NYX Eyeshadow Base

I picked up this little pot of wonderfulness (what, that's a word!) at my local beauty wholesaler last week.  I'd just finished the last of my Lemon Aid from Benefit and hadn't gotten around to getting another one.  It's cheap as chips at 6.50 and comes in three colours.  A white base which is to make your light colours sparkle and pop, a pearl base which makes your frosty, pearl shadows pop and a skin coloured base which deepends your dark colours and pigments.  I got the white one...ESB01.  I really, really like it.  It's as good as Lemon Aid and  a fraction of the price.  Dupe perhaps?

No 7 Exquisite Curl Mascara

I picked up this mascara at the weekend purely because Boots were selling it for a fiver with one of those vouchers they give you for Ruby & Milly or No 7 products.  Who uses these?!  I never have but I did on Saturday and I'm glad I did.  This mascara wand comes in a half moon shape so without even having any product on the wand it lifts and separates your lashes instantly.  Getting right in at the root and wiggling while pulling upwards gives great curl using this mascara.  However, it took me two coats over a coat I'd left on from the night before to achieve the desired effect.  I find mascara always goes on and looks better if you leave it on from the night before.  Not great for your pillowcase but a great smouldering look :-)  At a fiver, you really can't go wrong!

Nude Lips

I've never been one for wearing a strong colour on my lips and I think it all stems back to an old boyfriend telling me I looked "messy" when I attempted to wear a slightly too orangey red one evening.  Scarred for life I was!  I have a juicy pair of lips truth be told...not in the Angie Jolie camp mind you, but hardly in the Dot Cotton camp either so I could carry off a bold lip if I wanted.  However, I favour the less is more look when it comes to lips.  Think Kim Kardashian and that's what I'm after.  You would think it's easy enough to get this look but it's not.  There are so many good nude lipsticks and glosses on the market but they vary in colour, pigment and texture.  Then you have to consider your own natural lip colour.  I would be more pinky than reddy so I need a peachy toned nude to achieve the look I want.  At the moment I'm using Faces lipstick in Joanna.  At first glance it looks super salmony peach but when you put it on especially with a brown toned lipliner such as Oak by Mac you get a muted, nude lip.  I'm also using Soap and Glory's Sexy Motherpucker lipgloss over this as it's super shiny and lasts ages.  It's a plumper lipgloss and your lips will tingle like a bad thing for about 5 minutes after application.  I've a list as long as my arm of nudes I've tried but so far, I'm liking this combo. 

Revlon Photo Ready Foundation

Right, so lets blog about make up since that's primarily why I started this blog.  I spend my life looking for two things make up wise....the perfect foundation and the perfect nude lipstick.  I'll blog about the nude lipstick on it's ownio at a later date though (don't get me started!).  I read on another blog that the Revlon Photo Ready foundation was the new "it" foundation.  So I got it yesterday and used it on my night out last night and d'ye know what, it's only bloody brilliant!  It comes in liquid format and the texture is really creamy, a little bit thicker than Chanel Lumiere but not as thick as Estee Lauder Double Wear.  The coverage is just fantastic.  I didn't actually end up using a primer last night as I was so busy trying to de-grease my hair that I barely had time to slap on foundation let alone primer :-)  Even without the primer, this foundation settled onto my skin so well. What I was most impressed about was the dewy finish it gave without a hint of shine.  So much so that I didn't use any of my Bobbi Brown shimmer brick at all....a first for me!  It's staying power is as good as that of Double Wear and one pump did my whole face.  There are only 8 colours to choose from though.  I paid only €14.50 for it, special offer in Boots so I think it's well worth that price compared to the Estee Lauder and Chanel products I compare it to.

