WEDNESDAY SELECTION: Essence The Beach house collection

Dear beauties,

we all love new and exciting make-up, right? Well, one of the brands that never fails the make-up junkies such as myself is Essence – a brand I’ve come to know and love especially because of their limited edition collections, particularly their summer and Christmas releases.

In about two weeks, a new collection called The beach house is hitting the shelves of drugstores all around Europe and Slovenia will be no exception. I seriously cannot wait to get my hands on these products!

The collection includes:

-          two duo eyeshadows (1,99 €)
-          two lipsticks (2,79 €) with a shiny finish
-          glow fluid (3,49 €)
-          duo blush (3,29 €)
-          kabuki brush (4,49 €)
-          tip guides (0,99 €)
-          four different shades of nail polishes (1,99€) and
-          a beach bag (2,99 €).

I am most definitely going to try to get my hands on the nail polishes since the pink and coral shade look perfect for summer and promise a water shine effect, white polish has a sea-salt effect which I’m curious about and the turquois polish has a matte finish and I don’t own a matte shade in that color – yet.

 I’m also getting the tip-guides that come in three different styles – straight (stripes), waves and zig-zag. Since I’m seriously lacking in the steady hand department, these are a must buy for me.

Lately, I’ve begun to use blush a lot more again and I’m looking forward to picking up this interesting duo-blush in pink-coral. And to be honest, I’ll probably walk away from the stand with the glow fluid as well, since I have a hard time saying no to any sort of illuminator. 

As I said, the collection will be available from mid June until mid July. I’ll keep you posted on what I think about the collection!

Until next time, stay beautiful!

Your ideas and suggestions – a recap

First of all, thanks to each and everyone of you for entering my giveaway and for all the lovely messages and ideas. I love giving gifts even more than receiving them, so hopefully we'll be able to do many more giveaways in the future.

Anyway, when reading your comments, I realized I had to somehow organize everything by category, otherwise I will randomly forget what it is you want to read about. So without further ado, here are your ideas and my thoughts about them. 

Review of high-end make-up (Marc Jacobs, Bobby Brown, Clinique, Benefit, …)

Many of you suggested these brands or specific products from these brands as something you'd like to read about. The thing is, I'm not too sure about most of these. I would never go and make an online purchase of, for example, Marc Jacobs Genius Gel Super-Charged Foundation ($48) without being able to test it out first. Since most of these brands are not available in Slovenia, these kind of reviews are less likely to happen and they would really not be that beneficial to most of you. I will most likely stick to reviews of products that are either available on Slovenian market or that are easily enough shipped over here from EU stores and are not crazily expensive. Jamberry nails for instance sound like fun, but I can't find any EU shipping so again, unlikely to happen. 

Source: http://www.simonelovesmakeup.com

Drugstore make-up brands (Essence, Catrice, Barry M, …)

I feel there are so many reviews of these brands out there already. I think that Essence and Catrice just held a blogging event in Slovenia and stocked-up the invited bloggers with their products. So I'm not really sure I'll be going out and buying the same collections just to do reviews on. But if I buy a product and have a strong (positive or negative) opinion on it, you will be the first to know :) I do think that this category is good for finding inexpensive dupes for high-end products, which was also one of the requests – this I think I will try to do as often as possible. A penny saved is a penny earned, or however that saying goes. 

Foundations, BB creams and CC creams

This is a topic I'm excited to tackle – I'm still on the hunt for some really good foundations and I've only had bad experience with BB and CC creams, so it's definitely something to look into. I think that the Winter time will be more about foundations and we can start trying BB and CC creams once the sun comes out in the spring :)

Nail polish and manicures

Nail polish, definitely. I love everything to do with nails. I can this category can easily extend to polish removers, different tools for manicure as well as some nail-strenghtening products. I have a lot of problems with my my nails being brittle as well so I'll be happy to go through some treatments for you. As for photos of manicures, I will try, but I'm generally not really very innovative – I work in a professional environment with a moderate dress code  - somehow, I don't really think that nails with Halloween pumpkins in this season or snowflakes in the winter would excite my colleagues much.

I love  these, for instance :) Source: http://allforfashiondesign.com

 

Hair products

This is definitely something I'm happy to write about. I'm constantly switching brands and I've got a pretty good idea about what works and what doesn't. So be prepared for several reviews of drugstore and more high-end products coming up soon. 

Body products

Again a group of products that makes my bathroom look like a crazy scientist's laboratory. I have so many that I love and some I absolutely cannot stand. I think I will do a review of my recent purchases and then we can start focusing more in detail on the new products on the market. 

Moisturizers, creams and other face products

This is a topic I am not too excited about, to be honest with you. I have a hard time separating between really good and only mediocre products when it comes to my face. I have some personal favorites I can write about but quite frankly, I'm not loving the idea of buying and swithching between moisturizers or night creams on a regular basis since I dread what it would do to my already sensitive face skin. I will give this some more thought, but I doubt that I will change my position on this. I will do a post about my skincare routine quite soon though so I expect that would be something you'd be interested in. 

Nail polish and manicures

Nail polish, definitely. I love everything to do with nails. I can this category can easily extend to polish removers, different tools for manicure as well as some nail-strenghtening products. I have a lot of problems with my my nails being brittle as well so I'll be happy to go through some treatments for you. As for photos of manicures, I will try, but I'm generally not really very innovative – I work in a professional environment with a moderate dress code  - somehow, I don't really think that nails with Halloween pumpkins in this season or snowflakes in the winter would excite my colleagues much.

