This is just going to be a little bit of a catch up blog post today because I feel like it's been a long time since I posted. As well as this you all seem to enjoy the posts that are a little more personal and a especially the ones featuring Myles. (My boyfriend for any new viewers.) With that in mind I thought I'd tell you about our Valentines day together. 

As you can see by our red faces it was very cold and windy!

Valentines day this year was a Friday which meant we were both at college throughout the most of the day. He spend all day making me believe he felt really bad and guilty for totally forgetting Valentines day, which made me a little upset and sulky all day. I was totally wrong though because when we got to his house there was a card, a box of chocolates, a single red rose and most special to me a stunning blue orchid! Orchid's are my favourite flower and I love the fact it was blue, really different from the typical flowers girlfriends get given at Valentines day or any other time.

After a Dominoes and a tub of Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream between us (my romantic choice for an evening meal) it was an early night because the next morning we had to be up at half six ready to go to the Harry Potter Warner Brothers Studio Tour!

This is actually something we booked together as our Christmas present to each other but because it's such a popular place the 15th of February was the closest we got to Christmas. With that in mind we both agreed that the day would be our Christmas treat to each other and we'd get each other a Valentines day present from the gift shop. 

The Cupboard Under the Stairs

When we got there we found out that we'd been lucky enough to book tickets during the Animal Actors week which had the animals from the films dotted around the studios. We saw a little puppy of Fang's Crookshanks the cat, Scabbers the rat, Hedwig the owl and I touched a snake! It was a very strange feeling but I'm so glad I did it. It's a very brave thing for me to do.

On arrival we were told that it usually takes visitors 3-4 hours to walk around and enjoy everything including the giant gift shop at the end of the tour. Myles and I however, took a good 5 hours plus making sure we didn't miss a single thing and stopping for a nice lunch in the café. In the café we tried a Butterbeer which has to be one of the most disgusting thing's I've ever tasted which was disappointing, although it was made up for by the fact I got to keep the glass!

Sadly I don't have many pictures because I took them all on Myles' phone (his camera being a better quality than mine) but I'm sure if any of you are as big fans as I am then you'll either have seen the place in person or on youtube videos and blog posts. All in all I definitely recommend the experience to any of you who are big fans of Harry Potter it literally is magical. 

From the gift shop I got a Gryffindor hat which I love and is super cosy. I got my little sister a chocolate frog which she was head over heels in love with and Myles a Ministry of Magic mug.

I hope you enjoyed this post and I'll see you all next time...that could be a while away though considering all I feel like doing at the moment is curling up and watching Harry Potter films over and over and over again.

xxx

New Tag: Lotions & Potions/Product Storage:

Hey guys,  I hope you're all well today I'm going to be doing something a bit different and start my own tag. I'm going to call it the "Lotions & Potions Tag" because that's the name I've always used for all my hair, skin and tanning products e.t.c. and everyone has a different storage technique for them. I thought some of you might be interested in seeing the way I store mine and seeing how all the rest of you store yours.

I keep all my beauty products (that aren't make up) on top of the chest of drawers that holds the majority of my clothes and pyjamas. Going from left to the right the first thing you should see is a little basket. This is where I store the main products I use with the tallest at the bag working forwards to the smallest, so that I can see everything well and hopefully no product will be forgotten about and abandoned. It also means I can easily grab anything I need on lazy mornings without having to rifle through and knock things over. If I ever have too many products to fir into the basket then I'll line up some of the pretty little things along the front as you can see in the picture, I really like doing this because I think lining up some pretty bottles along the front can look really nice.

In the taller flowery pink basket I stand all my different hair brushes, I've got a thin and a wide toothed comb, a flat brush and a rounded barrel brush. I find that keeping them in a basket helps keep them look neat and pretty, when it's easy for your brushes to look a little scruffy when they don't have a proper home. I also have my tangle teaser which lives just outside the basket because it doesn't quite fit. Back to the basket though, I have my big bulldogs clips and grips to separate my hair when I straighten it clasped on to the side and a pair of scissors on the inside because, well, you never know when a spare pair of scissors comes in handy.

On the left side of the drawers I keep my vintage tin which features close up in this post  which holds little cotton wool pads for nail varnish and removing make up. Next to it I have a pretty little vintage bottle which you saw in my Christmas Post and my big mirror from Ikea. In a little glass box that my uncle made for me with an engraved lid (it has my name on it) I keep all my makeup brushes and last but not least I keep the necklace I wear everyday on it's little stand in the box and the watch I wear every day behind it.

Some of you may have noticed the little box with the red lid under the drawers in the top picture. This is a pretty little storage box that I keep little empty pots and bottles in that I want to photograph for empties posts.

Well that's it for this post I really hope this tag takes off because it would be nice to see how other people store their products. I tag all of you that want to have a go. 

xxx 

Monthly Favourites: January 2014

I know this gets said by every blogger and youtuber at the beginning of every single monthly favourites, but where oh where has the month gone? I still can't get over how quickly Christmas came and went and here we are in February. However on to the point, I know I don't do these posts every month but that's because I'm a but of a creature of habit and tend to stick with a product until it is completely used up so I very rarely have new products that I use each and every month. On to the point though as last month came after Christmas I had plenty of products that I've been loving and so I thought it was high time I made a monthly favourites.