Hairy Fairy

As I type this, I feel my anger being vented on the keyboard.  Y'see, I'm going out tonight for my good friend Nic Nac's birthday.  And since money is tight, I was gonna do my hair myself, even though I adore getting blow dries (careful!).  But at the last minute I decided I didn't have the energy to do it myself and off I popped to the local hairdresser.  Now I've been once before and I HATED what she did to my hair.  All pouffey and big done with rollers from one of those wheely black tray thingies they use for pensioners.  So why did I go back there when every pore in my body was screaming not to.  My internal alarm is sooooooo spot on most of the time and it was ringing off the hook.  Still, I went in and I figured she had to do a better job than me.  HARDLY!  She blow dried it with what looked like a comb and pouffed it out again.  Still, I thought I'd lash the GHD over it when I got home.  But NO, she ruined it for me, by putting an industrial size glob of serum on the roots of my hair...not on the ends where it was made to go but on my freshly washed roots and then proceeded to run her greasy hands through the rest of my gorgeously clean hair.  AGHHHHHHHHHHH!!  I was sitting in my chair and I had that expression on my face, y'know the one where you're not happy but trying to look happy.  Why do us Irish do that?  Why can't we be like the French and stand up and vent our unhappiness and throw a wobbler, refuse to pay and walk out in an arrogant huff?  Nope, not us Irish.  Not only did I say I liked it, I gushed about how much I liked it.  WTF??!
Anyway, I've an hour to get ready now.  Nothing I can do about the hair.  I'll just have to wear extra sparkly eyeshadow to draw attention away from it.  Moral of the story girls.....NEVER go to a hairdressers above a butchers, newsagents, off licence etc! 

Dollydaydreams n Gummygumdrops

So I got my blog name from childhood.  Anybody who knows me in the real world, not on Twitter or Facebook etc but actually spent any time with me will know that I'm in my own little world.  My Mam used to call me Dollydaydreams and that I live in an Airy Fairy world.  I'm a dreamer.  I think anything can happen.  I think, why not?  I'm a bit innocent and very gullible.  When I was about 14, my 10 year old sister told me that she'd found a secret doorway to Narnia, in Mam and Dad's wardrobe behind the stack of towels.  Well, I was soooooooooooooo excited.  She told me we couldn't go till after dinner and not to tell my other brother or sister.  So after dinner, I crawled into the wardrobe and started secret knocking on every part of the back of the wardrobe. When no door sprung open (surprise, surprise) I crawled out of the wardrobe to see her giggling from behind her pillow and I said to her "I'll try again later" ha ha ha ha ha!  To this day we laugh about it. 

Gummygumdrops is exactly as you'd expect.  My dad called me that because just before my communion when I was 7 I believe, my teeth all fell out at the front.  I was warned not to smile with my mouth open by my mam cos she didn't want the photo's ruined.  Now this would have been understandable (ish) if it wasn't for the fact that she made me wear my brown health service glasses with a patch over one of the lenses!!  I mean WTF?????  My lack of teeth didn't ruin the photo's.  The Jack Duckworth specs totally did ha ha.  I can empathize somewhat with my Mam though.  When my own daughther made her communion last year, I was hoping that her wobbly front teeth wouldn't fall out beforehand, and they didn't. (I'm resisting the urge to put Thank God at the end of that sentence like my Mam does)

Sparkly, lovely, things....

So I'm mad about make up.  Always have been.  Years ago when I was living at home and had the attic room all on my ownio I used to sit cross legged on the floor in front of my teeny radiator peering through a pink pound shop mirror and happily trial and error the contents of my make up.  Back then, my make up bag consisted of Constance Carroll Candyfloss lipstick (everyone's first lippie, right?) and a Constance Carroll deep orange and dark brown eye shadow pallet. No foundation but sure I was 15 and had mahoosive skin :-) Looking back, I'm SCARLET!  I never even heard of tweezing so it didn't matter if my eye make up was blended to high heaven, the stragglers underneath my brows had a life of their own ha ha. 

Fast forward to today and my make up routine has changed little.  I now sit at the kitchen table with my No 7 large make up mirror balanced on the biscuit tin.  Not a frosted pink lippie in sight although I must confess to several deep orange pigments (a la Mac).  For me, getting ready for a night out, starts the week before.  Skin is readied in preparation for the false tan (I'll blog about this later), nails are either filled (acrylic....thanks Eve) or painted depending on the occassin and the outfit (yes, it's THAT serious).  I've started to skip getting a blow dry because I'm never happy with the outcome.  It's sooooooo hard to find somebody to do your hair the way you want it.  Now maybe that's because I want Penelope Cruz hair and it's just never gonna happen but I'd rather spend my money on a new pigment than on my hair.  I know some girls hate doing their make up and spend 10 minutes on themselves before a night out and all I can say is....HOW and WHY?  This is the best part of going out (besides the actual being out part of course).  It's like deciding what to wear, deciding what make up to go with.  Smokey eye and pale lips, pale eye and strong lips, strong eyes and strong lips sure why not?  Primer or highlighting primer? Matt or dewy foundation, gloss or lippie or both, falsh lashes or lashings of mascara, powder or pencil in brows, shading or highlighting or both.  See, to me, it's an art form.  Make up can transform a person visually but more importantly it can transform how they feel about themselves and that can only be a good thing!

