Review: Clearasil Stayclear Pore Cleansing Pads and Boots Time Delay Cleansing Balm

Helloooooooooo

Boots have recently opened up a new store near where my parents live and as I am visiting them this week I've been going shopping with my mum quite a bit. This Boots is just a "chemist" Boots but it has a small section of makeup etc..so I call it a travel Boots. It has two racks of clearance stuff and recently I have bought the following from there:

• Boots Time Delay Cleansing Balm x 3
• Clearasil exfoliator pads x 2

My mum has also bought some shampoo from there and I'm quite liking the fact that they have this constant clearance section as I get to pick up bargains. The guy who worked there said that they would keep the clearance section until they found out what kinda products people in the local area bought and then just order those in.

Anyway, this post is about the Clearasil exfoliator pads and the Time Delay balm which are both heavenly!

Both products:
I know you can't really see the name of the Boots product so I'll tell you what it's called, it's Boots Daily Radiance Balm.

Clearasil
I used to use Clearasil when I was younger and had horrible spots and it has always been good to me. Bitter experience has taught me that when you see something on clearance grab as many of them as you can because you can always return them. Anyway, my skin has been really really greasy recently despite me having trying to take a lot of oil out and so I thought I'd give these pads a try.

They come in a tub and are quite "watery" and have little bumps in them which is the exfoliating part of the deal. There are 65 pads per tub and each tub retails at about £3.50 but I got mine on clearance for 97p. Anyway, I used one pad last night and they were really really good, the bumps exfoliated and made my skin soft and the watery part cleaned my skin. I am so glad I bought these as they are one of the first things like this that actually clean my skin and don't dry it out totally.

Repurchase?
Definitely.
I'd recommend these to anyone with skin which tends to grease up during the summer and people who occassionally have spot outbreaks. I didn't think that a product aimed at teenagers would work so well on my skin but I'm totally amazed at how good it has been :)

Boots Time Delay
This is apparently a dupe of a Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish but I've also heard it's a copy of an Eve Lom product. As my only foray into higher end face care was Clinique, I can't be sure which of the two claims is correct.

This product is a waxy kinda balm, kinda like vaseline. The product comes with two muslin cloths and what you do is put the balm on your face, leave it for a few minutes, soak the muslin cloth in warm water and press it over your face so as to take the balm off. Then you wash the rest of the balm off and clean the cloth, soak it in cold water (I actually wrote wet water first..) and then apply it to your face.

The first time I used this it made my skin really really dry so I thought I wouldn't use it ever again. Come the next day I put my moisturiser on as per usual and then got on the baking tube. Got off at the other side to apply my Stay Matte powder and saw that my skin was looking well moisturised and not greasy at all which was great but I've had cleansers in the past which have duped me like this so I didn't use it again and went on the tube the next day, lovely skin again.

Since then I have been using it once a week and it gives me lovely skin all week which is great, SUPER cost effective at the price I paid and I don't have to use it every day!

Repurchase?
Oh hell yes, it's my HG cleanser at the moment and I don't think (well I hope) that Boots aren't discontinuing it as I have seen it in full price at larger Boots.

Review: Sleek Palettes

Back when I was at TFL me and my friend Sophie were wandering around Superdrug one day and she decided to buy one of these palettes and for the next two weeks all she went on about was how great they were so I decided to buy some myself..We realised pretty quickly that they were for ladies with darker skin as models used were actually models of colour and not black and Indian women who had been photoshopped so they looked lighter than they actually were..yeah, you know the ads, company and women I'm talking about.

Then, come Xmas time they were on offer, 3 for 2 and I ummed and ahhed about it a lot and ended up buying none..I've been regretting that decision for ages and bought a palette the other day..then I went back and bought all the others they had in the store including the electric one..

Well, the colours are bloody gorgeous in all the palettes, one palette has shimmery colours, one has matte and the third has neutral..the electric palette has (as you would imagine) bright neon colours in it.

I've decided to use this palette tomorrow as we have a family get together for Father's Day and I've just used two of the colours on my lids and the colour pay off is great, this is the first time ever I've been able to coat an eyeshadow brush with a dark colour after only two weak strokes of the powder and have it turn out so bright on my eyelids.

I'm blabbing again but here we go..


The palette:

Quite sleek in itself, the writing is not this bright on the case, I had to fiddle with setting to get it to show but it's quite sturdy and yet sleek at the same time. One thing I did like was the insert which protects the eyeshadows, on most, it slips and slides away the second you open it. I get that with my Bobbi Brown palette and it really winds me up. The insert here is (I'm sure!) charged with something which makes it stick to the mirror so you don't lose it AND you can still see the mirror clearly behind it so that's all good so far.

The actual shadows:

Nice variety of colours and they actually come out that way on your skin, the ones I used are the second green in from the top row and the fourth browny/pinky colour in from the bottom row.

The browny colour:

As I'm sure you eagle eyed readers can see, the browny colour was more natural on me and it had a slight shimmer to it, I can see myself wearing it to work and out..I love double usage shadows like that..it looked really natural and was a doddle to apply, the only "issue" I had was that there was tonnes left on the brush when I finished but I assume that would have been used had I done something ridiculous like have two eyelids the same colour.

