Christmas Sales Bargains!

Hey lovelies,

I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas and Boxing day with lots of family time, feasting and happiness! I braved Westfield London for a couple of hours yesterday but went on a serious Black Ops mission there this morning.  I set my alarm for 7.30am but of course slept through it until about 9, but I was on my way within half an hour fully kitted out with backpack, trainers and list of everything I needed by shop. I can practically rotate a 3D image of Westfield and every shop/bathroom/restaurant in it in my head...if you ever get lost there and need directions, you want to bump into me!

I figure it's best to post this sale bargain haul first in case there's anything you fancy that you wouldn't want to miss out on, and then I'll do one on the goodies Santa brought...I do know a lot of elves but I seriously got bumped near the top of the "good" list this year!

This Juicy Couture perfume has been on my radar since it was released.  The bottle is divinely over the top and was made for my dressing table.  The scent is strangely incongruous with what I would expect from the brand (*cough* tacky smell *cough*), much like their original perfume.  It smells quite 'old fashioned', almost like a re-imagined Amarige by Givenchy.  It's definitely a night scent and is strong but sweetly feminine.  I got this set for 50% off - £27.50

BLING!

My Insolence is a softer, more wearable version on Insolence by Guerlain.  I absolutely love it and finished up my first bottle of it over a year ago, so when I saw it going for £21 ish for the set in Debenhams I had to grab it!

I went a bit overboard and got a third perfume.  I really can't justify this one, but it has been on my wishlist for ages.  I loved it from first whiff - to me it smells like a feminine version of Dior Fahrenheit for men, which is my all time fave scent on a guy (take note Kev!).  Lots of violet and a nice strong but not sweet fragrance for work.  It's normally about £35 for 30mls.  I adore the packaging, it's very sleek, but the bottle doesn't really capture my imagination.  House of Fraser have a tonne of half price perfume sets and reduced YSL makeup, definitely work a look.  The Westfield one has loads of gift sets of Vivienne Westwood's Naughty Alice for about £25, they're sold out online so I can't check the price, but it was a good deal.

I spotted this 100% pure silk robe on the M&S website yesterday for £25 down from £110! I didn't want to take a risk on the sizing, and since I had to return something to the shop for - what would you know?! - £25, I took it as a sign from the gods.  I found only one in the whole store and it fit perfectly! The embroidery is just beautiful.  I think I'll hang it on my wall as a piece of art as there's no way I want to slob around the house getting stains on it!  They had quite a few online yesterday but I checked today to the post the link here and they're all gone! So best to check in your local store for it.

I got a bit robe happy and also picked up this pale pink light robe for summer - one I can slob around in.  It's still for sale on the M&S website for £19 down from £45.  I do like it but now have three dressing gowns (I got a fluffy one for Christmas) so I might take it back.  You can see what it really looks like here.

Lancome Hypnose mascara is definitely a holy grail item for me, and low and behold, just as my first tube of it has dried up, I spotted a great deal on it in Boots.  For £14 something I got the 'Precious Cells' version which is supposed to nourish and help grow my lashes.  I doubt the claims but the mascara itself is amazing.  The Bi-Facil eye make up remover is the best out there, but I use the No7 dupe as it's too expensive.  The Kohl pencil is truly the best I've tried and I have the full size of it.  Lining your upper waterline is a doddle with it, not to mention the easy parts of your eye.  The Precious Cells version is sold out on the website but you can still pick up the regular version for £13.33.

Moving away from beauty items, I got this cute mini rucksack from Sports Direct as they wouldn't refund my postage from the online shop (such a cop out when they claim that their high street and online retail operations are entirely separate...they say it just to rip people off!) for a cute bear hat which sadly didn't fit.  So I swapped it for this bag, which was £9.99 down from £24.99.  I always try to be glamorous on holiday, but sometimes I do tend to go off on all day hikes (not shopping, okay?!) and need to carry a lot of junk with me, so I have to face facts and carry an appropriate bag!

