Fashion | Things I would buy if I wasn't so poor #2

Here we have the second in my series of 'things I would buy if I wasn't so poor'. I feel like these are going to become quite a regular thing on here because I am still spectacularly poor and will be for the foreseeable future! This time I didn't have any sort of budget in mind because after all, if I wasn't so poor I would buy these things! Here we have some of my ultimate dream items and well the bracelet is just because I love a bit of studs! 

Leather Satchel - Proenza Schouler - £1245

Leather Jacket - All Saints - £345

Spiked Bracelet - Humblechic - £17

Beauty | Shellac nails

Very much like with my hair I have had a lifelong battle with getting my nails to do what I want them to do! They are dry, flaky and peel off in little bits and just generally look awful. I am one of those people who hide their nails on the tube for fear of a random stranger seeing them and thinking something unsavoury about them, sad I know. Any nail varnish I put on, no matter how high end would chip and flake away literally within a day so I had been looking for a more permanent nail solution for a while now.

I stumbled upon a little beauty salon around the corner from my house the other day whilst I was looking for quite embarrassingly, a chip shop. This place does shellac manicures for twenty pounds and so I thought why not? I had heard really good things about shellac and how it doesn't chip, so I figured it was worth a go.

To cut a very long story short, I absolutely LOVE them! As you can see I chose a bright red colour called 'hollywood', thats one of the only downsides to shellac, that you only have quite a restricted colour range but the colours that they do have are really lovely and I think that there would be something there to suit everyones tastes. The whole process took around fourty five minutes but I did have a full manicure and not just the paint. In the place that I had mine done, to only get your nails painted with the shellac is cheaper as well. 

Shellac is basically a uv gel nail polish and so you apply it just as you would a nail polish and then put your hand under a uv light to set the polish. Its quick, its easy and the results are incredible!

I had these done on wednesday last week and as you can see there are no chips whatsoever and they are still just as shiny as when I got them done. They are supposed to last for about two weeks but really they last for as long as you can stand the growth of your nail showing at the bottom! My nails grow really slow so these should last me a pretty long time!

Have you ever had shellac nails done? Would you consider them?

Beauty | October GlossyBox

I've been subscribed to glossy box for over a year now and I always have mixed feelings about whether to keep my subscription or to cancel it. This month was another one of those months.

This month I received four items as apposed to the usual five or six. My items were an Anatomicals body scrub, a Dermalogica skin care three step kit, a Skinetica anti blemish solution and a Yves Rocher lipstick.

Lets start with the scrub, which retails for around the four pound mark. I'm a big fan of the Anatomicals brand having bought some of their stuff before off of ASOS. Its a brand I trust to be good quality so I was pleased to get this in my box and this scrub is pink grapefruit flavour which appears to be my new obsession! Anything pink grapefruit or mandarin I am all over lately, its something about fresh zingy scents when the weather gets more gloomy.

The next thing I was not so happy with; the Dermalogica set. Its not that I don’t like the product, which includes a cleanser, toner and moisturiser and is targeted at spot prone skin. Don’t get me wrong, I do like Dermalogica and I trust their products, its just that I had this exact same set in a glossy box that I got a few months back and I still haven’t finished this set from the last time I got it! Still the set retails for £12 and so thats my moneys worth for the box right there.

The Skinetica blemish solution I am excited to try. I almost want my skin to go through a bad patch so that I can test this out! I haven’t heard of the brand before either and I'm always up for trying out a new brand. This retails for £7 and says that you will see results in two to three days, further testing to follow...

The last product I'm sure some people will really like but its just not my cup of tea, I'm not a big lipstick wearer, I much prefer lip stains because lets face it I'm not the most ladylike or graceful person and so lipstick will inevitably end up on my nose or halfway down my chin, basically anywhere that it isn’t supposed to be. This is a beautiful shade of red and if I was partial to a lipstick then I would wear it but I'm just not!

Overall I do think I was pleased with this box but I sort of forget that I pay for them every month. When I think that these four things have cost me around thirteen pounds then maybe I'm not so happy... ah well perhaps next month will excite me more. Are you subscribed to glossy box? Would you have been happy with this months box?

Life | What's been going on?

Hello, hello, hello what do we have here then? Well the truth is we have a very sheepish me who has not posted for a very long time. The truth is is that these past two months have been an absolute whirlwind for me! I'll catch you up on it all right now.

I finally moved in to my new apartment and it was everything I dreamed and more! I don’t know if I said before but my move in day was the first time I had actually seen my new home so it was safe to say I was a bit nervous as to whether I was going to like it or not. It is stunning. Oh my God it is stunning. So moving in took up a lot of my time and so blogging and my tumblr and my twitter and whatnot just flew out of my mind; slap me on the wrist for being a bad blogger! Also we didn't have internet at that point so it was always going to be tricky getting posts up but thats no excuse now is it?

A few weeks after I moved in to my new apartment I started my new university course. I could finally officially say that I am a student at the London College of Fashion! I am loving it! Literally loving it! I think that having the university experience that I did last year (see this post if you don’t know what I'm on about) has really made me appreciate how good my new university is and how good my course is and how nice the people are. The only problem is how bloody expensive the whole thing is! I mean don’t get me wrong I get that its an investment for my (hopeful) future career in the footwear industry but Jesus! I'm already paying nine grand in fees per year and then on top of that I have to fork out hundreds of pounds that I don’t have for tools. But hey ho thats just how the cookie crumbles and I'm not complaining one bit!

Also this month I embarked on a desperate search for employment after realising how depressingly poor I am. So I only managed to get myself a job in Selfridges would you believe?! I literally am still in shock! It is my dream place to work in London! I haven’t started yet but I am so looking forward to it! I realise now that this is becoming more of an online diary than a blog...

