Banish those holiday blues with Batiste!

If you're like me and aren't going away this summer :-( and you want to banish those summer blues then give Batiste's dry shampoo in tropical a whirl.

It's great as a refresher for your hair whether you're lucky enough to be going on holiday, going to a festival or just if you'd rather spend your free time in the sunshine rather than doing your hair! Simply spray 30cm away from you roots, massage in using your fingertips and then brush and style to banish any oily roots and to refresh your hair!

Tropical is my favourite Batiste scent and is available in three sizes: 400ml (£4.99), 200ml (£2.99) and 50ml (£1.55).

Stockists: Boots, Superdrug, Sainsbury's, ASOS, Morrisons, Tesco, Wilkinsons, Lloyds Pharmacy, Savers and Independent Pharmacies.

Wednesday Wishlist - 2

Bourjois So Laque neon polishes - £5.99 (Superdrug & Boots)

W7 Africa and Candy Floss powders - £2.99 (various retailers)

 Pink butterfly letter tray - £8.75 (Paperchase)

I'm planning on getting my hands on these when I visit York in a few weeks.

Haul - Part 2

Part 2 of my haul is clothes which I've bought mainly for work wear but they're not that formal that I can wear them casually.

Peacocks

V-Neck pink stripe top - £7.20 on offer

White, black and pink t-shirts - 3 for £10 or £4 each

Next

Navy bow top - £14. I have this in coral and love it so bought the navy too!

Stripy rose top - £12

Black rose top - £10

Haul - Part 1

I have quite a few purchases to show you so I'm splitting the down into several posts to avoid having a post a mile long!

Wilkinsons and The Body Shop

I got this cute A5 sized note book from Wilkinsons so I can store all my passwords in it for websites and stuff. It was only £1.20 which is really good value.

I also got hold of the £5 Body Shop voucher which as in InStyle magazine and I spent it on a bottle of their Earth Lovers shower gel in Apricot and Basil.

Home Bargains

After what seems like a million blog posts saying how good St Moriz was I finally decided to give it a try myself and I have to say it's the best £2.99 I've spent! It really is on par with St Tropez.

Dainty Roses

Lisa has her own blog and she makes some fab jewellery which is really affordable. I'd been looking at her pieces for a while and then saw I had a few pounds in my Paypal account so decide to make a purchase! I got this cute crown button ring and love it! Her website can be found here.

Boots

I broke my hairbrush in half a while ago so was well overdue a new one so I picked up this purple one which I think was £2.55. I also had five vouchers for £5 off No7 so I used them against their new nail polishes and they only cost £2 each! 

Swatches above show one coat of polish. I haven't got the polishes in front of me so don't know the shades but leave a comment if you want to know and I'll let you know!

And I also had three £2 off professional haircare vouchers to use so after reading good reviews about Umberto Giannini's Morning After Dry Shampoo I got that (£3.61 with voucher), Lee Staffords Argan Oil which I love (£9.99 with voucher) and then I saw a can of dry conditioner (£4.29 with voucher) which I'd never seen before in Charles Worthingtons Front Row range so thought I'd give that a try.

Freebie galore!

Recently I've been very lucky and have won quite a few giveaways and competitions so here's a round up of what I've won!

Floral Jumpsuit (£20) from Matalan. I won this after taking part in a competition on their Twitter page. My own photo of this was awful so I've borrow this one off the Matalan website.

Every month Glamour magazine run a competition where you can win a different prize everyday, you just have to enter on that day in order to win that days prize. In May I entered most days and won an Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Intensive Moisturising Body Treatment and a Montague Jennesse face mask.

London Beauty Queen ran a competition in conjunction with Jergens and I won 5 full sized bottles of their moisturiser! I haven't tried theirs before so am looking forward to trying it out. With the risk of sounding slightly ungrateful, which I'm completely not, I'm quite disappointed I didn't get the cocoa butter one as I love products with it in but I feel very lucky to have won what I have! 

Cat from Reaching for the Stars ran a competition where you could win a bottle of Batistes Nude dry shampoo, you just had to say why you wanted to win. I said that it's the only one I hadn't tried in the Batiste collection so wanted to have tried the full set! And I also won a competition on Jergens Facebook page and I won another bottle of their moisturiser! That's a lot of moisturiser I have to get through!

Good Things has just launched in Superdrug and on their Facebook page you had the chance to win a pack of their cleansing wipes if you took a photo of their products in a Superdrug store and uploaded it so these landed on my door step a week ago. And a while ago I won a sample of one of Ren's new products and as a thank you for sending my feedback they kindly sent me a sample of their Glycolactic Skin Renewal Peel Mask.


Phew! So that's all my wins, oh I also made an impulse buy at the newsagents whilst with my mum and got a £1 scratch card and won a tenner! Have you won anything lately? Let me know in the comments below!

The week that was....

I haven't done this post in a few weeks mainly because I've been working so haven't been up to much interesting. This week it was my birthday, I'm now 23. Eek I feel so old! So I've been celebrating most of this last week even though I went to work on my birthday so it didn't really feel like it was my birthday :-(

Here's a few photos of what I got given (sorry about the light in the photos it wasn't on my side):

A new camera, a satchel bag for work, Escada Taj Sunset, Lipsy bracelet, a fancy pen, jewellery and I got some giftcards, another handbag and some other bits too.

On friday night six of us went for a trip out for tea at Nando's which meant a mad rush home for me but I left work 15 minutes early so got home at 5.45 then had to jump in the shower, wash my hair, decide on what to wear and clean up as everyone was meeting at my house.

It was a really night out and we all had a laugh and ate far too much! We all had double chicken burgers/wraps and then had cheesecake for pudding! Oops! All together it came to around £110 for six which really isn't bad at all.

This week at work was much less stressful than last week and surprisingly friday afternoon was busy even though we have no clinics running as we were preparing for this next week and catching up on little jobs we didn't get done in the week. But I didn't get paid which is a big pain in my ass as I'll have to catch up with my manager on monday and get her to ring pay services. Hope I don't have to wait until the end of July.

I have a few haul posts coming up this week to show what I've bought over the last few weeks so these start tomorrow.

Hope you've all had a good week and don't forget I'm also running a Mac giveaway where you can win a Mac lipstick or eyeshadow! Click here to go straight to the page.

Product use up - half way point

So it's the beginning of July and I'm now half way through my product use up challenge! I have to admit I think I'm doing quite well. I was originally trying to not buy any beauty products until I'd ran out but you know what it's like, a new product comes out or theres a great offer on so you succumb to the pressure and buy. But even with that in mind I still haven't done bad.

So in June what did I manage to use up?

Left photo: Sure deodorant x2, Elle Macpherson body scrub, Batiste dry shampoo and Clinique facial liquid soap


Right photo: Lee Stafford Grow Faster hair treatment, Organic Surge liquid handwash, Lee Stafford poker straight balm, No 7 make=up remover, Soap & Glory Fab Pore face mask and Neutrogena face wipes

For the second half of the year I'm going to revert back to what I was doing in my product use up challenges last year and aim to finish all the opened products I have a I've been abit naughty and have been opening new bottles when the old one hasn't been finished. So I have these to finish before the 31st December:

I'm not going to name every item but in a nut shell there are:
11x hair styling products
12x hair washing products
15x facial skincare products
4x washing products
10x moisturising products
Which totals 52 products to get through. Wish me luck!

Finally how are you doing with your challenge? Link me to you posts in the comments below!