I finally found a cute address book that's big enough to fit everyone in but not to heavy to carry on hols.  I'm done with sending loads of texts asking for addresses every time I'm abroad and about to send a postcard!  This one was £4.99 in W H Smith.

Pardon my slightly demented look (but what else would you expect from this sort of hat wearer?!).  I spotted this one in River Island a while ago but at the time wanted a woolly hat, plus I think £19.99 is expensive for it.  Since then I've realised I have an unnaturally fat head and nothing fits, except my little tiger friend here.  This will keep me toasty in Jan and Feb.  If I wear it with my Dominic the Donkey gloves I'll probably get carted off to a secure institution! I'm wearing the pink fluffy robe I got for Christmas...it's going to be my winter uniform thus forth!

I had a few quid left on an old House of Fraser gift card so I picked up a Linea room fragrance diffuser oil refill for the set my mum got me for Christmas along with some candles. They're apparently Frangipani but don't smell entirely like Elemis' Exotic Frangipani products, but nice enough.  I got 50% off both so they came to £6 in total.

And I just had to grab this Terry's Chocolate Orange in W H Smith for 99p! My mum never gets them but I think they're really Christmassy! YUM!

As if I hadn't had enough materialism for this year I'm still on the look out for some pink check or candy stripe warm pajamas, but everywhere I've looked is sold out! I'm going to Primark in the morning for fingers crossed! 


I also adore this River Island black satchel.  It's sold out in the stores I've been to but still full price online. I'm playing a game of dangerous chicken with it waiting for it to be reduced!  What do you think, should I just bite the bullet and pay £36.99 for it? (plus stupid postage fees ¬_¬)

I have my new Beauty and The Beast DVD on in the background...it brings me back!

What sale bargains have your discovered?!

Don't forget to enter my giveaway of the Urban Decay Book of Shadows Vol. III which is sold out in most stores now!  It closes on January 6th 2011.

E.L.F Haul & Swatches!

This came a couple of weeks back (although it did take a whole week to get here! I'm blaming the snow ¬_¬). I seized on the free shipping and eye shadow palette offer ELF ran to order a few items I hadn't got around to trying yet (I could probably open an ELF shop with all the stuff I have from them!).

First off, I really love the secure boxes they send their orders in and how everything is so neatly packed. I've ordered from them at least 6 times and nothing's ever been damaged in the post.

All laid out....

Word is the Makeup Mist & Set is the poor man's MAC Fix +...I haven't tried the MAC version so I'll have to let you know how I get on and whether it extends the wear of my makeup...I'm sceptical. 

Individual lashes are something I've never tried, and I think it could all go horribly wrong so I don't mind experimenting with expensive ones.  The Eye Widener is just a plain white pencil to use on my lower waterline.  At the moment I'm using an ancient stubby Rimmel white kohl pencil so it was due for an upgrade!

I was delighted to receive the free 'neutrals' eye shadow palette rather than the smoky ones as some of the browns looked delicious and I wasn't wrong! There's also a cute mirror in the lid.

And swatched...


I'm not hugely impressed with the quality of the eyeshadows, they are a bit loose and chalky but would work fine over a good primer.  It's a great set to keep in my desk at work for a last minute transformation!

I resisted the Shimmering Facial Whips for ages but for £1.50 I thought why not?! Below is the shade 'Lilac Petal' - now it may just be me but I can't even see a trace of Lilac!  It's a very pigmented creamy highlighter and a little goes a very long way! For those with dull complexions it would be useful to mix in with moisturiser or foundation for a bit of a glow, but it would be very easy to overdo it with this stuff!  It does smell like Orange Blossom as promised however!  I don't know how much use I will make out of this product but I don't regret picking it up.

