Pretty Head – UK Make Up Reviews

I had a family wedding coming up and decided to splash out on some more expensive makeup so I would look my best for the photos, I have dabbled with quite a few different foundations over the years, none of which ever cost more than £10 as being a student I couldn’t afford luxuries like expensive makeup! So with my birthday money in hand I went to Boots looking for a new, more expensive foundation. I chose Boots because not only do they stock their own range of cosmetics, they also stock all the other popular brands such as, Clinique, Maxfactor, Rimmel and Maybelline. I had already decided to try a brand of foundation that I had never tried before and after having an allergic reaction to some Clinique products I decided to head over to the No 7 counter first. After trying a lot of the foundations on the back of my hand I thought that the best match for my skin tone was their Stay Perfect foundation which comes in a compact and retails at £12.95. This foundation comes in a wide range of colours, suitable for all complexions.

The foundation comes in a black cardboard box with gold writing which is also how the compact itself is decorated. You get a sense that this is a more expensive brand of foundation as the compact comes with a mirror and application sponge, things that the cheaper brands do not include. The foundation itself is quite hard so getting it onto the sponge can require some force, it is however easier to get it onto your finger if u want to apply it to certain places this way, I presume this is because the heat of your skin melts it a bit. As you may have gathered from reading my other foundation reviews, I have quite bad dark circles under my eyes and a few blemishes so finding a foundation which provides good coverage is very important to me. This one did just that, my dark circles and blemishes were not visible and I hadn’t even applied concealer or setting powder! Once setting powder had been applied I had a totally flawless complexion which I was very happy with! The foundation stayed put all day, even with an outfit change and lots of hugging or relatives and 12 hours later it still looked like it did when I first applied it. The only complaint I would have is that in all the pictures that were taken that day I look rather like a ghost! But this is my fault, I should have fake tanned then got a darker foundation.

I would recommend this foundation for anyone with a bit of money to spend, who wants a flawless finish and a foundation that will last all day. I have had this for 6 months now and only use it for special occasions like nights out and so far it hasn’t run out.

Pros: Lasts all day and provides a perfect match and a flawless finish.

Cons: The price, but I def think in this case you get what you pay for.

Having dabbled with acrylic nails for the past few years I haven’t really had a need for nail varnish, however I am currently trying to let my nails recover from the constant damage that acrylics do to them and so thought I would try jazzing them up a bit with nail varnish.

I used to buy Rimmel nail varnishes and have over the years tried pretty much every different type they have and I am never pleased with the result. So I thought I would pay a bit more in the hopes that the effect would be better and the first shop I went into was Boots. To be honest I went in thinking about what colour I wanted instead of what brand (anything that wasn’t Rimmel!) and it just so happened that the exact colour I was looking for belonged to the Boots no 7 range. The colour I chose “Rose Truffle” is a gorgeous raspberry red, which looks lovely and not too tramp like! It cost £5.95 for 10ml, which is a good few pounds more than Rimmel’s polishes, however as I would soon discover it was so worth the money, as the saying goes you get what you pay for! Also on a money note, if you normally have acrylic nails you pay upwards of £15 every few weeks for in fills, so £6 for a nail varnish that will last a good few months doesn’t seem too extravagant. There isn’t any packaging surrounding the bottle; however there is a sticker on the top that contains all the relevant information such as the ingredients, that it is hypo allergenic and flammable.

Using the nail varnish is pretty straight forward; you unscrew the top and apply one or two coats, depending on how dark you want the colour to be. The first thing that I noticed was that this nail varnish didn’t have the characteristic nail varnish smell, which is a good thing! Also I think it must have something to do with the shape of the brush, but application was very easy, it literally glided on and one sweep of the brush would coat my whole nail without any mess. This meant that as I am right handed, painting the finger nails on my right hand was a lot easier than normal and resulted in a lot less mess.

The Stay Perfect range does not state just how long the nail varnish will stay perfect for, however 2 days later, when all Rimmel varnish would have started to chip off, the No 7 Stay Perfect nail varnish was still going strong and looking just as good as it did when I first applied. Normally you are advised to apply two coats of colour and a clear top coat to ensure that the varnish lasts, but I only applied one and the colour lasted for a week before it started to show signs of wear!

I would highly recommend this nail varnish as it really does stay perfect for a very long time, it just goes to show that you get what you pay for!

