Empties #3

Soap and Glory Smoulder Kohl eye liner 
This knocked my previous favourite eye liner Rimmel Eye Definer off it's top spot. Soap and Glory Smoulder Kohl liner is creamy and waterproof. It also comes with a pencil sharpener in the lid!  Unfortunately I lost the top to the sharpener and the last couple of inches dried up. This is my favourite black pencil liner and it's reasonably cheap.
Repurchase? Yes 

KVD Vegan Discovery Go Big or Go Home Mascara  (Formally Kat Von Dee Beauty)

I got this in my Christmas beauty calendar and the packaging is different than what's currently on sale. This mascara dried up very very quickly which may be to do with the toothpaste tube like packaging instead of a traditional mascara tube which is the current packaging . The brush is a bristle type brush and like the name the brush is very big! This creates a lot of volume to the lashes and is good  at separating lashes.  It does what it says on the tin lives up to it's claims. It retails for £20 and the mini is £11. I would buy this again, normally I would choose a mini size as I very rarely use up all the mascara in the tube within 3-4 months but I'm slightly concerned that it dried up so quickly.

Repurchase? Yes.

Marks and Spencer Absolute Ultimate Formula 8 hours Sleep Cream
This a great night-time moisturiser it's creamy rather than greasy and does a good job of hydrating the skin. It's paraben free and contains hyaluronic acid to hydrate your skin and anti aging ingredient peptides. It is fairly strongly scented, it a floral, fresh fragrance but it doesn't exacerbate my asthma.  I also haven't broken out despite my sensitive skin.   
Purchase? Yes 

Simple Moisture Cream with SPF30
Simple has unfortunately discontinued this product which I'm heartbroken about. It's a great light but nourishing moisturiser that contains SPF30. SPF30 is the recommended factor to protect skin. Most moisturisers go up to SFP15-20 which isn't enough.

Simple Dual Eye Make Up Remover
I chose this because I like the No 7 dual cleanser where you have oil and cleanser which you shake before use, The oil is good at removing waterproof mascara and eye liner. I found that I got through this quicker than my usual no 7 one but it does remove eye makeup well.

Repurchase? Yes

F.A.B Ultra Repair Hydrating Serum (Sample Not Pictured)
This is very similar to Hylamide's serum but slightly thicker. It has a clear gel texture, without much of a scent which is great as it's less irritating on the skin. It's good and as effective as Hylamide's version and would be worth picking up.
Purchase: Yes 

Murad Hydro-Dynamic Quenching Essence (sample Not pictured)
Essence lotion hails from Korea and is used after toner as an extra hydration step in a skincare routine. Murad's Hydro-Dynamic Quenching Essence contains Mexican Blue Agave leaf extract to improve the skin's ability to attract and retain water. A mixture of watermelon, apple, and lentil also help reduce dryness and flakiness. As well as improving hydration this essence contains glycolic Acid to gently exfoliate  so that your skin is smoothed. 

It is a gel consistency and smell slightly floral. I applied this 3 times on one side of my face. I found that my skin felt softer on the side I applied it or 'silkier' as Murad puts it. I didn't notice it contained glycolic acid until the final use. I have sensitive skin and it felt quite gentle but I'm not sure if the irritation would kick in the longer I used it. Because it has active ingredients of glycolic acid this essence acts more like a serum so that probably explains the high price point of £65. It works but it is expensive at £65.

Purchase? I'm not sure. This is seems gentle on my skin considering it contains glycolic acid but it's too expensive for me on my current budget.

Neutrogena Visibly Renew  Elasti-Boost Hand cream SPF20
A friend gave me a sample of this and I actually really like it. It has a nice fresh scent that's not overpowering. It's quite a thick formula which rubs in well but it does leave your hands tacky but not greasy afterwards. However it's a lightweight moisturiser and I feel that it's not moisturising enough  to use during the current pandemic. They say that your hands give away your age so having an SPF is a good idea to prevent brown spots though a higher SPF 30 would be better.