I picked up the studio line primer for my friend's birthday a few months ago and she's really been enjoying it so I ordered one for myself too.  I haven't used primers much recently as I have very oily skin and they can tend to make the shine a bit worse, but my friend reports back that this one keeps your skin matte for ages!

The consistency is quite similar to Smashbox's Photo Finish primer, which I bought with high hopes but was disappointed by.  I'll do a full review on this one for you soon.

I actually picked up two of the mineral lipsticks and it's LOVE.  The colour, pigmentation, texture, packaging, everything - for the price (£3.50) - is fantastic!  This one here is Cheerful Cherry, a very deep berry red, but I also picked up Barely Bitten which is rapidly becoming my all-time-favourite red lippy (Sorry Viva Glam Cyndi!).

Sorry for the messy application, I just swiped it on...

Now this was the one dud purchase.  I knew I shouldn't have ordered it as the bristles looked similar in the image online to a brush I received with an ELF mineral powder set a while back and which frankly was crap.  But it was only £1.50 and I needed to reach a certain basket value to get the free shipping (worth £3) so I bunged it in as I am a sucker for an angled brush.  It's not as awful as I thought it would be, and I'll probably keep it at work for emergency blusher applications, but if I were you there are much better products on the ELF website to spend your money on! Their £1.50 eye shadow brushes are actually pretty amazing - they brought to me my favourite e/s blending brush!  It tends to be out of stock a lot!

So there you have it.  I will do a fuller review on the primer and the mist and do a separate post of Barely Bitten mineral lipstick with swatches comparing it to VG Cyndi as I'm so in love with it!

What's your favourite ELF product of the moment?

Lipglossiping's Red Lip Crusade!

I'm taking part in Lipglossiping's Red Lip Crusade - her Mr. doesn't like her in red lips (and strangely enough neither does Himself!) and so in an act of defiance she's sporting red lips every day until she runs out of ones to try and discovers her favourite one! 

I'm Number 1!

So in an act of solidarity I sent Charlotte a snap of me wearing my favourite red lippy, MAC's Viva Glam Cyndi, and am featured alongside some other lovely ladies wearing their favourite reds. Sadly Cyndi doesn't show up on me how it looks in the tube - it actually looks a bit pink...

So if you have a favourite red lipstick head over to Lipglossiping and join the crusade!

Viva red lippy!

The One Where Fairy Liquid Saved My Career...

Ever since I got back from Miami I've really fallen out of the swing of posting regularly, so I do apologise for my week and a bit break. Work's been so tiring that all I want to do when I get in is have a lie down in front of a cooking show. However, I've really missed posting and now I'm ready to get back on the wagon!

This time last week I was at my company's annual black tie gala dinner at a swanky hotel in central London. It wasn't a complete knees-up for me though as I've been organising it since June and on the night I was dashing around making sure our guests were happy and things ran smoothly.

My little jaunt to Miami a few weeks ago for the launch of Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas was one of my best work trips ever, but it came at an inconvenient time in terms of pulling together my event. Normally we have our annual dinner on a newly launching cruise ship and get to stay over night, but this year none launching in the UK were available or large enough, so we had to go ashore. Even so it was a fun night and I did get to hit the dance floor by midnight with my lovely workmates. I've been catching up on everything else at work since last Friday and there's still so much that needs to be done that I may be celebrating Christmas day in the office!

I'm ashamed to admit it but one of the most stressful episodes last week was sorting out my dress! In the run up to the event I was so busy I didn't give a thought to what I'd wear as I've got 6 ball gowns in the wardrobe and planned on flinging on one of them. Thankfully I had enough sense to try one on the night before (the biggest one) and what would you know? It wouldn't zip up!

I lay on the floor. I donned ginormous control knickers. I tried it with bra on and bra off. I sliced off one of my spare tires with a kitchen knife...Okay I lied about the last one! Despite all the stresses with organising the event that I'd faced, my dress drama was the only thing which lead to a melt down. Now I'm not precious about not wearing the same dress twice etc. and I didn't care what the dress looked like on as long as it would zip up, but at 8pm the night before MY event, I literally had NOTHING suitable to wear to it. Disaster.

