Days By The Sea

Hello everyone, I hope you're all well.

This week was the half term holidays and I went to Norfolk for a few days! I took way too many photos (as usual) and you said you'd like to see some of the photos so here you go!

I apologise in advance that there are probably going to be quite a few photos, it's hard to narrow down over 1000 photos into a blogpost of a suitable length, and I'm sure I've said this before but I'm not a professional photographer, it's just something I enjoy and do a lot.

I haven't captioned any of the photos because I don't have time, if you have any questions about anything, feel free to ask!

I hope you enjoyed this, I had a really lovely time there.

Remember to follow on bloglovin to keep up to date with all of our posts!

Lots of love,

Emma xxx

Review || Real Techniques Brushes

Hello! Today I have a little review on Real Techniques makeup brushes and what I think each brush is best for!

The Core Collection

The core collection is a set costing £21.99, that contains four brushes; the Buffing brush, the Contour Brush, the Pointed Foundation brush and the Detailer brush.

The Buffing brush is probably the most used in my collection, it buffs in foundation or concealer really, really well and I can't imagine finding a brush I like better for my base than this one any time soon!

The Contour brush, can obviously be used for contour, but I like it for powder, if I want to be precise, the size of this brush allows me to be more precise while applying powder! I've heard that a lot of people like it for concealer as well!

Now I have to be honest, I never use this Pointed Foundation brush. As I said my favourite brush for bases is the buffing brush, I never have liked the classic foundation brushes for applying makeup as it's just like painting a layer on top of your face rather than being able to blend it in well, but everyone is individual  and some people may love this brush, it's just not my cup of tea.

The Detailer brush is perfect for applying concealer very precisely, and I also like to use it for inner corner highlights or just eyeshadow in general!

Finishing Brushes

I have two, the Blush brush and the Stippling brush. A Stippling brush costs £11.99 and a blush brush costs £9.99. For some odd reason I forgot to take photos of the stippling brush for this post - sorry! I find the stippling brush is great for bases, before I bought the Core Collection I used to use it all the time! It's also great for products such as cream blushes and other cream products!

The blush brush is not the greatest for blush application, it's so big! I'd recommend it if you're wanting to go for a bronzed look to apply some bronzer around the perimeter of your face!

Eye Brushes

The two eye brushes I have are the Fine Liner brush and the Shading brush. The Fine Liner brush is £6.99 and the Shading brush is £7.99.

The Fine Liner brush is quite self explanatory really, it's good to use for gel eyeliner. I don't use it much because I prefer using liquid eyeliner as its so quick but when I have used it, it's been good.

I recently bought the Shading brush, it's fantastic for blending eyeshadows, it fits perfectly in the crease of the eye. A dream to use.

Duo Fiber Collection

The Duo Fiber collection is a set of three brushes, costing £23.99. It comes in black and white and they're extremely soft!

The Eye brush is quite big, but good for blending out the edges of an eyeshadow look and making sure they're not too harsh!

The Contour brush is very similar in size and shape to the contour brush in the Core Collection, it's good for contouring, I like it with highlighter as it applies product more sheerly therefore you don't look like there's been an explosion at the highlighter factory!

The Face brush is good for bronzer again, the same as the blush brush, it's great for the golden look! It's also good for sheer powdering!

I hope you found this helpful if you were thinking about starting or adding to your Real Techniques collection! 

What's your favourite makeup brush?

Lots of love,

Emma xxx

Christmas Lush

Hello everyone! 

It's a little late, but I thought I would do a few reviews on the 3 items I had for Christmas from lush! I wanted to use them first so I could give proper reviews! 

The first thing I tried was the star light star bright bath melt. I picked this up because it smelt like lime and looked amazing! I was so let down by this product as it made my bath water thick, and the colour did not come out at all. Aswell as the fact the glitter didn't spread out in the bath to add shimmer, it stuck in blobs to me and the side of the bath. 

Secondly I had So white. One of my favourite bath bombs! It smells like fresh apples and turns your bath water an amazing pink colour! 

Finally I had 2 of the Golden Wander bath bombs, and what a wander it was! It was so nice to see tiny gold stars appear from the bath bomb, and it coloured my bath turquoise! It even had specs of glitter in my bath! 

What's your favourite lush product? Let me know in the comments! 

Love Ella xx

Review || Bourjois Healthy Mix

Hello!
I was asked quite a while ago if I could do a review on the Bourjois Healthy Mix Serum and Concealer after I'd bought another bottle of the foundation and mentioned I was going to try the concealer out and I finally am!

The foundation

Cost: £10.99
Coverage: Light
Finish: Semi-matt

This is definitely my favourite foundation, I love that it isn't too high coverage so looks natural and you can apply it with your fingers or build it up a bit more with a brush! It has a warm undertone so would be best for people with a yellow undertone to their skin rather than a cool, pink undertone! I first bought a bottle last spring and it has been a staple in my makeup collection since, so definitely give it a try if you've ever been wondering whether to buy it!

