ELF Budget buys

Afternoon all, I have just won tickets to a whisky tasting tonight so I'm in a great mood! A lovely woman at my work agreed to cover the four hour shift I was supposed to be doing so a box of choccies will be heading her way to say thanks! Today I have a review of a couple of items from a recent e.l.f order I placed recently. I love e.l.f, their products are really good value for money, high performing products within cheapish packaging to keep the prices low. The items are available in America and the UK, not sure about where else, check out their website for more info. I ordered quite a few bits and bobs as they had a half price sale on,I'm still trying some of them out, but these two are items I'd never tried before.

I love cream blushers, and to be honest I was wondering why it was so much more expensive than many of the other items(£6.50 when many items are around £2.00), so wanted to see if it was any good! It's from their studio range, which is generally a little higher in price but the products are great. When the blush arrived I realised partially why it was a bit more expensive- it's MASSIVE. Like the size of your face. Ok not quite, but it's three times the size of most of my other blushers and you get a huge 15g of product which makes it positively cheap!

There is an awful lot of packaging, it's not the most portable item but the performance outweighs the bulkiness of it.

The texture of the blush is spongy, moussy as opposed to a cream as such, it's very easy to get out of the pot though when I've used a lot more of it this might not be the case. I think I'd start using a stippling brush once I get further down. The consistency is not too thick, and it blends very easily, sinking into the skin, making it hard to overload with blush. The shade I have is Vixen which is pretty highly pigmented so it's good you don't end up looking like a clown.

I would definitely repurchase this in another colour, it's a high quality product and you get a lot of bang for your buck :)

Next up was the tinted moisturiser in Porcelain. I had tried their Flawless Finish foundation a couple of years ago, and while it was a good foundation, it was a little too moisturising for my oily skin so I fancied trying this in case it was more suited to my skin type. It contains Aloe and Cucumber which are calming, and SPF20. This costs £3.75 for 25ml of product. I'm still undecided as to whether I'm impressed by this.

This is their lightest shade, described as being for very fair skin with yellow undertones, but when it is squeezed out it looks very yellow/orangey. The consistency of this is quite odd, it's like a paste rather than a cream, and quite gelatinous. I was really dubious of putting this on my skin, but in a rush to go to work one day I slapped it on with my blusher, and received a couple of compliments! It adjusts well to your skin tone and has a light to medium coverage. As this is a moisturiser it feels a tad shiny/sticky when first on, but once set with powder it didn't budge all day. Overall I reckon I'll need to wear this more often to decide if I love it or am just using it up, but initial results are good for day to day wear!

9/10 for the blusher and 6/10 for the tinted moisturiser. Have you ever tried elf, if so do you have any favourite items I should try? xx

Gradient nails, first attempt!

Hey dollfaces, as you might have gathered, I love my nail varnish and tend to redo my nails as soon as they start to chip, I hate looking scruffy! Well I had on the horrendous Nfu Oh! nail varnish as reviewed here, so had to get rid of it sharpish and didn't want to just stick on a boring normal shafe (yawn). I love the gradient trend recently and bought some cosmetic sponges from Home Bargains so it seemed like a perfect time to give it a try!

I couldn't decide on which shade to go for, then though a lilac to purple gradient would go well. This is the rather inaccurately named Power Pink Nails Inc for InStyle, and ELF Purple Pleaser, which are very far enough in shade to work for a gradient.

I found this technique MUCH easier and quicker to complete than the nail marbling I tried here, which took forever! I painted a base coat of Power Pink then found an old glossy mag and dropped a bit of each nail varnish next to each other on it. You mix them slightly where they overlap using an orange stick, then take your cosmetic sponge, and make sure you get both colours on it. Start with the darker colour at the tip of your nail and dab gently, moving up and down the nail ever so slightly to make sure it's blending well.

All you need really!

Finish off with a top coat and your nails should look like this:

Super quick and easy, and quite an effective result! The ELF nail varnishes are £2.50, the Nails Inc came free with InStyle, £3.70 I think? You don't need to use much of either to achieve this effect either. I will definitely be trying this again with other colours, and want to try it with three colours. One step at a time, eh? 

Have you ever tried gradient nails? Any other effects I should try? xx