Because Christmas isn't over*...

I was lucky enough to receive money and gift cards this Christmas, giving me the perfect excuse to go on a mini makeup shopping spree and add to my collection. Naturally, being the makeup-holic that I am, I made a couple of impulse buys - shhh - but hey ho, I'm allowed to treat myself, right?!?! Yes I know this is a place for student friendly products and from the above picture I'm sure you will be questioning my tag line, but as you will see in due course, I bought them at budget prices hehe. Anyways, without further adieu, it's time to meet the stars of our show!!

NYX Born to Glow Illuminating Primer around £12

So this was an 'unscheduled' buy. The morning of my shopping spree I ran out of my L'Oreal Lumi Magique Primer and needed a new one. I was wondering around the NYX counter at my local Boots and spotted this which seemed like it promised to do a similar job to my L'Oreal primer - add a glow to your foundation, nothing about longevity - which I have since realised I could do with, suggestions for a prolongue-the-wear-of-makeup drugstore primer? Being a review checker, I stood in a corner of Boots and quickly searched best illuminating cheap primers on Google as well as reviews of this specific product. Boosted by positive reviews, some even comparing it to MAC Strobe Cream (which I have heard of, but not tried), I decided to give it a whirl - a decision heavily influenced by the fact that you get 3 times the amount of product to the L'Oreal primer for only a few pounds more - hence my justification paying top end drugstore price.

The verdict? The primer gives a nice glow to the skin, and helps add a dewy, lighter coverage and finish to my Nars Sheer Glow foundation. However, I have found it to loose this glow throughout the day, something I found with my L'Oreal primer. Furthermore, I find that you have to use quite a lot to cover you're whole face and get a glow to begin with, where as my L'Oreal, which lasted me over a year, despite the small amount, went a long way with only a pea sized amount! So I think, once I've finished it, I will go back to my original primer, or try one for longevity instead...

Final Verdict: ★★★

Left - the primer straight out of the tube              Right - The primer, blended

Mini Benefit High Beam Highlighter - £5

This legendary highlighter has finally made its way into my makeup collection. But June, it costs £20! How can you afford it on a student budget? I'll tell you: Christmas miniatures :) Benefit had a thing in Boots where you could buy four miniatures of their well known products for £15, or they were £5 each. So naturally, I took advantage of this bargain, and bought a teeny 4ml version. It is gorgeous! I really get what the hype I've seen for all those years is about. It gives the most gorgeous glow to the cheekbones (or where ever you want to apply it), but it doesn't last the day. Also, a little goes a long way, so even though it's only 4ml instead of the regular sized 10ml I can se this lasting a long time :)

Final Verdict: ★★★★☆

Left: Blended                                                    Right: Straight from the bottle

Real Techniques Starter Kit - £10.80* *This was the price I bought it for on Amazon, but it constantly fluctuates, currently it's £12.47 but that's still discounted from £20.99. Best tip: keep an eye out on the price to get it when it's low

For a while (well I say a while, it was an impulse buy with a reason behind it XD) I've been thinking about buying better quality brushes. I have this massive set a friend bought me for my birthday which are great for playing around with, but I wanted an upgrade. Naturally, I turned to Real Techniques to sort me out. This set comes with two larger blending brushes, an eyeliner brush, an angled brush and a small detail brush. They are wonderful and blend beautifully. The larger blending brush (the deluxe crease brush) is slightly too big for my eyelid, but my favourite brush is the base shadow brush (2nd down in the picture) which I love for blending shadow into my crease. I also love the accent brush (middle in the picture) for adding highlight into the inner third of my eye or just packing shadow onto the lid. The angled brush and liner brush aren't going to be used as much due to me owning an angled brush I love (by EcoTools) and I don't wear gel eyeliner (though I want to try it at some point). It's just a shame, they don't sell each brush individually (though I know the Deluxe Crease Brush is). Also, it would have been nice to have a larger flat shadow brush as part of the set...

Final Verdict: ★★★★☆

MAC Burgundy Times Nine Eyeshadow Palette - £25* *I bought it with a £20 MAC Voucher I got for Christmas, hence the fact I could buy it.