The concealer

Cost: £7.99

We all know that I love the Lasting Perfection concealer by collection because of the coverage, but due to the condition of my skin improving drastically I've not needed so much coverage. This isn't the best coverage-wise however if you find the Collection concealer too dry then you might want to give it a try. It contains apricot for radiance, melon for moisturisation and raspberry as a Micro-circulation activator and as with the foundation (which contains litchi, goji berries and pomegranate) it has an amazing smell, but doesn't irritate my very sensitive skin (to put it into perspective, I had an allergic reaction to some Simple products)

Overall I would definitely recommend these for the excellent quality, smell, I really like the packaging and they do exactly what they're supposed to do!

I hope you enjoyed this post and found my review helpful, are there any products you'd like me to review? leave a comment letting me know!

Don't forget to follow on bloglovin to keep up to date with posts!

Lots of love,
Emma xxx

Triple Chocolate Cookies| Ella

Hello!

Seeing as it's half term for most of us *jumps up and down and crys with joy* I thought I'd share a cookie Recipie with you so you can bake in the holiday and share it with friends and family! It will keep you from being bored! 

Recently I picked up Love Tanya and I fell in love with the baking chapter. Today I'm going to show you how I made her triple chocolate cookies, and you can follow along if you don't have the book! 

You will need:

• 200g butter

•300g castar sugar

• 1 large egg

•275g self-raising flour

•75g Cocoa powder

•3 large bars of chocolate (white, milk, dark)

• daim bar- optional ( I didn't use this) 

•dash of milk if your mix is too dry

Start by preheating your oven to 200C, and line a baking tray with grease proof paper. 

In a bowel cream the butter and sugar and then add the egg. You need to do this carefully or your mixture will curdle.

After you have done that, add in the dry ingredients. I tried using a spoon, then a whisk, but realised it easier to just mix it with your hands. Make sure they are clean! 

After your mixture is combined, add on your chocolate chunks. I cut my chunks in half, just to make them smaller. 

Throw them in, then mix with your hands to spread the chocolate in the dough evenly.

  

Finally using your hands make 10 balls of the cookie dough ( or as big or small as you want, 10 makes VERY big cookies) and place spread out on the baking trays. 

Bake in the oven for 11 minutes. They will come out looking under asked but because of the heat they carry on cooking while they cool. 

I like to eat mine while they are warm! These went so fast and were a hit with my friends! I need to make more! Let me know how yours turned out! 

Happy Baking

Love Ella xx

Hello February!

Hello! 

Where on earth did January go? It seems like only last week when we were all wishing each other a merry Christmas and happy new year! In this post I'm just going to talk about some of the stuff I enjoyed last month and if you enjoy this maybe I'll do one every month!

Photography - I took a lot of photos throughout the month, as I usually do, most of them are of snow as we've had so much of it! If you saw my last blogpost I shared some of my photography tips for blog photos, I've taken an awful lot of photos for the blog too!

Nail polish - a blogpost of mine is never complete without a mention to some nail polish. I've really enjoyed using Barry M Watermelon and Plum and also an Avon polish which doesn't have a name (or one that I can find anywhere on the bottle!) 

Makeup - I won't go on about these too much because they're pretty much all I've talked about or included in blogposts recently! Mac Creme Cup lipstick and Urban Decay Naked Flushed, I'm hoping to get reviews up soon!

Skincare - Clinique Anti Blemish solutions. Since I started using this my skin has improved so so much! I'll definitely be purchasing the full sizes (sorry bank account) and will do a review for you!

Baking - more specifically the little baking file book thing (what would you call it?) that Kate bought me for my birthday, it's so handy to write recipes down in and something to pass down in the future!

Music - I've really been enjoying Lucy Rose's album Like I Used To, her voice is beautiful and there's not a song I don't like! I've also really enjoyed James Bay's music, unfortunately his album Chaos And The Calm doesn't actually come out until March, but there's plenty of his songs on YouTube, I really like Let It Go (not from frozen haha) and If You Ever Want To Be In love, but all the songs I've heard are great!

Snow - I'm sure you're all very aware of how much snow we got here, I had two lovely relaxing snow days so thank you snow! My dogs have enjoyed running around the garden like mad puppies and the cats...well they've enjoyed being able to spend even more time inside sleeping!

Swan Lake - one of my friends bought us tickets to go and see Moscow City Ballet's Swan Lake for her birthday (thank you Lydia!!) and it was absolutely amazing! Such beautiful dancing and stunning costumes!

I can't wait to see what February brings!

If you enjoyed this post, you have any suggestions for how I can improve my posts or posts you want to see, let me know by leaving me a comment!

Goodbye January, hello February!

Lots of love,

Emma xxx