Shake Up Your Make Up: Small Changes that Make a BIG Difference

This months' Her Campus Article:

Shake Up Your Make Up: Small Changes that Make a BIG Difference

It’s 8.30am. In a zombie-like manner you thud over to the mirror. Horrified by the sorry state of your own weary reflection, you reach for your make-up bag silently praying that today it will perform miracles. You have just 4 precious minutes to go from looking like Ugly Betty to looking like Beyoncé; this will be an epic challenge. Head down and eyes closed, you plaster on some cheap foundation, rubbing it in brutally like face wash.  Two quick smears of a 5-year-old eye shadow are swiped across the lids with your index finger. It’s a little half-hearted and slightly panda-like but all lecture theatres are dark, right? A crayola-esque streak of a blunt pencil outlines, smudges and scratches your half-closed eyes and (if you remember) you pat two circles of bronzer onto your puffy cheeks.  To complete the look, you blink ferociously into a mascara wand and with your now colour-stained fingers, you cake Vaseline onto your cracked lips. Cursing at the fact your trying efforts have only amounted to looking like a surprised Ugly Betty at the circus, you trip out of the door and avoid mirrors for the rest of the day.

If you’re anything like me you’ll have been stuck undertaking the same beautifying routine since you were 14 years old; while your face may have changed, what you do to it has hardly altered. The cosmetics industry has transformed enormously since the good old days when we worshiped Claire’s Accessories, Britney Spears and Um-bongo and now we should adjust ourselves and our makeup bags accordingly. Here are some tiny changes you can make that could make an enormous difference to your make up:

Primer

Not using a face primer is like going to a seminar without doing the prep. You can get by without it, but it can make things a little substandard and a tad uncomfortable. A primer is a fantastic addition to your make up bag as it not only prevents your make up from sliding off your face halfway through the day, but it also evens out skin tone and gives your face a healthy and dewy glow. If you’re blessed with an already gorgeous complexion, you may even choose to wear primer and nothing else. With this season's new fresh faced fashion trend there are a mind-boggling array of primers out there to suit everyone’s needs and anyone’s budget; here are my top picks:

Investment Buy:

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer - £26

Budget Buy:

Rimmel Match Perfection Fix Perfect Primer - £6.99

Brushes

The importance of having a set of good make up brushes is extremely underestimated by most girls and I was shocked at how much of a difference good brushes can make when I invested in a decent set myself recently. Using your fingers, while quick and easy, can produce messy and uneven results but a good brush will effortlessly create a flawless, well-blended finish that will last much longer. Ditch the cheap ones that come free with products too as these are often very poor quality and frankly no good. MAC does some amazing professional brushes but if they are out of your budget, EcoTools provide a fantastic set of environmentally-friendly alternatives:

Investment Buy:

MAC Brushes - £16-£37 each

Budget Buy:

EcoTools Bamboo 6 Piece Brush Set £15.99

Shadow

For striking night out make up, eye shadow tricks are innumerable and whatever your eye shape or colour something can be done to enhance it. Putting a white or very light shade in the inner corner of your eye near the tear duct can instantly illuminate the eyes. Similarly, dark shadow or an eyeliner flick on the outer corner and along the lash line can make the eyes look feline and beautiful.

Colour-wise, blue eyes look great with shadows in blue, bronze and light brown. Green eyes can look stunning with light browns, dark greens and lavenders. If you have brown eyes consider yourself very lucky, you can pull off just about any shade!

Liquid Highlighter

 Another fantastic item often overlooked in many make up collections is highlighter. If applied correctly, highlighter can give you that glowing look where people can't place what's different, just that you look amazing. Apply it directly over blusher, mix with blusher, or use just above blusher and under the eyebrow arch to really emphasize the cheek and brow bones. A touch down the nose and above the Cupid’s bow will also freshen up your face instantly.

