Sleek Contour Palette Review

If you missed our article on how to Conquer Contouring, you can take a look here. One of the products we mentioned was the Sleek Contour Palette, so we thought we’d tell you all about it….

Firstly, like all the Sleek palettes, we love the classic, simple black exterior. Handily the palettes are wipe clean too, so product-covered paw prints don’t ruin it.

With a larger dark contour shade, and a smaller highlighter, we should be able to use this to shape and define our face. The darker colour is flat so it has no shine or shimmer to it, which is handy for contouring, the highlighter is quite light and also doesn’t have as much shimmer as other highlighter which is great if you want to highlight but not look like you’re twinkling all the time!

Both colours blend really well both with fingers and brushes. We like to apply the darker shade using our Real Techniques Contouring Brush to the areas we want to “hide”. Then we buff it in with the Buffing Brush and it gives definition without looking stripey or unnatural. The highlighter is easy to apply too, and is great for the nose, forehead and brows. We did find that if you want to give your cheek bones a little extra sharpen, using a liquid or cream highlighter gives it a bit of an edge.

For the brilliant price of £6.49, we think this is a definite must buy! You can purchase it from here.

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?

Makebelieve… we do!

We weren’t really aware that Makebelieve had a cosmetics line before we received our November She Said Beauty box. We knew they’ve been around for sometime in the self-tanning market and have had good reviews, but now they’ve branched out into the cosmetics market we were keen to see how they lived up to the hype. 

Our She Said Beauty box contained the Makebelieve Enhance, Luminize Skin Highlighter and we’ve been using it everyday for the last week. We liked the packaging, the black and gold box looks stylish, although the actual plastic container is quite plain and unexciting. The highlighter itself is in cream form, which we like as we’re mainly using either liquid or powder highlighter at present and we like to try different textures depending on our look.

The colour is also something we were very pleased with, it has pink/gold undertones which we felt would suit warmer skin tones. Other highlighters are often more silver/blue based and can give a rather unnatural halo effect but Enhance matched really well to our skin tone and gave a very natural looking glow. The cream consistency meant it was easy to apply with fingers and blended well. We found the product to last well and still be shimmering at the end of the day. We use the word shimmering deliberately as that’s exactly what it does, it doesn’t sparkle or glitter thankfully as that is something we detest in highlighters, we don’t want to look like the fairy on top of the Christmas tree!

Apply to the cheek and brow bones for a natural glow, build up the product to get the right level of shimmer for you and blend well with your fingers for the best effect.

We did find it quite difficult to find stockists through the Makebelieve site as they don’t appear to have updated with their own range yet! However a quick search revealed that Boots, asos, John&Ginger and other stockists are available and it’s priced at around £7.

There are other products in the Makebelieve cosmetics range, have you tried them? What did you think? We’d love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading.

tbo

xxx