Purchase? Maybe 

Boots Strawberry Lip Balm
This is my go-to lip balm it's moisturising, doesn't leave a white tint or make your lips tingle  and cheap! The scent isn't too bad either.
Repurchase? Yes. 

Shampoo and conditioners

Philip Kingsley Anti Dandruff Shampoo
This shampoo contains the ani-microbal pirotone olamine to calm the scalp while cleaning your hair. It has a fresh but very subtle scent that smells to my like watermelon and cucumber. 

However I found that I had to wash my oily hair twice and I still had dandruff. 

Repurchase? No. 

Tresseme Moisture Rich Conditioner
This smells really nice and made my hair shiny and sleek.
Repurchase? I'm tempted to pick it up again but I'm trying to find MCI/MI free (preservative than can cause contact dermatitis) conditioners.

OUAI Leave in Conditioner  Travel sized 45ml £10 / 140ml £22
This is the first leave in conditioner I've tried and I love it- it's a lazy girl's dream or for those who live with lots of people and want to cut down your shower time! It contains vitamin E, argan oil and primrose oil to moisturise and condition hair, while hydrolysed protein minimises damage caused by heat styling. The thick consistency doesn't look like it would work with a mister but it does deliver a overall fine mist and feels lightweight on the hair. It offers UV protection as well as heat protection. It's MCI/MI free  (known irritating preservatives)  paraben free and  OUAI do not test on animals. It did make my hair feel soft and silky, but it doesn't detangle hair well. Additionally if  you're looking for rich hydration you'd need to get an intensive conditioner. I think that the sweet scent may be overpowering for some but I love it it's a gorgeous floral scent.
Repurchase? It is more than I'd usually pay and doesn't detangle hair but I might get another travel sized one as the scent is so gorgeous!

Palmers Olive Oil Replenishing Conditioner
I bought this because it did not contain MCI and MI preservatives, but it's also free from sulphates, parabens, phthalates, mineral oil and gluten. It does contain dimethicone so if you're avoiding silicone this may not be for you. Extra virgin olive oil is known for nourishing properties and promoting hair strength and shine. It also claims to soften tight curls. The soya bean oil and keratin amino acids protects the hair from environmental aggressors and hot styling tools so that hair will look smooth and less frizzy, softer, bouncier and easier to style. It also contains Jamaican Castor oil which has a high lipid content to relieve dry itchy scalps while protecting hair from damage. I did not find that this reduced any frizziness . It did leave my hair feel soft and nourished although not sure if it made any difference it breakage.  It did leave my hair shiny but most hair conditioners do. I have long straight hair so I can't comment on curls. Apart from my hairdryer I don't use any hot styling tools. I also only apply conditioner to the ends and mid-length of my hair due to having an oily scalp so I can't comment on whether it helped my scalp.

I do love the squeeze tube packaging and the fact they have left some of the label transparent so that you can see how much product is left. I recommend using a comb to distribute the product even if it's mid to long length hair (I avoid my scalp as I have oily hair) because otherwise it will leave behind blobs in the bath. It has a mild refreshing scent.
Re-purchase? This was ok. Didn't blow me away but it's alright. The tube did last me a long time I want to try out other conditioners free from MCI and MI.

What Make Up Means To M.E. - Why I Wear It & Why I Started My Blog

There are two main reasons why I like makeup, firstly I love that it can transform you into something different. I like the fact that you can create a completely different look without a change of clothes. Secondly I love getting ready to go out and for me doing my makeup for a night out is as much fun as actually going out! However I'm quite laid back and I don't wear makeup everyday. I will wear it for work to look presentable and when I meet friends at the weekend or for a night out to look my best. I don't really care if a boyfriend or any of my friends sees me without any make up on.

