HAIR | Hot Tools One Step Blowout Volumizer with Before and After Pics!

I talked a little bit on Instagram about this revolutionary hairstyling tool last Fall after receiving one through the London Drugs Beauty event as we were all quite enamoured with it! It became one of those things like a hairdryer where I was just using it all the time and it felt like I didn't NEED to talk about it as it was such a big part of my life as is, but the One Step Blowout Volumizer really isn't like any hairstyling tool I have used before. I have already reviewed a blow dryer and a straightener in the past and after you review one of those, it's hard to to add much more to the conversation unless it makes your meals too! 

PR gifted

NAILS | Daisy, Daisy, Daisy #CBBxManiMonday

I took a few days off this week to essentially clean up the apartment and get my home life back and track. As I mentioned before, when work life is productive, I never seem to have the energy for home life, but I was thinking to myself this morning that if I didn't blog my days off would be more free to do the housework that I don't seem to have time to do more regularly. Without blogging though, I would be a most unhappy individual and the overall joy I feel from being surrounded by beauty products is well worth it so as I write this, I am soaking some long overdue hand-washing (I despise hand-washing dresses and sweaters) and finally ticking my first house-related chore off the list! When people ask me how I have time to do my nails even just once a week (I can't believe I used to paint them 2-3x before!), I legit have to make time...like at 12am sometimes which is what happened with these nails because my husband and I ended up watching the movie "Booksmart" last night (it was ok).

PR samples

BEAUTY | St. Tropez Bronzing Face Sheet Mask with Selfies

Where has this week gone? We have gone from "early to mid January" in the blink of an eye! I know many of us have been bitten with the Marie Kondo Bug, but I've actually been decluttering since the middle of December starting with my makeup. I still have a long ways to go as I find it difficult to do after I have come home from work, but the last two days I have stayed up until 12am working on clearing out underneath the bathroom sink and I am happy to say that MUCH has  been given away. I had 20 dry shampoos under there and I have no idea why I had so many!

In addition to decluttering my real life, I have decided to shift my blog content back to more of a mixture of beauty as this space was a Sheet Mask Mecca for the latter half of 2018, but it has been a little while since a dedicated sheet mask post and this was one that I had a lot of questions about! A sheet mask that tans makes perfect sense in theory and though I was afraid of what could happen - I had to give the St. Tropez Bronzing Face Sheet Mask* a try!

PR sample from LD Beauty Event

NAILS | Bloody Monster Mouth Kitty Stitches #CBBxManiMonday

I realize looking at these photos that I have no orange in my manicure so it's almost like a Christmas manicure except for the fangs, evil kitty and blood. I guess it depends on how your Christmas celebrations go, but we are now halfway through October which means two more weeks until Halloween! I had my first piece of Halloween-sized candy over the weekend which signals the beginning of the indulgent season of chocolate and feeling like I've eaten too much every week! I have been wanting to do all these Halloween designs over the years and finally sat down today and chose a few favourites!

Some PR samples featured

NAILS | Red Carpet Manicure Color Dip Video with London Drugs!

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a few teasers that I was back in the studio shooting another YouTube video with London Drugs! If you haven't seem my first one, check out my Halloween collaboration here! This video is all about how to use the Red Carpet Manicure Color Dip system which you may have seen last year as these "nail polish powders" were sort of a new way of doing acrylic nails, but at home! The dipping aspect is pretty cool and I definitely got an easy 2 weeks of wear using this new system because the finish is so rock hard strong! There is a bit of a learning curve, but hopefully this video helps!

I hope everyone enjoys the tutorial because I was really nervous about this one since it was a little out of my element! I think it turned out alright in the end and I may even pick up more powder colours!

London Drugs is currently sold out of the Starter Kits online, but head on over to your local London Drugs and you should be able to find the kit there! 

NAILS | Spook-tacular #MummyMonday

I am just squeaking this in for ManiMonday, but in all fairness I did at least have the photo up on Instagram this morning! I tried to get this post up last night, but I ended up calling it a night at 10pm and then being rudely awoken at 2am by Hugo and Hemingway fighting. On me. Multiple cats I tell ya!