Got a product you can’t live without?! Or do you regret spending your hard earnt cash on something? Either way we would LOVE to hear about it! Send your reviews and piccies to faye@prettyhead.co.uk and we will do our best to publish them! xxxx

Desperate for some more Boots Perfect and Protect serum but having limited funds, I bought a gift set off of eBay which contained not only the Protect and Perfect serum and day cream but also has a variety of new samples such as mascara, lip gloss, eye shadow, eye liner and nail varnish. I only really got this for the serum but thought I would give the mascara a go seen as I am always on the quest to find the best mascara and I have to say I was quite disappointed. This mascara retails at £11.50 for 7ml, which is a bit more than the mainstream brands like Maxfactor, Rimmel and Maybelline charge for the same quantity. As mine was a sample size the packaging differs from the usual simple, silver, hard plastic tube. Either way both sizes of the mascara do not come covered in plastic and stuck to a cardboard backing, which is good for the environment and made me think that they should have knocked a bit off of the price if they were not going to bother with packaging!

But anyway, I was very keen to try the mascara out and so at the first opportunity I gave it a go (which by the way is a bad habit to get into as you end up with loads of mascaras on the go at once and they all end up drying up, resulting in a loss of money and mascara!) The first thing that I noticed was just how huge the brush was; it looked like a bumble bee! Boots claims that this mascara can give you up to 7 times more volume, with its specially designed brush that gives 360 degree coverage to your lashes, but it really didn’t do this for me. Even thought the mascara had never been used before it seemed to be quite dry, with there not being much mascara on the brush.  This might have been because it was a sample size though as other reviews I have read for the full sized one suggest that you get far too much mascara on the brush and end up with a clumpy look. For me however I couldn’t get much mascara on the brush and the brush itself was far too big which made application very difficult. Not only was it hard to use the brush to give the lashes a full coating, but it was difficult to keep it neat and I ended up with mascara on the skin all around the eye area.

I normally like to have a dramatic lash look and can normally achieve this using most of the high street brands of mascara I have used, however with this slightly more expensive one even after 3 coats my lashes looked pretty much how they did before I started. The mascara didn’t add any length or volume to my eyelashes, but it did make them look quite feathery which is a lot nicer than being clumpy.

I would recommend this mascara to anyone wanting bridal make up or a natural makeup look. However anyone who likes to make a noticeable improvement to their lashes could well be disappointed by this mascara.

Pros: Doesn’t clump

Cons: Brush is too big, resulting in less coverage and more mess and it doesn’t actually improve the look of my lashes in any way, shape or form.

I first heard about this perfume when I was a teenager, I think it was in a girlie magazine as Britney Spears is apparently a big fan. So of course the thirteen year old me decided that I needed it and it was at the top of my Christmas list that year! On Christmas day I got to open it and loved the ice blue and black theme that was on the box and carried through to the vessel, the actual perfume comes in an ice blue, glass star that holds 50ml and has a silver sprayer. The retail price for this now is £62, which is quite expensive considering my other favourite perfume is Calvin Klein’s Euphoria that costs £30, however this can be found a lot cheaper on eBay (see links below), or in the duty free section of air ports. You can buy top ups for your original Angel star bottle that also come in a different shaped star bottle – I haven’t done this yet so I don’t know how easy it is to do, but I like the fact that I have the option of refilling.

The actual smell of this perfume is quite unusual, you will either love it or hate it and I will admit that I hated it at first, I even remember spraying it around my room just to get rid of it, that is until I found out that it was over £60 a bottle! After that I used to use it now and then and it definitely does grow on you, so much so that a few years late it was on my Christmas list again!

Angel has a very strong, deep and powerful smell to it that stays on the skin all day – something which is important from a perfume, especially when you are paying so much for one. There doesn’t appear to be any floral scents in it, instead it is spicy, creamy, with vanilla and earthy tones to it that change over time. The smell is very distinct and often I get asked whether I am wearing Angel by people when I am out, however it can get quite sickly so you never know whether people are asking you because they hate it. I have also noticed that it makes me sneeze a lot, however it does not irritate my sensitive skin so that’s a plus point.

Pros: I like the smell, it lasts all day, it is good on sensitive skin and it comes in a very pretty bottle.

Cons: It is expensive, some people really don’t like the smell and it makes me sneeze. I really wouldn’t suggest buying this as a surprise for someone unless you know that they like it as there is a good chance that they won’t and you will have wasted £60!
Check out Angel Perfume
on Amazon where its currently on Special Offer @ £57!!! – Bargain!

I heard about this mascara when my sister came downstairs ready for a night out and I noticed that her normally average eyelashes looked absolutely amazing; they were jet black and very long, totally fake looking and the type of lashes that most girls would kill for! This is sort of shown in the picture of the blue eye, I struggled to get the picture big enough which is why it looks a bit pixelated – however when I get the original picture from her I will put that up, which is a bet better quality and makes shows just how gorgeous her eyelashes looked.

Mascara is like kryptonite for me and even though I didn’t need any I went out and bought myself a tube for £7.82 from Superdrug. There were three shades to choose from, absolute black, disco blue and brown remix; I opted for the absolute black and I guess that this was the most popular shade as I have noticed that it is often sold out. The mascara comes in a rather funky looking tube, which is black, shiny and silver and has a picture of an eye with long, luscious lashes. Bourjois claim that this mascara is tested on clubbers and not only does it offer extreme volume, but it also gives lashes a shiny finish.

