Author Archives: marc

Cire Trudon Positano Candle: Summer in Your House

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cire trudon positano candle

One for those who want to skip past spring and head straight into summer: the Positano candle by Cire Trudon and Giambattista Valli. It’s heady and exotic, packed chockablock full with white florals and jasmine and orange blossom, but it’s also somehow very refined and chic. When it comes to unique, top quality candles you’d be hard pressed to beat Cire Trudon, but this limited edition is even more lust-worthy than usual. The overwhelming fragrance note, for me, is the tuberose, but the other florals add interest and stop the tuberose from smelling too…sickly. (Does anyone else get a bit nauseous when there’s a tuberose overload going on?)

Positano has (strangely enough!) been inspired by the scents of the little village of Positano on the Amalfi coast. I’m pretty sure I went to Positano on a secondary school trip back in 1994, but let’s not lower the tone: this candle scent is based on Giambattista Valli’s olfactory memories, which are possibly slightly more glamorous than my own. I’m pretty sure that my olfactory memories of the Amalfi coast are limited to the smell of the “naughty girls” smoking illicit cigarettes and the weird odour that a touring coach develops after eight straight days of occupation by thirty teenage girls.

Anyway: if you want a touch of Italian summer in your home and you fancy a bit of a treat-to-self, the Positano candle can be bought at Selfridges.com for £70. Burn time is around 55-60 hours but I find one little burning session every couple of days is enough to keep the ambient scent going, so you can make this one last a very long time…

The post Cire Trudon Positano Candle: Summer in Your House appeared first on A Model Recommends.

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How to Cover Dark Circles

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ruth crilly

As promised, a video dedicated to undereye circles and ways of disguising them. My dark circles are ridiculous today – so much so that I’m almost regretting filming the makeup video when I did, at the end of last week. It would have all looked so much more dramatic if I had waited and filmed it now; I’ve been laid up with some kind of bug, and a cold on top of that, so my face looks quite shocking. Dark circles that look as though I’ve shaded them in with eyeshadow, red flaky patches around my nose, chapped lips…

Anyway, enough about my sickbed face, let’s take a quick look at the couple of undereye-circle-concealing methods that I show in the video. The first works by correcting the bruised colour beneath the eye before using a light concealer over the top; the second simply uses one of those super-strength concealers that I mentioned a few weeks ago in my Top Undereye Concealers video. Both are followed with an ultra-fine setting powder (optional) and I then use YSL’s Touche Eclat and Charlotte Tilbury’s Retoucher just to show the different effects. It’s just a short and to-the-point demo, really, but I hope that at least some of you find it helpful. You can read more about the products I’ve used by scrolling down the page – to watch the video simply press play.

(Apologies in advance: Benefit’s Erase Paste does come in more than one shade. I have no idea why I thought otherwise, unless it originally just came in one shade?)

If you can’t see the video pane then you can find it on Youtube here.

Benefit Erase Paste: http://tinyurl.com/n45qfls
Clarins Concealer in shade 1: http://tidd.ly/51be4c15
Bobbi Brown Concealer in Cool Sand: http://tidd.ly/c650c632
Amazing Concealer in shade Medium Beige: http://goo.gl/28M6k1
YSL Touche Eclat (shade 2): http://tinyurl.com/p6ckbgw
Charlotte Tilbury Retoucher in Fair: http://tidd.ly/5f357a25

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Keep Calm and Shop: It’s Back. Almost.

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luxury gift guide

Back due to popular demand, my online luxury gift guide, Keep Calm and Shop. It has been something of a labour of love to get this up and running, and it’s not quite finished yet, but I do hope that you enjoy it and find it useful. If you’re a long-term follower you may remember that the first incarnation of this site was hacked by some utter git and I had to delete the entire database – hopefully this one is slightly better protected. (You live and learn.)

I am helped in all things KCAS by my lovely assistant Rachael, who also happens to have over twenty years’ experience in luxury retail so is something of a shopping expert. So there should be some wonderful things popping up on a regular basis – crap presents will be a thing of the past! Please have a browse, share with friends and loved ones and bookmark the site so that you can check back daily for new ideas!

www.keepcalmandshop.com

The post Keep Calm and Shop: It’s Back. Almost. appeared first on A Model Recommends.

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Vintage China Tea-Cup Nails

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vintage china tea cup nails

The lovely @NailArtistMartha has worked her manicure wizardry again; this week I set her the task of doing something pretty with Models Own’s Sticky Fingers polish in Pastel Petals Green. Not the easiest one to pull off – it’s kind of an odd shade and the stickers are a little fiddly – but I love what Martha came up with. Subtle and very vintage-looking. I love the single accent nail on each hand – I’d probably have gone completely nuts with all of the stickers and had a few on each finger! Here’s a close-up on the flower transfer:

vintage flower transfer manicure

It’s lifted a little at the edges (Martha said that it can be quite hard to keep them stuck down, you have to make sure that the polish is touch-dry and then put them on) but it’s very effective. It looks just like the patterns you find on the china cups and plates in bric-a-brac shops! And it’s a hell of a lot easier to stick a sticker on than hand paint a flower, I would imagine..

nail art transfers vintage

I think it’s really quite a clever little kit. Without the flower embellishments, I’d hate the pastel green, but together the two elements work very well. I might even be tempted to have a go at this look myself – you know how I love a bit of a distraction when I have loads of work to do! I’ve actually started doing my nails when I’m at the computer (ie, fourteen hours a day) because I can paint them as I wait for things to upload, and then I can still type as the polish is drying. It’s quite a good system.

There are loads of other shade and sticker combos in the Sticky Fingers Collection. My favourite is probably the dark taupe-y-looking shade (Sweet Candy) which comes with little candy and gingerbread man stickers. It’s kind of sad that I’m still into gingerbread men at the ripe old age of thirty-three but there you go. Mental age of five.

You can find the whole Sticky Fingers range at ASOS here – each set is £6. Follow Martha on Instagram for more nail pics – Martha works from a salon in Bath called Wisteria Lane. You can see their website here. The nails in the picture are shown after two coats of Models Own Pastel Petals Green and transfers applied using tweezers.

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Caudalie

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Caudalie Vinoperfect Complexion Correcting Radiance Serum Review

This serum has such an average formulation that the price just seems to be in bad taste. This contains mostly water, slip agents, emollient, thickener, vitamin E, plant extracts, fragrance, and film-forming agent. The small amount of grape extract means that this product likely has minimal antioxidant ability—and what about skin-identical substances, cell-communicating ingredients, or an anti-irritant or two? All of those are hallmarks of state-of-the-art serums, which this product certainly is not.

Note: This serum is dispensed via a dropper applicator. Although not the ideal method to dispense a serum that contains light- and air-sensitive ingredients, sometimes this type of packaging is necessary due to formulary requirements. When that’s the case, the goal is to keep the bottle opening as small as possible, the bottle should be opaque or specially coated to protect the contents from light, and you should use the serum up within three months of opening.

The new Beautypedia Team proudly and unequivocally maintains the commitment to help you find the best products possible for your skin. We do this by relentlessly pursuing and relying on published scientific research so you will have unbiased information on what works and what doesn’t-and the sneaky ways you could be making your skin worse, not better!