Category Archives: beauty news

First night of the holidays, and Mr AMR and I managed to drag ourselves out to dinner despite being absolutely shattered! I decided to do a bit of a sultry eye to compliment my rather glam leopard print dress (Baum und Pferdgarten) and cracked out Charlotte Tilbury’s Vintage Vamp palette, which has a beautiful array of warm, golden and glittery shadows that can be blended together or patted over one another to create the perfect look. (You can find The Vintage Vamp here, if you want to take a look at the shades.) I used the two darkest shadows to smoke around the lower lashline and into the outer corners, pulling the shadow towards the ends of my brows to create a soft, hazy kind of cat-eye look. If you have blue eyes then this palette is a must-have, it really intensifies them. Great for all eye colours, I imagine, but especially blue.

No foundation, as I have been prepping my skin pre-holiday with a gradual tanner – Clarins’ Radiance-Plus Golden Glow Booster, the Don of all face tanners. Just a couple of drops, added to whatever else you’re applying – moisturiser, face oil, serum, I’ve experimented with them all – and you have the most gorgeous, subtle glow the next day. I’m about to go in for a three-days-in-a-row application, so I’ll let you know just how bronzed I get! I barely let my face into the sun, now, when I’m on holiday – it’s thirty-two degrees where I am in Greece and it’s just too hardcore for my skin. Much better to fake it, and this little bottle of Clarins joy is doing an amazing job. It’s actually on offer at the moment, £15.80 at Escentual.com here.

I finished the look with a sweep of bronzer – Guerlain’s Terra Tropica, which you can read all about here. It has a hint of pink, a little fleck of gold, here and there…just perfect for holiday skin. If you want to snap one up before the very end of summer then they still have a few left online here. It’s a pretty special bronzer!

More makeup looks here…

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Oh, my Beauty Heart, be still, be still, be still! Do summer palettes get much prettier? The Terra Tropica from Guerlain is definitely right up there with the most desirable makeup morsels of the summer. And this is full summer – high summer – that we’re looking at now, not your namby-pamby easing-yourself-in kind of summer. It’s total beach babe bronzage with highlighted cheekbones and that kind of dusty, sandy skin that works so well with tousled, sun-bleached hair. All faked, of course, now that faking is de rigueur and the lying-on-tin-foil-whilst-basting-oneself-in-oilve-oil approach to sunbathing is (thankfully!) not cool or clever. (I never went so far as to baste myself in olive oil, but I do remember my first proper “hot” holiday when the choice of sunscreen was SPF3 or SPF8. Anything higher was just unimaginable – I don’t think that Boots even stocked a higher SPF in those days!)

Guerlain’s Terra Tropica is my kind of full-summer bronzer. Whereas in the winer and the spring I like to have something more subtle – matte, usually, and only a shade or so darker than my skintone – in the summer I quite like to go Glamazon. A warm, suntan kind of bronze with hints of pink to give that authentic “three days on the beach in Ibiza” look without even setting foot on the sand. What I like about Terra Tropica is that despite its brazen looks, it’s actually still quite subtle. Those who like a light, sunkissed look will be delighted with how delicate the “one coat” results are; those who want to go deeper will appreciate the way that the colour builds after a couple of applications. Here I am pre-Terra:

I didn’t actually intend to do before-and-afters, so excuse any little lighting differences, but here I am after two “coats” of Terra Tropica:

“Coats” is obviously a silly word to choose, but you know what I mean. I went in with a large powder brush for one application, taking the powder into the temples and then beneath the cheekbones, and then I went back in with a smaller brush and took the bronzer across the bridge of my nose and further defined my cheekbones. I swept the larger brush across both the bronze and pink areas of the compact to get a really warm and peachy glow, but you could just as easily use one side and then the other, or use only the bronzer and then pick out certain areas with the pinkier tone. It’s a very large compact, so easy enough to keep the colours separate, even if you use a large brush. There’s also the gold overspray on the suns to watch out for – very sparkly, so not ideal if you like your face powders totally matte. Personally, I welcome the added sparkle when we get to July – if I can’t actually go on holiday, then at least I can pretend that my skin is glistening with sea-spray and shimmering away in the sun.

You can find the Terra Tropica at Escentual.com here – it’s £40.50, or £45 from counters nationwide.

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Rather an exaggerated title, because my skin isn’t exactly “dried out”, but it is definitely more dry than it was a year ago. Pregnancy seemed to completely throw it off balance and it hasn’t yet returned to its “combination” default setting.

So, though I have been persisting with semi-matte or “velvet” finish foundations (thinking of you here, Chanel, with your totally irresistible Lumiere Velvet) my skin almost wept for joy when I first applied Max Factor’s Miracle Match a couple of weeks ago. It’s like a balmy moisturiser and is possibly the first foundation that I’ve actually wanted to apply purely for the feel! Though the coverage is lovely, too – I’d say it’s a medium – and the finish is long-lasting.

I’ve also been whacking on cream cheek products recently, which is a sidestep away from my usual powder bronzers and blushes – and though I find them more of a faff, they give a lovely juicy sheen.

This video is a bit of a mish-mash, if truth be known – I didn’t really know what I wanted to say when I started filming, but I suppose the main idea is as simple as this: “I tried a few creamy things for my face and liked them. Here they are on camera.” (That would have been a snappy title!)

Surprise makeup item of the month: Lancome’s Hypnose Volume-a-Porter mascara. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but after a bit of a play and a practise, I think that it’s very good indeed. Although I don’t think that this is touted as a selling-point, I find that the mascara seems to hold a curl in my lash, making my eyes a bit wider and brighter. Full review coming up on this one – there are a few new mascaras that have caught my eye (HAHA) recently.

Also coming up; more of an in-depth on the Estée Lauder Serum/Concealer duo. I like it a lot – very useful, though it could never replace my ultimate undereye hero, the Double Wear Stay-in-Place. 

Right – on with the show. Dim the lights, take the phone off the hook, etc etc…

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1) It’s nearly eleven and I need to take my bra off (ALL bras make me feel as though my ribs are being crushed in a vice at the moment!) and so a very short Sunday Tittle Tattle this week. First pic (above) is of my baby bump at twenty-two weeks (I’m twenty-three weeks tomorrow), just in case you don’t follow me on Twitter or Instagram. It’s growing at quite a fine rate, now! There are already parts of my anatomy that I can’t see…

2) This week’s other Tittle Tattle photos are of my very Peaceful Pets. There have been no mad moments this week and thus no breakages, though Dexter the dog has chewed through the crotch of two pairs of maternity leggings (gross!) and also shredded the edge of the bath mat. Overall, though, quite a minimal damage tally. Marvellous. Let’s see how we get on next week….

Read more Sunday Tittle Tattle posts here… 

The post Peaceful Pets and the 22 Week Bump. appeared first on A Model Recommends.

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Actually, I felt like doing a Tom Jones style ‘yeah’ when I smelled the Moa Fortifying Green Bath Potion! It’s about as near to bathing in an extra strong mint as you’re likely to get and absolutely a jolt of mental … Read more

The post Moa Fortifying Green Bath Potion appeared first on British Beauty Blogger.

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