Worth The Hype? BPerfect Stacey Marie Carnival Palette

I'll be honest, when this palette first found its way onto my Facebook news feed, I had never heard of BPerfect or Stacey Marie. I'll be honest, even after doing some research I can't actually fathom how this palette is being sold for £40, but we'll go into price later on.

BPerfect are an Irish brand, established by Brendan Macdowell in 2013. Over the past five years they seem to have grown rapidly in Ireland (perhaps why I have never come across them), and their products are stocked in shops around the country, and some stores in the UK too. The brand seems to focus mostly on tanning products (another reason they may have passed me by, I look like a paracetamol with pink hair), but they do stock some cosmetics too.

The Stacey Marie Carnival palette is the most expensive product that BPerfect stock. This is probably down to the higher number of shadows in the palette, and also I assume a commission will be paid to Stacey Marie. That being said, they also stock another palette which appears to be a collaboration with a makeup artist and that retails for £24.99. The Carnival is £39.99 plus £3.50 shipping. This product is available in some shops, so you can save the shipping cost if you can find it in stock near you, and it is also available on Beauty Bay who do student discount and free shipping if you spend over £15.

I do like this palette, actually. I think its so refreshing to see a palette which focuses on bright shades, rather than shoving one or two in there for the "pop effect". This palette has 24 eyeshadows in a range of matte, duochrome and metallic finishes and two highlighters, one which would suit light to medium skin tones and one for medium to deeper skin. I am never really a fan of palettes that have highlighters for a range of skin tones as I just don't get use out of the darker ones. I have seen a lot of girls on social media buy this palette for their makeup kit though. I personally don't use Chinese produced shadows in my kit, but I guess that's where the different highlighter shades might be useful.

The packaging is nothing special. It's a black cardboard component that came wrapped in clear film. There is no outer box or slipcase, and for £40 I'd personally like to see a little more attention to detail on the packaging, but then I am a total packaging junkie!

These shadows mostly swatch nicely. I did struggle with the purples and one or two others, but purple shadows are notoriously difficult to formulate so I'm not going to be too critical of that. They do, for the most part, perform well on the eye with a good quality brush although I did experience some patchiness and blending issues with a couple of shades - mainly Naked, Basic and Wasted. I didn't notice any staining to my eyes, but the brighter shadows (particularly the greens) stained my white bristled brushes really badly which I found to be quite disappointing.

As I've said previously, my main gripe with this palette is the price point. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely understand that smaller businesses can't afford to buy in the quantities that the likes of Morphe and BH Cosmetics do, but I just don't think that this palette is worth £40. If it was £25, or possibly even £30 I'd be telling everyone to snap it up. That said, this palette has been received extremely well on social media, with makeup enthusiasts and artists alike raving about it. So take my opinion as you wish, but I'd probably wait for a sale or try and find one with light usage on a makeup selling group or app instead.

Sugarpill x Little Twin Stars Collection

Behold! The most beautiful makeup collection my eyes ever did see!

On January 22nd, Sugarpill announced a mystery collaboration on their Instagram page. I didn't know what it was but I knew I was going to have this! Sugarpill is by far my favourite makeup brand in the world, and I absolutely adore the quality of their makeup, and the packaging is always absolutely perfect.

There was much speculation online about who the collab could be with. Given Amy (Sugarpill's owner)'s love of drag and her close friendships with many celebrity drag queens, most people were guessing a collab with another queen, much like Sugarpill's Kim Chi products. However, on January 24th, the brand announced that the collaboration was with Little Twin Stars, a pair of adorable Sanrio characters who were popular during the 1980's (another point from me, I am obsessed with anything from the 80's).

The collection consists of an eyeshadow palette, two liquid lipsticks and a makeup bag. The eyeshadow palette is available to purchase separately, and you can also purchase the liquid lipsticks as a twin set. They aren't available as singles, and the makeup bag only comes with the whole collection.