When I started getting interested in makeup 

When I started secondary school I was allowed to wear nail polish and I typically a wore glitter or a different shade of purple or blue on each finger. At about 13 years old I began wearing Rimmel white or silver eye shadow to make my eyes stand out behind my glasses. I also wore Collection 2000 (as it was known back then) black mascara and clear or pink lip gloss. After watching renowned make up artist Kevyn Aucoin on the Ricki Lake show I went out and bought his book Making Faces, where he used make up to transform celebrities into looking like other celebrities. Some of them were incredible. I also used to tear out the pages from Bliss and Sugar! magazines for make up inspiration. 

I discovered eyeliner when I went to university. I used Bourjois liquid eyeliner in black and while it's not the easiest eyeliner to start off with I found it much easier to use than pencil liner. I didn't start wearing foundation until I was 20 years old. The reason I hadn't worn foundation before was that the high street in the '90's only offered pink toned foundations and I have a yellow toned tan complexion. (They still lean this way despite the multi cultural makeup of the UK.) My first foundation was from Clinique because they had more inclusive shades and I had a bit more money to spend than I did in my teenage years. I later found the shades ran too terracotta instead of yellow and I'm still trying to find my Holy Grail foundation (Shu Uemura and Estee Lauder have been the best matches so far.) After foundation my first high end product I bought for myself were Lancome's Juicy Tubes as they were really popular at the time.  After I left university I wore makeup to look presentable for work.

Feeling Ill

In my late 20's I knew there was something physically wrong with me health-wise but I didn't know what it was. I caught the flu but while the rest of the symptoms disappeared I still had this unrelenting, extreme tiredness every day. I would get jelly legs and collapse while washing up the dishes on a Friday or Sunday night. If I got less than 11 hours sleep I would be unable to walk from the top of the bed to the bottom of the bed without collapsing. Some days I could barely talk. It was making me depressed because I had barely any energy to carry on with my usual routines and duties in my life. So I began to start wearing thicker foundation and used make up as a mask to cover how unhappy I was and to make sure that people wouldn't notice I was unhappy or ill. It sounds a bit illogical but I was a teacher and your job involves putting up a front or a performance in the classroom and the make up was part of my costume.

Anyway my life ground to a halt when I came home on the last day of school in May. The physical exhaustion made me bed bound for two weeks and then housebound for around 18 months. This time in my life was about survival. I couldn't even hold a graphite pencil or a metal dinner fork because it was too heavy for me as my muscles had wasted away. I could only walk a few metres. After my big collapse I was finally diagnosed with M.E. or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (now renamed as Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease ) but that didn't really help very much as the only advice the specialist had was that I was young at 27 and would recover but gave me no information on how to get better or any treatment or leaflets and discharged me! (I managed to get some treatment later and it helped a little bit but didn't 'cure' me or eliminate the dysfunctional tiredness. NHS treatment is limited: there's Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, graded exercise and some doctors will administer Vitamin B12 injections.) There is no long term cure at this point in time and research is underfunded.

M.E. often starts with someone having the flu, stomach flu, glandular fever (mono.) or shingles. Then some of the symptoms go way but you don't recover or bounce back to normal and the debilitating  tiredness remains leaving you only able to function at a much lower level. This can be 50% or less than normal. Think about your own life, operating at 50% means you will have to turn down nights at the pubs, cinema trips, visiting family, going to church, holidays, cleaning the house, not showering  as much as you like in order to keep your job or your family together. To survive from one day to the next you may just have to do the minimum or what you are able to do so you don't collapse and becoming bed bound or suffer pain from too much stimulation (light, noise, smells.) M.E. can result in years of being housebound or bedbound rather than just 'lockdowns' which have an end date. 

The current pandemic has seen the rise of  'Long Covid' or Long haulers, where people don't fully recover from the Covid 19 virus. They share some of the same symptoms of M.E. notably the extreme physical and mental fatigue, memory problems and 'brain fog' where it is difficult to understand or engage in a conversation, read or follow a TV show. The UK government has donated £18.5 million to fund 4 studies of long COVID in the hope to understand and develop treatment that may have implications for M.E. treatments as well.  

