Seventeen Cheek & Lip Stain

Seventeen Cheek and Lip Stain

Liquid or gel blush can be really hard to work with, the ever cult Benetint is so watery that if you don't apply it quickly and carefully you end up with red water stains down your cheeks. I've tried many from different brands and never really got along with them, traditional blusher will always be my favourite.

So why bother trying another product? Well why not. These from Seventeen who have some wonderful products but also some that are just too gimmicky, cheek stamp anyone? These are by no means a unique or innovative product, most brands now have a multi purpose cheek / lip product.  I haven't used a gel cheek tint before, a quick search around the internet show Pixi also have a Cheek Gel.

Packaging wise, it is in squeezable tube with a sponge "applicator" at the end. Not sure how you would ever apply blush like this though, far too much product would come out and it would be impossible to blend. Instead I found the most effective way was to apply with a stippling brush and blend it in. You have to work fast, it is very thick but not that pigmented.  The sponge applicator is not exactly hygienic. Usually I'm a stickler for ensuring there are proper swatches but I've lost that photo and have already thrown these in the bin. There wasn't much to show anyway.

Basically not worth the faff.

Eucerin Dermo Purifyer Active Night Care

Eucerin Dermopurifyer Active Night Care - £9.50

Recently I have been struggling with awful skin, I thought I had my skin routine sussed but something was clearly causing it to become angry and full of spots. Every morning I was waking up with another blemish, always angry and painful. I upped my water intake and became more vigilant with my cleansing but no luck. My trusty Effaclar Duo + just wasn't being magical enough. I searched Boots, even tried the traditional Clearasil sport fighting products but they were far too drying.

I have used some Eucerin products before but for extremely dry skin, I did not know they had a range for blemish prone skin. After some serious reading of the packaging I decided to go for the Night Care cream, hoping it would work miracles and I would wake up with radiant clear skin. It has a high concentration of Lactic Acid, a AHA, to help improve skin turn over. 

You know what? It works. I've only used it for around a week now but my skin has calmed down, no longer am I waking up to a new angry spot every morning. I shall keep using it and will report back, but now on my wish list is the rest of the Eucerin Dermo Purifyer range!

iPad Apps for Studying

I am incredibly lucky to have an iPad to help with my studies, I am forever disorganised so it really helps to have all my notes in one place and of course everything is backed up to a cloud (whichever you choose, just make sure your work is backed up somewhere!) I have rounded up a few of my favourite apps that make lectures just that little bit easier.

GoodReader - 69p (Limited time, usually £6.99)

I have spent far too much of my life printing 100s of pages of journals and attacking them with a highlighter, it was the only way I can research for writing an essay. This app lets you do this but without the printing. Once highlighted the important and relevant can either be emailed to your or printed so you just have one page of relevant quotes. Great for reading, managing and annotating any pdfs! You can also create notes from scratch but I much prefer another app for that, taking me onto the next app.

Notability -  £1.99

Did you go to university expecting epic lectures you've seen in all the films? Instead you are paying thousands of pounds to view some wonderful power points. If you are lucky enough to have a lecturer who puts the slides up before then this app is perfect. You can import powerpoint slides and then write and annotate directly onto them. My other main use for this app is writing up any lecture notes, you can easily import photos from the internet as well as record your lecturer from the app. Basically the best £2 you could spend to keep on top of all your lectures. 

Idea Sketch - Free

I haven't used this app too much, however it is incredibly useful for creating essay plans if you like to create a "mind map" or whatever they are called these days (showing my age..). It is very intuitive to use, easily able to switch between colours and shapes. I downloaded a few of these type of apps, this was however by far the best and most user friendly.

Sunrise - Free 

I discovered this app completely by accident, our university calendar is via google however it wouldn't show up on the native iOS calendar. I downloaded every single calendar app that was free and this was just awesome. It is better than the iOS calendar by far, more user friendly, nicer to look at. Syncs instantly with google and can even be accessed from your desktop.

Honourable mentions
Evernote - I know lots of people love this app for organising recipes and lectures, my friend Kirsty uses it for writing essays
Wunderlist - The best to do / list making app ever.

Tea Tree Pore Minimiser

I love The Body Shop skin care ranges, they have something for everything from extremely dry skin to acne prone blemished skin. The Tea Tree range was one of the first items I tried, my mum bought them home from a Body Shop party (eh remember them!) once and I loved the cooling feeling they had on my acne ridden skin. They were perhaps a bit too drying for my skin but I still slathered them on in the hope of perfect skin.

Fast forward 10 years and the range has also moved on a bit, they ahem everything from day creams to night lotions. The newest member of the family is the Pore Minimiser, promising to make pores smaller and at the same time instantly mattifying skin with the added benefits of tea tree oil. 

Now firstly it does nothing to the size of my pores, especially compared to something like Benefit's pore minimising POREfessional. For a product that promises as to minimise pores this is pretty crap. It's second promise is to leave skin feeling fresh and pore, it does this. There are better products that leave a perfect base for makeup. That said it is nice to smooth on if my skin is feeling particularly warm and oily.

Mainly though this is a big fail from me, sorry Body Shop.

London

A month ago when I was feeling rubbish and poorly my sister and I booked a little trip to London. She had never been before so wanted to do all the touristy things like visiting the Queen. We stayed in Greenwich and managed to work out London transport every day to get to where we wanted to go. My sister loved the tube and the DLR after mastering which side of the escalator to stand on and how to tap in and out successfully. The forever country girl is already planning her next trip back.

We ate lots of lovely food, Wahaca was as lovely as everyone said and as instagram-able (that is a word, promise) as I imagined. Our feet hurt, we ate too much food and got lost trying to find Hyde Park but all in all two northerners did just fine in London. Even if we didn't really know where we were about 100% of the time.

We stupidly decided to go in the Easter Holidays which made everything about 100 times busier, the queues for the museum's were ridiculous so we didn't get to see the Dinosaurs as we really didn't want to stand in a queue for over an hour. How very un-British of us.

The weather was beautiful, we even had a picnic in Hyde Park. We are basically the people all Londoners hate but we had a wonderful time

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