Single Socks

Why do they go into the washing machine happily in pairs and come out singletons.  Always, without fail.  Even when I ball them up together, they still separate mid cycle.  My younger man reminded me today that all 8 pairs of new socks that Auntie Trish had token gifted him for Christmas had been worn.  He gazed wistfully to the ceiling saying "back to wearing socks for days (weeks) at a time so".  Twas like a dagger to me heart, cos I, being a stay at home mammy, feel it's my duty to make sure he has clean socks to wear to his big fancy job every day.  That sounds so olf fashioned I know but that's what my life is now.  My day consists of schools runs, dishes, hoovering, laundry, cooking, cleaning, feeding the pup, walking the pup, more laundry, dancing (see my The Biggest Loser previous blog) and trying to avoid chocolate for the day.  It bugs the bejaysus out of me when socks get lost cos I feel like it's my fault then when really it's Mr Hotpoints fault for making his filter pipe too big (thanks Google)!
So as I type, himself is gone out with odd black socks but that's a bonus cos usually, it's one brown and one black ha ha!  Anyway, the mystery will continue and as I said to him, there's always next Christmas when no doubt you'll get another 8 pairs from Auntie Trish :-)

The biggest loser...

Every year I promise myself something and every year I let myself down.  I don't ever let anybody else down mind you, just myself.  So once again, come January 4th this year (no one ever starts on the 1st Jan right?), I promised myself that I would shed the weight that has stuck to my body since having the babbas.  Well, that's the excuse I'm giving but considering the eldest will be 9 in June, and the youngest 5 in May, I can't use that as much of an excuse.  The fact is, as is always the case, I got lazy!  I stopped moving around as much as I used to.  The women who say "Oh well running around after these little monsters, keeps me fit" while running a perfectly manicured, well moisturised, sparkling hand through their salon blow dryed hair are lying!! Yes, I defy anybody with kids to tell me that solely looking after your kids keeps you fit.  I mean, how much running around after them do you have to do?  My kids never run fast enough for me to have to chase after them mores the pity. I used to walk everywhere.  I used to play basketball even though I'm only 5.3 give or take a pair of Jimmy Choo's.  I used to do Yoga, Salsa, Running Club (until the boobies grew to big).  Then before you know it, you fall in love, get married, have a child, get separated, fall in love again, have another child and live happily ever after.  Except you would do if only you could shift that bit of weight that taunts you everytime you go shopping for a new dress!  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not massively mahoosive but I have enough junk in my trunk to want to clear that bad boy out for once and for all.  Because when I do shift it, life will be perfect, right?! 

So I joined Slimming World.  Never heard of it till this year but their plan appealed to me. So that's the eating part sorted.  My eldest girl got Just Dance at Christmas for the Wii and I've rediscovered my love of dance. Oh I dance when I'm out etc but not like this.  This is dancing when there is nobody watching and it's brilliant!  So 45 mins every morning when the kids are at school and I lash on my Madonna leggings and my off the shoulder 80's Fame t-shirt, I feel like one of those girls in the Call Me Video.  Y'know, the video with all the gorgeous girls in their spandex and lycra bending over all suggestively etc.  That's me!  So what if you can't balance an egg on my ass....yet!!  So what if they are camera perfect while I'm purple and shiny (eueuewwww).  Perception is everything and I perceive that I'm like them so I give it socks and really go for it when I'm dancing.  Fab!

In my first two weeks I've lost 5lbs.  I'm happy.  It's a slow process but I'm willing to give myself the time to do it this year.  By sharing this with you all, I feel like I can't let you down and I'm hoping that some of you are on this journey with me???  I hope so anyway.

So in the meantime, wish me willpower as Cadbury Creme Egg season approaches and bendy lycra :-)