Make Up Atelier Paris - Waterproof Liquid Foundation Review

If you've been following my blog for a while you may have come across a review I done for the Make Up Atelier Paris Waterproof Gel Foundation.
(http://broonylou.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/make-up-atelier-paris-waterproof-gel.html)

I was so impressed by the foundation that I've decided to try out and review their new Waterproof Liquid Foundation and luckily if you head over to the website (http://www.makeupatelierparis.co.uk/) you can buy samples for a mere £0.75!

My relationship with this brand was built entirely from the one product but after spending some time looking through the products there's actually so many different things I want to buy and I'm really impressed with how they deal with their customers.

The only problem I have is that I can never find many reviews of the products online before I decide to buy them so I'm kind of going in blind here. The benefit of that however is that it gives me a chance to take it upon myself to provide everyone else with good reviews of their products.

So here's what the company has to say about this new foundation:

Our long lasting water resistant makeup, available in a sample jar for the purpose of colour matching to your skintone. The foundation settles on the skin to a near matte finish and is almost full coverage.

First of all the sample I ordered arrived after only a few days which was great because when I order make up I get so keen for it to arrive and I hate when it takes weeks to come through the door. I think these only took 2 or 3 days to get to me and as you can see the company gave me a tester in the colour I wanted and another tester a shade darker just in case.

I love the initiative of a company to do this. If you buy a tester in the wrong shade it can be easy to just give up and move onto something else, especially when the brand can only be bought online and you have to spend days waiting on it arriving so they try and stop this from happening by providing a second option to ensure that you find what colour matches you and ensure you buy the full sized product.

Now, onto the foundation itself. I used the lighter shade of the two testers they gave me, colour FLW2B and the shade actually matched me really well. I'm really pale and therefore tend to just go for the lightest colour offered in any foundation range/brand and this seemed as close to my natural skin colour as possible on the site.

My skin before. As you can see I have a few red spots and blemishes at the moment but nothing too crazy.

And my skin after!

As you can see the foundation has really good coverage which is consistent with the old gel foundation I had from them before and is extremely matte looking. These photos are just of the foundation on my face, no powder so you can see that there is very little shine to it.

I really like this foundation, there isn't any smell to it and in contrast to the gel foundation it feels much less cakey on the skin. I've applied this with a brush and then used a beauty blender over it to give a nice even finish and I'm happy with how it sits on my skin. It provides a really good base for the rest of my make up and after wearing it for a few hours I found it to hold up really well.

I would suggest this to anyone wanting to try out Make Up Atelier. The gel foundation was something I was dying to have because I was sick of getting shiny skin after a few hours of applying make up and this is a much more ...daily foundation in that it does the same thing without the thickness that the gel had. The gel was a nightmare to remove due to its thickness and this is much easier as well so you don't have to fight with it at the end of every day.

This is how the product appears on the website. It's packaging is nice, I've always liked being able to see the shade and most importantly it comes with a pump so you're not going to end up using more than you need and having to somehow spread the foundation all down your neck to try and stop it looking cakey (I've committed this sin before and I speak from experience.) I also like the silver around the top of the tube but the clear top puts me off, I manage to break to many of these and hate seeing all the foundation smeared around the pump after a few uses. I wish this was silver to like the Urban Decay foundation bottles you can get.

Price wise this foundation comes in at a very affordable £22 which is great considering that the gel is now priced at £28 so it's worth the price for a well-performing product that you can wear daily both to worth or a night out. To put it into perspective the NARS brightening concealer is £22 and you're getting way more product with this.

On payday I'll definitely be placing the order for mine and what's even better is that the cost of postage for the samples can be redeemed and taken off the price of a full bottle so you don't lose out on any money due to testing the product first. It's little things like that which make me really like Make Up Atelier Paris as a whole, they are really considerate towards the customer.  

Payday Pickings!

Ah Payday!

As a typical 22 year old female I am guilty of living payday like a queen and spending the following 30 days in complete squalor but I think everybody my age feels that when the wages come in they really deserve a little splurge on themselves and as of late I have not splurged. 

