Mascara Monday: The Battle of Mascaras.

Today, I have the honour to introduce you to Sophie from Melovemakeup Blog who has kindly volunteered to help me out reviewing 2 mascaras. I love Sophie: her blog is amazing, her makeup tutorials in her youtube channel are inspiring and a delight to watch. Over to you Sophie:






Firstly, thanks to the lovely Liloo for giving me the chance to try out both of these mascaras. I've road tested them both now, so I will share my thoughts..


Before I start, here are the wands for the two mascaras, both totally different.. The Exceptional Definition (left) has the shorter bristles on the right, longer on the left, and then the little spikes at the top.  The Essence mascara is a standard bristle brush, but is absolutely massive!

Boots No7 Say:

"No7 Exceptional Definition Mascara. This amazing new mascara has a truly magic wand and unique, conditioning formula. The innovative three-in-one brush gives lashes exceptional definition and volume. "

Essence Say:

"The ultimate lash-wonder for eyes which will take your breath away: the extra large brush ensures even more volume. ophthalmologically tested."

Here are the Mascaras in action.. As you can see, I have very fair natural lashes, so a great mascara is a big  must for me.

No7 Exceptional Definition:

I love this mascara! I have never used a mascara with 3 wands in one before. This wand is so good for grabbing every single lash, even the finest innermost lashes that you didn't know were there, that's what the little spikes on the end are great for. The double sided brush is great, I like to use the longer side to get through and coat my lashes, and then the shorter side to really comb through and remove any clumps from my lashes.

The results are luscious long looking lashes with both added volume and length, and also great curl too. In the photos (above) I have used one coat of  the mascaras - as you can see my lashes look long, but not overly clumped at all. This mascara lasted really well through the day too, no smudging, no flaking. It gets a big thumbs up from me!

Essence Lash Mania:

My first impression on this mascara when I applied it was great. I was wowed by how amazing my lashes appeared, they looked full and very voluminous. The problem I have with this mascara though, is that the wand is huge, and I'm talking the size of my eye huge! It is very easy to make a mess with this, and I did get quite a bit of the formula on my eye lid and lashline.

After about 4 hours I also noticed that this had smudged underneath my eyes quite a bit, and I looked a bit like a panda. I liked how this made my lashes look, but for me the brush is too large which caused messy application, I don't think it added very much curl either, which the No7 mascara did. The Boots mascara definitely wins for me!

Thanks for reading!

Want to see and read more from Sophie? Please make sure to check out her blog and her fabulous YouTube makeup channel! :)

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Free No.7 Autumn Eye palette EOTD

A few months ago, in Autumn 2010, Boots got us to buy their latest mascara (the exceptional definition mascara) by giving away a 4 quad eyeshadow "Shimmer & Define" palette with it. It turns out the mascara was really really decent and even fussy Charlotte Lipglossiping was impressed ;) Like many people, I bought the mascara just to get the free palette. Boots is doing this offer again but this time round with the "Exquisite Curl Mascara"

Should you go and rush to buy the mascara to get your hands with this "free" palette? 





The palette looks absolutely gorgeous. Look at the cool suede effect on top of the shadows, I think they should have called the 'autumn suede' palette. The pigmentation is much better than all the individual eyeshadows I've ever swatched in the shop before (No.17 shadows offer so much better colour pay off).






It's primarily the colour combination which caught my eyes, so I really wanted to do a look incorporating as many colours as I could from the palette. Here are some swatches:





The shimmer jumps out of the page: there's too much of it. It's not chunky, there is no problem of fall out here but all the colours are too shimmery to create a look which is going to work on my eyes. I have very droopy lids, I need to highlight the good bits and make the bad bits (the overlapping droopy lid) recede and this palette is not going to do it any favour. But let's try it anyway for the purpose of ‘swatching’ this palette straight onto my eyes.




To create this look, I used 3 colours out of the 4 contained in the palette. I had to cheat for the highlight though, and used 'vanilla’ from Mac. There is no way I could have used the lighter colour to go all the way up there. There is already too shimmer all around.








My overall opinion: this palette is ok but it's not working for me. The colours could work individually and matched with colours outside this palette, but it defeats the purpose of this palette, whose colour combination drawn me to it in the first place. Just because the palette offers 4 colours doesn't mean you need to use all the 4 colours in the same look, but I would have liked the possibility to do so.

Have you got this palette? Look at me in the eyes and tell me how many times you have used it? x

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