Investment Buy:

Benefit High Beam Highlighter - £18.50

Budget Buy:

Loreal Lumi Magique Touch of Light Highlighting Pen - £8.49

Beautiful Brows

 Before I start let me assure you that by no means am I condoning the infamous Scouse Brow; we all know slugs should stay in the garden. However, having a well-defined, face-framing brow can make all the difference to how your visage looks overall. There are numerous ways in which you can darken and define your brows without looking like an idiot - stencils, pencils and mini sets of utensils to name a few. If you’re nervous, start off by filling in the eyebrows using a pencil. When you feel more confident a mini brow kit like the one by Urban Decay is great for experimenting with shapes and colour.

Budget Buy:

Eylure Shape Shade Brow Pencil and Tamer - £5.39

Investment Buy:

Urban Decay Brow Box - £15.30

Contouring

While I’m completely aware that the image to the right looks like something out of The Lion King, the picture shows the basic concept of getting dark and light colouring in the right places to really emphasise your best facial assets and transform the face from super-boring to supermodel. Contouring properly is quite complicated; here’s a video by the gurus of makeup, Pixiwoo, explaining how best to do it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwnYThqUBB0

So there you have it, small changes that can make a BIG difference. Why not shake up your make up and adopt a change today? You certainly won’t be avoiding mirrors quite like you were before!

Get Hash-Tag Happy: 8 Good Reasons Why You Should be on Twitter

Hello!

Sorry I've been so bad with keeping up with blogging at the moment; I've been so tied down with Uni work, work experience applications and my dissertation and my 21st birthday has been and gone amongst all that...nightmare! I've got lots of things to blog about so will be back on track as soon as my work load lessens a little.

Anyway, here is my Her Campus article from last week:

Get Hash-Tag Happy: 8 Good Reasons Why You Should be on Twitter

It seems like wherever you go at the moment, Twitter is being talked about. It's all over the web, on most TV programmes, in numerous adverts and constantly on the radio. There is literally no getting away from it right now and while I’m no Mystic Meg, I don’t predict that’s going to change anytime soon. It won’t be too long before everyone’s going to be signed up and unless you want to appear as ancient as Brotherton’s Special Collections area, I suggest you bite the blue bullet and jump on the Twitter bandwagon before it’s too late.

For those that are completely unbeknown, Twitter is a social network like no other. It is an interactive micro-blogging site that allows you to follow other people’s updates and answer the question ‘What are you doing?’ in just 140 characters. Sound familiar? Fear not those who lives are continuously hindered by a Facebook obsession, it is worlds apart. Twitter is not just a social network. It is an event coordinator, a business tool, a news reporting service and a marketing utility.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows you to keep track of updates from anyone you want to, be it close friends, celebrities, sports personalities, musicians or news feeds from around the world. You can effortlessly follow updates from big companies and top employers at a mouse click, giving you the upper hand in job interviews, topical debates, gossip with friends and everything in between.

Need more convincing? Here are my top eight reasons why I urge you to sign up:

1. Celebrity Stalking

Whether your celebrity obsession is Kelly Rowland or Lorraine Kelly, Harry Styles or Harry Derbridge, Wayne Rooney or Lil Wayne or none of the above, the likelihood is that your favourite celebrity is using Twitter. It’s not just for the fame-hungry, perma-tanned, ‘look-at-me-falling-out-of-a-nightclub’ celebrities either. Stephen Fry, Barack Obama and Richard Branson are all very famous, slightly more intelligent Twitter users that share regular life-updates with their hoards of followers. 

(Tip: Look for a blue tick next to a celebrity’s name, it means they’ve been verified - it’s actually them, not an imposter)

2. Finding a Job or Work Experience

 

If you use Twitter sensibly you can really maximize your career prospects with just a few intelligent choices. Follow big names in your prospective industry, post about their topical business matters and don’t be afraid to interact with potential employers and companies. I know at least two people who have gained work experience placements through Twitter; play your cards right and who knows what doors it could open for you.

3. Driving Traffic to Your Blog or Website

As I’ve said before, Twitter is a massive marketing tool. If you have a blog or website you want to promote, Twitter can be the opportune platform to do so. Posting about your latest blog entry, a website or even a new Her Campus article will get attention to your pages fast. The more followers you have, the more traffic you’ll obtain so tweet to your heart’s content, spread the online word and watch your hit count grow.

