My other entry attempts for Mizz Worthy's Elementals Contest!

First of all I went for earth, striations of rock, and also an aspect of ageing.........Then I wondered why the photos made me feel old!

But worse still, my first thought on examining the photos was that I looked like a Klingon.....

Boy my eyes look blue in that pic, doesn't really help the earth feel.
It's a while ago and I can't give you a full and accurate list of what I used, but mainly Illamasqua Liquid Metals in Solstice and Enrapture, Sleek Acid Palette and some MUA.

The Matte Brown MUA really didn't stand up to being used in this way:

Next I wanted to do an Ice look, I bought 2 pairs of lashes for this, really wanted some white ones but couldn't find any, ending up with silver and blue. One idea was more Ice Queen the other a more blue look,  like this lovely one from Lillian. I went for the Ice Queen look and never got the bluer version done.

All white and silver gave no definition to the makeup, and the sparkles really don't show up. Lips looked much better originally, then I messed them up, so put some OCC Lip Tar in feathered on followed by more sparkles but it really didn't work in comparison with the original look. Lashes are Stargazer.

Friday I had a bit of a go at wind, but it really wasn't long enough before school time and I really hashed my chin and lip area up.

Eye of the Storm!

I needed far more time to bring the detail round like a satellite picture of a hurricane....... Instead I tried using the OCC LipTars again and mashing on some cloud detail!

On the whole I'm a lot more happy with these pics than I was before I did my water look yesterday which I am well happy with. Plenty to learn from and build on though:) 

Mizz Worthy's Illamasqua Elementals Contest Entry

Today I actually did a look I am happy to enter! This is my fourth attempt to realise one of my ideas. The others were pants in comparison and I've been feeling quite down about it all. I so need to get me some training!! The state of my skin doesn't help, but that's the aging process for you, so I'm gonna have to learn to lump it somehow..... Anyway, I may post my fails yet.........we'll see.

Oh and before I forget, my mood was greatly lifted during the week by reaching 100 followers, thank you all so much. I have another small giveaway planned, but it may have to wait until after half term now. xx

So here we go:

My fails were Earth, Ice and Wind

Today I went for Water:

Face:

Smashbox Photo Finish primer

Mixture of Boots No7 Lift & Luminate Foundation in Porcelain and Illamasqua rich liquid foundation in 145.

Illamasqua Pressed Powder in 100 

Amazing Cosmetics Concealer

Lashes:

MUA Shades 2 & 3

Rimini collection False Lashes

Eyes:

Illamasqua Cream Eyeshadows in Suck and Grace

Illamasqua Pressed Powder in 100

Sleek Acid Palette White

Barry M Supersoft Eye Crayon in Shades 7 & 8

Cheeks:

Illamasqua Cream Eyeshadow in Suck

Lips:

Illamasqua Cream Eyeshadow in Suck

Barry M Supersoft Eye Crayon in Shade 7

Sorry there are so many photos I might edit some out tomorrow, It's hard to see them clearly in Blogger editor and my parents need this room to sleep in tonight!!

NOTD Nails inc Fleet Street - Recommendations for dupes welcome!

Fleet Street is my absolute favourite colour from last year.......too bad it's so difficult to apply!

This is my 3rd attempt to do an NOTD with it, that's how difficult it is. I adore the colour, but the consistency is a nightmare for application.

So, any recommendations for dupes out there?

MyPure Blogger Panel

Well it's been a bit of a manic week! Oooh it’s so nice to have a computer again. Monday was so weird it’s untrue. No internet access nearly did my head in. First thing in the morning I was looking up something un-beauty related and got bitten big time! The anti-virus and spyware products did what they could but my machine is now full of all sorts of viruses and totally unusable grrr....

Thankfully my wonderful hubby has rigged me up a temporary replacement pc to get me back up and running for the time being. Which is just as well, because I received a package of goodies that day:)

Yep, I’m one of those bloggers on what MyPure are calling their Blogger Panel. Apparently there are 50 of us, so you could be getting rather a lot of reviews on these products landing in your in box. I apologize in advance if this gets on your nerves, but bear with me and I’ll explain a bit about why I went for this:

Dressing Tables, Superdrug MUA Green Shadow Swatches and EOTD

It's been a bit of a mixed bag of a week for me. Not really had much time for posting as I try to swap rooms round. Lots of cleaning and furniture moving still to be done..... But I did get chance to swatch those lovely MUA greens.