I saved the mascara to use on my next night out and I actually couldn’t wait to put it on and see if it made my eyelashes look as gorgeous as it made my sisters. So I unscrewed the lid and pulled out the wand and I have to say that I was rather shocked by how much mascara comes out on the wand, there was far too much and I had to try and scraped some off which resulted in a right mess! The wand itself is sort of flat with very soft bristles; it is easy to get the mascara onto the upper lashes without too much trouble, however trying to put it on the lower lashes was a bit of a nightmare. I think this is because the wand was quite big and your lower lashes are smaller than the upper ones, meaning that not only do you coat the lashes, you also coat most of the skin in the surrounding area! The mascara really clumped my lashes together, worryingly though I think that this is what it is meant to do. In the end to try and get my eye lashes looking a bit more normal I ended up using the wand from another mascara to separate them a bit. Even after I did this my eyelashes looked very clumpy and I ended up looking like I had about 4 lashes on each eye! I tried to capture this in the picture (brown eye), you can see how four or five individual lashes are separate at the root but get stuck together further up, resulting when face on, in me looking like I had two spiders attached to my face.

I have to say that I was very disappointed as it looked so much better on my sister, whose eyelashes are not that much different to mine in shape and length. I even asked her to put it on me in case I was being stupid and doing it totally wrong, but the effect was the same. All I can say is that I will never buy this again, but it still looks great on my sister so I suppose it depends on the individual; as the two pictures show the result you get differs depending on the person, even when you are sisters!

Pros: Really looks good and gives a false lash effect on some people.

Cons: Gave me clumpy lashes which resulted in me looking like I had fewer eyelashes than I had started with. If it doesn’t work you have wasted nearly £8 and it would not be suitable for people wanting a natural makeup look.

I stumbled across this foundation by accident when I had run out of foundation and had to rummage through my sister’s makeup bag in the hopes that she had some. My first impressions of this was that it looked cheap, it comes in a flimsy, plastic tube that you have to squeeze to get the foundation to come out. The actual bit that the foundation comes out of is just a hole, which means that there is quite a lot of mess as it is hard to control just how much comes out with each squeeze. The actual foundation looked very orange when in the tube and so I really didn’t think that it would look very good on my skin, however I was desperate and in a rush so I thought I would give it a go, fully expecting to have to take it off as soon as I put it on because it looked too orange. After moisturising I sat with my face wipes at the ready and squeezed a bit of the foundation onto the back of my hand. Due to the bit where the foundation comes out of being just a hole more than I needed came out and it was very runny, it also looked really orange on the back of my hand, definitely not the colour I would have chosen to match my skin tone. I dubiously started to put it on my face using a foundation brush that I bought from MAC; I thought that being so watery a foundation sponge would just absorb it all so opted for the brush, however I am sure that fingers would work just fine. Now this is where I was shocked, surprisingly the foundation didn’t look orange at all once on my skin, it went on well, was moisturising, covered my blemishes and dark circles under my eyes and most importantly it looked really natural! I finished it off with some pale pressed powder and the end result was a nearly flawless, natural looking complexion – something that I am always trying to achieve. This foundation only costs £5.89 from Boots, which is probably the cheapest main stream brand foundation I have ever come across.

This foundation comes in five shades, none of which I would say would be suitable for people with darker skin tones (something that as I do my research for reviews is becoming more evident – there seems to be a huge gap in the market for mainstream brand foundations and concealers that cater for olive to dark complexions).  Rimmel claim that this foundation provides a flawless, fade proof, rub proof, smudge proof, smooth and healthy look that lasts for 16 hours and I have to say that this foundation lives up to all these claims. After a days worth of wear (I would say about 18hours), I took off of my skin near enough the same amount of foundation that I put on. As for the flawless finish, I for the first time ever, didn’t have to put concealer on the dark circles under my eyes as the foundation provided perfect coverage. I didn’t look cakey or shiny and I after borrowing a bit of my sister’s I went out and bought my own tube. I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a cheap, long lasting foundation that provides good coverage. The only thing I would say is that finding the correct shade for your skin might be an issue as even on the back of my hand the product looked orange so I would never have tried it on my face. Just goes to show that you can’t judge a foundation by its appearance in the tube or its price tag!

Pros: Cheap, lives up to all of Rimmel’s claims, provides great coverage and is perfect for anyone wanting a natural makeup look. I would also say that this would be great for wedding makeup as its smudge proof so you won’t get it on your white dress and it wouldn’t need topping up all day.

Cons: Watery and Rimmel does not make this foundation for people with anything but white skin.