So last payday I was going through to Hamilton for a night out and was with my friend Melissa when she decided to go to Superdrug and get her eyebrows tinted for the occasion. 

Naturally whilst she was doing that I ended up browsing and came back laden down with a whole load of stuff but for this post I'm going to focus predominantly on what I got from Make Up Revolution.  

Personally I love Make Up Revolution, I know there's a lot of debate about the number of products they produce that are similar to those by other brands, for example they have their own version of the too faced chocolate palette, but for the price I really like the quality of what you're getting.

I know there are many people out there who seem to almost...frown upon really cheap make up but I see no reason why I cant spend £19 on a high end concealer and then £8 on a whole palette of concealers as long as they do the job and I feel great about myself wearing them.

So I got a few things for myself, some MUA, some Rimmel but the Make Up Revolution products definitely made up the bulk of my purchase so lets concentrate on that. 

I got the blush palette seen in the photo above at Christmas time but had to get another, both of these palettes were £8 in total and I'll admit right away that I freaking LOVE the packaging. It's very sleek and thin which is what I want from my products really because I like to store them all upright and this makes it so much easier. 

The concealer palette is creamy and quite thick, my only gripe is that I wish the colour range was a tad more diverse, I like to have a darker colour to aid in cream contouring but overall for £8 this is an awesome product. 

Same goes for the blush palette, I love that it has some matte shades and some more shinier shades along with a highlight colour. Again for the price you pay it's £1 a blush/concealer which is awesome, I can't complain. 

I also picked up the Benefit Roller Lash Mascara which debuted in my store the day before Payday, it felt good to be one of the early birds buying a new product for once. The review of this product is also in my MARCH posts so go and check that out. This mascara was my biggest purchase of the day and is a great product. 

Now I am a huge eye product fan. In my make up stand the mascara and eyeliner box is the second most jam packed after lipstick and recently I had been loving this Maybeline felt tip liner that could draw really thin lines and then be dragged to make thicker and this liner is similar. 

At either end is a thick felt tip and a thin felt tip and oh my gosh it's my new go-to! Don't be fooled, the eyeliner is very durable and also pigmented. It also goes on like an absolute dream and from now on it will probably be one of my staples. One advantage this has over the Maybeline is that the felt tips are finer whereas the other had a very boxy shape. 

Highlighters weren't products I reached for very often but this one is so pretty. 

Being a girl with a greasy complexion I like most of my face products to be in powder form if possible to help fight shininess and so this is a fantastic product. 

It's very pigmented and very highlighting. My Urban Decay highlighters are probably just a little bit more reflective but again for the price it is a fantastic product.

Finally the matte bronzer, You can't tell from the picture but this is quite a big product which is brilliant for getting your bronzing brush into (I hate it with Hoola when you try and get the brush in and it's bending off the side because the packaging is tiny.) 

Again, this product is a powder and so is great for my skin and I have no complaints about it. If applied properly you get this stunning glow, it's more brown in tone instead of some of the horrible orange bronzers you can come across from the cheaper drug store brands. 

I don't know if I'll stay loyal to the bronzer from this brand purely because with things like bronzers/finishing powders they're so cheap and there's so many you can have access to that I like to have loads of different ones but for now this is what I'm applying in the morning and I really like the bronze glow it gives me. 

After trying all of these products I was starting to wonder why people weren't going mental for the brand. The packaging isn't what I would refer to as cheap or anything either and the only products I would really not buy as the eyeshadow palettes because I don't like the colour combinations and love my Urban Decay Naked palettes. 

I'm not sure if it is because people are so loyal to the higher end brands that they avoid these because they are at some points blatantly copying other brands but I see no reason why they can't try to create more affordable dupes that are more accessible to the mass market.

Judging purely off what I bought this day I will 100% be buying from this brand again, especially the bronzers and blushes it has to offer. I also haven't tried any lip products or mascaras from the brand so next time these will be at the top of my list. 

