Don’t let Winter have its wicked way with your skin!

One of our favourite beauty blogs is We Were Raised By Wolves, so we were delighted to be able to write a guest post whilst Evelyn is away. We hope you like it…..take a look at the blog here.

As most of us have probably noticed, it’s getting a lot darker, wetter and colder outside now we’re getting closer to December. We don’t know about you, but the change in temperature and biting British winds plays havoc with our skin, and we often end up with red and sore faces as this time of year.

We’ve put together our pick of our favourite winter skin wonders that we can’t live without, and thought we’d share them with you!

Preparation is key….

Using the right cleanser is essential in winter. Using an astringent, drying cleanser at this time of year is asking for sore skin. Our favourite product is In the Beginning Deep Cleansing Melt by Temple Spa. This waxy cleanser literally melts on the skin, removing all traces of makeup and grime and gives a super strong injection of moisturiser without being greasy. Lavender and Vitamin E helps to soothe and relieve any tightness.

Go the extra mile….

To give your skin a boost when the usual cleanse, tone and moisturise isn’t enough, we love Natio Ageless Hydrating mask. It is like an intensive conditioner for your face! Containing organic rosehip and sesame oils, as well as papaya and aloe vera, this mask really helps brighten and refresh your skin with intensive moisturisation. When applied it feels like double cream, and gives instant relief to skin battered by the elements!

When the going gets tough….

If you’re really suffering, for example with chapped or cracked skin around the nose, lips and eyelids which often happens to us during winter time, we recommend turning to Nurture’s Nourishing Rescue Balm. This extra softening balm is great on those areas which need some real TLC. It reminds us of Elizabeth Arden’s Eight Hour Cream but with a much smaller price tag. And we find the lavender scent really soothing and relaxing which is an added bonus.

Primetime for Primer…

We’re always extolling the benefits of primers here at thebeautyobsession, but it’s even more important during the winter months. As well as providing a nice base for makeup, they offer an extra barrier between your skin and the elements. Our favourite primer is Avon’s Magix Skin Perfector.

Cover it up….

Once you’ve full prepped and pampered your skin, if you’re still suffering from redness, don’t panic! The constant changing temperatures brought about by central heating and then stepping outside into the cold, mean that even those of us with usually flawless skin can suffer from some serious flushing! You can disguise the redness by using yellow or green toned concealers and foundations. We like Benefit’s Perk Up Artist for evening out skin tones.

Love your lips…

The most common part of your face to suffer during winter are your poor lips! We can’t stress enough how important it is to protect and moisturise – chapped lips really aren’t a good look! We don’t leave the house without our Balmi lipbalm attached to our keyring, and if we need some colour, we use one of our Clinique Chubby Sticks. They moisturise and have great colour!

What are your winter skin saviours? Have you tried any of our favourites?

 

Vintage makeup trends are everywhere at the moment, and we love this 60’s inspired look created by Laura Hannon, Creative Executive at The London School of Beauty & Makeup.

To recreate this look at home, you’ll need to start by applying a good base like MAC Face & Body. A dewy finish is key to keeping it up-to-date.

Apply a setting powder with pink base tones to give a more vintage look. Shu Uemura and Bare Minerals do great ones. Use a very light hand to apply this, you want to keep the dewy finish and just take the shine off the T-zone.

Laura recommends using a cake liner to get the best liquid liner effect, however if you don’t have that, a gel eyeliner would be a good alternative. We like Maybelline’s Lasting Drama.

Keep the rest of the eye makeup light. Blend a charcoal shade onto the lid and use a small detail brush to apply under the bottom lash line. Use a cotton bud to smudge and create a smokey effect.

Then add lashings of your favourite mascara, we love They’re Real.

Use a light pink lipstick as the final touch. We like Avon Colour Rich in Berry Glitz but if you can’t find the right colour for you, Laura recommends blending two together to create your perfect shade.

To complete the overall look, back comb the hair for Bardot oomph.

Voila, 60’s inspired gorgeousness!

