I’ve started a little series on Instagram that I hope to keep regularly adding posts to; it’s called 3 Best Beauty Buys, which isn’t the most inventive of feature names, but it’ll do what it says on the tin and that’s what counts! I’ve already done a quick IGTV feature on Maskne products (Maskne is the new, vaguely annoying term for blemishes and outbreaks that have been brought about by the wearing of a facemask) and you can watch that here, but now I’m prepping a video on the best firming eye creams and so I thought I’d take you along for the ride.

I always have to write myself an abundance of notes before I start filming something, otherwise I go off on crazy tangents, talking about parking woes and singing foxes and the complexities of British queueing etiquette. And it makes some sort of sense for me to write those research notes here on the website, so that you all get a handy post out of it, rather than scribbling them on the back of a council tax bill and chucking it all in the recycling afterwards…

And so here are three great firming eye creams that I’ve had noticeable results with. My usual eye cream, for reference, is the Kiehl’s Powerful Strength Line-Reducing Serum (find more details in posts here) but after a summer-long love affair with everything antioxidant and Vitamin-C-heavy, I’m turning my attention to the super-firmers.

Let’s go in with a sharp intake of breath and the priciest option – the DCL Peptide Plus Eye Treatment – which is £86 at Cult Beauty here*. DCL burst onto the UK scene a few years ago and the products are so good – really well-formulated and effective – but I haven’t heard that much noise about them since. This powerful eye cream is deeply hydrating but also focuses on helping to increase elasticity around the delicate eye area so that fine lines are smoothed. It mentions dark circles on the marketing material, but I don’t find that anything helps that much with dark circles if you have them severely – this is definitely one for firming and making everything just feel a bit more…robust. I gave it a very lengthy and intense trial last year but my review got pushed to the side when the world fell apart. So here: it’s a good ‘un – I’m on my second bottle.

My next “pick of the bunch” would be Paula’s Choice Clinical Ceramide-Enriched Firming Eye Cream, which is £43 here*. I didn’t realise until quite far down the road that this contained retinol  as well as a wheelbarrow-load of ceramides for strengthening delicate, crepey skin. This is the most advanced eye cream available from Paula’s Choice, which excites me; I feel as though their formulas are always really well-considered and offer solid, marketing-bollocks-free options for the crowd who want no-nonsense answers to their skincare complaints. Love the pump-action bottle (DCL’s is the same sort of packaging) and the rich texture of the cream. It feels instantly relieving if your skin is chronically dry around the eyes.

When it comes to Vichy’s Neovadiol Rose Platinum Eye Cream (online here*) I have to admit that I was entirely seduced by the packaging! I’ve really gone off pots of stuff because the cream gets under my nails and annoys me and it just feels less…clean…than tubes and bottles, but this teeny pink pot just felt so unbelievably retro.

As though I had been transported to the 60s and sauntered down to a Parisian pharmacie to pick up a cold cream and some velcro rollers for my hair but thrown un petit creme pour les yeux for good measure. It’s a total trinket of beauty treasure and the eye cream inside is equally as delicious. Rose pink – so nostalgic! – and really very rich and buttery so that it feels nourishing and comforting straight away. I’ve just seen that it targets the signs of ageing caused by the menopause but it seems just as appropriate for signs of ageing caused by the half term holiday. It’s also £18 rather than £27 at Escentual here* until the end of October.

Right, keep a lookout for the video on IGTV – I’m here if you use Instagram but you’re not already following!

The post 3 Best Beauty Buys: Firming Eye Creams appeared first on A Model Recommends.

I think that Chanel’s new Les Beiges Healthy Glow Makeup is an absolute triumph of a foundation relaunch. It’s so tweaked that it’s barely the same product. I didn’t ever properly review the original Healthy Glow foundation because – to get straight to the point – I wasn’t that keen on it. I had my favourite Chanel foundation already (Perfection Lumiere Velvet, now discontinued) and the Healthy Glow, for me, didn’t bring much extra to the party. Perfection Lumiere Velvet gave the most refined, flawless finish with the lightest of touches and subtlest of glows  (God only knows why you’d stop making such an absolute gem of a base) and Les Beiges gave sort of the same coverage and semi-matte finish but didn’t seem to so seamlessly disappear.

