Cosplay for Hallowe'en: SQUID GAME with a touch of MIDSOMMAR

For Hallowe'en this year, I dressed up as 456 from Squid Game. Like most people, I was obsessed with the show when Netflix dropped it last year. However, I got on the bandwagon a little too late for Hallowe'en 2021, with most of the items of my cosplay, arriving after last Hallowe'en.

Thus, this year was the perfect opportunity for my 'make-up cosplay', and I did it in style, at the Ballie Ballerson, a Shoreditch hotspot famous for its massive, neon-lit ball pits!

it's me, hi, i'm the problem, it's me!

Product reviews: Fenty Beauty Crush on Cupid blush and Girl Next Door x Chic Phreak highlighter

Fenty Beauty, the make-up brand from Rihanna, was launched in September 2017. It has been praised for its inclusivity, especially in offering products for skin tones where previously there had been scant choice.

Fenty Beauty also broke down gender norms, with its products being accessible to men as well as women. One of its most high-profile advocates was Daniel Kaluuya, who wore shades 480 and 490 of the foundation when attending the 2018 Oscars, where he was nominated for Best Actor, with several media outlets commenting on how glowy his skin looked.

As I’ve discussed before on my blog, I have tended to be quite rigid in the make-up products that I use, with MAC constituting about 80% of my make-up collection.

But, following the positive word of mouth for Fenty Beauty (if it’s good enough for Danny Kaluuya, it has to be good enough for me!), along with the fact that I adore Rihanna’s music, I decided to see for myself, and treated myself to two products from the line: the blush and highlighter.

Review: LookFantastic Scent Edit Autumn 2021 box

Getting perfume samplers in the post were one of the little treats that served as a fantastic pick me up during the seemingly never-ending period that was lockdown. As I have now exhausted all the perfume samples that are available on the FeelUnique website, I had to look elsewhere, and was alerted to this very tempting offer from LookFantastic.

It's a box with five fragrances in, luxury-sized (so larger than the usual 1.2ml sample-sizes I reviewed from FeelUnique), with two other non-fragrance samples thrown in. The box costs £55, which may seem pricey… until you consider that the box comes with a voucher code, that gives you £55 off the price of a full-sized bottle of any of the five perfumes it trials (and I made use of this voucher!)

Here are my thoughts on the seven items in the box:

Product review: MAC Hyper Real Glow Palette / Get It Glowin’ highlighter palette

Prior to going into lockdown, my daily make-up routine consisted of just two products: MAC concealer for the bags under my eyes and blemishes on my face, and MAC blush to give my cheeks a bit of colour. On Fridays, if I was feeling audacious, I would top this look up with MAC eyeshadow, usually a glittery pink shade, on the eyelids. I'm certainly loyal to the brand! 

This was an extremely simple process that I could do quickly when my train was ten minutes away from its destination, meaning that my make-up was freshly applied for work. 

Over lockdown, with there not being much to do, I had time to refine my beauty routine, and in doing so, added an extra component to the existing process: highlighter. 

Thoughts on five items ordered from the FeelUnique luxury samples

Unlike the other three sample reviews I did (most recent one here), the five items I ordered in this review weren't part of the pick and mix for £3.95 deal. Instead, these samplers were part of the 'deluxe samples', where it is £16.90 for five samples and postage and packaging.

Product review: KIND TO SKIN REFRESHING FACIAL WASH GEL (Simple)

Product review: DEEP ACTION FACIAL WIPES (Clean & Clear)

Make-up remover is an essential product, because if you don’t wash off your makeup before you go to sleep, it facilitates build-up of germs, causing your skin to get greasy and look bad. The cleansing wipes that I have been using recently are Deep Action Facial Wipes. 

Review of two concealers: MAC SELECT COVER UP SHADE 25 and BOBBI BROWN SHADE 6 BEIGE

I recently had to replenish my concealer supply, due to me using up the MAC tube pictured above, and me wishing to avoid looking like this chap below due to the bags under my eyes:

Product review: EYELASH CURLERS (Models Own)

To this items credit, despite it looking like a  medieval torture device, it didn’t gouge my eyes out, which is why I’d been evading them for many a year. After watching a few YouTube tutorials I immediately picked up how they worked. 

Furthermore, the hot pink handles of the product are what set it apart for me from the cheaper but dull-looking Boots own-brand, and the more expensive and sophisticated looking No.7 version of the item.

 

 

 

Make-up review: THICK & FAST MASCARA (Soap and Glory)

 

Relatively inexperienced with mascara I may be, but even I knew enough about them to realise that this was a complete dud of a product. As aforementioned, my eyelashes are already woefully short, so you could argue that this product doesn't have a whole lot to work with. 

Nail polish experiment: mixing No7 So Neat with No7 Daisy Darling.

In theory, I didn't expect these two colours to go, as their tones are completely different: teal with sparkly pieces of pink:

 

 

The end product was surprisingly good though!

Daisy Darling provides a useful topcoat to So Neat, as I find that No7 nail varnishes chip far too easily for my liking. I'm my third day in to wearing my nails in this colour and so far there's been no chipping, so I'm delighted I've found a functional and fashionable way of jazzing up my nails slightly! Daisy Darling is the first glittery-type nail varnish I've bought, but it's so pretty and now I think I'm in the market for a multi-coloured sprinkles type nail polish as well.

I think, on a night out, I will pair Daisy Darling with an even more daring colour and see what the end product is. If it looks bad, I can just palm it off as #experimentation.

Make-up review: CALIFORNIA KISSIN' LIPGLOSS (Benefit)

 

An awful attempt to give myself a French manicure.

I've graduated!~~~ I got a 2:1 in Economics, which means all those endless nights of studying Taylor Rules, logit and probit regressions, memorising elasticity equations, solving mathematical problems pertaining to moral hazard and auction theory, pretending to give a damn about the stock market, reading the FT, deriving Hotelling formulae and memorising facts about tax evasion have amounted to something.

To celebrate, I went on a bit of a splurge, buying a tonne of girly crap I didn't really need. One of these things was a Bourjois Paris French manicure kit, because I'll be entering the working world next month and I want give the semblance of a ~classy lady~ in worldplace, even if I'm anything but. The kit was £9.99 for three things:

It's classily packaged stuff, and extremely functional. I can imagine that if applied correctly and accurately, it will give the look that you can get in the salon. However, I'm a completely nail polish n00b and so my attempts were rather amateurish, to say the least:

This is somewhat of an embarrassment: uneven application, chipped at parts, smudged... I definitely need to train.

I'm a big fan of this product though, and will continue to use it until that elusive day when I actually get it right!

Product Review: CLUBBING COLOURS QUICK DRY NAIL POLISH (Miss Sporty)

I’ve developed a bit of a re-birth in my love for bright red nail polish. This is due to two things – my adoration for Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita and Dolores wearing red polish, as well as having recently watched On the Road. I wasn’t totally enamoured with the film, but I noticed Kristen Stewart’s character wearing bright red nail varnish, and even though it was heavily chipped, just the fact that Kristen Stewart was wearing it automatically made it a fabulous colour. 

So, taking on some fashion tips from those two characters, I chased some red of my own.

3 beauty review: EASY GLISTENING DRY OIL BODY GLOSS, FLAKE AWAY BODY SCRUB and LIP GLOSS (Soap & Glory)

Having recently rebranded this site as a lifestyle blog a couple of weeks back, I’m going to share a few reviews of items that I use in my “lifestyle”.