The London School of Beauty & Makeup offer makeup & beauty courses full-time, part-time and at weekends. Take a look at their courses here. Laura Hannon is their Creative Executive and professional makeup artist. You can tweet Laura @makeupLSBM or the school @londest

B is for…………….Benefit

Next in our #AtoZBeautyFaves series is Benefit. Benefit is a brand that really needs no introduction. Arriving in the UK in 1997, this fun and fabulous American brand is one thebeautyobsession can’t get enough of! Allegedly started when its two founding sisters created Benetint as a nipple tint for an exotic dancer, there is now a Benefit stand or pop up in almost every department store in the country. In 2003 they launched the Benefit Brow bars so you could get a shape and tint at the same time as buying your Brow Zings. Now if you’re lucky enough to have a Benefit Boutique near you like we are, you can even get a tan and a leg wax at the same time! And as the whole shop floor is purely Benefit, we often behave like little kids high on sugar when we visit!

You might already know that we have a passion for packaging (we don’t get out much) and Benefit are the type of brand you buy so you can look at them as well as use them. Or is that just us? We love the product names and the Benebabe characters. Sometimes makeup and beauty can be taken a bit too seriously and Benefit is the perfect anecdote to that.

As well as their individual products, Benefit sell a number of kits which we find invaluable, they can show you how to create the look in a few easy steps. Get smoky eyes with Big Beautiful Eyes, wake up your face with Finding Mr Bright and now you can create a whole look with their How to Look the Best at Everything kits.

So here are our top 5 Benefit Beauty product of the moment:

Confessions of a Concealaholic – We can’t live without this little kit! As much as we all like to think we’re natural beauties, we do have the odd parts we like to hide. The kit contains a mini That Gal primer (see full review later), two shades of Boing Concealer, which we use to cover everything from undereye bags to blemishes, and we swear by it for covering redness around our nose. There’s also a mini pot of Erasepaste which is a heavier concealer for really bad days or nasty blemishes! We also use the Lemon Aid which is a yellow eyelid primer – the yellow helps minimise any darkness in the lids, and Eye Bright which we put in the inside corners to give us a more awake look. Buy it for £28.50

High beam – This was the first product we ever bought from Benefit and we still swear by it now. We use this as a highlighter on our cheekbones, browbones, bridge of our nose and cupids bow as it really lifts the face – we can’t do without it after a heavy night. It blends really easily and you can apply a little for a subtle glow or build it up for a night out. Buy it for £18.50.

That Gal – If you haven’t guessed already, we need a lot of help brightening up in the mornings! We love That Gal as it helps us do just that. Used as a brightening primer we pat it onto our skin (not rub) before applying our base and it gives a light glow throughout the day. If we’re feeling really dull then we’ll also pat a bit on over the top of our foundation. As it sits really nicely on the skin and feels really light, we like using it either way. £21.50

Cheek Tints – We actually have two joint favourite products; Benetint and Cha Cha Tint. Both are lip and cheek stains and both work in the same way, but they’re two very different colours. We love Cha Cha tint’s mango/coral colour for the summer (or when we want to feel like it’s summer!). Benetint is perfect for a flushed look all year round. We recommend applying with fingertips to the apples of the cheeks and blending well before it stains. Don’t paint it directly onto the face with a little brush as it will leave brush lines. We do sometimes use a buffing brush to apply them for a really natural look. We also use them as lip stains, on their own for a natural look or underneath lipstick so that you have some colour remaining when your lipstick fades. We like how you can build up the colour to get the look you want, night or day. £24.50 each.

They’re Real – This is something else that needs no introduction. They’re Real seem to have featured in every magazine and blog since it was released and whilst we don’t like overhyped products, this one genuinely deserves to be talked about. The mascara really does coat individual lashes without giving a spider effect and the shape of the brush means you can get even the little lashes.

Benefit is definitely a thebeautyobsession favourite. They regularly bring out new products which we love trying when we can, but we think the have some really good staple products that will always be in our makeup bags.

What’s your favourite Benefit product? Have you ever had a Benefit treatment done, if so what did you think?

Brilliant brows for £3.50? Surely not!