But here it is, relaunched and with twice as many shades available; it’s fresh-feeling where the original sometimes felt slightly claggy, the coverage is more sheer, more buildable and more elegant – no opaque masks here! – and the makeup feels as though it’s part of the skin rather than sitting on top in a layer.

The new version is way more hydrating too – it’s not quite on a par with Pat McGrath’s or Lauder’s Futurist, but it’s on its way. Layered over a good juicy moisturiser it looks and feels dewier and more alive than the original, but with good longevity and very little in the way of slippage in oilier zones it offers the best of both worlds: the real-skin benefits of a tinted moisturiser, the finish and coverage of a semi-velvety foundation.

Let’s take a look at the before and after photos…

This is just one very light coat of the Healthy Glow Makeup, applied with a flat-top kabuki-style foundation brush, but you can see how effortlessly it perfects the skin whilst leaving a believable, healthy sheen. This version of Les Beiges Healthy Glow really lives up to its name – there’s glow but it is very much on the natural end of the spectrum. No strobing effects here! Coverage is on the lighter side of medium but you can easily build up where you need more base and it never looks heavy or caked.

Here are the close-ups – you can see how fine and chic the finish is and that it doesn’t obliterate every imperfection but leaves a gorgeous, flexible sort of veil that evens out the skintone and adds a hint of glow:

I usually find it really hard to get into my foundation reviews – I dither about this and that and spend weeks trying it out in every sort of condition, with heavy face creams beneath or with powders on top – but I have to say that this review has been easy. Les Beiges was such a spectacularly pleasant surprise even on the first application – it’s nothing like Perfection Lumiere Velvet, my old favourite, but it definitely offers up a solid replacement.

Buy Chanel Les Beiges Healthy Glow Makeup*

On a practical note, the new version of Les Beiges Healthy Glow doesn’t contain an SPF. I actually prefer this because I tend to wear a dedicated SPF anyway and apply foundation on top. Many like to use the sunscreen in their makeup product as a sort of light protection against incidental sun exposure, but I’m usually either all in or all out and I quite like to tick off my SPF requirement as I do my skincare routine.

Either way, it’s easy enough to add the sunscreen step before foundation if you need to, but I think that the formula feels lighter and more elegant without it built in.

So to recap: the changes in this new formula are many and varied. No SPF, much more hydrating, a lighter feel and a sheerer finish, more of a dewy glow. Over twice as many shades and slightly different packaging.

Who will love this? I honestly think that it will suit most skin types, including those on the oily side so long as they use a primer in the places they tend to have trouble with. It’s not a greasy finish by any stretch of the imagination but the formula is really hydrating so drier skin will love it – those who want a discrete, grown-up foundation that looks barely there but is actually working quite hard behind the scenes will also rate this.

I’m wearing shade B30 but will need to step back to B20 in the winter months as my lockdown tan dissipates and I apply using a brush. I usually wear a hydrating serum and moisturiser combo beneath this base – I find that too rich a cream makes most foundations just a little bit slidey – and I never need to set it with powder.

You can find the new Chanel Les Beiges Healthy Glow foundation at Chanel here* – it’s £41. Don’t confuse it with the old version, one that most stockists still seem to be selling! If it says SPF25 on the bottle or in the title then that’s not the guy you want…

The post Foundation Review: Chanel Les Beiges Healthy Glow Makeup appeared first on A Model Recommends.

In what might be considered the rebrand of the century, the monthly 5 Beauty Favourites feature has now become…

*drumroll*

…5 Favourites. It took me a hell of a long time to come up with the new title format and so please do show your appreciation in the comments below. Ha. In response to your overwhelming positivity on the matter (and also my own ever-increasing boredom) I have expanded the monthly favourites to include things I’ve loved from all manner of categories. Food, clothing, lifestyle, interiors, health; the list will, I am sure, go on and on.

And so I bring you 5 Favourites: September 2020 (catchy!) with something for just about everyone. There’s a video at the bottom of the post if you hate reading words and there are words for those who hate the sound of my voice. If you’re a glutton for punishment then you can read the post and watch the video!

Favourite 1: The Peloton

At time of filming I hadn’t had the new Peloton Bike+ delivered and so here I refer to the original home spinning bike which has had its price cut to a still quite astonishing £1750. It’s eye-watering, I know, but it would be no exaggeration to say that this futuristic exercise bike has completely changed my fitness life. In that before I had the Peloton I was doing nothing towards my health and fitness and now I can cycle almost six miles in twenty minutes.

