Guys, this is just a short update to let you know that I came down with the flu on Wednesday last week and have been having a high temperature and the sore throat of the century since then. I swear I haven't felt this miserable in years and still need some time before I can get up from bed, not to mention put together a blog post.

Please bear with me; I'm really trying to pull myself together but no matter what I do, it doesn't seem to work. Urgh...


Till then, have a nice week everybody!  

I promised Nimphe, Karen and the rest of my readers that I would get this post our at the weekend, and boy am I glad I'm finally able to stick to my promises...

Only God knows why, but I'm on a high today: I'm listening to Roxette (don't laugh, they were the only thing that kept me alive during high-school), cuddling with my cat, eating fruit gums (I know, I know, I shouldn't be, but I just don't care right now...), and generally feel like I'm on top of the world.

Reasons? Here are a few:

• My job.
  Actually, the fact that I have one.
  No more nagging from my parents and my own conscience, no more self-loathing and hopelessness, and most importantly no more empty pockets. Life's good.
  
  
• Oh, and that we a have an extremely cool PC in our office with Windows 7. You know what I like best about Win7? Yep: StickyNotes. It's a lot of fun, extremely practical and useful, and just plain and simple cool.
  
  
• That I'm going to accompany my boss on a trade fair in Nuremberg for a week in February, which gives me the opportunity to shop for a suitcase, a few sets of womens suits, shoes and other yummy things.
  
  
• Music.
  
  
• The knowledge that if all goes well, I'll soon be the owner of (another) heap of Silk Naturals makeup.
  
  
• The sort-of sunny-spell we're experiencing right now where I live.

Sorry for gushing and bragging as if it was Things I Love Thursday, but I just had to tell the world how happy I am for the first time in... well, a very long time.




Now, about those brushes: out of the 4 I'm going to review today there's only one I haven't managed to befriend yet, so I guess you can start guarding your pockets/purses/wallets or any other accessories you use to store your money in. ;)





Brushes like this one are also called stippling brushes which is not something you want to forget. What's "stippling" you ask? Well, allow me to explain.


In art stippling is when instead of strokes or lines you use an insane amount of small dots to create various degrees of shading. Take a look at this artist drawing a portrait to get the idea. You can use the same method to apply blush and achieve a really nice, natural effect, especially if you have to work with an intensely pigmented kind of powder.

Since brushes like this have a very thin head with a small amount hairs scattered on a relatively big surface, it's easy to use them as if they were a bunch of pointed paintbrushes joined together. Actually, this brush has two kinds of hair: one is short and black, and it is there to separate the other kind of hairs which are long and white, and which are the ones that'll pick up the blush and disperse it on your skin.

Ever since I bought it, it's been my favorite brush to apply my blushes with. You can, of course, use it as a regular brush and put on your blush with sweeping or circular motions, but in my opinion it's best to just "dot-sot-dot" all over your cheeks. It can also be used to apply liquid- or cream-foundation too, but since I don't use any of those, I wouldn't know how well a brush like this performs at that.

However, here's a girls who does: check out beechbum06's video on YouTube to see what I've been talking about in the past few minutes.

Silk Naturals' brush is $5.99 and is practically a steal when you consider how useful it is. (I actually had store credit with SN at the time I bough it so it was "free" for me, but I don't think it takes away from my objectivity as I still had to pay for shipping and all the other things I bought together with it.) It's a bit different from the average stippling brush I think: most of them seem pretty big in diameter while this one is only about 2 cm. It's probably a bit weird for people who're used to larger brushes, but let me tell you that this one's perfectly usable if you're willing to give it a chance. In fact, I think it's much better this way, because it allows for more precise application and better control over where you put your blush.

All in all, I totally recommend this brush: it's a cheap alternative for MAC brushes and it does the job perfectly. It does shed more than an EDM brush and washing does bring out some black gunge, but that stops after a while and then you have a perfect blush brush.

