Selfridges Big Beauty Bang Event

Last night my friend Leonie and I headed out to a beauty event at Selfridges Oxford St. They are having a whole series of events collectively called 'The Big British Bang' to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and last night was the opening night of the beauty event.

We bought tickets the previous week when we were shopping in the beauty hall, which cost £10 but is redeemable against purchase on the night. The reason I'm telling you all about this now is because there is another big event on the 7th of June, and I highly reccomend you get tickets if you can! Essentially it's a free event as you can claim your £10 back, and there were plenty of goodies to sample, from free champagne to jelly beans and of course, beauty samples.

Upon arrival we were provided with big yellow rosettes to wear so that the staff on the counters knew that we were part of the event, and that they should shower us with gifts! I'm exagerating a little, but there really were lots of things going on, and people without tickets were gutted that they werent allowed to join in with any of the festivities.

I spent quite a lot of time at the Illamaqua counter where the artist created a really amazing eye look for me, and I bought the palette that he had used, redeeming my £10 ticket cost at the same time.

Unfortunately not the best photo, Taken a few hours later when I got home, as my compact camera that I took with me really wasn't standing up to the low light conditions, but the look really was beautiful.

Leonie getting her eye-makeup done at NARS

NARS cupcakes!

Trying Chubby Sticks at Clinique

One bottle of champagne is never enough!

Leonie getting her eyes re-done at Bobbi Brown

There were also a few performers laid on at the event. The first and most obvious was a brilliant drag artist who was dressed as Mary Portas. He was really very convincing! He seemed to be 'master of ceremonies' and also had a photo area where you could dress up as the queen and have your photo taken. We obviously couldnt pass up this opportunity, but Leonie has the photo and I wanted this to go out as soon as possible, so I can't post it here! There was also a performance by Marawa The Amazing who appeared on Britain's Got Talent 2011, I believe she reached the semi-finals. Anyway, she was very entertaining! Sorry again about the photo quality!

Lastly, they had a 'grabber' machine, like you get in amusement arcades. It was filled with iconic yellow selfridges bags, which contained various (unseen) beauty products. If you spent over £60 on the night, you got to have a go. Leonie and I spent £60 between us, so we pretended that I had bought both of our shopping and they let me go without a problem, so definitely team up with people! Also, I reccomend going at the end of the event, as the guy running it was just picking out bags for people who didnt manage to grab one as the event was ending soon, and they certainly weren't doing that at the beginning of the night! I actually did manage to grab one and it contained Shu Uemura UV Underbase BB Mousse, which is worth £29 and is absolutely brilliant!

Would you go to an event like this?







LOOOONG overdue IMATS London haul!!

hey girls!! i'm SO sorry this has taken me so long, but i was super busy with my job and family stuff, so i took a little break from blogging. i have now quit my job (YAY!) and so i' hoping to get back to my regular blogging schedule.

anyway, i promised to do a haul from IMATS which was last month, as i bought quite a lot of stuff! before i go into this i just want to give a little disclaimer, i am in no way trying to brag or show off about how much money i have or how much stuff i have, i saved up for months proir to IMATS to enable me to make some big purchases at reduced prices, which is really a money saving way to buy.

anyway, into the haul!!

when i got home, before i played with or opened anything, i had to take lots and lots of pictures!! these are all of the bags i came back with, i was so excited!!

this is eveything i came back with all laid out. it looks like more than it actually is because i included all of the bags and literature. come on, i love that stuff!!

first of all i got quite a few new tools. crown brush was really well priced and inexpensive, so i picked up a few brushes there. i also got some disposable plastic spatulas. i think this entire bundle cost around £20, so really good value!

i picked up (from left to right) a small fan bush, a tiny little blending brush, a fine detailer brush, a badger (so soft!) flat shader brush, a HUGE natural hair shader brush, a badger crease brush, a tiny synthetic smudger brush, a square liner brush, and a badger anglpenil brush. let me just say that these brushes are LOVELY. i have had zero shedding (unlikemy 3 MAC brushes!!) and they are all super soft.

i really wanted a big flat-topped kabuki brush, and Royal and langnickel were having a big sale on their kabuki's, selling them at only £6 each.  

this brush as been a bit of an obsession of mine! it's so soft, and absoutely brilliant for buffing mineral and powder based products into the skin.

sleek had a big stall shaped like one fo their iconic eyeshadow palettes, and they also had some great discounts!

they were doing pout paints at 3 for £10, and lipsticks at 4 for £10, which was a complete bargain, considering pount paints are usually around the £6 mark and lipsticks aound £5!

the i-Divines were discounted, but only by about 50p individually. you could buy all of them for a bigger discount but i already had most of them, so i just got the PPQ palette, which i haven't seen before.

 as always, the shadows are super pigmented, and are a mixture of shimmery and matte formulas.

the lipsticks i got. they are (L-R) cherry, mystic (matte), candy cane and baby doll. baby doll is FAR too pale for me to actually wear, but it looked nice in the tube!! the colours here are really washed out, but i just couldnt get a true picture. to give you an idea, candy cane (3rd from left) is actually a super bright pink toned red, but it comes out here looking like a pastel pink. and cherry is really dark and vampy, but here looks more like candy cane does in real life. i'll put swatches up eventually, as i really like the formula of these lipsticks.

i also picked up some pout paints, so that i now have the complete collection.

i stopped off at Beatuy So Clean to get some cosmetic sanitiser, as i'm a bit of a germ freak!! the other day i told one of my friends that she coud help herself to use any of my makeup, and then i nearly freaked out when i saw her sticking an eye pencil in her eye! i was very glad for this spray that day.

i cant actually remember what stall i bought this at, i just remember they were selling beauty blenders and BEAUTIFUL foundation palettes which i was sorely tempted by, but it was the nd of the day by then and i'd already gone over my budget! this palette is lovely though, even though the surface of each shade is quite small, they go down quite deep and the coverage is great. i managed to snag this for a cheeky tenner as the show was closing, which i was so excited about!!

i actually bought these at the first stand i visited, i belive it was 3 for £5, and they are super soft because they're human hair.

i also bought some lash adhesive from there, but i havent tried it yet so i can't tell you much about that one!!

