Recent Budget Beauty Buys

 There's something slightly embarrassing about the word budget - if you let it, it can make you feel like you're not good enough to buy the best and that you have to settle for the dupes and poorer quality goods. But budget doesn't always equate to poor quality and certainly not poor value. I love the higher end brands but can often feel deflated when I buy higher and realise that brand name aside - there's often not a massive difference in the quality of the product or even in the quality of the packaging. I will almost always suffer some kind of buyer's remorse when I've spent a lot, but never if I buy budget/High Street.

 

These recent items I've acquired also feel like more of a win as some of them were free or greatly reduced! And that's never a bad thing.

 

First up this Ultra Contour Palette from Makeup Revolution.

I actually won this for a review prize - so it was a freebie.

 

 

This is a great little palette. Unlike some of the other TAM Beauty brands, I find that Makeup Revolution products are of a really good quality. They are highly pigmented and blend well. It does seem that almost every single Makeup Revolution product is a dupe for a popular palette and there is a lot of argument about the ethical issue of duping.

But for me personally, it's all about affordability.

 

More freebies! This time a voucher that came with some home insurance. Lovely to get a free £30 voucher - however, the catch was that you had to spend it in full at Littlewoods.com. Have you ever looked at Littlewoods.com? There's not a great deal you can actually buy for under £30 and prices seemed very jacked up. So I took a look in their beauty and skincare section - again, hugely jacked up prices and some interesting bits but not a mega choice. It was actually quite hard to spend the £30 - so I opted for a couple of palettes that I'd had my eye on and to spend the rest chose some false eyelashes (not pictured) and the cheapest thing I could find to round it up - a Rimmel blusher.

 

 

The Nyx Lid Lingerie palette is absolutely gorgeous! I'm particularly in love with the heather-lilac colour. The pigments are strong and they blend well. I'm sure this is going to be an often reached for palette for an every day look.

The Sleek palette is slightly disappointing on first try. The colours look nice in the pan but they are not as pigmented as the Nyx and don't blend as well. I ended up with a rather muddied look unfortunately. Needs some more playing around with and figuring out how to get the best out of it.

The Rimmel blush was a nice surprise though (considering it was just picked to fill up the deal). The packaging is a bugger to open though but I love the colour (although have to be careful not to be too heavy handed).

 

Now to some items where I actually paid for them!

We paid a really quick visit to Leeds last week before business in York and of course I had to pop into T.K Maxx to see what they had on offer.

Mindful that we'd spending the night in a hotel (which always dries out my skin so badly) I chose a couple of face masks and some under-eye masks from the clearance section. I also bought some 'Crème Shop' Hyaluronic Acid sleeping mask to wear over night so that my skin wouldn't get too dehydrated. Buying the sleeping mask gel broke my new rule of not buying more of the same kind of products before finishing already opened ones up first. But the whole hotel= dry skin thing was my reasoning for that!

 

 

And of course, when in Leeds, I had to pay a quick visit to the Models Own shop. Last time we went they had an amazing deal of 5 items for £20, no such luck this time, but I did get a 20% off card and a free pack of make up removing wipes.

 

Again, I forgot myself and my buying rules - namely with the Sculpt and Glow highlighter stick. I was eyeing up the gold-tone Sculpt and Glow highlighting palette but deemed it more than I should responsibly spend. However, the highlighting stick was half the price of the palette and after swatching it on the back of my hand, I was mesmerised by the glow. The rule I broke? Not remembering that I prefer powder highlighters over cream highlighters (which tend to clump on my skin). Never mind the rule of 'I already have more highlighters than I can shake a highlighting stick at'!

 

The lipstick is the most gorgeous plum shade - perfect for Autumn and Winter and nice to move away from my usual nude tones that I always pick. It's an odd consistency - kind of like a slightly thicker Korean lip tint. This doesn't make for the best application - it smears and streaks and leaves thicker lines around the lips (maybe something a lip liner would cure). I was able to test this in store (as they supply disposable make-up applicators) and I found this out when testing it there, but again, common sense left me alone in that shop and I decided the love for the colour overruled the quality of the product!

 

I called to my husband (who was waiting outside the shop) to pout at him and show him my lovely new lip colour and we happened to be standing by the eye shadow area. He started to point at eye shadow colours that he liked and then pulled out these two above and mixed them together. My god, the man is a born mixologist! Together they make the most wonderful tarnished-copper-penny colour - like verdigris. I thought that the green was a lovely colour but wasn't convinced that I could pull it off on it's own, but the mix of these two shades is just stunning! Well done hubby! And he made me buy them too.