3 Budget Beauty Tips

Sometimes I just want to write about something really frivolous, today is one of those days. I'm a sucker for buying beauty products, yeah my make up looks pretty much the same whatever I get but I find it enjoyable hoarding the stuff anyway. Especially lipstick, I can justify lipsticks a bit more because they take no skill to apply, where as eye shadows ahhh not so much. I own lots of eyeshadows but I will forever be clueless about how to do anything half decent with them, a smoky eye and me are just never meant to be </3 </3 </3 Does anyone else miss Myspace broken hearts? The OG emoji. Those broken hearts are all the feels </3. Anyway, back to make up... I was browsing the net today putting an order in for some make up and then I thought 'this stuff is good maybe its worth sharing' so here I am writing about some of my favourite budget beauty products and places to shop for good quality bargains. This may also be a post I'm writing so I can feel ok about just having spent half an hour browsing new lipsticks to buy. So here are 3 tips of sort, on ways to feed the beauty addiction without breaking the bank.

1) Look Online

There are so many good places to get a good deal online. I particularly like shopping on Fragrance Direct, which of course sells perfume but also lots of beauty products. They have Essie polishes for just £2.99 and OPI for £3.49. Then there's lipsticks from the likes of Rimmel and Maybelline usually around the £2 mark, as well as plenty of face and eye products from all the usual brands you'd find in your local Boots or Superdrug. In addition to this there's also a few bits of Bobbi Brown and Mac, some of the discounts on these products are just a couple of £s here and there but they do have some MAC shadows for £7.90 which is a fair bit cheaper. If you're after hair products they stock brands like Tigi and for perfumes they pretty much have all of the ones you can buy at the perfume counters of a department store. 

If you're wondering how to pick items out if you can't see the real product colours, I wouldn't go by the colour charts they give, they're usually a bit off..  if you like the look of a colour then look at the name of it, most of the items will also have a shade name and if you pop that into Google with the brand name too you'll usually find some one out there that's swatched that particular shade for their blog. That's the great thing about the amount of beauty content on the internet now, nothing has to be completely blind bought.

Another good place to look is the special offers section on allbeauty.com they're another discount beauty site, usually not quite as cheap as fragrance direct but they carry a lot of slightly higher range skincare like Clarins or Clinique, click here to check it out.

2) Look In Non Beauty Shops

Naturally when you're looking for beauty products you're likely to just pop into shops like Boots or Superdrug but sometimes it's worth checking out the smaller beauty sections in stores like Wilko that primarily stock homeware or household goods. The Essence stand in Wilko is a dream for those on the look out for budget beauty items that all come under the £5 mark. Their long lasting lipsticks are smooth and opaque and for £2.30 you really can't complain. I also love their lipliners, they have good wear and they apply evenly if you've prepped your lips well with a good balm beforehand. If you're looking to do that whole 90's Kylie Jenner lip colour 06 Satin Mauve lip liner is perfect for it and its only £1! A final recommendation from me is their XXXL nude lipgloss in 06 Soft Almond, this is a really flattering brownish nude, super comfortable on the lips and gives quite a good colour payoff for a gloss, this ones a steal too at £2. I'm definitely going to try more from the range, their liquid lipsticks look intriguing and I'd be curious to see how well their face products wear for such a low price point. If you don't have a store near you the Essence range is also available here via the Wilko website. Just as a side note f you do pop into Wilko some of their brushes are pretty great, the range with the orange handles, they're soft and again, well priced.

3) Try Out Smaller Brands

I've discovered a few lesser known brands recently that have amazing products that are ideal if you want to keep your beauty products at a budget price points and you're bored of buying from the same affordable brands at Boots, such as Collection or Seventeen. 

If you're a complete beauty blogger junkie you may already consider these to be fairly well known because their praises have been sung across many blogs but in case you've missed them I'll mention a few favourites I've discovered and I've just placed an order to try more from.

L.A Girl is available here at BeautyBay.com. I'm not sure if they sell in stores in England but I've never seen them around. I discovered them through a beauty YouTubers and I've really enjoyed a couple of the products I've purchased. Their liquid lipsticks are great, they call them the 'matte flat finish pigment gloss' and they dry down to a very matte finish with great staying power. I have the shade Dreamy (a perfect 60's style peachy nude) and Fleur (on me it's quite a true peach, a little darker than most peach lipsticks) I love both and I think these might be a new addiction. I will say though they are quite drying so be prepared for that but I love the retro matte look that gives and I don't find them to be drying to an uncomfortable point. These come in at £4.99 really reasonable for a liquid lipstick, which often seem to be pricier than normal lipsticks I guess due to the long wear claims. Their lipliners are great too, theyre retractable so no annoying sharpening required, they're creamy so don't drag across the lips if you like to fill the whole lip in with the colour like I do and they only cost £2.49. Unfortunately I can't get their pro concealer to work on me, which is a product I've seen a few people rave about, it's a little thick and I find it hard to blend but I always like to try and make a product work so that I don't waste it so we'll see. I haven't tried loads from L.A girl but for just the lip products alone I'd say it's worth putting in an order.