NYX had a HUGE line the whole ime i was there, so i went back just before the show closed to get what i wanted. it was slim pickings, so i just got 2 lipliners in dolly pink (front) and pinky (back) 

there was a stand called backstageshop.com which i was SO attracted to. it had the usual cosmetic stuff, but also quite a lot of theatrical and stage makeup too. i bought quite a bit from there and went back several times!!

the pack in th back of this shot was like a special effects starter set, and was a bargain at only £15! it contains: a lip colour/balm, liquid latex, arterial blood, spirit gum, and wound wax, all made by makerm and all in clear plastic cosmetic bag. i think the individual items had about a £35 value, so it was a great price for the bundle. i also picked up from this stand the ben nye mist and set (which unfortunately i had a bad experience with!) a ben nye concealer quad and a lipbalm they gave me for free because i bought so much!

i also picked up at this stall my biggest and most exciting purchase.... an airbrush system!! i decided not to go for one of the big brand systems because A) theyare very expensive compared to generic systems and B) a generic system will be easier to sell on if i decide i want to invest in a branded system, as a generic compessor has more practical uses.

the whole bundle, including 2 types of cleaner, airbrush and compressor cost only £100, compared to the £280 benchmark of the big brand names! so far i'm loving airbrush makeup and application, it just looks so flawless!

after i bought my compressor i was super excited, and went out looking for some makeup to go in it. OCC was my first port of call, and they fulfilled my needs perfectly.

i got a full sized bottle of foundation in my own colour, which is Y0, and then sample packs of all the yellow and red based shades, plus the blush, bronzer and highlight shades.

that about wraps it up for this haul, hope you enjoyed!

whats on YOUR whishlist?

The IMATS Experience

Hey girls!

I went to IMATS yesterday and had the most amazing time, and i have so much to tell you all that i'm splitting the IMATS London posts into two, this one will be only about the actual experiene, and the other will be a huge haul of all the stuff i bought!

the event itsself is held over 2 days, and i chose to go on the saturday, which is the first day. i would reccomend going on a saturday for a few reasons, but mainly because lots of stalls were sold out of the best deals by the middle of saturday, and had no plans to re-stock, so i imagine that sunday shopping would be slim pickings! it was held int he grand hall in Alexandra Palace in north london, which is a beautiful building and had more than enough space to fit everything in.

When i first arrived i was completely overawed, and kind of nervous of even looking at stalls because there were so many people who all seemed very driven and knew what they wanted, whereas i just felt a bit lost!

i spent some time just looking around, and soon got used to competing for space at stalls. i sadly didn't get too many pictures of the actual makeup and stalls, i was far to distracted by the amazing demos happening all around me!

the event itsself was so much fun, which i kind of didn't expect it to be. i thought it would be quite fasat paced, stressful, driven shopping for bargains, but i found that i was actually going at a reasonably slow pace and taking time to really look at and appreciate everything. there were a couple of things i knew i wanted to get, mainly a compressor, and looking for that was a bit stressful but i bought one early on (and left it at the stall to be collected later) and then i was so pleased to just be able to shop for things that simply caught my eye, and of course some new airbase makeup to go with my compressor!

the nyx stall was SOOO tempting but the queue was HUGE. another tip is to check out what you want and then come back nearer to closing time. i returned to nyx later on and there wa no line at all, because the show was due to close in half an hour.

i would advise keeping your phone to hand too, especially if it has a web browser. maybe i'm just a bit cynical but i wanted to price check everything, and i found that some things were being advertised as 50% off when in reality they werent reduced at all. even if it doesn't have internet keep it close at hand even for the calculator, to keep your budget in check and to make sure that you're getting a good deal. on one stall (i wont say which) they had a deal on airbrush stuff where if you paid £200 you got the compressor and 2 mini sets of makeup, but if you paid £250 you got 4 mini sets with it. what they didn't tell you was that separately the mini sets were only £15, so if you bought the £200 set plus the other 2 minis separately, it would only have cost £230!
overall i had a great day, spent far too much money and got some great deals, i throughly reccomend it to everyone!

i'll leave you with some more photos of the amazing demos!

warwick davis was there having goblin makeup from harry potter being re-created on him. his kids were there too, and seemed to be having a wicked time playing with presthetics and wounds!

the wonderful EnKore at the crown brush stand creating and awsome airbrush look to be viewed with 3D glasses!

IMATS Anyone?

hey girls! tommorrow i'm going to IMATS London for the first time, so i'm super excited! are any of you guys going? i was going to go with the wonderful Neve (check her out here) but unfortunately she can't make it, so i dont know who i'm going to be going with, i might end up going on my own, so if you see me, come and hang out!!

hope to see you there! xxx