The collection launched on February 1st and once it has sold out, will  not be returning (and unlike most brands, I actually believe Sugarpill when they say this stuff....remember the Pumpkin Spice eyeshadow and lipstick? Man, I wish they'd bring those back). The products are currently available from the Sugarpill website and Beautylish, but keep in mind that when you are buying from the US you will have to pay an import fee. I bought mine from Beautylish and the fees were £16, but if I had bought through Sugarpill I'd have had to pay another £8 on top of that for the Royal Mail handling fee.

I have contacted Beauty Bay and Love-Makeup.co.uk who both told me that they will be getting the collection in, but neither of them would give me a launch date. I absolutely needed this in my hands as soon as possible so I chose to buy through Beautylish as I know that their shipping is really fast (and they use FedEx so no Royal Mail fee) and I would probably get this collection before Beauty Bay launched it. As of the time I am writing this blog, the products are fully stocked at Beautylish and Sugarpill and have just been launched on Beauty Bay and Love-Makeup in the UK.

The prices appear to be different on both UK sites, with Beauty Bay listing the full collection at £60, the lip duo at £30 and the palette at £32. Love-Makeup are selling the whole collection at £63, the palette at £30 and the lip duo at £28.

Let's take a look at the collection:

The collection comes packaged in this really pretty little keepsake box. The box is made from cardboard and has a magnetic closure. It's fairly sturdy so can be kept to store things inside - I think I will keep my single highlighters in this box since they are currently taking over the drawer that they live in at the moment!

The box has a cardboard sleeve with the Little Twin Stars in colour, and this slides off to reveal the Little Twin Stars in gold, with the Sugarpill logo on the box itself. 

Once you open the box, there's a removable insert which holds all the pieces of the collection. The packaging on this set is just beautiful. It's so detailed and true to both the Little Twin Stars and Sugarpill aesthetics. I generally don't keep the boxes that my makeup comes in, but I will definitely be using this box again. 

Inside the box you can see the 6 eyeshadow palette, makeup bag and two liquid lipsticks. The eyeshadow palette is the same size as the previous Sugarpill x Edward Scissorhands palette, for reference. 

The palette comes with 6 rectangular eyeshadow pans, weighing 2.5g each, slightly smaller than a regular sized Sugarpill pressed shadow which is 3g. This palette contains three foiled shadows, two frost shades and one matte. I know most people would prefer to have more than one matte shade in a palette, but I have so many eyeshadows that it really doesn't bother me. I very rarely use one palette per eye look anyway. 

L-R: Wish, Sky Candy, Dream Dust, Twinkle Twinkle, Star Ribbon, Cloud Maker

The shadows swatch beautifully and perform really nicely, just as I would expect from any Sugarpill shadows. They are very pale in colour but can be built up for intensity or applied with a damp brush to really bring out the foiled aspect of the shades.

The lipsticks are absolutely adorable. There is one lip colour to represent each of the twins hair colours. Kiki is a beautiful aqua shade with gold sparkles, and Lala is a bright bubblegum pink which also has the gold sparkles running through it.

Please excuse my awful swatches, I tapped them to bring out the glitter before they had dried! Both of these shades can be worn on the eyes, and I like to use Kiki in my waterline if I'm wearing the eyeshadow palette, I think it goes so well with Star Ribbon! When I was playing about with this collection, I mixed the two colours together and got this muted purple colour, which is probably much more wearable as an every day shade than either of the two lipsticks alone.

The makeup bag is fairly small, but it can fit a decent amount of products inside. I am not a collector of makeup bags really, I prefer to have everything out so that I can see it, and I don't ever travel at all but this is very cute. I like the frosted plastic on the front, which means you can see what's inside but you can't see through the bag completely. It's a very cute design with the Little Twin Stars sitting on a cloud and the zipper is the Sugarpill logo.

I'm so pleased with this collection. I think it's so cute and such a refreshing change from the constant stream of warm toned red and orange palettes we've been bombarded with lately. Yes, you may need to incorporate another palette if you're using this one for a full eye look but it isn't necessary and the foiled shades make a great accent to a neutral look if you want to change up your eye look now and again. I absolutely adore the lip colours, but if you're a nude lip kind of girl then you might want to skip the lip duo and just go for the eyeshadow palette - or give bold lips a try, you never know, you might love them!