I'll start with the least glamorous of the bunch and that's deodorant. Lacura is an Aldi based brand and some of you may be thinking oh dear not a supermarket brand but I'm sure the rest of you who have used Lacura products will know what I mean when I say you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and regular beauty products if you didn't know. This is the Aloe Fresh roll on deodorant, and after the Sure product from an old empties post which stopped working about half way through it was nice to have such a fresh clean feeling product that actually worked. I would say I recommend it because it did it's job but I would be lying because I won't be buying it again as it has stained a ridiculous amount of my tops with those horrible white marks that so many deodorants do.

The M.A.C 235 is hands down one of the best brushes I have ever used. My first impressions of it were oh dear it's bigger than my eye I'm really going to struggle to use it, whereas in actuality I find it the perfect shape and size for highlighting under my brow bone and in the inner corners of my eye. It's made it a two second job to do both eyes since I started using it, and I have no intentions of stopping for a time.

The Body Shop Beautifying Oil in Olive is next. As much as I still cam't get over the fact I could have bought any other scent than olive (because even though I do like the smell I struggle to get past the fact it really does feel like I'm using olive cooking oil on my skin) I do absolutely love it. I've used it in a really thick layer along the ends of my hair a few hours before a shower to really soak in as much moisture as possible before a wash and also in my cuticles before and after painting my nails to make them look better. I feel like it has made a difference but I can't quite tell if that's a placebo effect or not so I think a little linger using it should make things more clear.

Another M.A.C brush now, this one the 266. Ever since I started using his I have loved the way it makes my eyebrows look. As someone who used to just quickly run a brown eyebrow pencil through my brows using a powder and a precise brush has made a huge difference for me, I think my eyebrows look far more natural and real when I use this brush along with a powder.

Liz Earle's Instant Boost Skin Tonic Spritzer is a big love of mine for before bedtime. It smells so nice and relaxing as well as soothing my skin, which always helps send me off to bed well. I plan on doing a full review of this at some point so I won't go into too much detail but I will say I'm sad the bottle isn't any bigger because I don't want to run out! 

Last but not least is a non-beauty favourite, it's the lovely Michael Buble's album to be loved. I just had to include it because I have to have listened to this album from start to end at least 50 times and I love his voice in every single song. 

That's all for another post, I hope you enjoyed it and I hope to see you again soon. Also do you like a little non-beauty favourite every now and again or would you prefer these posts to be strictly beauty related? Let me know in the comments.

xxx

FOTD: Meg (Hercules) Inspired Makeup:

Hercules has to be one of my all time favourite films and considering I have crazy curly hair and my favourite colour is purple how could I not create a look inspired by Meg?

From the pictures I saw she had a completely flawless base with very angular features. So I really packed on the foundation, concealer and powdered an awful lot over the top to make sure the base was really flawless and high coverage. I also contoured a lot more than usual to really add definition to my face making it look so much more angular. I added a really little amount of a rose toned blush just on the apples of my cheeks because the picture I looked at had a little pink tone in it.

The eyes were my favourite park, there was no highlighting or crease work involved it was just block light toned purple up to the crease and stopping there in a block line. The eyeliner was kind of strange to draw because there was literally a dot at the outer corner of the eye and then a line all the way around the eye completely darkly lining it along with very long thin eyebrows, which I couldn't create too well because mine are so naturally thick.

For the lips she hardly had any definition to them they were very rounded but very dark purple. I filled in the top of my lip to make them look rounded but with a deep purple colour.

I hope you enjoyed this post and if you want any more Disney inspired post's then please let me know in the description.

xxx

FOTD: Pink and Brown Natural Valentines Look:

As you can see this is a very natural look, that I will probably be sporting this Valentine's day. I know it's not a lot of makeup but I personally think that on Valentine's day you wouldn't want to look too done up and over the top. 

I started off with a fresh natural looking base made up of a BB cream, light concealer, a very very light contour, a touch of blush and a little higlithing. The reason I was so light and gentle with all of is because, personally, I associate love and Valentine's with softness and smoothness which in terms of the face would mean no harsh lines or bright colours.

I wanted to go with a pink and brown eye because, again they're soft colours also I really like the way they blend together. So I started with a really light and shimmery pink, then went through the crease with another light shimmery colour, only this time it was a brown. I did a lot of blending to keep the look seamless then blended the same colours under the eyes and doing a little highlighting along the brow bone and in the inner corner of the eyes. The brows themselves are really gentle and natural too I just used a light brown powder and a clear gel to set them. I applied an extremely thin line of brown liner along the upper lash line and a brown mascara.

Last but not least a pretty nude lip, not much to say about that just nice and natural as with the rest of the look. 

That's the end of another post, I really hope you enjoyed this post and I'd love to see if any of you recreate the loo. If you do then please find me on twitter @EJEbeauty and tweet me a picture.

I'll see you all next time. 

xxx