Rating: a solid 5 out of 5





I know, I know: it looks very unkempt upon first glance.

Even upon second glance, to be honest.

Fine, all right, whatever... It does look disheveled and tousled no matter how many times you look at it.

It doesn't really matter though. I had thought it was an eyeshadow brush and as far as I can remember it was advertised as one, but I've been know for going off the beaten path and using things in a different way that they were originally intended to. So I use this as a concealer brush and it works perfectly that way. It's small, it covers nothing else but the zit I'm trying to hide, and when you use it like this, it really doesn't matter how rumpled it is.

It retails for $1.99 at Coastal Scents and is a great buy if you want to conceal blemishes but find concealer brushes too big and clumsy.

Rating: 4 out of 5





Yeesh, photographing brushes is just like photographing your face: the camera catches every little detail and flaw you'd think doesn't normally show...

Okay, this one is a solid little brush, and since I've had it, I haven't once used it to apply lipstick with.

However, it's perfect for applying dark, matte eyeshadows to the corner of your eyes and to contour your lids with. In one word, it was meant to assist you in creating a gorgeous smoky eye. Using it is like drawing with a pencil, but it's never once rough on the delicate skin around my eyes. It allows for precise application, and because of how thin it is, it's great to line your eyes with too providing you're using eyeshadow (preferably dry) and want to blend it a bit.

It's one of my favorite brushes ever, so I encourage you to get it for yourself too. For only $1.99 it's a great deal!

Rating: 5 out of 5





I guess this is what I get if I don't read the product description... I know it's written there in plain black and white that it has a 5/8 inch hair span and it says "big", but I honestly didn't expect it to be THIS BIG...!

That's completely my fault though, so I'm not going to blame Coastal Scents for my own laziness and stupidity. But honestly, what can you do with a brush that big? Me, I'm a fairly tiny* person, so not much obviously.

* Tiny as in "vertically": I'm 155 cm tall. I'm still working on the "horizontally" part...

Anyway, I honestly can't tell you much about this one as I've only used it once or twice since I got it last spring. It's very dense, soft and pliable when I run my thumb over it, and I have a hunch that it's great to blend eyeshadow with, I just can't seem to figure out how to make it work on my eyes. Oh well, perhaps one day I'll experiment with it a bit, but for now it doesn't excite me that much.

It was $2.99, by the way.

Rating: 3 out of 5 ('3' only because it's a very well-made, good quality brush...)


Next post? Soon, I can tell you that much. ;) Topic? Silk Naturals lippies most likely with swatches. Also, I may just start swatching all my SN and Pure Luxe eyeshadows too. I've had them for ages and I still haven't managed to churn out a post about them...


 

Hello dear Readers!

Long time no see! Yeah, it's my fault again... *blushes like crazy*

But... Guess what:

I'd been job-hunting since September, the month when I finally decided to quit being an entrepreneur (and English-teacher) and find myself a nice 8 hour job with a place to hang up my coat and place my bum. :-)

I am now the personal assistant of a sales manager and really-really enjoy being able to learn something new and not freezing to death for min. 4 hours a day... (That's how much time I used to spend traveling from one company to another.) Now I even get to go abroad and assist in our participation in a trade fair. Yay! (How much I'm actually going see of the city is an entirely different matter though... Probably not much.)

What made me write today were two girls from a Romanian forum who are, in all likelihood, bound to read this sometime or another. :)


Thank you for your kind words about me and my blog; I'm truly happy you like it. ^_^ You made me want to write this now because I'm not a member of your forum, this place is the only way I can communicate with you, and I desperately wanted to thank you and tell you how much your Google-translated words mean to me. I'd like to make good use of the occasion and thank all my other readers too who have been following my blog: perhaps just silently visiting, or commenting or even writing me an e-mail asking for help (like a lovely girl from Brazil did a day ago :).