If you follow me on Instagram (and if you don't then, you're missing out. Click the Instagram icon on the sidebar, or at the top of the page. Now! Do it!) then you will know that I have been obsessed - and I mean obsessed - with this palette. It took ages to arrive, because the first time I ordered it they took the money off my card but the order didn't go through :( , but hey, they sorted it out and here it is in all it's beauty. When I was reading reviews on this everyone commented on the beauty of Star Violet. I didn't get what was so special about a pink eyeshadow. Boy was I wrong! It is simply the most stunning eyeshadow I had ever seen (actually, the whole palette is). Pictures really don't do it justice so if you see it in store SWATCH IT! It has this gorgeous bronze undertone (potentially, I really don't know how to describe it haha), but it is beautiful so yeah, enough about me getting over excited over an eyeshadow haha. The palette as a whole is gorgeous, it's like a mini Naked 3, and much smaller than you're average palette, so great for popping into your makeup bag - on my Instagram is a picture of it in my hand to show how small it is. I really am plugging my Instagram today aren't I haha! The colour range means that it can be used all year round, with lighter pastel colours for the spring and summer and darker colours for the winter. Each shadow is only a couple of centimetres across in diameter, but they are so pigmented that you don't need a lot (see the swatches below). I know some people aren't big fans of Honey Lust and have found that it has a lot of fall out, but I have found it to be beautiful packed round the inner corner and third of the eye to brighten it. The black shade, #Noir, however isn't great. I have seen drugstore black eyeshadows that have a more intense pay off without primer, and the gold glitter in it is a bit pointless, I don't know, it just doesn't work... A matte black for intensifying the outer corner or the lash line would have been more useful, so thank goodness I own a few of those already haha. However, this doesn't take away from the fact that it is my favourite palette ever!

Final Verdict: ★★★★★

Top Line - Without Primer, Bottom Line - With Eye Primer (Used MUA Pro Base Eye Primer)

So that's my first ever haul out of the way! Just knocking down these blog milestones like they're dominoes XD (ok that was a terrible analogy, help me out here guys!)

June xx

p.s. I just want to send a massive thank you to the people who make these products. I watched a documentary once about the factory that collapsed where they interviewed survivors. One of them said she wanted to be remembered, so here I am thanking and remembering the people that we often forget about working in factories, so that we can have beautiful products :)



*yes I am aware it's January, but I have chosen to ignore this little fact. Plus, I swear QI said it doesn't end til March, so there :)

I know I'm late on the bandwagon (or what ever the phrase is) here, but I am finally the owner of the much raved about, very beautiful Fortune Favours the Brave Palette by Make Up Revolution and BritishBeautyBlogger. It comes with a mix of 30 matte, shimmery and baked shades and costs just £9.99 (with free shipping if you get it at Superdrug with your Health and Beauty card- gotta save your mulla as a student haha). This means each shades is costing you just 33p! The pans are smaller than usual (see comparison with my thumb below) but this is probably to keep costs down and to fit them all in a non-huge palette. Although it is a little bigger than usual, it is not as big as, say, a Morphe 350 palette, meaning that it is a great palette to take with you on your travels - the colour range means you can create loads of different looks without having to pack a tonne of makeup :) As you can see, the colour range runs from light pinks to purples, blues, greens and browns as well as highlight shades. 

Back of the outer packaging (box) (the front of the box is the same as the inner main palette's cover below) Front of the packaging (it's so beautiful!!) Back of Packaging

I love that all the shadows were given names, as far as I'm aware Makeup Revolution don't normally name their shades... It makes it so much easier to refer to shades as a blogger, provided I don't loose the plastic sheet with them on... Also, note how small the pans are in contrast to my thumb. They are smaller than regular pans, but ah well :)

Artsy photo cause blogger 😂

Now what is the all important pigmentation like you ask?? Well maybe because it was super hyped about I was expecting it to be better than it is, especially as I have the Iconic 3 Palette so can compare it against other Revolution palettes. The colours are a bit hit and miss in some areas, and to get the best payoff, as always, you will need to use a primer, or at least moisten the lid area in some way, for instance by using concealer on the lid if you don't own primer. Originally I wanted to swatch each colour on my eyelid with and without primer but when I tried I quickly remembered that my terrible phone camera doesn't do the colours justice... Instead I've done a couple of examples so you can see what I was getting at, as well as some arm swatches. Note about arm swatches. 1) to keep it as even as possible I applied with the same brush each time (removing as much of the previous product as possible) and brushed the brush in each pan 4 times before switching onto my arm using the same amount of pressure each time(this sounds like my A Level biology coursework XD). 2) You can apply a lot more pressure with the brush when applying them to your arm than on your eye hence the fact the pigmentation looks out of this world. Believe me when I say that when it comes to applying onto your lid, they will not look as good as they look on your forearm.