Here thebeautyobsession we don’t leave the house without filling in our brows, god did not bless us with Middleton style face-framers so we have to make the best of what we’ve got!

Over the years we’ve tried many powders, pencils and kits to keep us groomed. Our lasting favourite is Benefit Brow Zings but priced at £22.50, we don’t mind saying we’re always on the lookout for a purse friendly alternative. So it was with some glee that we found out MUA have a very similar Brow Kit for the Bank Manager approving price of £3.50.

As we’ve said before, we love products that save us pennies but we are very fussy and if it seems we can only get quality by paying from in then we’ll do so, but having been impressed with other MUA products, we thought we’d give it a try.

The kit comes with 3 shades of brown pressed powders and a fixing gel/wax, plus a mini double-ended brush and some mini tweezers. It’s presented in a black compact with a large mirror so it is bigger than the Brow Zings, but then you get more in it so that’s no bad thing.

Firstly, we liked the choice of colours as it means we could blend them together to get the exact shade we wanted. Although we are a fan of striking brows for a night out, we like something a bit more natural for everyday wear. We used our usual Real Techniques brow brush to apply as we love the excellent application it gives, however we did try the brush included in the kit and have to say it is perfectly good for touching up on the go. Same with the tweezers, when we’re able to use our full size ones, we will, but they’re great for grabbing an annoying stray hair whilst we’re out and about.

Once we’ve applied, we then added a pat or two of the fixing gel. It does look a bit shiny at first so use it sparingly and it won’t look odd! After using this kit on a number of occasions, we can safely say the colour really does stay put for most of the day without having to touch up, and if you do need to the kit doesn’t take up too much space in your handbag.

So does  MUA’s Brow Kit live up to the holy grail of Benefit’s Brow Zings? The short answer is yes. Although the kit isn’t quite as handbag friendly and we have found the writing rubs off quite quickly, we really can’t fault it and for the price of £3.50, we think it’s a brilliant brow beautifier.

We have to say, that often we can be quite elitist about the products and brands that we use but MUA have really started to show us that makeup doesn’t have to cost the earth to actually be fit for purpose and we’d recommend a trip to your local Superdrug to check out the MUA counter. We’d love to hear what you pick up and how it works for you.

Thanks for reading.

tbo

xxx

Get your mitts on these November Magazine Freebies!

Everyone loves a freebie and we at thebeautyobsession are no exception, in fact we often go hunting them down! We thought we’d quickly collate some great magazine freebies that we’ve seen around this month, so that you can go and get your mitts on them if you wish!

Glamour – Nails Inc Polishes

There are four gorgeous full size shades to collect worth £11 each. Glamour is only £2 so it’s a real bargain. Plus we’re very rarely disappointed by the Nail Inc polishes, they’re usually a good colour and easy to apply.

Instyle – Benefit Goodies

You can choose from Benetint, ChaCha Tint and Sun Beam for the magazine prize of £3.80 (£2.50 in Tesco). These are mini’s (4ml) but are great for putting in your clutch during the party season and they’ll last a good while.

Marie Claire – November Issue -L’Occitane Handcream (still available in some stores)

Choose from four different L’Occitane handcreams – Shea Butter, Limited Edition Date Bouquet, Limited Edition Rose Petals or Limited Edition Mango Flowers, each worth £8. The mag costs £3.70.

Marie Claire – December Issue – Jemma Kidd Makeup

**Out Now** Choose from the Jemma Kidd i-define Volumising Mascara or Skin Protecting Primer, together worth £19. Again the mag is £3.70 this month.

Brides Magazine – Elemis Night Cream

When you buy the November/December issue of Brides for £4.99, there is a voucher included for a full-size Elemis night cream worth £49. Just fill out the voucher and take it to your nearest Elemis counter in Debenhams, John Lewis or Harvey Nichols. Hurry though, this one is only for the first 1500.

These are the ones we’ve managed to get hold of this month, we’ll let you know what is coming up for December really soon. Let us know which of these you’ve managed to grab, and if there are any others we haven’t seen! Tweet us with the #novmagfreebies

Thanks for reading.

tbo        

xxx