I'm not intentionally trying to be an unofficial spokesperson for nail polish brand Prim+Proper, but I just really love these polishes and I have been really surprised by how much I keep wanting to use them! Halloween is one of my favourite times of the year and I actually love doing Halloween more than Christmas nail art. I've done a mummy or two before, but never on allll my nails so here it is!

NAILS | Wonder Woman Nail Art Tutorial with Prim+Proper and LD Beauty

I am so excited to share this post with you because it features my first EVER nail art tutorial on YouTube! London Drugs approached me back in the summer to create a Halloween nail art tutorial on their LD Beauty channel and I will admit that I was hesitant at first. I am totally fine speaking in person, but on camera with a film crew is a whole other barrel of worms! A long time ago, I figured that I should constantly do things I am scared of doing and it's not like I was being asked to jump out of a plane or address the nation about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. I just had to paint my nails. Something I do almost every three days so why the hell not?  

EVENT | London Drugs 2017 Fall Beauty Event

I rarely do event posts because I never know if you guys are interested in reading about them, but this year's annual London Drugs Beauty Event was something totally different than from previous years as it was an overnight event taking place in beautiful Whistler! London Drugs very generously hosted all media at the Fairmont Chateau in Whistler with each of us having our own accommodations. For me this meant lounging in bed and watching Food Network! Though it was a bit of a challenge to attend the event, as it was in the middle of the week, I did a bit of soul-selling with my boss and even SHE thought this was something I needed to go to! I am going to apologize for the quality of the photos now with their different sizes (I had to crop out the hoardes of people passing by the products!) and horrific lighting! I promise the photos will be better when my reviews are ready! 

BATH & BODY | The New Zoella Beauty Jelly and Gelato Collection!

Zoe Sugg, better known as Zoella, is probably one of the few millennials on YouTube I actually like. Not to bash millennials, but some of the younger girls on YouTube can be a bit high energy for me/fake sounding which is just something I don't identify with. I feel like Zoella is intelligent, entertaining and the British accent definitely helps!

When Zoella came out with her first bath and body collection, I was enamored with the cuteness of it all and the fact that she admitted to buying her own bath fizzies on her video because she loved them so much and wanted them right away that day when she had run out! Whether that story is true or not, I would like to believe it is because her bath products really do smell fantastic in a playful, grown-up type of way. Having used Zoella's new Jelly & Gelato Collection for a couple of weeks now, I am now very tempted to pick up the additional pieces of the collection because I find myself looking forward to actually having a shower just to use these shower gels!

NAILS | Happy Canada 150 and Birthday to Me!

Apologies for the blog silence the last three days as I have had some very long work days and then a horrific case of food poisoning Thursday night from a bowl of tuna poke. It was a pretty good bowl too, but an hour later and every hour after that...from 9pm-6am was probably one of the worst things I have ever experienced in a very long time. Thankfully, today is my birthday and I am feeling SO MUCH better so at least now I get to head out and celebrate!

NAILS | Red Carpet Manicure LED Gel Polish in My Main Beach and Black Stretch Limo #ManiMonday

Though it looks like I have abandoned the bloggy while l have been away, I am staying in tonight after a great and crazy weekend at GenBeauty to make sure that I still have a Mani Monday post for you because I am ridiculously behind on everything else! I hope you have been following me on Snapchat and Instagram because there is a ridiculous amount of GenBeauty spam on those two channels as we speak! Since I knew I would be traveling and BUSY, I figured it was the perfect time to wear my favourite curable gel polishes because I wanted my nails to be absolutely flawless the week I was in Toronto. Red Carpet Manicure has a huge library of colours and there are some brights for the spring and summer season which I happily dove into!

HAIR | Remington T|Studio™ PROtect Straightener Review with Before and After Hair!

I don't know about you, but have gone through quite a number of straighteners in my life. I started using a straightener when I was 17, but it straightened "safely" with steam. Sure, it worked for the most part, but when it came to frizziness, forget about it. Steam just didn't cut it. I bought my trusty GHD flat iron last year during the Sephora VIB sale more for curling my hair than straightening it and though the GHD does a good job of giving me slick straight hair, I usually take extra care to add in some sort of oil or other conditioning treatment afterwards so that my hair doesn't snap like straw.