Swatches of every shade, laid out as they come in the palette so you can workout what every colour is. This picture is every shadow applied with a primer underneath. By comparing this to the swatches on my eyelids, you can see what I was getting at about how misleading they are about the colour intensity of the shadows.

Swatches without primer. As you can see with the darker shades, there is little difference in the shade intensity - but when on the eyelid the difference is massive. The lighter colours do benefit from the addition of a primer though. One thing I was impressed by was the black shadow- it's the one I accidentally smudged. Look at how intense the colour was post smudging; some poorer quality eyeshadows can look intense then disappear when smudged to nothing. Good work Makeup Revolution!

Shimmer eyeshadow (I think I used Brave) No primer on the right, with primer on the left. Look at how less patchy and more intense the colour is on the left - I know my poor camera quality makes it hard to see, but believe me, the difference was considerably more noticeable in comparison to on my forearm in real life.

To give you an idea what the matte and baked shadows are like. The blue is the baked shadow skylight which I'm really not a fan of- for me the blue is too bright (or at least doesn't go with my skin tone) and the gold doesn't go; I would have preferred a bronze shimmer. The matte shade on the right is Latte if I remember correctly. I was really impressed with this shade. Normally mattes struggle in palettes but it applied and blended really easily :)

Here are some looks I created with the palette while playing with it in the last week. I created a neutral pink look, a blue look (that looks quite grey. I don't know why, potentially because I took it after wearing it for a few hours cause I forgot to wear it straight away) and a green look (which was surprisingly my favourite haha). The glitter on the centre of my lids faded quite fast, which I have come to notice with a lot of drugstore eyeshadows after Sam of PixiWoo pointed it out in her high end v highstreet videos. They don't crease too badly (although the blue look did more than the other two), I use the MUA Pro-Base Primer if you're interested, which was quite surprising and a nice bonus :) My lids aren't that oily but eyeshadow does generally crease by the end of the day...

I don't know what this pose is XD. I keep finding myself pouting since watching Candice on Bake Off and I don't know why haha. Anyways, this was created using some of the green shadows. And I don't even know what's going on with my hair, it doesn't like to lie flat 😂

This was a blue look, but looked much greyer by the time I remembered to photograph it a few hours later... Worth noting from this picture though that the centre of the lids had one the of the bronze/gold shadows on and that after a few hours it had completely faded off - lets play Where's Wally but with the bronze shadow on my lids haha

A pinky, bronze look. A bit more day time friendly than the other two looks I created. Definitely something I'll be reaching for in the spring time!

So overall, how would I rate this palette?? Pigmentation wasn't as amazing as expected from the hype but still good once I got used to the palette. I have never used baked shadows before so don't know how comparable they are to others on the market, but they aren't my favourite shades in the palette although they look beautiful in the palette - New World looks like marble😍. The greens and purples are probably winners for me personally and I know I will be hitting pan on them before long bwahaha. Please don't even attempt to use the brush. It is the WORST brush I have ever used in my life. Honestly. it does nothing and the flat brush fails to pick up any product at all. I'm keeping it for special effects work cause I can afford to ruin it haha.

Pigmentation: ★★★☆
Lasting Quality: ★★★★
Colour range: ★★★★★
Value for Money: ★★★★☆

(☆= half a star fyi)

Hope you enjoyed my FIRST EVER review. I would love feedback about how I can improve these, what you would like to know about products I review in the future, so please leave constructive criticism in the comments below.

Have you ever tried the palette? What did you think of it? Or have I tempted you to buy it? Lets have a natter in the comments section :)

June xx

disclaimer: I was not paid to feature this product by anyone. I bought this with my own money and it was my own decision to review it. Neither am I a fan of the blog "BritishBeautyBlogger" meaning I don't feel obliged to love this palette as a fan of the creator of it. In fact, to show my ignorance of the blogging world, I had never heard of her before this palette.