Another brand who's products I bought on BeautyBay.com at the same time as L.A girl is Morphe Brushes. I bought a few of their brushes which ranged from around £5-£12 and they are such great quality, on the same par as something like MAC in terms of softness, I can't tell you how long they will last as I've not had them too long but they seem to be holding up really well. Just like MAC they have such a wide range of types of brushes for any need, definitely worth checking out. I also bought an eyeshadow palette from them this 35 pan matte one, which consists mostly of neutral colours and is so useful. You get such a range of colours for your money and when you think about how much individual eye shadows from brands that are well priced like Loreal cost, which many of us probably won't even get through, it makes sense to pick up a palette like this for just under £16 with all of the colours I'll probably ever need in one place. They're mostly all very soft and easy to blend, even for someone as cack-handed as me, not quite on a urban decay palette level but for half of the price your getting something pretty damn good.

So there are 3 of my tips and budget product recommendations, I hope I've not been too much of an enabler ahem and if I have at least these beauty buys aren't going to set you back too much! Now I'm currently lusting after more lipsticks I don't need but will some how justify to myself, dammit.

Acne and Giving Up Dairy

I'll admit, I feel slightly apprehensive about writing this one because I know once I've hit that publish button and it's out there on the internet I'll feel obliged to stick to this, even if nobody reads it. The problem is I don't want to do it. I freaking love cheese and milk, I know a lot of people that find the idea of drinking milk a bit gross but I'll drink glass after glass after glass, until the cows come home (ok....I couldn't help it...terrible, I know..). Cheese is also a big part of my life, SRSLY. So you might have guessed from the title and this little introduction, I'm giving up dairy. I'm not saying for forever but for the next few months I plan to at least try my best. This may not seem like a hard feat for some but for a girl who often finds herself thinking 'I can't wait to get home and have some cheese and hot sauce' this is going to be tricky. FYI Enocoda hot sauce is the bomb diggity and belongs on everything.

So why am I giving it up? Well over the past year my skin seems to be returning to it old spot ridden self and I'm not happy with it at all. I've always had acne, since I started getting spots when I was about 13 I've had it and ever since then I can't say I've ever had a day where I've not had at least a few pimples on my face. For the majority of that time my face was covered in more than just a few pimples, I had full blown painful acne some of it cystic. It was unpleasant and really effected my confidence badly and for years all the doctors did was give me the same useless anti biotics over and over and the same harsh creams that burnt my skin and bleached my pjama tops (never a good sign!). Then a few years ago in my early 20's I finally asked for a referral to a dermatologist. I won't go too much into the ins and outs of it but I ended up going on roaccutaine after reading lots online about it. The side effects were horrible, really unpleasant (cracked lips and flaky snake skin mmm) but I knew they were just temporary and after a few months or however long I was on it (I think it was more like 6 but my memory is terrible with these things) my skin became the clearest it had ever been. It was definitely not what many people would deem as clear skin but for me a girl who'd always had a face covered in spots just having a few and some red scarring made me feel a whole load better.

Fast forward a few years and my acne has really begun to flare up badly again. My skin is especially problematic because any spot I have will result in a red mark left on my skin and they don't seem to fade at all or if they do it's at a ridiculously slow rate, as there are marks on my cheeks from years ago that are still visible. Some of these buggers won't even cover up with war paint style concealer, they are THAT stubborn. I'm working on finding ways to fade these, this includes wearing facial sunscreen everyday and not just one contained in a moisturiser. I only ever thought to do this in the Summer months but it turns out at all times of the year UVA and UVB rays can do damage to the skin, I guess this should have been obvious to me it's not like the sun just disappears all together... but yeah exposure to these rays will prolong my scarring from fading, so like Baz Luhrmann famously reminded us 'Wear Sunscreen'.

Now for a while I'd been reading about the possible connection between consuming dairy products and problematic skin. The NHS website does not support this claim but I have gone on to read countless other articles on the good old interweb that have lead me to believe there could be some truth in this diaryaintsogoodforyoskin thang.