A quick play:

I absolutely loved the look of shade 6 when swatched, but had been dying to try out shade 5 all week....and they just didn't look like they were gonna work together in a hurry, so shade 5 won, this time.

Sleek Kajal in Nocturnal

Rimmel Volume Flash Mascara

MUA Shadows - Shades 5, 7 and 2 (that's the white and yes your right it's not on my original list - I did go back for more...)

Back in the land of furniture moving, here is my beloved makeup unit/dressing table 'thing' in it's new home:

I fell in love with this last year when I spotted it in the clearance area of Ikea. I always stand up to do my makeup so this had my name written all over it. It's from the Vinstra range and usually costs around £300 pounds, way out of my price bracket. But it was the display model a little bashed and with the odd handle missing and a couple of drawers loose. For £100 it was mine:) better still we then went round to the Customer Services Desk, who ordered replacement handles and drawer screws to be sent from Sweden. OK so if your into perfect furniture it's still not gonna reach up to scratch but it's mine and it wouldn't have been otherwise :D

Just got to fill all the drawers back up now.......

And the winners are...........

So here we are, what a day!

So I was gonna do this the old fashioned way, but RANDOM.ORG is just so easy....

First up we have -

Who's first choice was the Nails inc polishes

Next we have:

Who's first choice was the peacock colours.

Next up:

For Lillian that means her third choice item the sunset colours, as the first and second had already gone.

And finally:

Who get's the Sleek Acid Palette, which was in fact her first choice!

So there you go, my first giveaway.....keep watching for another one coming soon. Right now I need some sleep!

Superdrug MUA NOTD - Shades 1 and 9

From the sublime to the ridiculous! Well it's maybe not that bad, but really these MUA nail polishes did bring out my worst feelings of, why the hell do I even bother buying cheap polish. The thing is, in actuality it's not even the polish that was causing the problem this time, it's the packaging. The tops are very difficult to manipulate and the brushes are short and stubby. Shade 1 (Dark Navy with reflective flecks) shed 2 hairs on the first 2 dips into the bottle and trying to get enough shade 9 on my brush required the kind of bottle tilting you'd expect from a half empty bottle.

Rant over and the colours are nice enough and to be fair have just survived washing up, which yesterday's Nails inc didn't! And in both cases I used Nails inc Kensington Caviar Base and Top Coat.....

 Nice enough to put myself through the hastle again? mmm possibly for shade 1....but I doubt it.

Alex Box on the cover of todays Sunday Times Style Magazine

I was leafing through yesterday's Times Magazine when I came across this image for the front cover of todays Style Mag:

As soon as I saw it, I just knew I wanted to post it on here and I knew the outrageous make-up artist they were referring to. I hunted high and low to find a larger digital version, but this is still all I can find, without being a paid subscriber to the Times Newspaper.

The write up is just a small one, but you can read it here .

I'd still like to get a larger copy of the cover pic to post if at all possible, so I'll keep trying to track it down.

Edit: Hubby just got back from the papershop and the pics are awsome, they're full size and there's an extra one not featured in the online version.

*********

Also featured in today's Style mag are the Winners of Style beauty awards 2010 if you voted, you'll know that the choice of items to vote for, was given in a rather dubious drop down menu of ready chosen items. So what relevance this award has really, is anyones guess, but there you go.  

Look what Mr Sparklz found for me:

Fabulous!

Nails inc Paris NOTD and giveaway reminder

Nails inc Paris, currently free from Boots with 2 bottles of Diet Coke.....so effectively £2.38

PS Don't forget to enter my giveaway:

Open until Monday 10th May 23.59 BST

x

Superdrug MUA Eyeshadow Swatches and EOTD

The MUA eyeshadows currently consists of a range of 20 colours cunningly named shades 1-20. There are 15 pearl shades (1-15) and 5 matt colours (15-20). Looking on the web I can see that there are colours which were definitely not present in the store I visited despite the fact that the stand looked reasonably well stocked. Shades 1, 2, 8 and 18 particularly stick out as being absent. Whether that means the whole range is not actually in the shops or it just makes them the more popular shades I'm not sure. I'd guess the latter, but I was too much like a child in a sweetshop at the time to notice! Shade 8 would most definitely have been mine if I had seen it.