The brush after stroking the green colour lightly:

Look at the colour pay off there, the brush was fully coated and ready to go..

The green eye:

I'm not sure why it looks bluey/grey there, in real life the colour was a very nice green, kinda the colour you see on the right side of the eyelid near to the base of the lashes. Very very very easy to blend and look how good the colour payoff is for a light stroke of the eyeshadow..

My mascara dream team:

I reviewed the Stiletto last week and this is the first time I've ever used them together, the results were amazing!

Neutral eye with mascara:

I am so happy at how those lashes came out and the fact that I got nothing on my beautiful eyeshadow, I shall be combining these from now on..

Green eye with mascara:

I never actually believed that green makes blue eyes stand out as it has never worked with me before but with this lovely palette I can finally see it, in both pics I'm looking exactly the same way but the green make my eyes look a lot more browner :)!!

I got this look together in the space of 10 minutes and that was with my crappy blending, I can't wait to use this tomorrow with proper blending to see how well it comes out :)

Repurchase?
HELL TO THE YES. I would be a be a fool to not repurchase these:

• the colour payoff is great
• the colours are not chalky as some can be on darker skins
• the shadows are very soft and you get a tiny bit on the brush but they pack a lot of colour (hence the payoff)
• moneywise these palettes are a godsend, for less than a fiver you get 12 eyeshadows which will last you an age (I've gotten one use out of them and they still look untouched)
  

Review: Benefit's BadGal and Maybelline's Stiletto

Well, I went to Boots and they had a sample of the L'oreal Telescopic Explosion mascara out and I flicked it and broke it so I decided to return mine and instead get the Maybelline Stiletto instead.

I also picked up Glamour and used the BadGal mascara which came with it.

Maybelline Stiletto
The actual mascara:
This had been bigged up like no mans business after Maybelline's success with the Colossal which is my new HG mascara. Anyway, I used this and it wasn't as good as expected, it gave me really thin pin like lashes so is best for ladies who have applied another mascara but want some definition over the top. I wouldn't use it alone as it doesn't do anything for me, it is very similar to the Lash Architect from Maybelline so just buy that as it is cheaper than this..

The patent shine is practically non existent, I really struggled to see a patent coating on it and I can't see why you'd want plastic looking lashes..

The brush:
The brush itself is long and thin which leads me to believe that it's not really going to provide you with much volume..this belief was rendered true when I tried it on and all it did was make them look like black pins.

I don't curl my lashes so I can't speak about how good it is for ladies who curl but I can't imagine it taking curls out as it is a fairly light mascara.

My eye with the mascara:
I can't make the photo any bigger without scaring people but IRL the lashes were very nicely defined but to get to that stage I did get quite a lot of mess on my upper lid (some of which you can still see). I only have the mascara on my upper lashes so that's how it balances out with my natural lashes underneath. Close up the lashes were a damn sight longer than the BadGal lashes which looked stubby at best. Also, I should point out that my eye is only red because I took my contact lens out and itched it beforehand, it has nothing to do with the mascara.

Repurchase?
Based on the above, I would purchase this again. I retried it when doing this review and compared to the BadGal it gave me great length but the BadGal isn't my best friend. However, comparing it to the Colossal it falls a bit behind, I'd consider teaming them up and thus would repurchase if it builds on the Colossal.


Benefit BadGal
The mascara:
I have had this used on me before in Boots and it worked really really well, then I had it used on me and again and the results were mediocre. I heard that Glamour magazine was giving a smaller size of this away so I thought I'd give it a bash seeing as it was only £2.

My experience with this was pleasant enough but I can't see why so many people swear by it and why Benefit make such a big deal out of it. All it does is make the base of my lashes look thicker and provides no length at all. It also clumps and smudges.

The brush:
I took this photo with the super macro function and this is how chunky and cumbersome the brush is, apparently the bigger the barrel bit, the bigger lashes you get..that only works for me with the Colossal.

The brush is chunky which lead me to believe it would be like the Colossal but oh, how wrong I was, it provided no length and only makes them look a smidgen thicker..this is all.

My eye with the mascara:

I tried really hard to make this mascara look good in the shot but is honestly how my eye looked, actually, the photos make the mascara stand out a bit more than it actually did. If you compared it with the Stiletto, it looked like this eye didn't even have mascara on. It wasn't as uniform in its application as the Stiletto, that coated all lashes equally regardless of size whilst this missed out some of the smaller ones. It even only half coated the normal length lashes and then overcoated others. If there was a set routine as to which it overcoated and undercoated I could compensate
but it just does as it wishes.

Repurchase?
No way Jose. This did nothing for my lashes apart from just make them a bit blacker and I expected a lot more from this mascara. The colour is a very nice black but it doesn't translate over to the lashes in the same way and so I've given it to my mum to use as an emergency "root dye" so that she can just coat her roots with it when she's caught short. She said that it's worked very well, gives her a nice black colour and doesn't rub off on your hands when you touch your hair. So, if it doesn't work for you and you dye your hair black, use it as a mid-term treatment.