Since I know you're looking forward to the next review, I can probably tell you and all my other readers that it's going to appear on Saturday or Sunday and will be a review of some brushes I got during these last months. (Silk Naturals Fiber Optic Blush Brush and some Coastal Scents ones.) Oh, and it's gonna have pictures too. ;-)

My job is pretty good from a blogger's point of view: I don't bring my work home, get away pretty early, and from the point that I get home I can concentrate on my hobbies fully and hopefully blog more often from now on. We'll see. I certainly have enough material and there's another Silk Naturals order on its way to me.

Have a nice weekend everybody!  

Buying stuff from Alverde is a rather hit or miss affair: some women like their stuff (me included, most of the time), some not so much. Complaints from members of the latter group include (among others) that Alverde's products smell weird, and I must concede that they're right: most of Alverde's products do need a little getting used to smell- and texture-wise.

However.

*pregnant pause*

I really can't imagine anyone not liking the smell of this:




That bottle up there is Alverde's newest and, as far as I know, limited edition body oil scented with blood orange and passionfruit (also known as 'maracuja'). :) It's a blend of many fine vegetable oils such as soy, olive, sweet almond, jojoba and sunflower, and it has such a zesty fragrance that every time I sniff it I go thirsty. (I dunno, some scents just have that effect on me. ^_^) It has this incredibly sweet orangey fragrance that reminds me of a type of orange-flavored hard candy I used to eat when I was a kid. The candy itself actually was shaped like orange slices, came in orange and yellow colors, and I suppose it was perfect to shut kids up as it was much too big to fit into the mouth of an average child. (And it might also be responsible for the Pavlovi-reflex I seem to have developed for zesty fragrances... :-)

Anyway, the oil comes in a matte glass bottle which has ridges on both sides so as to prevent it from slipping out of your hand. (The bottle is in a box, but I managed to throw it out before taking a picture, jeesh...) The oil itself has a really nice consistency, although perhaps it's just a teensy-weensy bit thicker than I would prefer my body oils to be. It's definitely more viscous than jojoba oil, probably about as thick as almond oil.

It feels really nice on my skin ( I apply all my body oils and butters right after taking a shower while my skin is still wet), but as with all body oils my gripe with it is that I just can't spread it in a thin enough layer. (NOT Alverde's fault though!!!) My solution to that is creating all sorts of yummy body scrubs: take a scrubbing agent, add some fragrant body oil (all other goodies are optional) and treat your whole body with it while still in the shower. Somehow, with the help of the added particles I'm able to spread the oil/butter in a micro-thin layer on my body and it feels just like having grown another (much softer) layer of skin to protect me in the cold, hard winter.

All in all, I can only recommend that you try this body oil if you can get a hold of it. The scent itself is enough to make you fall in love with this stuff, I promise, aaand it's perfect for massages too. ;-)

Ingredients: Glycine Soya (Soy) Oil, Passiflora Incarnata (Passionfruit) Oil, Olea Europaea (Olive) Oil, Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis (Sweet Almond) Oil, Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) Oil, Tocopheryl Acetate, Heliantus Annuus (Sunflower) Seed Oil, Tocopherol (Vitamin E), Parfum, Limonene, Linalool, Citral, Citronellol

Price: 1200-1300 HUF??? (yikes, I honestly don't remember) for a 100 ml bottle
Available: in Drogerie Markt stores only
Rating: 5 out of 5  

As is obvious in my previous post, I don't generally lean towards gentle things when it comes to cosmetics. That may or may not be a mistake on my part, and I definitely don't see this tendency of mine changing anytime soon, but after having used Freeman's Facial Enzyme Mask for three weeks now, I will perhaps be willing to justify the existence of milder things too.