Here's a closer look at the shadows I bought:

Photographing the colour accurately was quite hard, my camera is starting to pack up and the time between shots is becoming excessive. But to me the colours in this picture are a true representation:

Yesterday I had chance to swatch 4 of the colours:

And in direct sunlight:

14 -  pearl black/dark grey with a green tinge

3  - pearl silver grey

4  - pearl lavender

9  - pearl purple with a blue duocrome effect - This really doesn't come out in my photos of the pots or the swatches, but can be seen a little on the fingers I used to make the swatches:

And slightly round the edge of the pan in this pic, but in real life it is much more evident.

Couldn't resist an EOTD this morning:

Shadows as above.

It was a quick one so I forgot to use a primer.

I used FrontCover Shadowline with Shades 9 and 4 to line the upper and lower lids - if you do this be really gentle as the MUA shadows are very soft in comparison to the baked FrontCover Shadows it's designed for.

Rimmel Sexy Eyes Mascara

I'll swatch my remaining shadow tomorrow.......

Superdrug MUA - Makeup Academy - Haul

You might know from Twitter that I had to travel a little further than my local Superdrug to get my hands on their latest brand, Makeup Academy MUA. Why would I bother you ask? It's £1 it's not gonna be much cop you might think. Well I used to think like that too, and obviously if I had the money........ well maybe that's not entirely true. Because the thing about drugstore brands is that you get to try new things without breaking the bank.

So what was it that was getting my attention....

I saw the pics and hoped very much that these mascara's were indeed the colour they appeared, but the website gives no colour descriptions so I really wanted to see for myself.  I also really liked the look of some of the glitter liners the yellow in particular stood out. Being me, it hadn't even ocurred to me to look at the lipstuff or blushers....traditional colours, I'll let someone else review those :) Just as well as the comments I've read seem quite mixed.

So those were my expectations......

...................what did I actually get?

Firstly you'll note, no glitter liners! They just didn't swatch up as well as the Collection 2000 Glam Crystals, for the extra couple of quid there's no contest. The glitter moved to the sides of the swatch leaving a blank gap in the middle. I might still have been tempted by the yellow but there were better things in the collection to spend my money on.

Namely the shadows, which is why I ended up with 9. They have a real soft velvety feel and swatched up nicely. At that price I can afford to cover my whole face with one shadow if I choose to, although I must add that I haven't tried these enough yet to tell you that they'll come off OK if you do!

I'll leave the shadow swatches for another day, hopefully tomorrow, but the school's are out for polling day so there's no guarantees : D

On to the Eye Dust's, there's really not a huge variety of colour for this product so I just picked a couple...more of those another day too. This is looking like a week or two of MUA here.

I'd already fallen for shade 1 Nail Varnish in this post from Lipglossiping so that was going in my basket for definite. But I'm not known for my love of drugstore varnishes and a quick swipe of shade 13 a pearly green colour really didn't entice me. I did however grab a 9....we'll see how that goes.

So did I get those mascara's you ask?........I did indeed, well you can't really swatch them can you?

It was the Teal Shade 2 that had grabbed my attention but it's the Blue in shade 3 that I'm wearing today. It's such a pretty colour on. I'd be quite happy to wear it with a fairly neutral face. I took some photos without any other makeup and I'm really wishing I hadn't, my skin is not looking good and seeing it in the high definition of a photo is really quite saddening. This is the best of some very scary shots :(

What I would say is that I don't think this mascara is going to last long. It looked quite sticky even on the first opening and there was quite definite clumping on one eye.

But it is still looking good 6 hours later and I do love the colour. So I'll be wearing it lots more and anyway for most people a blue mascara is going to be a one off wear and at £1 you can afford to experiment, so what's to lose?