4. Free Stuff

Students being students, we all love a good freebie and following the right people can give you supreme access to endless offers and giveaways. There are lots of student-related Twitter profiles that are constantly feeding their followers with irresistible deals and discounts,  @studentbeans and @MyUNiDAYS to name a few.

5. Getting the Breaking News Before it Breaks

One of the best things about Twitter is the fact that you can literally discover things as they happen, often well before they break onto mainstream news. The left-hand ‘trending topics’ are great ways to find out about big stories before anyone else. I discovered the death of Amy Winehouse, Osama Bin Laden and just recently Whitney Houston a good hour before they appeared on national headlines.

(Tip: Hash tags (#) are used in tweets to indicate a ‘topic’)

(Tip: All ‘#RIP*****’ trends should be taken with extreme caution. If they were all true, Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift would let’s just say ‘not be with us’ anymore)

6. Twitter-wars

A brand new style of spicy celebrity cat-fight has hit the radar and we have the divine privilege to see it first-hand and from the comfort of our own homes. Twitter-wars have been all over the news in the past year or so, the most high-profile Twitter slanging matches include Britney Spears vs. Kanye West, Lindsay Lohan vs. Samantha Ronson and Joey Barton vs. the whole cast of ‘The Only Way is Essex’.

7. Entertainment Gold

There are some hilarious spoof accounts that are bound to give you a giggle when Uni work is getting you down. Here are three crackers:

@oldmansearch  – 82 year old Norman was told by his son that Twitter was a new search engine, like Google. Anything he tweets is therefore something he thinks he’s searching for on the internet. My favourite tweets include: ‘tour de france age maximum’ and ‘eggs give me a headache’ (sic).

@EdwardBoyle – The incredibly entertaining twitter feed of our very own Edward Boyle library. Follow him for twitter wars with @TheBrotherton , confessions about Marjorie Ziff and other generally amusing comments from inside the library walls.

@Queen_UK – Did you know our beloved Queen Elizabeth is actually a gin-drinking, cursing, down-to-earth celebrity lover like the rest of us? Follow the queen’s parody account for silly, light-hearted tweets on ‘one’s’ thoughts and life updates.

8. Feel-Good Twitter Feeds

Follow @GirlDictionary for girl-power goodness, @TheNoteboook for soppy one-liners or @Tweets2Motivate for a daily dose of inspirational language in under 140 characters. Not all Twitter accounts are individuals and sometimes it’s nice to read the odd encouraging tweet while you’re scanning through your Twitter feed - it’s definitely worth sprinkling it with some quotidian cuteness. 

So what are you waiting for? Sign up to Twitter today and make sure you follow @HerCampusLeeds  while you’re at it!

January Bites: Ten Tips for Rescuing Winter Skin

So although I submitted my monthly HerCampus article to the editors almost 3 weeks ago, it's not been put onto the site yet. Normally I would wait untill after it's been uploaded before posting it to my blog but at this rate it will be severely out of date! Enjoy....

So 2012 has already begun. At this moment in time you’re probably sick of being surrounded by tinsel and fairy lights, bored of the daily banquet of turkey sandwiches and Quality Street, fed up of irritating younger siblings and nagging parents and tired of being so worried about the impending exams that you’re yet to actually start any revision. Whether you’re one or all of these things, your skin will almost certainly be paying the price.

Stress, cold weather, poor diet, excessive drinking and lack of sleep are just some of the many factors that can leave the body particularly weak and run-down come January and us students seem to bear this brunt much more than most. Unfortunately, when our bodies are drained and our lifestyle is hectic our skin screams it. While we can easily cover a few mince pie induced pounds under an oversized jumper and a couple of shameful NYE eye-bags under thirteen layers of concealer, the sad state of our skin can be much more difficult to hide.

