FashionistA: A look at the brand and a closer inspection at their Supermodel Kohl Eyeliners

If it wasn't through Twitter and the beauty blogging world, I would have never heard of Makeup brand 'Fashionista' spelt 'FashionistA', with a capital A at the end, just to be awkward different. Like Look Beauty which was born last year (around October 2011 I believe?) FashionistA suffers from a crucial lack of representation in the high street shops and they have yet to open a webstore.


If it was up to FashionistA, they would be in every Superdrug nationwide but sadly this isn't possible. I have a few suggestions on what stand they could get rid of but I don't think some cosmetics brands will be happy with that. ;)




It was by pure chance yesterday that I discovered that there was finally had a stand of FashionistA Makeup in the Superdrug in Preston. I was not ready for what I was going to see:

A huge stand, slick black and red packaging, and all that at very affordable price which is music to my ears. Probably what FashionistA is most renowned for is their customisable palette system. You choose your shadows (49 to choose from!!) or blushes and you simply click them in a blank palette. Each individual shadow or blush cost £4. How cool is that! A picture is worth millions of words and expletives, so this is what I mean:







You will have to excuse my enthusiasm if this is old news for you. For me, this company just appeared in a Superdrug not too far from my small neck of the woods and it feels it's brand new to me.


They hadn't receive testers for everything yet (I know already that I *will* own a customised palette at some point and pray to god that there are some matte eyeshadows in 49) but I have some swatches for the khol eyeliners if you want to see. The liners are at £4 each, they are lovely and butter soft, and as their name entails, they are named after supermodels. My pictures don't show them justice and Claudia (Schiffer, I presume) is a beautiful sparkly black.










My favourite supermodel khol eyeliner? The gorgeous Heidi grey. I need to be careful on what I spend my money at the moment and already indulged on a small shopping spree yesterday but I will definitely travel again to that Superdrug and 'Heidi' will grace my lower lashline.

I leave you with a little montage I've made with pictures from the internet of their range of gel eyeliners. There are 13 shades in total, I didn't have room on the montage to feature the blackest black, it's not very easy to appreciate the nuances of grey and brown from these 'stock' pictures but hopefully these will give you an idea.






Conclusion: I am so happy this brand is stocked by a Superdrug near me. I hope there is one near you too, ‘cause there are plenty of things to play with and lots of happy affordable makeup moments to be had :)



Do you own any FashionistA makeup? What are the must haves from the brand?

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Overglaze: the latest gossip

Can't get your hands on 'Rainbow', the gorgeous discontinued 'flakie' top coat from Gosh? Not a problem. Inspired by the main female characters (Blair, Lily and Serena) of the 'Gossip Girl' American TV series, Nails Inc have released 3 gorgeous collections of special effect nail polishes. Don't call them 'flakies', these are 'overglaze' top coats, dahling!

Using hand cut particles, overglaze top coats will give your nails a futuristic finish which is bang on trend for this season. Applied over a deep glossy nails inc polish, overglaze provides a unique and exciting look for your nails

Meet Blair, a Teal black Blair nail polish teamed with Privileged blue / green overglaze top coat

This is Lily, a Plum black Lily nail polish teamed with High Society red / green overglaze top coat.

and last but not least, meet Serena, a patent black Serena nail polish teamed with It Girl electric blue overglaze top coat

Now, I know what you're going to ask. Can you buy the overglaze top coat separate? No, as far as you know you can't and you need to buy the whole collection, which is £20 per 'character'. But if you don't mind spending £17.50 in Chanel polish, then £20 in a collection of 2 polishes, with limitless combinations brought with the fancy top coat shouldn't be too much a problem :P

Do the nail polish correspond to the personality and look of the characters of the series? I couldn't tell you, I need to confess that I've not watched the series, but boy these polishes are gorgeous and get me more excited than any magnetic polish could ever do!

What? Nails Inc Gossip Girl Special Effects Overglaze Polishes
How much? £20 for one set of 2x10ml bottles
Where? Nails Inc website.

