Living With Eczema: Body Shop Hemp Body Butter

I think I've mentioned it a couple of times before but I suffer from severe eczema and have for about a year and a half now. I have discoid eczema and atopic eczema and it's pretty much taken over my life since it started. Not only is it constantly itchy, sleep disrupting and painful but my skin is very dry which makes it prone to breaking when I scratch. I don't think I own any piece of clothing that isn't spotted in blood anymore! 

I have steroid creams and moisturiser prescribed from the doctors and I have to apply the moisturiser as soon as I get out of the shower without drying off or anything, but even then my skin is back to being really dry within in hour. Sooooo, my mum did some research and heard that a lot of eczema sufferers were championing Body Shop's hemp body butter, and since I don't have anything to lose I thought I might as well give it a try!

My only regret about this is not finding out about it sooner! MY GOD. This stuff is pretty much a miracle cream. A little spread over all of my leg, for example, will last from 8 AM until I get home from work at 4 PM without needing to be reapplied. A little really does go a long way so it's great value for money too. Almost instantly after I used this I felt a crazy different and for the first time in ages my skin felt soft and healthy. Okay, so it hasn't stopped the itching but the product sort of sits on your skin as well as sinking in so it helps protect my fragile skin (the steroid creams thin the skin). Honestly, it's pretty much a wonder cream.

The product has a very odd smell. It's not nice, but it smells natural and to me it smells like wet soil. I quite like the smell of soil after it's rained (not that I go around sticking my nose in soil all the time) so I'm all right with it! I would totally recommend this to anyone with ANY type of skin. Iit is designed for very dry skin but I can't see it not benefitting a lot of different skin types. It's quite steep at £12.50 a pop, but currently Body Shop have got a two body butters for £15 deal on which is great! I also bought a citrus lemon body butter which I've been using on my face and under my arms to keep me feeling fresh at work, plus it keeps the flies away! 

Are you an adult eczema sufferer? Please share any tips and tricks you may have for dealing with skin conditions, because they are incredibly hard to live with. Some days I don't even want to get out of bed I feel so terrible and it's very disheartening to hear people to tell you to "just stop scratching", so I would love to hear some other stories!

Nail Review: Models Own Indian Ocean

I saw this polish the other day and was INSTANTLY SMITTEN. In the bottle it looks very blue with flecks of pink and silver glitter but as with ALL GLITTER POLISH what was in the bottle wasn't what it looked like on my nails.

So Indian Ocean is part of the Beetlejuice range from Models Own, which has a huge range of AMAZING polishes that are meant to reflect the way beetles look or some shit, I dunno, all I know is they are totally bad ass but it doesn't really stop the fact that Models Own don't make very good polish over all. It took four coats to get a nice coverage that was anything like on the bottle, and even then it was still a silver with hardly any blue. HOWEVER. The colour is amazing once you get it thick enough. Oh gosh, I could stare at it for hours! As well as that, it looks incredible as a top coat over other colours. I tried it with my U Rok nail polish (on my fourth fingers) and it is super nice, giving good coverage but still letting the other colour show through. I would definitely recommend this polish but be prepared to be disappointed if you want anything like that it looks like on the bottle!

FotD: A Foray into Lip Stain!

I was in Boots the other day and on a whim I picked up 17 Berry Crush Lip Stain and decided to give it a whirl. I'm totally out of love with lipstick at the moment because even with a lip pencil nothing stays on my lips or it ends up bleeding out. I thought a lip stain would solve all my problems, so I bought the 'Smoking Hot' version and tested it out!

 I have to say I wasn't that impressed. I like the idea of a lip stain but maybe I just bought a shitty product? When I was using the pen it felt like a felt tip that was running out, it didn't apply evenly and sometimes didn't come out at all! The only thing I could think of that was going wrong was that gravity wasn't allowing the 'ink' to come out since I was holding it upsidedown. Also, this stain comes with a lip balm on the other end. I used the lip balm about 15 minutes before applying the stain so maybe using it and putting the stain on top affected its performance? I will have to try it again without. The good news though is that the colour is very nice (here I have put just a plain red lipstick over the top with is why it's also a little glossy) and it stays on for FLIPPIN AGES. I went out to pub quiz, brushed my teeth and used a make up wipe at my lips were still stained slightly the next day. Very impressive! I would definitely buy a lip stain again but I think I would find another brand to try.

I've also added to my sunglasses collection (I think I have about twenty pairs now!) with these amazing ones from Primark. I just wish I had an excuse to wear them now! COME OUT SUN.

