First Impression: LUSH Angels On Bare Skin Cleanser

Hello Princesses!

Today I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite cleansers at the moment - Lush's Angels On Bare Skin Cleanser! This is another top seller for lush, and when I was browsing my local Lush store one day, a lovely Lush assistant recommended this cleanser to help soothe my angry acne and allergies.

What Is It?

"Angelic, medieval cleansing wash with rose and lavender. Angels on Bare Skin is the Lush version of an expensive medieval skincare recipe. Rare, precious essential oils were first brought to Europe by the crusaders who encountered Arabian medicine. The church immediately banned them because their ability to alter states of mind was considered the devil’s work! But the final result was Cosmetics 1, Church 0. Rose oil and lavender oil were discovered to do wonderful things for the skin, too. Almost a thousand years later, you’d be hard pressed to find a better all round cleanser and exfoliator than Angels.

Quantitative Ingredients

We buy our ingredients from suppliers who do not test on animals

Ground Almonds (Prunus dulcis), Glycerine (Glycerine), Kaolin (Kaolin), Water (Aqua), Lavender Oil ((Lavandula angustifolia)), Rose Absolute (Rosa damascena), Chamomile Blue Oil (Matricaria chamomilla), Tagetes Oil (Tagetes minuta), Benzoin Resinoid (Styrax tonkinensis pierre), Lavender Flowers (Lavandula angustifolia), *Limonene (*Limonene), *Linalool (*Linalool)

* Occurs naturally in essential oils" (1)

This product is such fun to play with, all you need is a small pea sized amount for your whole face! The exfoliation is incredibly soft but effective, and when water is added to the solid cleanser to form a paste, the ground almonds create almond milk which helps to tone and brighten the skin. You can use this cleanser once a week or once a day, it's that gentle!

Would I Purchase This Product?

Yes, I purchased this two days after I finished my tester pot! I absolutely love this cleanser, it's super soft and gentle on the skin, but provides a great clean and gentle exfoliate. The Lavender in the cleanser helped soothe my skin and left my face feel super smooth and moisturized. I cannot recommend this product enough, and if you have a local LUSH, go in and ask for a tester to try it out for yourself! 

What do you think of this cleanser? Do you prefer gentle or harsh exfoliators?

Update: Doxy-50; Doxycycline (6 Months)

Hello Princesses!

Today I'm going to be talking about my second three month session with the acne medication Doxy-50. After the first three months of Doxy-50, I was prescribed another three months worth of Doxy-50 and told to stop taking the medication after I felt that I had achieved "perfect skin". I reached my ideal skin after one and a half months into my second session and stopped taking the medication. I still had a lot of scarring which made my face seem imperfect, but I had zero acne!

This was my skin before I started taking Doxy-50

 And this is my skin after 4 and a half months taking Doxy-50 and 1 and a half month adjusting.

 Close ups of my beautiful face before, and 3 months into the acne medication.

 And this is my skin another three months down the line.

I still get the odd breakout along my forehead due to stress, and along my chin from hormones, but I'm largely acne free! I know my skin looks awful but a lot of the blemishes are just scarring, there are only 4 pimples present which is a massive improvement for me!

During the past 3 months I was still experiencing allergic reactions. These reactions were becoming more severe, and I seemed to be reacting to more and more products until the only skin care that wasn't triggering painful hivey whiteheads was my trilogy rose hip oil and cleanser.

Then one day, I had a brainwave. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn't skincare that was the problem. It turns out that I've developed an allergy to adhesive.

Here's the back store. 