Falling outside of the categories above were some great ideas about natural products or home-made products that can improve your beauty routines, favorite products by seasons and many more. Your wish is my command, so hopefully I'll be able to provide you with some interesting reads. I become a real couch potato when the weather gets cold so I'll probably be doing more posts than usual.

What's your favorite thing about the Autumn and winter time? Let me know!

Until next time, stay beautiful, stay awesome!

Products I regret buying

I’m sure you all know the feeling when you walk into a store, see this one, shiny, new make-up or beauty item and immediately fall in love with it. Of course it’s coming home with you. You are super excited about it and can’t wait to try it out properly. 

So you go into the bathroom and put it on your face or your body and immediately, you are disappointed. You contemplate throwing the product away, but at the same time you also feel the need to use it, since you already spent good money on it, right? Well, below are some products I feel that way about. A word of warning though – these are products that I don’t like or don’t work for me personally, but might work for you. So just some honest opinions, really. 

I’ll just quickly mention the Avon Nail polish drying spray. It’s icky, it’s oily and it my opinion, it doesn’t perform. So it’s going straight in the bin. If you want to read more about it, click  here.

Next up, we have the Aldo Vandini hydrating face mask with hyaluronic acid and caviar. Sounds great, right? Well, this thing isn’t exactly cheap for a single use product, I think it’s about  1 € (you get two in one packet for about 2 €). But besides that, my skin reaction to this mask was horrible. I felt a tingling sensation when I was putting it on and after the specified ten minutes when I took it off, my face was none the same but for the weird red patches on different areas. I will be throwing this remaining packet away.

Being an Argan addict, I was really happy when I spotted the Dvorec Trebnik argan ointment in the store. Mind you, the price was again quite high, I think it cost about 7 €. It’s a nice product overall, but it is just way too oily to be suitable for someone like me who is always busy with something. I simply don’t have the luxury of putting this on my hands and then sitting around for hours. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this, maybe give it to my grandmother :)

I somehow managed to buy two very pink products in the last months. First is the NXY lipstick in Flower. I bought this online and was quite disappointed in the difference between the photo and the real color. With this on my lips, I look like Malibu Barbie. Can’t think of a single occasion when I would wear this, so I’ll probably pass it on.

Another “great” purchase was a Bourjois 1 second silicone texture nail polish in Rose Cupcake. I picked this up in Müller for about 7 € and the moment I applied the first layer to my nails I knew that I made a big mistake. It’s the brightest pinkie Barbie pink you’ve ever seen before. Being 30 years old, I am way too old to rock such a color. I will probably pass this on as well. I did however like the brush and the texture of the polish. The only thing that bothered me was the “1 second” advertising in the name (which could be 1 second/nail to apply polish, but I interpreted it as 1 second to dry). In the smallest print possible, the back of the bottle says that it requires 50 seconds drying time. But I can say for a fact that this nail polish was not dry in 50 second, nor was it dry in 2 minutes. So, case closed on that fake advertising line. 

One of the products I thought I would really enjoy with my slightly oily skin is the L’Oreal Mat’ Magique foundation. I got mine in 04 – Rose Beige. But the thing is that while this foundation has a very whipped formula and feels nice and smooth when swatched on the back of my hand, it looked absolutely horrible on my face. It somehow got into the pores even though I was wearing a silicone primer and my face looked like I had tons of tiny holes in it. But the final nail in the coffin for this foundation is that it only keeps your face matte for a couple of hours but then it kind of melts off. Probably the worst foundation I have ever tried. 

Last but not least, let’s take a moment to talk about two e.l.f. products I picked up online. One is the eye primer and liner sealer. This already came a bit chapped on the priming side in the mail and the stick was leaning as if it was broken. But I could live with that if the product was any good, which it is not. It is way too dry and doesn’t apply well to the eyes either directly or with finger. It also doesn’t really do anything to make the eye make-up last longer. As for the liner sealer side I can’t really judge the product because my liners tend to stick in place by themselves. 

The other product I am definitely getting rid of right now is the e.l.f. professional bronzing brush. It has a nice shape but sheds like nothing I’ve ever seen before. For the purpose of this post, I went and used it to apply bronzer to my face. And I counted  no less than 7 brush hair left on my face. In words of one of my American friends – “ain’t nobody got time for that”. 

That’s it for my recent regrets. Do you have any that you’d particularly like to share?

Until next time, stay beautiful, stay awesome.                 

Wet n Wild – Comfort Zone Palette

This is one of the many reviews that were promised so long ago when I first went through the USA haul. I picked up several palettes overseas and this is one of them – the first one that I actually started to use during the trip. It was also the least expensive of all the palettes that I bought  – I picked it up for about $5 at Walgreens. 

The palette consists of 8 colors in earth tones. Again, it's a palette for dummies because every shade has an inscription where it should be used – browbone, eyelid, crease and definer. Generally this means that they should/could be used in quads, but of course every other combination is also possible. 

The packaging is nothing special which can be expected for this price, but it is sturdy enough to survive any travel. I also dropped it once already and it survived the experience unharmed.

The left side is the one I have used much more so far, especially since it's a bit lighter and in my opinion somewhat more appropriate for summer.