Get the Look - My Night in Hamilton

So last weekend I went out with a friend to Hamilton which is just outside Glasgow to let my hair down because I haven't actually had a proper night out since the staff Christmas night (Last year!) Honestly I've no idea how that happened, usually I'm out at least once a month. 

So I went all out, me and my friend Melly left work and-because it was payday-ran straight for the shops, I got myself a whole host of new drugstore makeup which I used to create this evening look, there's also some of my trusted higher end products thrown in (to see some of the stuff I bought look at the post in my MARCH folder.)

 It took me 2 hours to do my makeup because I was so keen to look awesome for my first night out of the year and it's been so long since I've done a full face of contouring and all the rest of it. Since I loved this look so much I've decided to share with you what I used to create it. 

Now all of these products are available in the UK and the newer drugstore products I bought were all from Superdrug because Melly decided to go in and get her brows done which lead to me browsing the shelves and ultimately a lot of unplanned purchases.

So here we go! 

First of all I primed my skin with Maybelline 8-in-1 BB cream. I love this primer, it's for oily skin which is great, it stops my skin getting shiny and is really durable plus it doesn't feel cakey. 

My holy grail foundation, honestly the staple to my evening looks, again, super durable and non, cakey on my face. Couldn't rave about this enough so for this sake of keeping this blog post short I'll stop. 

Urban Decay Powder, I like this powder but it's nothing I can't get from a drugstore brand. It keeps my face matte and the only reason I had this particular powder instead of any others is because I like the size of the mirror in it for when I'm out and want to check my make up without having to get up and go to the bathroom. 

My freshly bought Make Up Revolution baked highlighter. One of the best highlighters I own, totally affordable and really pretty on the sin when applied right. Packaging is also tough so I won't need to worry about this smashing on a night out. In the photo I've applied it just under the brows and on the upper cheeks. 

New Make Up Revolution Bronzer. This has been applied all over the face bar under my eyes because I like that area to be paler and more contoured. I didn't use this bronzer to contour my forehead and cheeks though, just as an overall cover to make me look that little bit darker because my double wear is quite a pale shade. 

My Beautiful brows palette. My Go-to eyebrow powder, used this everyday since I got it about a year ago, As you can see after a years use I still have loads left and it comes with stencils that I no longer use and it's own highlighter and application brush. 

Make Up Revolution gel pen liner. Loved using this on my eyes for this occasion, got a really precise line thats to its double end with a thick and thin nib for applying the product to my face. I had a really similar product from Maybelline but this is cheaper and much better to use. 

Roller Lash Mascara by Benefit. There's a review of this on the blog in my MARCH folder so go see that and you'll see why I love this. This particular night was my first ever time wearing it although in the above photo I've applied lashes over them. 

For my eyeshadow I used 3 palettes, the chocolate palette was used for my base, crease. I've lost the sheet that tells you what the colours are so I'll just say top row big eyeshadow for base. Second row 1st shadow for my crease blended upwards and the 1st row, 3rd eyeshadow to deepen the crease. 

My self-made Urban Decay Moondust palette 

The first shadow in the palette was used to take my eye look to a more nighttime look. This was applied all over the lid. 

Urban Decay Lip Liner

My Urban Decay lipstick in Shame which is my go-to lippy for a more vampy/autumnal look 

I ended up taking the black shadow from this palette and using it to deepen the outer V of my eyes after the moondust had been applied 

Finally I contoured my forehead and under my cheeks using this sleek palette which is super cheap but my absolute favourite contouring palette at the moment, as you can see it's been used an absolute tonne. 

So that's how I got the look for my night out in Hamilton, if this is the sort of thing you'd like to see more of let me know. I might even look into filming one of these because its a lot easier than just photographing the photos and telling you what I done, it'd be easier to just show you! 

Mascara Review - Benefit Roller Lash

Woo! Another mascara review! Yes my addiction to all things lash lengthening is still as rife as ever so it's just as well Benefit have decided to grace their counters with a new mascara for me to own!

Now I'll admit when I heard that they were bringing out a new mascara I was totally confused. 'They're Real!' was a huge success. I don't know a single beauty guru on YouTube who didn't review the mascara and it is a personal favourite for myself as well. 