Anyway a year later when I was physically able to do a few more things, I made a New Year's resolution to start wearing make up again. I wasn't working and didn't have a boyfriend, the make up was for me. I felt well enough to start concentrating on grooming again. It was also to recapture some of the old me. I went out and bought some lightweight make up brushes. Then I started playing around with makeup, copying looks from magazines, working it out as there weren't any guides or listed products beside the pictures. Around 2009-2010, UK makeup artist Lauren Luke became a big sensation on Youtube and and I began watching her videos.

I was still housebound and so any visitors to the house was a big event and excuse to wear makeup! When I saw people they would say that 'you don't look ill'  because I was wearing makeup. I still wore it because I felt so drained and shit all the time I didn't want to have to look shit as well. Anyway I really got into watching Youtube make up tutorials. I loved Tiffany D she is a true artist and amazingly talented but unfortunately doesn't do tutorials or much makeup content these days. I learnt the most from Sineady Cady (The Makeup Chair) as her tutorials were really easy to follow. I also watched Wayne Goss who seemed honest and succinct. I liked a lot of his makeup hacks and techniques especially his contouring video here.

Why I started this blog.

One of my symptoms of having M.E. / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome was forgetting how to spell. It was like that type information had gone missing from my memory. Somehow I found the beauty review site MakeupAlley. I started writing reviews on make up products I had used and I found my spelling was improving. Then I thought why not have all my reviews together in a blog? I loved writing and also hoped to help people through giving honest reviews and find other people who were also into makeup as much as I was. I didn't have any sisters to talk to and my mum wasn't into make up. She thought my interest in make up was frivolous but for me it was an escape. While blogging I've also picked up other skills such as styling photographs, using social media and a bit of HTML.

Why I wear Make up 

Makeup is something I wear for me, to look presentable and feel special and I would put it on to meet up with friends. However since the pandemic I haven't been wearing much makeup but writing this reminds me of how much I love it and going to make an effort to keep up my morale (and I have a lot of mascaras in my stash to test!) I must stress that my reasons for wearing makeup have been my own personal experience, others with M.E /CFS have their own reasons for wearing make up.

While I haven't recovered from M.E. I credit The Lightening Process for improving my quality of life. The best way of explaining it is NLP and self hypnosis. You use previous memories of a healthy you to remind your body how it used to function when it was well. You reunite the body and mind.  It helped me to break the boom bust cycle where you do a lot on your good days as you finally have some energy and then payback happens where you end being bed bound for the rest of the week. The lightening process gave me energy to be spontaneous, I'm no longer housebound, I can walk further and generally seem to be improving. 

Although this diagram is for Dysautonomia it applies to most chronic illnesses

The advice I would give to anyone suffering from fatigue is to write down your daily activities and categorise them as low or high energy. So changing my bed, walking to the post box, having a shower, or phoning the bank require a lot of energy. Reading a book or writing a blog post are low energy tasks for me. It will be different for lots of people. Plan a daily schedule where you make sure high energy tasks are spread out with lower energy tasks in-between.  There's also pacing which you kind of learn anyway which means you 'rest' (don't sleep or watch TV or read because they are activities not a proper rest) or mediate and cut back on activities you have to do. If you used to do a three hour clean and tidy blitz, you now need to divide the tasks into bite sizes and breaks across the day (s). Otherwise you may push yourself too far and be unable to do anything for days after.  Maybe you used to jam pack your schedule or were always late because you underestimated how much time you had. Now you need to overestimate how long activities take and add buffer zones of rest in-between. These rest breaks can be 15 minutes, a few hours or day in-between. You may need to delegate household chores or work part time or have to stay home and rest. I only do one thing a day so if I have to go to a hospital appointment that will be the only thing I do that day. I will rest and sleep afterwards. And the following day will be resting indoors as well