Understandably, an arduous skin-care regime may seem like the last thing any student feels like committing to this month, but it appears January really is the time our sorry epidermises need a little refresh and revival the most.  For that reason I give you ten easy, inexpensive tips for rescuing your January skin. I can’t promise you’ll end up with a complexion quite akin to Halle Berry, but unless you fancy sporting a balaclava for the next 28 days, they could be worth a try:

1) Exfoliate - Winter skin can be much more sensitive than usual and while you don't want to over-exfoliate or irritate the face, a gentle micro-exfoliant will help keep the skin silky smooth and radiant. Try The BodyShop’s Vitamin C Microdermabrasion (£12) or something a little cheaper such as  St Ives Elements Micro Dermabrasion (£3.99), which promises to do the job just as effectively.

2) Watch the Temperature - To keep the skin hydrated, be sure to wash your face with lukewarm water rather than hot, as this will only dry the skin out even more. It’s also important to moisturize your face immediately after washing, as this is when your skin is more likely to lock in that much-needed moisture.

3) Drink Water, Water, and More Water – No doubt you’ve heard this one more times than you’ve set foot on Campus, but drinking sufficient water is extremely important. With water fountains on every level of Edward Boyle and now also installed in the Brotherton Library, there is absolutely no excuse. Plenty of water helps keep the body hydrated and we all should aim to drink 8 glasses of water every day.

4) Body Butter-Up – Cold weather can seriously dehydrate and dry out the skin and consequently a good moisturizer or thick body butter is vital for soothing and replenishing; a rich emollient like shea butter acts to form an invisible barrier and helps prevent surplus water loss. My personal favourite is Palmers Cocoa Butter Formula  (£3.77) as it’s exceptionally cheap and smells incredible. I also love Bliss Lemon and Sage Body Butter (£20.50); a little more expensive, but if your student loan can stretch to it, worth every penny.

5) Get Your Glow Back - To snatch back your much missed healthy summer colour, exercise and a good night’s sleep are the ultimate natural ways to boost that longed-for lustrous complexion. Alternatively, go for a glow–boosting product like Soap & Glory Glow Job  (£9), which provides a healthy bronze veil of wash–off colour.

6) Skin Super-Foods – Dairy products such as natural yogurt, goat’s milk and cottage cheese are packed with essential vitamins and minerals including vitamin A, vitamin D, and calcium. Snacks such as blueberries, strawberries, nuts and sunflower seeds are also brilliant as they have extremely high nutritional value. Salmon contains many fatty acids that are essential to keeping your skin from drying out and if you can fathom facing another Christmas-esque dinner plate, turkey isn’t too bad either. Spinach, sweet potato and carrots are cheap and cheerful vegetables to enliven your skin and what better excuse to make something more indulgent like carrot cake, roasts or coleslaw.

7) Cut Down the Caffeine - Can’t live without your morning Starbucks? Rely on your Red Bull mixer to keep pulling out Beyoncé dance moves past 1am? You may have to reduce this intake severely in order to avoid the high levels of caffeine and sugar that can cause oily spots and rob your body of moisture. Green tea is one of the best natural alternatives to caffeine; it will still give you a pre-lecture energy boost and could also modestly increase metabolism, bonus!

8) Multi-Vitamins - Taking multi-vitamins is a sure-fire way to get fundamental nutrients in your system without having to worry about breaking the bank during the weekly food shop. Some are more specifically tailored towards targeting the skin, like Holland and Barratt's ‘Skin Hair Nails' formula (£7.69 – 60 caplets) which I’ve been taking for around 3 months. Although I can’t say they’ve made an enormous difference to my skin just yet, the condition of my hair has definitely improved and I’m hopeful that the rest will come with time.

9) Be Make-up Vigilant – Wherever possible reduce your daily face paint and work the more natural look. Swap your heavy, suffocating foundation for something lighter like a tinted moisturizer; this one from Nivea (£2.03) will provide good coverage and let your skin breathe. For particularly sensitive skin, use hypo-allergic, naturally coloured cosmetics for make-up; the fewer pigments, the less irritating property.

10) (Attempt to) Make a Face Mask – Fun, cheap and a fantastic source of procrastination. There are millions of recipes online and there’s sure to be one perfect for utilizing whatever’s hiding in the back of the fridge. Here’s a simple OatmealFacemask to try and an even simpler Egg YolkFace Mask to get messy with.