I bloody love it. I actually look forward to getting on the saddle, choosing my class (or you can join live ones) and working so hard that my vision goes blurry. I love it so much I’ve returned the original Peloton and gone for the new one which is even more hideously expensive, but with both the adults in the household using it daily and looking and feeling a million times better for it, I can’t actually think of a better investment we’ve made in recent years.

I’m about to do a review video on the new Peloton Bike+ so make sure you’re following on Instagram – you can find my video on the original bike on IGTV here.

Favourite 2: Clipper Sleepy Tea

It’s not actually called Sleepy Tea at all, it’s Sleep Easy, and it smells a bit like old cow dung when you open the foil pouch, but persevere and you’ll find a delectable bedtime infusion with orange, chamomile and valerian. I think I’ve tried the majority of sleep teas on the mainstream market and this is my repeat buy – I do like the Tea Pigs one for the big lumps of actual apple and whole blossoms inside the bag (it’s like someone has wrapped up a fairies’ tea party in a hurry!) but Clipper’s pips it to the post.

I like to drink a mug of it whilst I’m in one of my special Epsom Salt baths. Double whammy. I can’t even read a sentence of my book when I get into bed before falling asleep!

Favourite 3: Louis de Poortere Antiquarian Rug

I’ve bought four rugs from Louis de Poortere now but this is the largest and most extravagant – it needed to be because the floor it covers is in “the new room” and is quite expansive. But it’s absolutely one of my favourite home purchases since we moved to this house – it’s amazing how some pattern and warmth can suddenly pull a room together and make a large space feel cosy.

You can find this particular rug online here, they do loads of different sizes. It has a traditional, slightly distressed feel to it but it’s actually new. Which usually I’d hate, but I couldn’t be doing with trawling through loads of old rugs to find “the one” that just happened to be a) authentic and b) the right size and c) the right colour! I like buying second hand and I’d say that way more than half of my furniture and home stuff is vintage but sometimes I have to draw the line…

Favourite 4: StricVectin Daily Reveal Pads

You’re going to be hearing a lot about these one-swipe wonder pads – they’re seriously impressive. They contain four different exfoliating acids for that immediate look of brightness we’re now quite familiar with, but the difference is that they also leave your skin feeling really moisturised. They have that instant “fresh” feel that you tend to get with acid peel pads (usually the alcohol evaporating) but just seconds after you finish wiping your face, the skin develops an almost oily layer. Not greasy or unpleasant, but certainly enough that I wouldn’t bother with serum and moisturiser afterwards!

The ultimate one-step facial, then. I think they’re great – you can find them online here*; they’re £39 for 60 pads which is a few months’ worth if you use two or three times a week, which would be my personal preference.

Favourite 5: Simple Protect n Glow Rest & Reset 72h Hydrating Gel

A cheeky little bargain for you; I think that this little pot of lightweight, fresh-feel gel moisturiser is as good as the pricey ones. Thing Moisture Surge on a budget. If you hate oily or heavy face creams but have skin that’s slightly dehydrated then give this a try, it’s a pretty safe investment! Ditto if you want something to layer on beneath your SPF. You can find it at Boots here*, it’s £6.99.

The post 5 Favourites: September 2020 appeared first on A Model Recommends.

A giant white moth just flew at my window as I started to type this life update, and I’m not sure what sort of omen that represents. I almost had a heart attack when its huge wings hit the glass and was forced to immediately raid my desk drawers for something edible to calm my nerves. Unfortunately I had already eaten the vulva-shaped lollipop that a feminine hygiene brand had so kindly sent to me last month (an honest-to-God, true-to-life replica of a full-sized vulva in pink chocolate, folds and all) and so the cupboard was bare, so to speak.

Who sends a lollipop that’s an artful replica of a (hairless) vulva, you might ask? Well, let me tell you that it’s not the first one I’ve had posted through the letterbox. And it’s not top of my list of things I particularly want to eat, but when the sugar craving hits (usually at around 3pm) then you can’t be too picky about these things. The chocolate was actually quite delicious – it reminded me of the little pink mice you used to get at the sweet shop, back in the Victorian times when sweete shoppes still existed.

Bloody hell, the moth is still at it! Flying at my window panes as though it’s possessed – it’s hurtling backwards and forwards as though it’s lashed to the business end of an invisible battering ram.