Click on any of these if you'd like to read more here here and here

I'm not saying dairy will have caused my acne full stop, not at all, I know it would be a problem either way but I am at least a bit curious to see if giving it up makes a positive difference to my skin, like it has for so many other peoples who's stories I have read about online. I figure what have I got to lose? APART FROM LOTS OF BEAUTIFUL CHEESE. I'll just have to suck that one up, won't I.After all I've tried sorting out the problem with cosmetic products and now I want to look at what I'm actually putting into my body and the kind of effect that could be possibly having on my skin. If I'm doing this I should probably address also cutting down on sugar, I don't have a lot of it but I could certainly make sure eating a sweet treat becomes just that, a treat, every now and then. At least I will always have peanut butter, peanut butter will never leave me, we're in it for the long haul.

Here's to hoping I see some results soon and if not at least it will be a good way to see how disciplined I can be with my diet, my guess for far is that this is going to be a struggle, when it comes to food my belly takes over my brain. To keep myself semi on track though I've taken a few before photos and I plan on taking photos throughout this process so I can log any changes I see and work out if there's a big enough correlation between the two and to just generally keep me on track. It's almost like science. Almost.

5 Films to look forward to in 2016

In no particular order, here are some of the films I'm looking forward to seeing in 2016.

1) Jason Bourne

Now I know this series has been done to death but I loved the original trilogy, I have to admit I've never watched the reboot (y'know the one without Matt Damon) but now that Damon is back on board I'm looking forward to seeing what a new Bourne film could bring. I'm hoping they manage to inject a new lease of life into the franchise and with the names they have on board it's looking likely. Alicia Vikander is set to star in the film, who's performance in The Danish Girl really caught my attention. Paul Greengrass who directed the other Bourne films is once again directing and Co writing with Damon and Julia Stiles and Tommy Lee Jones are also among the star studded cast. I've always really enjoyed Paul Greengrass' style of direction, the shaky camera and the sense of realism and urgency in his films creates so much tension. I challenge anyone to watch Captain Phillips and not feel in the teeniest bit on edge. I've heard his style described as 'docu realist' which I feel sums it up perfectly. His influence on action thriller films since the Bourne films were released is clear to see, just go and watch any of the latest Bond films.

Release date: 29th July


2) Alice Through the Looking Glass

This one's a funny choice, I didn't actually like Tim Burton's re imagining of Alice in Wonderland, in fact I found it very disappointing, this follow up however has a new director so may in turn be a very different sequel. I love the books and the Disney adaptation, which kind of has elements of both books, so I look forward to anything to do with the stories in the hope that I'll enjoy it just as much. I'm still looking forward to seeing this film despite the first because Through the Looking Glass has some great characters (humpty dumpty, the unicorn..) and I'd like to see them brought to life on the big screen. Often it's only 'In Wonderland' that people choose to adapt for television or film.

Release date: 27th May

3) The Witch

A good horror film is hard to come by. I often skip on horror films nowadays because of this. Genres such as Thriller or Drama feel as though they have a constant stream of good inventive films to check out, however looking for a something that's not just your usual cheap jump scare affair can be much more difficult. Despite the short comings of many modern horror films, The Witch looks very promising. Set in 1630 in New England it tells the story of a family who's newborn son goes missing whilst being watched by their eldest daughter, who is then suspected of witchcraft. The film follows the family into a descent of suspicion and paranoia as they suspect the involvement of Withcraft and become prey to a force of evil. The film won the Directing award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and looks set to be one to look out for upon release.

Release: 11th March



4) Silence

Martin Scorsese has been quoted as saying he only has a couple of films left he wants to make and if that's true this may be one of his final films. That alone is enough reason to anticipate this release. Scorsese has directed some of my favourite films (The Departed, Taxi Driver...) and I look forward to any film he comes out with because he has cemented himself in my mind already as one of the greatest directors alive. Silence is based on a novel of the same name written by Shusaku Endo about two Catholic priests who face a violent persecution when they travel to Japan to spread the message of Christianity and meet their mentor. Scorsese has been reportedly working on the project since 1991.

I couldn't find a release date or a trailer for this one yet so I'm guessing it will be out much later on than the rest.


5) Suicide Squad

I'm not huge on comic books at all but I do like Batman a lot and the villains of the Batman DC universe. The film has a big names cast, notably Jared Leto as the Joker, who looks perfect for the role. This one has received a lot of hype and the expectations seems to have been set very high, so we'll see how it lives up to it but the trailer certainly makes it look fun!

The premise : A secret government agency recruits imprisoned super villains to execute dangerous black ops missions in exchange for clemency.

Release date: 5th August

There we have it, 5 films I'm looking forward to this year, quite a mixed bag. What are 5 of yours?