Review - Charlotte Tilbury Bar of Gold

First released in 2013 as a limited edition, the Bar of Gold highlighter is now back in stock! This highlighter has become a cult favourite among collectors, mainly because of how stunning it looks! 
Charlotte Tilbury is well known for her high end products and beautiful packaging. The products look astounding and the items I have tried from her range have all performed really well. It's nice to find a brand that has eye catching packaging and that works like a dream too.

If you Google reviews on the Bar of Gold, probably the first thing you will notice is people saying that it is smaller than expected. It. Is. Tiny. Absolutely miniscule, especially for something that retails at £32. The packaging is also cardboard, which I have seen quite a few complaints about. Ideally I'd like to see this in a plastic or metal component, but it's not the end of the world for me that it's in cardboard. Here's a comparison with a Charlotte Tilbury Lipstick box:

See. Tiny. Good job it's highlighter and that you don't need to use much of it at a time!

On to the swatches! Here is a finger swatch (top) and a brush swatch using the Illamasqua highlighter brush (now discontinued, but I'd compare it to the Morphe M510 if you want an idea of the brush used). No primer, NW10 skin:

I was worried that this would be too dark for my skin, as I tend to find gold highlights too warm toned and dark for me. I was very pleasantly surprised, however, to find that this is very much a white toned gold shade on the skin and looks great on us ghost faced girls (and boys, of course)!

If you're expecting Instagram levels of glow, then this highlighter is definitely not for you. It gives a really pretty, subtle glow to the cheekbones. I'm sure it can be built up, but I really don't think it's necessary with a product like this. I don't have a picture of me wearing this highlighter so I threw some on this afternoon and took a quick picture - please excuse pretty much everything about this picture!!

That's a shadow, not muddy contour I promise!

I really do enjoy this highlighter for day to day use, and I will get a lot of use out of it. I can't see this working well on anything darker than a medium toned skin though (although I'd love you to prove me wrong, please tag me in your swatches on Instagram), and as I said before, if you like the whole "glowing to the gods" Tin Man look then this is definitely not for you. I think it's a great little item for a makeup collector as it's fast becoming an iconic piece of makeup and it's bound to sell out again this time around!

Salon Update

So, we have had the salon for around two months now and this is how it originally looked! It still looks pretty much the same to be honest, as it was nicely decorated and kitted out with most of the things we needed, we just wanted to make it a bit more homely.

I have moved my makeup in, and that's pretty much all I need, I'm using these drawers which I got from Amazon at the moment, but I'll have to replace them as I thought I would be clever and take the entire thing with me on a mobile job but ended up breaking them - not so clever! Next time I'll be less lazy and pack up the Zuca bag instead! Julie also has a set of these drawers for her kit, but hers are white because she's much better at being a grown up than I am.

The acrylic stand on the top has lipsticks, lip and eye pencils, concealers and lip stains in. The drawers are full of everything else I need - palettes, foundations, single shadows, hair clips, cotton pads etc.. And of course, my Makeup Forever brush cleaner is on the top of the drawers, I love this for when I need to clean off my brushes very quickly in between colours.

You can just see our little fire in the corner of this picture, there's no heating in the room so we have this to keep us - and you - warm!

Our waiting chair - we get SO many comments about this, and it really is beautiful! I think we are going to get a little magazine rack to go next to it so people can have a read while they're waiting.

Julie's beauty bed and nail station - she offers brow and lash treatments, gel polish, pedicures, waxing and more! We've also brought a little mirror in, and the clutter on the back shelves has gone now.

Child labour is cheap but they don't get much done! This is my boys helping us to clean up. They weren't very helpful at all, surprisingly.

Here's Julie performing HD brows on a client, we are so excited to have people coming through our doors and can't wait to meet more of you! We will be expanding our services over the coming months too, so keep an eye on our Facebook and Instagram pages for updates!

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