Category Archives: beauty look

Have you ever seen any balm as beautiful as Rare Indigo? The answer is probably no.

The May Beauty Heroes Box (which is now SOLD OUT! … but stay tuned until the end of the post for more info on how and where to get this balm with money off) arrived very early this month, which was a lovely surprise! Inside the box was the beautiful full-size Mahalo Skincare Rare Indigo worth $110/£88 and a deluxe 15ml sample of the newest launch The Petal Mask worth about $17. So that’s a $127 of product for $39, amazing!

The Rare Indigo balm is perhaps one of the loveliest moisturising beauty balms I’ve ever used, it’s early days into our relationship, but I think we might be in it for the long run, guys. What makes this balm so different is its hemp seed oil base – my skin loves hemp oil, and it gives the balm a beautifully light and silky texture that sinks into skin instead of sitting on the top feeling greasy. Also, I have to admit my skin twin Lisa totally made me crave this balm, anything she uses on her face I want to use on my face too, simple.
The balm is also free of ingredients that are too rich and can clog pores/cause breakouts such as shea butter, coconut oil and beeswax! But the balm is still very, very moisturising and is perfectly suitable for dry skin types as well as oily. Oils and butters like murumuru, babassu and marula can be found, a little exotic and luxurious, no? plus that all so important indigo infusion that give the balm it’s incredible purple hue.

The Petal is deceptively small and cute but seriously mighty, 28 active ingredients come together to create this jelly-like pink mask that smells like roses, honey, and vanilla. I have only used this once so haven’t much of an opinion yet, but it feels lovely and calming on the skin – even if seeing yourself with a pink face is quite strange! The texture is really unique, creamy but not runny, it’s very thick and I found I needed a few drops of water to make it spreadable across skin. Honey, rose petals, clay, silver hydrosol, hibiscus and jasmine are just a few of those 28 ingredients here. I can’t way to try it a few more times and will report back with a verdict.

Beauty Heroes is currently sold out of the May Mahalo box, and if you would like to be put on to the waitlist ready to subscribe for next month’s box you can do so here. Subscriptions are no longer month-to-month which is quite a drawback, as you do have to pay for 3 months upfront to subscribe. I asked Beauty Heroes if you have to pay shipping on top of this when you subsribe as an international customer but they didn’t respond so I can’t let you know, sorry!
The value is still incredible (the 3 month subscription cost is still cheaper than the value of this one box!) but I know for a lot of people that initial cost, without knowing the contents of the boxes will be a big turn off, but just know I have never once seen a box that wasn’t absolutely amazing 😉

If you really want to try the Mahalo Rare Indigo balm, or The Petal mask in the UK/Europe I would recommend Alyaka as they have a fabulous Mahalo sample kit which includes the whole product range for £22, the cost of that can then be deducted from a full size purchase! OR you can skip the sample and use the code “ANNABEL15” to receive 15% off of your order across the whole site (not including sample kits or May Lindstrom)

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Listen, we get it. You’re probably feeling a little overwhelmed with all this talk about they’re real! push-up liner. We feel you 100%—so we thought we’d bring in an outsider! Annabelle is the fashion genius behind Viva Luxury, one of our very favorite blogs. Since she is a cat-eye master, we asked her to do a review about our ever-famous, new eyeliner. She did that & beyond. Take a peek at her flawless looks & read below!

If you read my blog on regular basis, you may know that when it comes to make up, I generally prefer a more natural look. That is of course with one major exception, i.e. my can’t-live-without cat-eye liner look! In fact, I am so addicted to it, I don’t think I have ever left the house without it within the past few years. Seriously, even when I am sporting a pair of sunnies, it is always there with me:) Perhaps because I wear it so often, I get a lot of questions about the techniques I use to apply my eye liner. 

Though, applying an eye liner may seem like an intimidating task at first, it is actually very easy to do. The first and most important thing is the product you use, because naturally, not all eye liners are created equal. Since, I’ve been using eye liner pretty much every day for the past few years, I got to try quite a few different ones. Few of them I liked, others I just couldn’t deal with, but I certainly didn’t find my favorite until I got the opportunity to test Benefit‘s they’re real! push-up liner. 

Day vs Night:

Though some people recommend applying eye liner by drawing a series of dots and then connecting them, I prefer to draw an even line across the lash line and once I reach the outer corner, angle the tip and draw another line towards the brow, creating a winged out look. Next, depending on the intensity I am looking for, I fill in and thicken the liner a bit. For day, I usually go for a more natural look, so I tend to apply the liner closer to the lash line and extend the corners very slightly for just a hint of the cat eye look. But for night, I definitely favor the more dramatic look, so I thicken the line above the lashes and extend the line way beyond the natural outer corner. 

What I like about Benefit They’re Real !  push-up liner:

Normally, it takes a few coats to achieve the intense black I am looking for, but with Benefit, I was able to achieve the desired color with just one coat. Another pet peeve of mine, is trying to get the liner as close to the lash line as possible. Usually, I have to go back a few times to fill out the little gaps, but I did not experience this problem with Benefit. The liner glided perfectly right over the base of my lashes leaving no visible gaps. Finally, when it comes to eye liner, longevity is important to me. I absolutely hate having to worry about smudges or fading color. Once again, Benefit liner lasted all day and the color looked just as intense as it did in the morning. And that is always a good thing!:) 

Thank you for reading

& Keep On Smiling,

LOVE,

Annabelle 

BENEFIT They’re Real !  push-up liner | IRO Emmie top | A.P.C. beige nubuck bucket bag via SSENCE  | GENETIC Denim Loren skinny jeans in Destroy | Aminah Abdul Jillil Coin sandals | Tory Burch hat – old also love this one  | Finders Keepers Foolproof dress similar here & here  | Rafe mother-of-pearl box clutch | Ryan Storer ear cuff also love the one here & here 

Continue reading →

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

Continue reading →

Continue reading →