First thing you'll notice about the mascara is the packaging. It's not as sleek looking as 'They're Real!' but it is a really pretty looking canister. The top (I believe) is meant to look like a hair roller to fit in with their campaign describing the mascara as a means of getting flirty, fluttering and curled lashes without the need for actual eyelash curlers themselves. 

Personally I like the packaging, whilst it is slightly bulkier on the lid than 'They're Real' it's easy to hold and apply mascara with plus it totally fits in with Benefit's aesthetic. Most of the products they produce have a quirky theme running through them to help marketing.

I hadn't tried a sample of this before buying it so I had no idea what to expect but the first thing I noticed with this product is that the formula inside the tube feels quite thick. After you apply the mascara you start to understand why this is. The wand curls your lashes and the formula holds the lash at that angle, creating the "no need for an eyelash curler" look. 

Below are photos of my eye before and after applying the mascara so I'll let you judge for yourself! 

Apologies for my eye being slightly red but you get the idea!

I actually love this mascara and probably more than 'They're Real' if I'm being honest with you, if you look at the outer part of my eye in both pictures you can see that the lashes are definitely more curled. I've used this mascara everyday since I got it and I don't find that it can smudge onto my upper eyelid like 'They're Real!' sometimes does and whilst I find it a little hard to get off, it's easier to remove than 'They're Real' as well. Although you can of course use the Benefit 'They're Real' remover and save yourself having any problems removing either of the mascaras.

Overall this is a fantastic addition to the Benefit mascara range. Whilst I was confused at first about why Benefit had decided to add another mascara to their range when their existing products were doing so well it's now clear that this is a product that can stand on it's own and works in a completely different way.

Gonna be hard to top this mascara!! 

TAG: 40 Make up Questions

Hey again everyone!

Due to the large amount of make up posts on this blog at the moment I've decided to switch things up a little and do a few make up TAGS to change the tone a little. Plus doing little quizzes like this takes me back to my young teenage days on Bebo where this sort of thing was all the range.

So anyway I hope this is a nice little change for everyone, leave a comment and let me know if this kind of post is something you'd like the see more of in the future and I'll answer as thoroughly and detailed as possible.  

SKINCARE

-How many times do you wash your face daily?

Only once, last thing before bed

-What skin type do you have? (dry,oily,combo)

Without a shadow of a doubt OILY!! Apparently this will prevent wrinkles though!

 -What is your current facial wash?

I like to switch up my facial washes daily as I find that my skin gets used to them and begins to produce oil again. By switching it up I am able to stop my face becoming as oily. Right now my facial wash is a Clean and Clear facial wash and I'm alternating that with a Clearasil Blemish and Marks facial wash and mask. I tend to keep my facial washes drug store and my serums etc that little big more luxury.

 -Do you exfoliate?

Yes. about 4 times a week, again to stop a build up of oils etc and prevent my break outs.

-What brand do you use?

Right now I'm using Plush Therapy Mild Dermabrasion Scrub

-What moisturizer do you use?

This is a total no-no but I actually try not to use any moisturizer because it's essentially extra oil being put on my face. Feel free to bombard me with possible options but I like to use serums and day creams instead.

-Do you have freckles?

Not any more and yet I had loads when I was a child. 

-Do you use eye cream?

Yes I have a few I like to use:

-Estee Lauder Resilience Lift Eye Cream

-Balance Me Wonder Eye Cream

-Benefits 'It's Potent!' Eye Cream

-Do you or did you have acne prone skin?

In my early teens I had really bad spots. I actually have a few scars because I found it impossible to stop picking at them, I don't have it anymore though thank god!

-Did you ever have to use Pro-activ?

No but I was really tempted

MAKE-UP

-What foundation do you use?

Estee Lauder Doublewear Foundation in Ecru 

-How about concealer?

Urban Decay Naked Skin Concealer in Fair

 -Do you know your undertone color?

Erm.. I think it's cool toned? I should really know this!

-What do you think of fake eyelashes?