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Double Dares with Lily – A clown in Vegas FOTD

In short, this post is about a cool makeup challenge the lovely Lily from Beauty's Bad Habit has invited me to take part in, my excitement the whole way through the challenge and lastly my disappointment with my finished look. If you're reading this in hurry skip along to lily's blog to read all about the challenge and her makeup creation. At the time of writing this post, I have not yet seen her look, but knowing Lily, it's going to be absolutely stunning!


And in details... (Put the kettle on)
I don't know why. It's my own personal blog but I can't help myself from feeling self conscious about writing lengthy posts and losing you, my readers in the process, even before you get to the 'meat' of the post. Even in normal speech, when I explain things at work, I tend to want to speak fast and summarise, before people want to cut me and lose interest. Today, I don't care and I have got a lot to say and I don't want to be rushed. Please bear with me, will you? xx


If you've been following my blog or my youtube channel for a while, you will have noticed that I am very fond of makeup contests and makeup challenges. I absolutely adore them. There's nothing quite like a makeup challenge to excite me, get my creative juices (or lack of) flowing, and have an excuse to play around with makeup. There is also that buzz, which is like no other, when you're happy with your finished look, especially when it's been challenging and that you've overcome successfully a few obstacles. (You’ve scrolled down to the bottom already haven’t you, had one glance at the piccie and left didn’t you? ;)

When Lily, from Beauty's Bad Habit invited me to take part in her 'double dares' makeup challenges series, I was bouncing up and down. Her first episode with Leanne (from donotrefreeze.com} really excited me and I just fell in love with the concept. I was also mega excited as I have a lot of respect for Lily. Not only her makeup skills are absolutely out of this world, she has got amazing enviable photography skills and  all this in a really cool and unpretentious blog. Off the top of my head, my favourite recent posts from her are her photography guide 101 ( for dummies like me), her bermuda sunshine makeup look fotd and her post about some cheap as chips crappy looking eyeliner at first, where she goes beyond the first impressions of the product, work with it and reveal its true brilliance. I love that about her: striking makeup looks with high end products as well as products that even a teen would be embarrassed buying because they *think* it's  going to be crap and they don't want to give the product a chance. So, put it that way, I was pretty chuffed when Lily invited me to take part in her 'double dares' challenge on top of mildy cacking myself with the pressure.
The idea of this double dares challenge is that I challenge Lily to create a makeup look (theme of my choice) and we both create a look from the same theme and post it at the same time and surprise each other with the finished product. The theme I have chosen for her this week was:

to recreate a makeup look from a Mac Cosmetics Collection Promo Picture from any collection she liked. To see her creation, click here (at the time I am writing this, I have yet to see her look).

Die hard fan of Mac Cosmetics or not, and if you are remotely interested about makeup, you would have come across some stunning makeup creations and visuals. It was very hard to choose but my heart set for this promotion picture, in particular, which I believe was part of the Star Flash or Star Vegas Collection.






Was this a wise choice? No. Was it more than I could chew? Oh my definitely. I couldn't have made life more difficult for myself. I wish I could be positive about my finished look. The truth is that I don't like it and that I didn't want to post it. Personal pride and respect for Lily made it that I just had to go ahead with it and post it anyway.





So without further ado, this is my very loose recreation of the mac visual (hell, there is some pink and yellow, right?)  I'll spare you the 1000 additional words of why I don't like my finished look and try to focus on the positive: I've had a whale of time playing with brown face paint and foundation changing my skin colour (I didn’t have to, but I really wanted to have fun with it) and I can't wait to be invited to a pocahontas fancy dress when I can play some more. :P





  
This week, a few things pretty surreal happened to me. I reached 300 readers on my little blog and 15,000 subscribers on my youtube channel. This is to hoping that I won't lose any after this makeup, where a 6 year old could have done better with just fingers for tools. I shall end this post, with a nice cheery smile…

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