If someone tells you that they can't meet up tomorrow because they had a bath yesterday- BELIEVE THEM as preposterous as it seems because if you have M.E. you only have so much energy to live on for the week because sleep and food don't seem to top up your energy enough to function fully. The spoons theory explains living with chronic illness well. This pandemic has meant that many people have experienced the loneliness of isolation that many with chronic illness live with. So please post covid, remember to include and check up on your friend or family member who happens to have a chronic illness.  If anyone has lost someone directly or indirectly to covid my heart goes out to you. 

If anyone wants to know more about having Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/M.E. tweet me or send me an Instagram DM. For more information or to make a donation contact ME Association  or Action for ME  (U.K) 

Kind Natured Sea Minerals & Mint Revitalising Foot Scrub

Just like our face, our feet also require attention so I always use a foot scrub come spring/summer to get my feet sandal ready. I recently picked up Kind Natured Sea Minerals & Mint Revitalising Foot Scrub without having heard of the brand before. Their products range includes skincare and hair care. All their products are 97% natural, the remaining 3% often consists of fragrance & preservatives that are essential to creating a functional product. Whenever possible they use fragrances that are derived from plants but have to label them as 'non-natural' due to the extraction process they have been under. Their goal is to create a 100% natural product. They claim that they "always test on people rather than animals" so are cruelty free but aren't registered  as part of an official scheme (there's no leaping bunny logo.) I love the name as it refers to the 'natural' ingredients and has happy, positive connotations.  

The Kind Natured Sea Minerals & Mint Revitalising Foot Scrub is free from sulphates, parabens and petrochemicals (mineral oil) and is vegan. The sea minerals include sea salt and pumice, to exfoliate the skin. The red algae extract (Chondrus Crispus (Carageenan) Extract) Fucus vesiculosus extract, (a type of brown algae) and Laminaria Digitata Extract, (another type of brown algae/kelp) soothe and moisturise the skin.  The peppermint oil is to refresh and revitalise the feet. I appreciate that they haven't added a lot of essential oils to this product as they can irritate my sensitive skin and it's a habit a lot of natural skincare brands fall into which is to stuff their products with as many essential oils they can for the fragrance. There's just peppermint oil in the formula which is listed as no 12 out of 18 ingredients appearing towards the end of the list. 

The colour of the tube stands out and it has a 'window' where you can see the product which is nice as often you can't see what's inside until you get home. The flip top lid is very practical. 

Kind Natured claim that this scrub will "revive and smooth overworked feet." It's very abrasive scrub with oats, sea salt and pumice, it feels like they've chosen everything they can think of that's rough to the touch and put them all in one formula. When I tested it on my hand it felt sharp and rough and almost sore when I rubbed the scrub across my hand so I was worried it would be too rough and unpleasant to use but actually was ok.  It’s a rough scrub but luckily it didn’t leave any cuts on my skin but I wouldn't apply this in a rush as you need to massage it gently.  I applied the scrub on the top of my feet, heel and between my toes and it left my skin looking fresh and pink rubbing away all the grey winter skin cells. My feet felt incredibly soft and smooth afterwards although it was a little sore in-between my toes. It smells very minty and I felt a very slight tingle afterwards and it felt very refreshing. I think that this scrub would be good at getting rid of callouses. The packaging in relatively unisex and I think this would suit men as their skin is thicker and tougher. 

Kind Natured Sea Minerals & Mint Revitalising Foot Scrub is priced at £4.99 for 150ml making it one of the cheapest foot scrubs. 

In conclusion I think that this is very effective and does what it says. I will happily finish the tube but because of it's abrasive nature I wouldn't repurchase. If you're interested in natural skin products at an affordable price then check out Kind Natured, they offer free shipping over £10 on the Kind Natured website . Their products are also available in Boots and on Amazon.