Review: Primark £1 Lipstick!

So I started work last Friday and the thing is I don't have any work clothes, so after work each day if I'm really struggling trying to put an outfit together for the next day, I pop into Primark (it's right next door to my work) and try and buy something smart. Today when I was paying (for a dress for a fiver!) I spotted that Primark were selling lippy for a quid. ONE POUND. you can't really go wrong, either its terrible and you haven't wasted any money, or its good and you feel good about it. So I bought two of them because I don't have any pink lipstick, and I got a candy pink and a bright pink. I thought I'd do a little review since I'm sure a lot of people are reluctant to try Primark cosmetics! Having said that, I really doubt Primark has an animal testing policy, and if they do I am too tired to go digging through their website so you might want to check that out before you buy!

These pictures are slightly terrifying. Okay, so the lipstick is you know, okay. I wouldn't buy it again, but it'll tide me over until I can afford something better. They don't apply very easily and they smell a lot like plasticine, but the colour is vibrant. In these pictures I am wearing both the shades of pink as I tend to mix my lipsticks up. They're quite matte but they are not very smooth going on, you really have to drag them over your lips to get a good application. 

Perhaps I would recommend this, especially if you don't know if a colour is going to suit you! Theya re great for experimenting and would probably work well as a base coat for a erm, better lipstick. Hope that helps!

New Favourite Nails: MUA Love Hearts 'U Rok'!

OMG I am soooo in love with this MUA Love Heart polish! At £2 you BASICALLY can't go wrong, I keep staring at my nails lovingly. This colour is 'U Rok' (which isn't even a little bit grammatically correct) and its sort of a parma violets colour, like a blueish purple. It's hard to explain, but so nice! It's very glossy and lovely and only needed two coats. I've had it on all week and its only chipped a little bit at the tips. WELL WORTH IT MATE.

Things have been quiet over here recently, I've started a new job for a little while which is ind of wiping me out! Not to mention the constant rain is driving me insane. I don't think I've opened my curtains for days! Don't want to even look at it!

L'Oreal Paris Intense Lipstick FotD!

My mum got a free sample of L'Oreal Paris 'Made For Me' Intense lipstick, and since it was a bright red she gave it to me instead! Score! The shade is 286, also known as Light Brunette I think and from what I gather, the actual product comes with a matching nail polish which is awesome!  I couldn't wait to try it out, so now I'm strutting around with red lips and it's not even lunch time. Is that indecent? I think it's probably awesome.

So this lipstick claims to be filled with omega 3's and all that jazz to make your lips smooth and I reckon my lips so feel smoother and perhaps even moistened, but I don't really like that feeling in a lipstick? I like it to feel invisible rather than lip-glossy if that makes sense. But it definitely does what it claims to!

The colour is absolutely gorgeous, with flecks of glitter that are quite subtle. It glides on very smoothly and is lighter than it looks in the tube. I wore this with a plain red liner underneath but it did still slip around a bit and bled out which is super annoying as I am completely paranoid about my lips bleeding out. If you were going to buy this I would suggest going easy on it perhaps as a shimmery top coat to a stained lip as I wouldn't trust it to stay on all day!

P.S. I'm completely in love with this Bobbi Brown mascara! It stays on forever and separates the lashes so easily.

Spring FotD!

Here is what my face looks like today! Just a little bit of make up, I tried out a mascara I got ages ago and never used and it turned out to be pretty excellent, if not a little clumpy and thick. The lipstick I wore today is actually a bright red one, but I read a trick on another blog the other day of filling in your lips with white liner then blending with red lipstick to make a pink lipstick! It's lasted all day too so it's definitely something I'll be doing often! All my lovely rings are from JWLRY and the eyeball rings are Halloween accessories from Ebay. I have a twelve pack of the bladdy things, but the paint comes off SOOO easy so I'm wearing them all off and then I will paint them with lovely things!

As well as really craving pink hair again I also want to switch my septum ring out for a gold ring, since I usually wear gold jewellery. I'm just a bit bored of it and you don't see much gold body jewellery. What do you think? Gold would be okay in a body mod too right? Since it's like, the most resistant metal ever or whatever. I dunno, I don't know much about body modification!

After my last FotD post I cracked and snipped my fringe. I was flip flopping about whether to grow it out for the summer, but the temptation to cut it was too difficult to resist! I think I'm going to be a slave to this fringe forever, it's been with me since I was fifteen, how could I stop now?