I love them! When I was in my last year at high school I used to wear them everyday to classes which is totally mental now I look back on it but I loved having these massive looking eyes 

-Did you know that you are supposed to change your mascara every 3 months?

Yes but the truth is that I literally have about 30 different mascaras now that I lose track. I try and stick to using 3 or so at any one time and then rotate. 

-What brand of mascara do you use?

Right now I'm using:

-AVON Supershock mascara

-Collection lengthening mascara

-Smashbox Full Exposure mascara

-Soap and Glory Thick and Fast mascara

-Benefits They're Real mascara 

(only using a few at the moment...!!)

-Sephora or MAC?

MAC, Purely becauseI don't have a Sephora here 

-Do you have a MAC Pro-card?

No.

-What makeup tools do you use in make up application?

Loads of brushes for my eyeshadow, blush, bronzer etc but I always always ALWAYS use a beauty blender for my foundation. Jessup Brushes are also an absolute must for me, brilliant quality for the price.

-Do you use make-up base/primer for the eyes?

Yes, Urban Decay Primer Potion

-For the face?

I'm a huge fan of Benefits Porefesional and Smashbox Primers 

-What is your favorite eyeshadow (color or shade)?

Right now its Urban Decays 'Half Baked' such a beautiful gold shimmer shade

-Do you use pencil or liquid eyeliner?

Liquid

-How often do you poke your eyes with an eyeliner pencil?

Loads when I was younger but not so much now

-What do you think of pigment eyeshadows?

I am totally onboard with them but I like to do my eyes after the foundation but with pigments I need to reverse it which totally throws me off my routine. They're so messy and end up stuck to my foundation otherwise. 

-Do you use mineral makeup?

I got a Bare Minerals foundation and hated the finish of it but to be fair if I had got the matte finish I'd probably love it 

-What is your favorite lipstick?

I have two:

YSL Rouge Volupte Number 1 Nude Beige and Number 7 Lingerie Pink 

-How about lipgloss?

I shy away from lipgloss because I find them to be so sticky but If I had to pick one I would choose Elizabeth Arden High Shine Lipgloss 

-What is your favorite blush to use?

Dainty Doll 004 Powder Blusher

-Do you buy your makeup on ebay?

Never, only my Jessup brushes 

-Do you like drugstore makeup?

Yes, I feel there's this whole stigma now where drug store automatically means poor quality and that's just not the case 

-Do you go to CCO's? (cosmetic company outlets)

We had one called 'The Luxury Beauty Store' in the shopping centre near me until recently and it was an amazing place to buy YSL lipsticks at discount as well as some of my bioderm skincare 

-Did you ever consider taking make-up classes?

All the time but I've made it this far with Youtube and I enjoy fooling around and deciding what's best for myself through trial and error 

-Are you clumsy in putting on makeup?

No! Until recently I was clumsy with winged eyeliner but I think I've nailed that now after 10 years of trying and failing 

-Name a makeup crime that you hate?

Just too much make up 

-Do you like colorful shades of makeup (lipstick,eyeshadow) or neutral ones?

I have a lot of smokey tones and nudes but I have my Urban Decay electric palette as well, I just need to build up my confidence in reaching for a vibrant colour and knowing I can make a good look from it 

-Which celebrity always has great make up?

Blake Lively 

-If you could leave the house using just ONE make up item,what would you use?

It would be my Urban Decay Flushed Palette 

-Could you ever leave the house without any makeup on?

Yeah I done it today actually! I try to avoid it but sometimes needs must 

-Do you think you look good even without any makeup on?

I mean I don't take my make up off and turn into a monster... I have blonde eyelashes though so my eyes can look really small

-In your opinion, what is the BEST makeup line?

Urban Decay have never made a product that I don't love.

-What do you think of Makeup??

I think it's a great way to express yourself and just a load of fun to experiment with. For me I get a lot of enjoyment from sitting infront of a mirror and getting ready to go out and even more from actually buying new products to experiment with. 

Well that's that! Hopefully you find this entertaining of decide to fill it in for yourself. I actually never realised how much of an Urban Decay junkie I am.