I am currently studying towards my Master of Music, majoring in Performance Flute. I play in orchestras, operas and do a lot of teaching and performing. When you're performing on the flute, it can get very hot on stage, and you sweat from the heat and the pure terror of playing in front of crowds. This seems like TMI, but it's important to the story, trust me. When your face sweats (and it will) it makes it very difficult to keep the flute from sliding around on your face since wet metal is very slippery, especially when it's balanced precariously on your face. To increase surface area on the lip plate (section of the flute that rests on your chin) you can tape a small section of masking tape to the lip plate. This effectively stops the flute from accidentally sliding around if you have tricky passages, playing during the summer or when you're just a nervous sweaty performer. I don't always use the tape, but reserve it for important concerts, because you can get too dependent on the security of the tape and forget what it's like to play on a smooth metal head.  The tape also stops the flutes metal/silver/gold reacting with some types of skincare (Clearisil is notoriously bad) and makeup corroding your flute and leaving tarnish stains on your chin (also known as that gross flute chin thing).

I've been using masking tape on my flute for four years now with no problems, but during my last concert I noticed that the tape was making my chin feel super dry and itchy, so I did the only thing that would make my skin feel better, which was to remove the tape and keep playing. That evening my skin was absolutely on fire with itches, and the following morning was covered in itchy painful hives. I couldn't understand why, because I hadn't changed any skincare or makeup! Honestly, this allergy made me upset in ways you cannot imagine, (unless your also allergic to the things you love most), because I assumed I was allergic to skin care and makeup, and I though I would have to give up blogging for sure, and live out my days as a gross skinned makeup-less hermit.

Only then did it occur to me that it was only on my chin ... and my chin was itchy after playing the flute ... after using tape. It seems so obvious in retrospect, (especially considering both my boyfriend and younger sister are allergic to heavy duty adhesive), but at the time I was so confused and scared! I thought that I either had an allergy to silver (totally possible) or an allergy to the tape (almost as bad because I do rely on it for performance), so I stopped playing with the tape, and I stopped getting the allergies. I'm left with horribly scarred skin which is no fun, but it's miles better than the painful allergies.

So after 4 and a half months of Doxy-50, how has my skin fared?

I really liked being on Doxy-50! It cleared up my skin without having too many side effects. I experienced severely dry lips and minor photo sensitivity, but that was it! To combat the dry lips, my holy grail life saving product was the Clarins Moisture Replenishing Lip Balm, which was well worth the $40! I wore a high SPF sunscreen and sunglasses constantly to combat the photo sensitivity.

There is just a pre-warning and a mini disclaimer - even though Doxy-50 worked well for my skin, it does not guarantee the same results for your skin. Everyone has different skin, and between the severity of acne, hormones and eating habits that can contribute to acne, so you may have to try a couple of different acne medications before you find something that works for you, but I hope this update has helped some of you princesses out there that are suffering from acne (or extreme stupidity + adhesive allergies) like me!

If you have any questions about Doxy-50 leave me a comment down below and I'll try my best to help you out! ^.^

Manicure Monday: Sweet Princess

Hello Princesses!

Today I have a super sweet princess-like manicure to show you! ^.^ I recently broke two of my long nails so had to cut down to nubbins :C Interestingly enough, one year ago I would have considered these to be long nails! I haven't had nails this short for a long time, but it's quite nice to try some manicures designed for short nails since a lot of you princesses cannot have hard to maintain long talons like me due to work or life commitments! (Seriously though, long nails are hard to maintain and not break! -.-")

To create this manicure I started off with a couple of base coats of OPI's Second Honeymoon. I created the blue gradient on the tips of my nails by dabbing Color Club's Factory Girl onto the dried base colour using a triangular sponge. I then used white pearls and blue rhinestones from Fullmoon, and steel balls from Born Pretty Store to create a half moon design on my ring finger. 

What's your favorite way to spice up a plain manicure?

Blogging 101: Social Media Icons

Hello Princesses!

Today I'm going to be showing you how I got these cute little social media buttons that are down the bottom of each of my blog posts! You might notice that my sidebar social media icons look different at the moment, but I used the same method to create these as I did to create the circular ones so don't worry!

Truth be told (and I'm always truthful) I had a lot of trouble learning how to  create these icons, for the simple reason that I couldn't figure out what they were called! *facepalm* Once I found out what they were called I found a whole bunch of tutorials to teach me how to code them properly. There are so many tutorials out there to teach you how to create your own Social Media Icons, but this is how I did mine.

