the packaging it says:

All the trends covered - matte, glossy or everything at once!

I thought that sounded really interesting, but unfortunately, the lipstick's finish is not a true matte.

The lipsticks on their own. There is a bit of a sheen to them, and they have quite a balmy texture. Red Alert is on the left, Berry Blast on the right. To me Red Alert is not a red at all, but a bright, orangey coral. They are pretty well pigmented.

Here is both lipsticks with the glosses layered over the top.

The glosses on their own. The glosses are much sheerer.

So, my opinions. To be honest, I really don't like these. I would love to do lip swatches for you but my skin is quite bad at the moment, so hopefully I will add some later. I don't know what it is about them I don't like, but I find they apply on the lips weirdly and don't seem as pigmented as they look in the tube. However, the thing I dislike the most is the scent. Both the lipstick and the gloss are really strongly scented with a sickly sweet, artificial smell. So much so I have not worn either of these for longer than 5 minutes. If you happen to like the smell of them you may really enjoy them, but the smell is definitely not for everyone!

I hope you found this helpful!

EOTD: Morbid Faerie

Here's the look I wore yesterday. I wanted to play around with colours that have duochrome effects, or different colours in them. It gives a really nice effect I think, and makes the overall look seem a lot more complex. Hope you like it!

What I used:

Too Faced Shadow Insurance

Fyrinnae Pixie Epoxy

Fyrinnae Rapunzel Had Extensions (lid)

Fyrinnae Darling Misfit (outer v and lower lashline)

Fyrinnae Faerie Glamour (crease)

Hi Fi Cosmetics Morbid Faith (between crease and browbone)

Fyrinnae Winter Again (inner corner)

Sleek Oh So Special palette matte cream (browbone)

Illamasqua Volume Mascara in Harness

Review: Bellapierre Makeup Base

It's been a while since I reviewed anything on here, so I've got quite a backlog to get through! This is something I picked up on BrandAlley, which is a website which has sales of various brands, with different products appearing at different times. Bellapierre Cosmetics seem to feature fairly regularly on there, so you may see this for a reasonable price.

The product I am reviewing is what they call the Makeup Base. Here is their description:

This wonderful product helps transform all of our shimmer powders, from shimmery to matte; it also provides a water proof base for any of our pigments. Some clients also choose to use our makeup base as a Concealer for blemishes and impurities that are more difficult to cover with makeup.

It's quite a strange concept for a product, since it seems to have so many different uses. To me though, the most interesting one is the mattifying aspect. I've done some swatches below of two eyeshadows, on the left over Fyrinnae's Pixie Epoxy, and on the right, over the Bellapierre Makeup Base.

Barry M Dazzle Dust in #39 Tan. The Pixie Epoxy (left) enhances the shimmer and helps it stick, whereas the Makeup Base (right), as you can tell, takes the shimmer down. You can also see that the base is a light colour, with a fair amount of pigment to it. I haven't used it as a concealer yet, but it would definitely give a moderate amount of coverage.

MAC Pigment in White Gold. Over the Pixie Epoxy, you can see a lot of the white and gold reflects in the pigment, whereas the Bellapierre base seems much less of the white, and just looks like a more subtle shimmer texture.

Something I should note is the way to use this product. It will mattify much better if you blend your shadow into the creamy base. If applying on your eye, it will work better  if you use a small amount of shadow, and use a sweeping, rather than patting motion to apply. Blending well will take most of the shimmer away.

I have found that this product can crease on my eyelids, but if you also use a primer such as Urban Decay's Primer Potion underneath, it doesn't crease.

To sum up:

Pros:
- Mattifies eyeshadows that you may find too shimmery.
- Multi-use, can be used as a concealer.
- Provides some coverage to even out eyelids.

Cons:
- May be too light for many skintones.
- Could crease without a primer underneath.

Price: The Makeup Base is currently priced at £9.99 on the Bellapierre Cosmetics UK website. For different countries, check their worldwide website, where it should be available.

Catching Up

Hey all, sorry for the long gap in posting. I've just completed a big project for college so hopefully now I'll have a bit more time to spend on the blog.

Last Sunday we had some friends round to watch the Superbowl, which was really fun, but very tiring. I live in the UK so it finished around 3am for us! Of course I had to do a makeup look to match the event, so I did a red, white&blue look on my eyes:

The glitter spread around a lot but whatever. I still thought it looked cool. I used Sugarpill eyeshadows, with glitter from The Body Needs and Helen E pressed on top. I also did some face paint on my bf, but I won't show you that haha!

The other exciting thing to happen lately was winning a contest on Wendy's blog Turtle Beauty! Here's a pic of most of the goodies (there was even more but some stuff got passed on to friends or into my kit):

I'm hoping to swatch some of this stuff for you soon, but so far I'm loving it! I was so glad to get my hands on the Day 2 Night eyeshadow quad, it's so pretty. Let me know if there's anything you see here you want a review/swatches of. I also have a cream eyeshadow that's not pictured here, in Dawn.

Update

Hi everyone! Hope you are all well. Just to let you know that the blog is gonna be a bit quiet for the next couple of weeks. I've been suffering a horrible cold, on top of having tons of college work to get through. However I did receive a box brimming full of makeup from Wendy from Turtle Beauty the other day, as I won a contest on her blog! Yay! :D As soon as I get chance I will post some pictures and swatches of the stuff for you!