Apparently the weather is going to take a turn for the worse soon, so I'm spending the last day of sunshine listening to 90s radio on Spotify and eating pizza! Tomorrow I am visiting my boyfriend in London for the weekend where we will probably... eat more pizza!

Let's take a second to talk about...

When I was little the one thing I hated above anything else was having my hair washed and brushed. I still hate it. I put off washing my hair for as long as possible and some days I don't brush at all! My hair is very thick and gets knotted very easily, dragging a brush through it was an ordeal every morning and it it took a buttload of time to brush after washing. I was going through Amazon one day when I was something that caught me eye. It was a hairbrush, but it was nearly ten quid! Scoffing, I checked it out thinking that I never would spend a tenner on a bloody hairbrush, but I am now the proud owner of a sparkly, purple Tangle Teezer.

Tangle Teezer promises to brush your hair, wet or dry, and not pull or cause breakage. It's a heavy promise to make but BY JOVE, IT BLADDY WORKS. Okay, so it doesn't stop pulling your tangles COMPLETELY, but it doesn't hurt! When I first used it I wasn't even convinced it was going all the way trhough my hair because it wasn't coming across all the knots a usual brush does, but its just because it has a clever way of untangling them. I would recommend this brush just for that alone, but it actually seems to have done a lot more for my hair. For instance, I used to have a really bad shedding problem. My hair fell out all the time, it covered the carpet in my room, it got in my food and on all my clothes and it especially came out in clumps in the shower. Since using the TT I've noticed that a lot of my hair stays where it should do, or perhaps any lose hairs all get caught by the bristles. My hair also just feels better, less fly-away and softer. I don't know if that's a promise from the TT, but that's what it's done for me! (Also I reckon it would make a great pet brush.)

The only draw back is the design. Countless times its gone flinging out of my hand and under the bed because it's shaped like a bit of soap and doesn't have a handle. WEIRD. I don't know why they did that, but I looked and I think you can get them with handles now. They are expensive, but it is well worth it! I've seen a lot of other lbog posts about the TT recently too so it's definitely not just me who loves it!

Sunshine, Lollipops and...

It was such a lovely day out! I picked up three new nail polishes from Boots (3 for 2 deal!) and I got these cute Models Own sea side colours (slate green, lemon meringue and orange sorbet)!). I'm really happy at the moment because I'm going on a little holiday for Easter down to Great Yarmouth, hopefully. Great Yarmouth is on the east coat and they have sticks or rock and chips and freshly made donuts and deck chairs and claw machines and it's completely tacky and probably one of my favourite places ever! I've been going ever since I was a kid,  I learnt to rollerblade, skateboard and swim down there and even though its not the most fancy of places (not by a long shot!) I've always got fond memories. I'm going to take a bunch of pictures and spend all my 2p's on the penny machines!

Do you like my gold tooth? I got it in the ASOS sale and I'm in love! 

Well that's all from me! Bit of a weird post, but I've been working on a great big post all this week and its draining my creativity!  Have a great Friday!

Nail Review: Liberty of London x Hello Kitty

I don't know if I'm going mad or what but I can't find a single thing about the Liberty of London x Hello Kitty nail polish collaboration, and I know it exists because I'VE GOT IT IN MY BLADDY HAND. Its a trio of polishes all in the Liberty colours that comes in a really cute tin. I got it for Christmas around the same time I also got the eyeshadow pallet so I don't even know if its still being sold, but I got it from Boots anyway. They look like this:

I've gotta be honest, it's a really weird mixture of colours that I wouldn't wear together, but for the purpose of this review I've put all the colours together since I assume that's what you're meant to do, otherwise why would they come together? So there's a greeny blue one which I have been describing as "navy green", a dark pink and a berry red colour. The pots are small and hard to open, as these bite marks on the lids will testify to:

And here are all the colours on my nails, as helped to be shown off by Totoro:

Okay so, firstly I found them quite runny and for someone as rubbish as me at applying nail polish it was a bit nerve-wracking, in fact my fingers looked a mess afterwards. But it does dry very quickly! I've only done one coat as I'm taking it off again, but the green is a nice, deep colour whilst the red could do with another coat. The biggest surprise was the pink polish, WHICH DRIED MATTE. You sneaky thing. It's my favourite one and it looks bloody lovely, but it's quite thin so you definitely need another coat. The matte is really nice though and I would say if you can get it by itself then get it because it feels lovely and looks great. Overall, I'm glad I didn't buy this for myself. If you're a fan of Hello Kitty then you might want to get it because they are cute bottles! Also the tin is the perfect size for storing all my ticket stubbs.