There has been some more things that have gone on but that will do for now before this gets to be an essay!

Fashion | Things I would buy if I wasn't so poor #1

Welcome to a new segment I like to call "things I would buy if I wasn't so poor"but unfortunately I am so alas these things can not be mine... Well, a girl can dream, a girl can dream. As you can probably see I'm going through one of those 'Topshop phases' where I want to buy literally all the things that they have in store. If you want to buy any of these then I'll link them all below so that I can spend vicariously through you. Also, if you want to follow me on polyvore then feel free! I'll link it here

Broderie anglais bralet top - Topshop - £24

MOTO supersoft skinny Leigh jeans - Topshop - £38

Studded ballet flats - Topshop - £25

Leather satchel - Topshop - £55

Life | Room decoration

I truly believe that the little things you do in a room can make or break a space in terms of decoration. I discovered this after many a conversation with my sister as to why her room always felt nice and very personal to her and mine never did. My sister has a sort of god given gift for interior design. Every room she has had has always been such a lovely space! You could go into any of them and know immediately that it's her room. It has always been my ultimate goal (in terms of room decoration that is), to harness some of this insane power and make it my own.

I finally think that I have in someway achieved this with my room at my mum's house where I used to live before I moved down to London for university. The wall with my bed is by far my favourite in the room. I spent a good few hours cutting out pictures from magazines, some of my favourite picture source magazines include; Clash, Pigeons & Peacocks, the Urban Outfitters catalogue and Nylon. If your not a bit ridiculous like me (I refuse to cut up hardback A4 magazines) then I would also recommend Love, Pop, Dazed and Confused, Vogue and iD, oh and Notion. Side note – if your ever around the Barbican area of London, which I am quite a lot, then get yourself down to the market on Leather Lane, you can pick up magazines like these there for practically nothing. A key thing to take note of when selecting your pictures is another little gem of wisdom from my sister; 'don’t worry about if they all go together or if they all go along the same theme, if you like them all then it will look good'. I follow this when I'm cutting out my pictures and it seems to have worked for me! Oh, and I generally find that smaller pictures look better in a collage, don’t ask me why, they just do.

Back from that slightly related tangent I then stuck them all up on my wall with blue tack. I really love how the wall looks now because not only is it so much better than what I used to have up there which was a load of fashion adverts and editorials that I had cut out of old issues of Elle magazine, once again I refuse to cut up my sizeable collection of Vogues, but it reflects what I like and my personality a lot more now. Also on the same wall I have some of my shoe collection stored in a little shelving unit that I think we got form Ikea ages ago (it used to be my sisters so forgive me if I'm wrong). Again, I believe that you should have things that you like on display in your room so as shallow as it sounds, I like shoes, so I'm going to display my shoes proudly for all to see. (shoe collection to come soon).

In terms of my bed, I love it! I got it for my eighteenth birthday from my mum, I think she got it from Dreams, which is a bed shop here in England. For as long as I can remember I have wanted a metal day bed type of bed and I finally got one! I love how girly it looks as I'm not a very girly girl at all and so I think it gives a nice contrast to everything else that I've got. My bedding is pretty average, I like the whole red, white and blue theme that I have going on because I have a lot of union jack things in my room and so having my bedding be in this colour scheme ties my room together quite nicely I think.

How do you decorate you room? Let me know!

Review | Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse

I have been on the quest for my perfect hair product for many a year now, it all started in about year nine I would say, I was around the thirteen/fourteen age if you don’t get the school system we have here in England. It was at this time that the trend for ruler straight hair was in full swing and like the naïve, young child that I was, I wanted a piece of that pie. I then proceeded to straighten my hair, I kid you not, four or five times a day with a pair of straighteners that I bought from a shop called Ethel Austin for the grand old price of three pounds.  

Needless to say this destroyed my hair. Full on destroyed it. At this age I didn’t know anything about heat protectants or anything like that and so my hair fought this battle against my straighteners alone, and lost. Oh boy did it lose! Since then I've been searching for a way to tame my naturally curly-ish, wavy-ish, frizzy-ish hair without submitting it to the insane levels of heat I used to.

In a glossy box maybe last month (I can't really remember to tell you the truth), I received the Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse. The oil is described as a dry oil that can be used on your hair, face and body. I haven't ventured into using it on my skin yet but I've been using it on my hair for the past few weeks. Now I've used a hell of a lot of different products on my hair, always hoping for something that will tame the damage that habitual heat styling and a lot of bleach will inevitably cause. So I decided to add in this dry oil to my normal after shower hair routine, (I'll do a separate post on that because otherwise this would be way too long!). I was hopeful but as always I didn't place any major weight on this product actually making a significant difference in my hair.

My hair is extremely dry and fragile due to all the bleach I used to use on it but a few drops of the Nuxe oil(seriously two or three drops will do my whole head of hair and I have a lot of hair!) and my hair feels really soft and with a good amount of shine! The smell of the oil itself is slightly strange, like sort of planty but I think the smell is totally worth the results and the smell doesn't linger for too long anyway, which for me is a plus point as I don’t really like my hair to smell really strongly as it kind of freaks me out a little bit (weird, I know).

The only down side I would say that there is to this product is the packaging. don’t get me wrong I really like how it looks, the little glass bottle that the oil comes in is lovely and looks very classy and expensive but it does make the application process slightly tricky. It's still very do-able but I personally think that a spray or dropper would have just made this an absolute must have for me.

All in all I would still give the Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse four and a half stars out of five purely for the effect it has on my hair. If you would be interested in trying it for yourself then you can buy it online for around the thirty pound mark here.