The first thing you need to do is find your perfect social media icons. These might be pink, blue, transparent or floral, whatever you think suits your blog! You can create your own, or use someone else's. My social media icons came from the lovely Carrie Loves who has an amazing set of blogger tips and I highly highly recommend you check out her posts! Otherwise you can google search "free social media icons" or "cute free social media icons" to find your perfect set of icons! 

Please make sure that the icons are free and that you're not indirectly stealing them. If it's within your means, make a donation to the creator! They will have spent hours/money on creating these icons so it's always nice to give back or give credit!

The hardest part of the social media icon installation is actually getting the pictures. The next part is super easy, all you need to do is create a click-through picture code using the simple codes I showed you in last weeks Blogging 101 post. You can also follow this tutorial to create a super cool hover effect.

<a href="Linktodestination">

<img src="Yourimagehostlink"width="300px"/></a>

This is really easy to get confused by, but really simple once you know what's happening! The first line is where the clickable picture is taking you to (affiliate links, shop links etc) so all you need to do is pop the hyperlink in the red text section. The next line is the image line, so you need to host your image on your image hosting site, copy the hyperlink, and paste it into the blue text section. Make sure there are no spaces where there shouldn't be spaces, and change the green numbers to change the size.

<a href="Link to destination">

<img src="Your image host link"width="40px"/></a>

That's the quickest way to create your social media icons! To install them on your sidebar, you need to create a HTML/Java gadget and insert the clickable image code. You will create a separate code for each image with the correlating URL's and insert them all into the same gadget. You can change the size of the icons to fit three or four on one line.

To create the icons in a main text blog, you will need to take the same code and insert it into your HTML tab IN your blog post, and that's all! I hope this post was helpful for you princesses starting out with your blogs! Be sure to let me know in the comments below if you're having any troubles and I'll try my best to help you out! ^.^

Next week I'll be showing you how to create your own personalized text and signature at the end of each post!

First Impression: NARS Radient Creamy Concealer

Hello Princesses!

Today I'm going to be talking about the NARS Radiant Creamy Concealer in the shade Chantilly! I picked up a baby tester pot from Mecca Cosmetica in Auckland because one of my favorite pale guru's, Arna Alayne, raves about it as one of her favorite pale products. Even though Arna is cool toned and I'm warm toned, the product still works for both of us which is fantastic!

What Is It?

"Coveted by artists for its luxurious texture and luminous finish, the Radiant Creamy Concealer evens skin with lightweight medium to high buildable coverage. Enriched with hydrating, multi-action skincare benefits and light diffusing technology, it creates a softer, smoother complexion while instantly obscuring imperfections and diminishing fine lines and signs of fatigue. Long wearing and crease-proof for the perfect cover" (1)

(This is YSL CC cream in purple with NARS Siberia against my pale white neck. Tragic.)

I trialled this concealer in two different ways, the first being a spot concealer. I had three baby cystic pimples to cover, and one light layer of the NARS concealer worked really well. Of course the bumps will never disappear into the skin with the use of concealer, but this concealer did better than any other I have owned! It was smooth, easy to blend and not cakey at all which I love!

The second test was to use the concealer for my under eye and eyelid area. It did fairly well at brightening up my eye area and neutralizing redness. It's a nice option for the times when I want a brightening, but not a heavily concealed look.

Here I have the concealer on the left eye only. It looks a lot brighter than the right side, but the lines on the left seem more apparent. Yes, one of my eyebrows is misshapen, the hair doesn't grow there due to scars and I haven't filled them in yet.

Would I Purchase This Product?

Probably! It is a little pricey at $46NZD, but it really is a lovely product that works well with all of my foundation and BB Creams. I thought it worked really well as a spot cover, as well as around the eye area, and it's brightening for my pale skin (which is a rare thing!). I would totally recommend this concealer for any other pale beauties, and if you can try it before buying it that's even better! ^. ~

What is your all-time favorite concealer?