Last year at the London Drugs event, we witnessed the debut of an incredibly cool new hair straightener from Remington called the T|Studio PROtect. Ioulia from the Real Housewives of Vancouver was the spokesmodel that night and I must admit that I fangirled a little bit when I asked to take a photo with her. The other thing I noticed was how nice her hair looked even though it had been continually curled and straightened for most of the evening!
  

NAILS | London Drugs Beauty Night “Straw” Nail Art

If anyone was following the “#LDBeauty hashtag on Twitter and/or IG you will know that in Western Canada there is one HUGE beauty event that is the talk of the town for months before and certainly long after the event is done! The London Drugs Beauty event is a showcase of LD’s top beauty vendors showing media what’s new and cool and what’s upcoming in the Fall. It also happens to be an event where there is much blogger swag given out so that we can let you guys know what you need to have in your life as well provide reviews on products you might need help deciding on. I’ve been trying to get back into nail art a bit more, so in an attempt to get into the LD spirit last night, I decided to do a straw manicure with a little accent nail of LD love!

(Polishes used: Base colour: Rainbow Honey – Charaxes, Models Own – Pastel Pink, Rainbow Honey – Tayabak, Sally Hansen InstaDri – OMGhost)

Straw manicures are kind of cool to create because all you need to do is dip the end of a straw into some polish and “stamp” away! The circles are never quite complete for me because my nails are quite curved, but I think it almost makes the manicure look more abstract. I attempted to write “London Drugs” across my nails, but letter are brutally difficult for me to draw and space out so “LD” and a hear it was! 

Reviews of products from the LD event will be slowly coming through! I’m such a snail…

HAIR | Giving Hair Anti-Frizz Style with the *NEW* CONAIR Infiniti Pro The Ultimate Brush and got2b Haircare

Ever since I got my hair ombred, I feel like I have gotten somewhat vain about my hair. I used to be fairly low maintenance about it with straightening and smoothing being the only things I cared about, but now that it only really looks good with waves I have employed what feels like an entourage of tools to make it look fabulous. I have been relying solely on my ghd as my one and only hair appliance and although I still use a hairbrush to brush out tangles it’s not a tool that I have been looking to improve upon. When London Drugs offered me the opportunity to try out the new Conair Infiniti Pro The Ultimate Brush*($39.99 CDN) I though sure, why not. My current hairbrush situation is pretty boring and it can only get better, right?

The Infiniti Pro is a revolutionary new hair brush that is going to be a game changer for anyone who has struggled with frizz or static-prone hair. Vancouver’s humidity can play massive havoc with any gal’s hair and I will admit that there have been times when I have DRIVEN instead of taken transit to avoid dealing with my hair after humidity. This brush is powered with an anti-frizz ionic generator that releases ions straight onto hair, making it smooth, silky and soft. We have heard about ions before with flat irons and hairdryers and what conditioning ions do is neutralize any static charge along the cuticle of the hair for that instantly shiny finish.

Swatch It Up | Revlon Parfumerie–Italian Leather

When I first saw the Revlon Parfumerie collection released in the US, I figured it was another collection that we Canadians would be deprived of yet again, but when I asked Revlon on Twitter whether these would be available in Canada and they said yes, I was elated! I have been dying for this collection to show up since last month and when I finally spotted a fresh new display at London Drugs a few days ago, I was literally shaking with excitement! The bottles are absolutely adorable and the scents and colours look spectacular!

The very first colour that I had to try on was Italian Leather as my curiosity was peaked by how Revlon managed to package the scent of leather into a polish. Just to let everyone know, the scent only appears once the polish has dried, so don’t go sniffing the actual polish from the bottle!

Disappointingly, it smells sweet, almost like candy. Maybe Italian leather smells different from regular leather? Even though the scent wasn’t quite right, the formula and colour are to die for! What I’m wearing is 2 coats that applied just BEAUTIFULLY!