It’s difficult to stay focused under these conditions – I simply can’t work like this! – but I have to admit that I’m not entirely in the best frame of mind anyway to write this life update tonight. Long-term readers will know that I haveto publish my life update on the third of every month (it has become almost a superstition – I once wrote it blind drunk at five minutes to midnight, you can trawl through them all here and guess which one) but I’m struggling to get my words down tonight.

And it’s not that nothing has happened in the last month, it’s more that everything has happened. It’s all change. A new business venture that involves coastal paths and cosy fires, a huge new life plan and a fitness regime that I’ve been surprisingly good at throwing myself into.

(In fact it’s not even a regime – I just bought one of those Peloton bikes and, despite hating almost all forms of physical activity*, can’t stop going on it. The classes are gruelling but make me smile like a total fool – must be the endorphins. I’ve never once enjoyed having to move my body at more than a walking pace yet here I am wearing padded lycra cycling shorts listening to 90s Garage and pedalling so hard that I get black spots in front of my eyes.

Who knew?

*I hate almost all forms of physical activity and cannot understand people who take up sports as a hobby. Ditto those who go on holiday and then book in for daily sessions of scuba diving or dune-surfing or whatever it is people like to do. How is that even a holiday? Lying down is a holiday! Reading a Kindle through one squinted eye because it’s so bright but you can’t read with your sunglasses on is a holiday. Falling asleep on a sunlounger after a heavy rosé-fuelled lunch and waking up six hours later with sunstroke and mild cystitis…is a holiday. Sort of.)

Anyway, the Peloton (fancy exercise bike with a huge screen that immerses you in very dynamic live-streamed spin classes) is about the only thing I can talk about at the moment. My mind is absolutely buzzing with new things, new horizons and exciting changes but it’s too soon to go there and report on it all. One of my projects is a little bit of a content goldmine, come to think of it – I could film and serialise the whole thing and I think it would be so interesting, like Homes Under The Hammer crossed with a very low-key version of Grand Designs! Does that sound like something you’d watch? A no holds barred account of a total house renovation? (Albeit a very tiny one?)

Let me know in the comments. I’ll consider this my litmus test.

In this month’s family developments we have: both kids in school/pre-school, which gives a clear four-ish hours a day to work, but somehow results in less actual work being done than during lockdown when I had only a meagre forty-ish minutes a day to work. Where on earth does the time go? I go to do a twenty minute Peloton class and suddenly an hour and a half has gone by – answering the door to the postman seems to use up the best part of ten minutes. I try to steer clear of social media, because that seems to be a black hole of time-swallowing proportions and I limit myself to two toilet trips per workday, because otherwise I find myself automatically having a quick scroll through Instagram. God forbid I stop to have lunch.

So I have more time, now, but in an unexpected and weird turn of events, I also have less. I end up doing nearly all of my most important work between 2.30pm and 3, typing frantically like one of those geeks in the movies when they’re trying to hack into an evil warlord’s computer to prevent a missile from blowing up the entire east coast of America and they’ve only got twenty seconds to go. I spend that half an hour working so intensively that I’m surprised I don’t self-combust – it’s like making a carthorse suddenly do a steeplechase after it’s spent the day plodding about the farmyard sniffing the fence panels and hoofing the mud.

And the few hours between school and bedtime seem to be so much harder than when it was the long, full days during lockdown and the summer holidays – what’s up with that? Again, is it that you’ve been blobbing about all day in near-silence and then suddenly you’re expected to perform the roles of FBI negotiator, short-order chef, butler, fashion stylist and driver all at the same time?

Whatever, it’s all very brilliant and intense and I definitely know that I’m alive – the moments of sheer elation and the times of absolute rock-bottom morale that define parenthood continue to delight and torment. What an incredible journey it is – and each phase is so short-lived, I can now barely remember a time when my kids couldn’t talk. Their baby photos are starting to seem almost alien, as though they are photos of entirely different people, and I’m just about to collect up and pass along all of their plastic bowls and plates and funny short-handled cutlery. They’ve decided that they are too grown-up for unbreakable stuff and that they’d like a stab at the Burleigh collection.

(Joke, like I’d even risk it! They’re using circa 2005 IKEA plates that are chipped and that have so many knife scores in them they look like little faded treasure maps. I knew that Mr AMR’s hoarding tendencies would pay off one day.)

