Lush Review - Phoenix Rising & Lord of Misrule

Hey Guys!

If you follow me on twitter or instagram you will know that recently I had a bit of a splurge in Lush, spent far too much money, but now have the nicest smelling room in the world! Now I have far to many products to put into one post so I'm going to do a few separate posts over the coming weeks to review and share all of this amazingness with you lovely lot!

So the first product I'm going to talk about is a staple favourite of mine from Lush's permanent collection and that is the Phoenix Rising bath bomb. I would definitely say that I'm more of a bubble bar than a bath bomb person but this is an exception to the rule and something I will continue to buy until the end of it's days (which I solemnly hope isn't until after mine). This product is a beautiful metallic purple colour with a dusting of gold over it and once in the bath fizzles into a wonderful deep purple before fading into an as equally beautiful green colour.

The thing that completely wins me over with this product though is the scent of it! It's scented with cinnamon which gives off a perfect warming spicy scent that you only tend to find in Lush's Christmas products. This is a complete winner for me as I tend to stock up hugely on the Christmas products and it's nice that there is at least one staple spicy sent within the permanent collection to keep me ticking over once my christmas stash runs out. This bath bomb currently retails at £3.35 which is middle of the range for lush bath products and I think you could definitely get two baths out of this were you to chop it in half.

Final verdict 5/5, completely adore this product and will repurchase at every opportunity!

The second product was a limited edition product for Halloween and goes by the name of "Lord of Misrule", First impressions of this product are that it's huge, it's so much bigger than i expected it to be and you could probably get three baths out of it should you figure out a way to cut it, alas it's very solid in texture so cutting it could be a difficult and hazardous task. It's light green in colour with flecks of pinks and yellows throughout and when thrown into the bath gives of a beautiful unexpected rich ruby colour.

According to Lush's website it's scented with patchouli (had to give this one a google, it's a herb) and black pepper oil. I had someone pick this product up for me as I'd read this description online and thought it sounded right up my street. In my opinion it's not as spicy and peppery as I was expecting but instead has more of a fresh smell (I'm assuming that's the patchouli) combined with the smell of a lush store (even if you've never been inside a Lush store there's no getting away from the distinctive smell that invades your nostrils as you pass one). All that being said I do like this product, the scent isn't too heavy and the colours are breathtaking, it retails for roughly £4.35 (had to currency convert from the US site). However, as I said earlier it is one of the biggest bath bombs I've seen from lush and therefore I would say is worth the money.

Final verdict 4/5, not what I expected but still beautiful, smells divine, though I really wish it was easier to break up!

So that's all I have for you guys today, let me know which products you'd like me to review next and what are your favourite lush products? Until next time!

Love & TubTubs

Nailene Ultra Quick

Hey Guys!

So recently I was in London and whilst shopping in Camden I picked up some of the elegant touch false nails. For those of you familiar with this brand you will know that some of their nails come with adhesive tabs as opposed to the traditional nail glue for mess free application. Personally I prefer to adhere my nails using glue, so I also picked up a bottle of the nailene "ultra quick", which as I will come to explain now I thoroughly regret.

Tonight's blog post was going to be a nail of the day featuring some Halloween nails, unfortunately when I got home after sorting which nails would fit my minuscule hands I went to apply them, and no glue would come out of the bottle. Now I'm not a particularly strong person so I waited until my dad came home so he could get the glue out for me (because dad's can do everything right?). No such luck, after a solid half hour of squeezing and even biting the tube until both sides of the bottle touched no glue was coming out.

This leaves me with two possible conclusions. Either the nail glue had dried up during the manufacturing process due to a fault in the packaging -or- there was no glue in there to begin with. Whatever the reason I'm not a happy bunny. I would like to put emphasis on that this was a bottle straight out of the cardboard packaging and not something that I've had out on the side, I even took a picture of it in it's packaging earlier today because I wanted to review how well it worked as a nail glue which you can see above!

Now I know a lot of people use nailene myself included and have had really good experiences with it in the past and I'm in no way bashing the quality of the glue itself. However, this is only the second bottle I've ever bought and when 50% of purchases don't actually contain the product you paid for, you're going to be a bit pissed. This glue retails for about £4 which I believe is a perfectly reasonable price, should you actually receive the product. After looking at other reviews on amazon it's also been brought to my attention I'm not the only person to have this problem so please do leave a comment and let me know if you've had a similar experience. I'm waiting for payday to come around again so I can pick up some more glue and finally get these nail pictures out to you guys because they are beautiful beyond belief so don't panic I haven't given up on that front.

On that note if anyone has any nail glue recommendations do leave them in the comments below and I'll talk to you guys next time!

Love and TubTubs

Reading Festival Rant 2014

Hey Guys

So every summer I throw myself into the world of festivals and this year was no different with me attending both Sonisphire and Reading Festival. When it comes to music I tend to gravitate towards the alternative scene however this still ranges over a large spectrum from glam rock to heavy metal so festivals such as Sonisphire, Download and Bloodstock are the obvious choices every summer. However, with me being local to Reading Festival I decided to go with a friend that had a spare ticket and even though the line up wasn't exactly to my taste there were a select few good bands and the idea of partying in a field for three days solid is always an appealing one. Hey what could go wrong right?