For a while now I have completely done away with abrasive skincare for my face, except for Bioderma's Sebium Exfoliating Gel used with caution once a week, and have instead opted for chemical exfoliation. For a month now I have been sampling various products with alpha hydroxy acids, first alternating between Skinceuticals' Intense Line Defense and Skyn Iceland's Nordic Skin Peel (thank you Ladybird for the samples! :-), and now using the 8% AHA Gel from Paula's Choice. After a while I managed to ascertain that my skin appreciates AHAs of any kind much better than BHA (=salycilic acid), but there was still one option left undiscovered:

Enzymes such as bromelain found in the stems and juice of pineapples and papain found in unripe papayas are excellent if you want to exfoliate your skin. They break down the stuff that hold cells together (="extracellular matrix molecules", thanks Wikipedia!), thereby effectively ridding our face of skin-cells that have been dead for a while and only hanging on to us for dear life with their "pinkies". :-)

Some of you might argue that I could have chosen a much better, more effective, classier, fancier, pricier, whatever product than that of Freeman, but I was seriously lacking in alternatives. I didn't have the money for more expensive stuff at the time (come to think of it, I still don't...) and some I knew of were pretty difficult to come by even on EBay, whereas I just happened to stumble upon Freeman's face mask by pure luck in Tesco one day, and that was the end of the story. In my basket it went despite some shortcomings, and I haven't regretted it one bit.

It's the mask of my dreams: no clay, no peel-off craziness, no warming/cooling effect, no drying ingredients, no sachet to fumble with, no layers of tissue paper, nada, just a nice mask with a gel consistency and lots of chemical exfoliants. Just what my skin needs. :-)




The product comes in a 150 ml plastic tube with a flip-top cap and a big pineapple plastered over the front. The mask itself is a relatively thick, semi-transparent gel, easy to spread on my skin. What caught my attention was the horde of exfoliating ingredients listed on top of the INCI list: bromelain and papain (the two enzymes), pineapple extract, glycolic acid and lactic acid (two AHAs*), and yeah, my brain also faintly registered the presence of chamomile extract and aloe vera juice on the list but was probably too happy about the previous few to care.

* AHAs reach optimal potency in an environment with a PH under 4. The PH of this product is not stated anywhere on the label, thereby indicating that the previous information has probably not been taken into consideration when formulating the product. How effective the glycolic and lactic acids are in this mask is anyone's guess...




According to the instructions on the label you should leave the mask on for 10 minutes. Me being the little overachiever that I am couldn't be content with just 10 minutes (I mean what's 10 minutes enough for...?), so I left it on for 30. There's probably some deity up there watching over dumb people like me who like to experiment with their own skin, so luckily I didn't end up with a red, irritated visage, though I tried really hard. :) I even sprayed my face with mineral water every time I felt my face was getting dry as I felt it wouldn't be able to do a proper job if left to dry. Still nothing, just glowing skin when I washed it off approximately half an hour later. I suppose somebody up there regularly takes pity on idiots like me. ,-)




The funny bit about the gel is that it's got quite a bit of polyethylene particles in it that turn this mask into a multipurpose product. It easily doubles as a facial scrub for people with very sensitive skin, and the particles also serve to give an extra bit of exfoliation when you wash the mask off. You just have to refrain from splashing your face with water: instead wet your hands and massage your face a bit, then repeat the process as many times as needed for the by-then-dry mask to become gel-like again.

I like to commit repeated and totally senseless acts of stupidity and have been using this mask every morning and night for three weeks. Yup, still no adverse effects, just healthy, glowing skin and a far smaller smattering of blemishes than could have been my share this holiday season. (There's absolutely no way one could say no to Mum's 'bájgli".)

So I credit this mask for having survived the festive season without a horde of zits and for giving my skin a really nice glow by dissolving dead skin cells and sweeping them off of my face.

Verdict: get it if you can!

A word of warning:

When using chemical exfoliants for a prolonged period, please use an effective sunscreen of at least SPF30 and PPD of 20! (I'd go much higher though.)

Price: ~ 1500 HUF
Available: in Tesco stores
Rating: 5 out of 5
Ingredients: see above