New: Models Own Ice Neon Collection

My lucky streak continued last week as I ended up being one of the winners of a double Models Own giveaway over at The Love Cats Inc. blog and bagged myself a full set of the new Models Own Ice Neon collection. The Love Cats Inc. is one of my favourite blogs and I'd been planning on getting my mitts on a few of these shades anyway, so imagine my excitement when I found out that I'd won! It made my whole month, so thank you Helen! (Everybody go and look at her blog). 

The collection consists of five brand new intensely pigmented and super bright neon shades (they are a lot brighter than they look here); Left to right - Toxic Apple, Luis Lemon, Pukka Purple, Bubblegum, and Pink Punch ..and if you buy the whole set together there's a top coat thrown in there too. When I say 'brand new', the shades 'Toxic Apple' and 'Pink Punch' do actually already exist, but imagine those shades 5x brighter and super fluorescent!

These shades are right up my street as I'm a huge fan of brightly coloured nails, and even though my collection already has plenty of super bright pinks and oranges in it, all of these are welcomed with open arms and make all the other shades look so dull in comparison. Models Own advises to keep these bottles in the fridge to maintain their fluro colour for longer (think keeping glow sticks in the freezer to keep them glowing!), but I'm not too sold on that idea - it's probably just a sales gimmick, plus I don't think that my Dad would be too happy with pink nail varnish chilling next to his beers and the milk! So, they're sitting pretty on my dressing table and I'm not too worried about their brightness fading with them not being kept really cold. 

These are all absolutely perfect for the S/S season this year and I'm more than happy to hop right onto the neon loving train; especially with the pinks and yellows. They add such a nice 'pop' of colour to any otherwise quite plain outfit and bright nails is such a simple and subtle way to join in with the trend.

 

Here are swatches from the 5 shades available in the collection:

 

The shades: all of the above swatches are shown with one coat of colour. The finish isn't exactly 'matte', but it isn't a high gloss either. You can see that some of the shades applied a little streaky with just one coat, so a 2nd would be best, and some were a little more sheer than other.. I'm looking at you Toxic Apple. The brightest, and my favourite, is the yellow: Luis Lemon, and my least favourite is the purple: Pukka Purple, mainly because it's not as 'neon' as the others and is quite a dark shade too. However, this one did have the best application and applied fully opaque in just one coat. Bubblegum and Pink Punch appear to be quite similar shades and sometimes my camera doesn't pick up the full potential of the shades; but Bubblegum is the shade that is pink, pink and pink. Very bright and true Barbie pink, whereas (misleadingly), Pink Punch is more of an orange/coral toned pink in the bottle, but when I applied it onto my nails it looked like neon orange! Confusing, but it's still amazing. A little head's up that this shade of Pink Punch is very similar to 'Hedonist' from the Hed Kandi collection.

Models Own Ice Neon Collection are available from Boots and the Models Own website now for £5.00 each, or £20.00 for all 5 colours plus a topcoat.

Which one's your favourite?

 Thanks again to Helen for running the giveaway for these!

Like Me On Facebook - Follow Me On Twitter - Follow Me On Bloglovin'

ASOS, Feel Unique & eBay Beauty Haul

Okay, we all know I've got a shopping problem, that was established a longgg time ago, and yes I am looking into rehab for exessive shoppers.. or maybe just confiscation of the bank card.

 

In this post are the little beauty bits and bobs that I have picked up in recent weeks and this was originally intended to be an 'online beauty haul' post ..until I accidentally stepped foot inside Superdrug too.

oops!

 

 

ASOS

- link -

How amazing are these super bright neon orange make-up brushes from ASOS? I absolutely love them! They were so inexpensive too; the set of 5 brushes originally cost £10.00 but I bought mine whilst there was a 20% discount code going around and got mine for £8.00 with free postage. The handles are quite short, making them easy to work with and the bristles are soo soft - plus, you'll never lose them in your make-up bag when they're this bright! The set includes: a powder brush, a lip brush, a shading brush, an angled brush and a blending brush.

 

 

Feel Unique

- link -

I moan lots about my She Said Beauty Box subscription but there is no denying that it has introduced me to some amazing products that I otherwise would never have tried! In November's box there was a sample size of Redken's new Smooth Lock shampoo and conditioner duo which I didn't think much of at the time of use.. but 6 days after washing when my hair was still perfectly styled, smooth, frizz free and minimal traces of greasy roots (nice, I know), I was very impressed. I could not stop running my fingers through my hair, amazed at how soft my dry and damaged ends were so I just knew that I had to purchase the full sized bottles. They're not cheap at about £11 a bottle so I never would have taken the plunge if I hadn't tried out a sample of them first. Available on Feel Unique at the moment is a gift set version of the duo with the full sized bottles available as a pair for just £17.00 saving you a huge 15% as RRP of the pair is £25.25.

 

 

SuperDrug

 

Ermmmm.. did somebody say '3 for 2'? Such an irresistable offer! I picked up the Rimmel Precious Stones nail varnish in 'Diamond Dust' because I already have the red one (Ruby Crush) and love it to pieces but on all swatches that I have seen this silver version looks much nicer so I thought that I would give this a try too as you can never have too many nail varnishes.

 

Another thing that you can never have too many of is lipsticks! I picked up this very bright pink shade from Rimmel's Kate Moss range in shade 20 as it is an apparant dupe for Mac's 'Girl About Town' at a fraction of the price - and look how well it matches my nail varnish! (See picture below)

 

My third, and technically free product was MUA's 'undressed' eyeshadow palette, which, as the name suggests is a dupe for Urban Decay's 'Naked' palette - why spend £36 when you can spend £4?? MUAs shadows are amazing quality, super pigmented and long lasting, and I was looking to extend my collection of their singles so just thought why not pick up a palette with 12 shades in instead.

 

 

 

 

eBay

 

I found a seller on eBay who I'm sure will gain a lot of business from me in the future: hairproductsonline_ltd and their stock is like a hair care and bargain lover's dream! I'd been eyeing up this Macadamia Infused Hair Brush on Beauty Bay (link) for literally months but was reluctant to spend £16.75 on just another brush when I already have so many ..so when I saw it being sold on eBay for £15.99 but with a 10ml bottle of the oil treatment too then I was sold and clicked purchase right away (link). Browsing this seller's stock I also noticed that they sold bottles of the Osmo Berber Oil Hair Treatment in various sizes. On Feel Unique this Osmo Berber oil costs £5.90 for 10ml but I found it for £3.20 on eBay (link) - if I can save £2.70 on something then I will; every little helps.

[Full reviews coming soon]
 

Last but not least.. I fell for the Bioderma hype and bought the make up remover solution in the 250ml bottle! You can shop around for it on eBay but I found it for the cheapest price that I saw and it was £7.49 plus £2.79 postage costs totalling £10.28 (link) which is quite an expensive total for something which is essentially a bottle of glorified water that can take your make up at the end of the day, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I've been using this daily for nearly 2 weeks now and my views on are just a bit 'meh', it's okay but not worth the hassle of buying from overseas or the price tag.
 

 

 

 

 

 

I know I should be shopping for Christmas presents instead of bankrupting myself on superficial treats but all of these were just irresistable!

 

Have you ever tried and loved anything that I've bought here?

 ♥