I grabbed my bag and ran out of the house like a mad woman over to Westfield. I don't think I even wore a coat and certainly didn't have gloves or a scarf even though it was subzero! I ran into every dress shop brandishing my credit card, and spent two hours (THANK GOD for the later Christmas opening hours!) buying two dresses from Monsoon, one from a random shop called Apricot and finally, the winning dress from Coast and other bits and bobs (read: even larger, sturdier control underwear). 

These are the ones I got from Monsoon.  I preferred the green (£120) even though I looked like a house in it, himself preferred the black (£90).

This is the one from Apricot, it was only £29 in the sale, but it was baggy around the waist.

And this is the one I went for in the end, I was so busy on the night I don't have one full length snap of me in it!

I spent last Saturday sheepishly returning the unsuitable dresses.  And the chosen dress is currently at the dry cleaners being exorcised of red wine...

Kate Moss was right, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, and the utter trauma that I went through that night made me swear off food, well junk food at least, forever, or at least until I'm a pensioner! If I hadn't been such a greedy guts for the past year I could have worn something I already own, saving £100 and a whole lot of unnecessary stress. Thankfully I got an amazing deal at Coast. The dress was originally £195, reduced to £125 and on the day it had a further 20% off so I got it for £100. If I'd realised earlier that I'd become such a hippo I would have gone shopping sooner and probably had to cough up a lot more for a suitable dress, so at least there was a little bit of a silver lining to the whole escapade.

But that wasn't the end of it. I got home and had to repaint my nails and toenails - the dress I'd planned to wear was black so Ciate's Dangerous Affair which I'd applied the the night before to get a head start on things clashed horribly with my pale blue dress. So I replaced it with Gosh's Metallic Purple with Frou Frou over the top to give a sort of pale purple silver colour. Then I had to sort out my hair. Like a complete idiot, I had a bath with some Sanctuary bath oil a few nights before the event and let my hair get wet. In the bath. With the oil. I washed it about 1o times and it still looked greasy. I even listened to my mum's insane suggestion of rinsing it in water with a bit of white vinegar dissolved in it. I was worried this would really strip my hair but was willing to try anything! My hair dried and the grease was still there. Earlier that day my workmate had suggested that washing up liquid would shift the grease/oil from my hair, which I guess makes sense, but I was terrified to try it and my mum said the bubbles would never rinse out. However it was gone midnight and my hair was still so greasy you could cook a breakfast on it. So out came the Fairy Liquid (I can hear you gasping!) and back into the shower I went...

Well, it was a revelation. I took care not to get the suds in my eyes and it miraculously rinsed out very easily. I didn't use conditioner (I'm DONE with greasy substances okay?!). I always use a plastic wide toothed comb to detangle my hair when it's wet. There were no tangles. The comb literally FELL down my hair and once dried, I don't think I've ever seen my hair shinier (and I didn't use any styling products/serums at all on it). So you're all probably beyond horrified by this revelation and unfollowing me and deleting me from your bookmarks as fast as you can, but what can I say?! Fairy Liquid is my new holy grail clarifying shampoo! 

Not really, but if things ever go wrong for you with the old bath oil or olive oil hair treatments (that's a tale for another post) you know what to do!

I got to bed at about 2am, survived on adrenaline on D-day and have been exhausted ever since whilst trying to manically catch up on everything else before the Christmas break. Hence the lack of posting.

Anyway, our event manager at the hotel (who wasn't there on the night may I add! ¬_¬) gave me a Jo Malone candle. It's very pretty but I haven't burned it yet so I'm not sure about the scent. The packaging is so luxurious and it's my first 'Jo' product so I'm pretty excited!

I like!

So that's what I've been up to.  Back to normal service :-)