I have to go, this moth is frantic and to be quite honest it’s unnerving. I’ve started thinking that it’s someone trapped in a moth’s body, or something worse, like an angry shrunken angel, and once I get a spooky thought like that into my head I have to go and hide under the covers. White moths always remind me of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations; I imagine they have withered old ladies faces superimposed on their tiny hairy heads…

You’re welcome.

Browse earlier life updates…

The post Life Update: It’s An Omen appeared first on A Model Recommends.

I don’t have an amazing track record with mascara-testing. Firstly, I am massively picky when it comes to what I put on my lashes, which means that I hate most mascaras and quickly become disgruntled when I have to test a whole run of them. (I like my mascaras to be just tacky enough to give volume but not require a blowtorch and chisel to remove, I like the brush to be precise enough not to spread product all over my eyelids but big enough to create lift and length. The list continues but I wouldn’t want you to fall asleep.)

So as I said, I’m picky, which means that I relegate most test samples to the sin bin after a couple of uses, but I’m also sensitive around the eye area which means that I can only test one or two a day before my eyes start streaming and the skin gets red and raw. It’s a slow and arduous process, then, and one that I’ll only drum up the enthusiasm for once in a blue moon.

Fortunately for you (if you’re interested in mascaras!) it’s that blue moon kind of time and I’ve been putting up with eyes that look as though they’ve been weeping battery fluid just so that I can bring you the best of the new luxury mascara launches.

The idea was to rate all of these with scores out of ten for various things like longevity, ease of application, depth of colour, but let’s be frank: they’re all black, none of them come off easily and the wand size and flexibility (hoho) is all about personal preference, so vaguely irrelevant.

But if you have flattish, fine and fair lashes like mine and tend to coat your eyelid in product when applying then you’re in a similar beauty boat to me and you’ll hopefully love these new launches as much as I do.

Charlotte Tilbury Push Up Lashes Mascara, £12/£23 at SpaceNK here*. Best for flat, drab lashes that refuse to go upwards, this really does push up by depositing a load of mascara at the base of the lash before sweeping the volume through to the ends. I find this one the messiest, so be warned on that front if you tend to need an hour to clean up after you’ve put on your mascara! Out of the four this is the one that gives me a tiny but of dropping and flaking towards the end of a long wear, but it’s nothing massively noticeable.

Dior Iconic Overcurl Mascara, £28 at Selfridges here*. I think that this is my favourite of the lot. I’m not sure it beats Dior’s Pump ‘n’ Volume, which is one of the greatest mascaras of all time, but it’s up there. Pump ‘n’ Volume (find it at FeelUnique here*) is like the Batman of mascaras, with its rubbery suit packaging and its ability to coat each and every lash with about a kilo of product without any clumping; the Iconic Overcurl is just ever so slightly more refined. I need to do a side-by-side comparison on these don’t I?

Marc Jacobs At Lash’d Mascara, £25 at Harvey Nichols here*. I’d say that this mascara is perfect for the smaller-lash’d amongst us as the brush is ever-so-slightly more petite. I get the least amount of lid-painting carnage with this one but I still get great volume and brilliant lash separation. For those who can’t abide the formation of those lash-fans that you get when all of your lashes start off nicely separated but then five or six of them join together at the ends to form a super-clump, this is important. Because when you get a lash-fan it follows that you then have to find something sharp and pointy to separate them out again, which inevitably is the pin from one of those freebie hotel sewing kits, and then it’s so fine you can’t actually see it, because you’re long-sighted and anything within a foot of your face is invisible, and then you pierce your own eyeball and it’s all game over and who needs mascara anyway when you have to permanently wear an eye patch.

NARS Climax Extreme Mascara, £22 at SpaceNK here*. Annoying name, because honestly, I’m not a prude, but I don’t want everything to be about sex. What has mascara got to do with sex? Unless you like to groom your private areas with your mascara (brings a new meaning to the term “bottom lashes”), but that would be weird. Anyway, this is a very good mascara with huge volume and a sort of matte, rubbery finish on the lashes rather than a shiny one. You could get away with one coat of this (and the Dior Iconic, come to think of it) but as with most mascaras this really comes into its own on the second.

Watch the video to see all of these mascaras in action – I’m going to do the same thing for some high street launches too, when I get a second and my eyes have recovered. Honestly it’s as though someone’s brillo-padded the skin off my undereyes.

The post The Best New Luxury Mascaras appeared first on A Model Recommends.