Source: http://www.readingfestival.com

 

Oh how wrong I was. Don't get me wrong I will be fair to Reading and say that some of the reasons I didn't enjoy my time there were down to poor decisions on my part and it did have some high points which I will get onto later but first let me get my little rant out of the way. Firstly the staff that were working for Reading Festival were definitely only there for the free entry, never in my life have I met more unhelpful staff who were constantly giving me wrong advice or not knowing answers to things they really should of. Now I'm not sure if this was down to poor briefing on the festivals part, or laziness on the members of staffs part but I picked up very quickly that if you wanted any helpful advice to look for staff members that looked like they really didn't want to be there. Another point I'd like to make is the amount of hiccups that occurred with bands sets over the weekend from the power going out during paramores set to bands having to stop mid-song because their instruments weren't tuned properly. I totally accept that things like this may happen here and there with such a huge event but it happened with 50% of the bands I saw and by Sunday was really starting to grate on me.

Another point that I really want to make is the crowds at Reading, now as I said before I tend to gravitate towards heavier music which means I'm no stranger to rough crowds, mosh pits and many drunk people in a small area. That said the crowds at Reading were nothing like I'd ever experienced before, even with the more mellow bands that I saw there were people starting pits left right and centre which is fine by me. However, these were not standard mosh pits these were people out to try and hurt everyone around them; kicking, punching even biting I saw it all and don't even get me started on the amount of young girls I saw being dragged into these pits that clearly wanted nothing to do with it and were scared shitless. Eventually I decided I'd had enough of being kicked in the head and went to leave the crowd which was a challenge in itself as it appears no one is willing to help you in anyway and you end up having to turn into an asshole yourself and push people out of the way to get yourself out. I guess mosh etiquette is wasted here and I'm just spoilt by the kindness of metal crowds, and they say we're the rough bunch!

A final point I would like to add to round off my Reading rant 2014 is that this assholery didn't end at the crowds and I received regular abuse walking around site, this hit an all time high when I group of guys decided to grab me and harass me on my way back to my tent on my own. I must say out of every music event I've ever been to Reading is definitely where I felt the least safe, and it takes a lot to unnerve me. Now these were the main points that really made the festival a total write off for me, sure there were other things that did annoy me over the weekend but I will credit that to me already not feeling great about things due to the above points and also some poor decisions on my part.

With my rant out the way I'm going to say that although I completely stick to my view that Reading 2014 was the worst festival I've ever attended it did have some high points which I will cover in my next blog post to prevent this turning into an essay. Hell it feels so weird to write a negative review on something but I really needed to vent my frustration about a wasted £200! So I'll talk to you guys very soon with a much happier outlook on things and even a few festival pictures thrown in there for good measure!

Love & TubTubs 

Lush Review - Mask of Magnaminty

Hey guys! So I'm not sure how many of you have drifted over from my old blog but I did indeed have a temporary blog whilst I was fighting blogger for the AMP domain. So only having a few posts on that site I decided to move the few I had back over! Just thought I'd explain to those of you thinking this sounded familiar or those of you wondering why the writing style is slightly different. So without further ado lets get into a good ol' fashioned Lush review!

Mask of Magnaminty is one of Lush's better known skincare products from the permanent line and with everyone raving about it I thought I'd try it out myself.
 

The first thing I noticed when I opened the lid was the scent of it. I knew it was going to smell minty but it wasn't what I was expecting at all, I don't know if I had to high expectations on the scent but I was expecting it to smell like a packet of Polos, or maybe even slightly like toothpaste, instead the scent just reminded me of mint chewing gum that's started to lose it's flavor, a bit of a disappointment. I really do like the color of this mask and the consistency was really good and it spread over the skin easily without losing any product drown the drain. I also found I didn't have to use a lot, after doing an application on my face, my mum's and even my brother's there was only a dent in the product. You can definitely feel it working as it has a slight tingly feeling on the skin but I found it's not uncomfortable or painful just a little odd if you're someone who doesn't use face masks much (such as my brother).

When it came to washing it off i found this mask didn't stick in my eyebrows and came off in a matter of minutes. I have combination and acne prone skin, and once I'd dried my face and moisturized I can say my face was noticeably softer, didn't worsen my dry patches like I feared and did tackle my oily patches well, but to be honest with you that's all I can say for it. I found it didn't really do anything in clearing up any spots on my face even the morning after they were still there with no change at all which was a disappointment as the product description claims it's for getting rid of spots and blemishes.

So my final thoughts on this are that this mask are that it's doesn't really do much for the skin visibly as far as sorting out blemishes goes, it does however improve the texture of the skin. Everyone seems to have a different opinion on which skin type this mask would suit and mine is that people with oily or combination skin would benefit most from this mask. I'm yet to try it on my chest or back but I feel like it may be better for that rather then the face due to how little of the product you use up, though I do wish I'd gotten the smaller tub but with the long shelf life I'm sure I'll find a use for it.

RRP - £4.95 - 125g / £8.75 - 315g

Overall Rating - 5/10

Love & TubTubs