Benefit Happy Beauty Day!

When I was staying with my brother the weekend that I went to the Beyoncé concert, we were browsing in Boots and I came across this bad boy in the perpetually tempting "impulse buy" section by the till.

The Happy Beauty Day! gift set contains a 7.5ml tube of the POREfessional, a 4ml vial of posietint and a 4g tube of BADgal lash, all for the reduced price of £9.50 (roughly, I can't remember exactly but it was under £10 for definite). Bargain, eh?

Benefit is normally pretty pricey so £9.50 for three miniature versions of their products, I thought, was a pretty good deal. I hadn't tried any of these products before so buying small sizes of them seemed like a nice way of trying a few things without breaking the bank. I've only tried posietint as yet but so far, so good - I like it. It gives the cheeks a lovely springy/summery flush and looks a lot more natural than a powder blusher in my opinion.

Annoyingly, because I was disorganised and didn't get round to writing this sooner, this deal is not on the Boots website, although you could check in a Boots shop if you were interested in buying this. If not, there are places on the internet that you can find it, namely eBay (although you should be careful buying beauty products on eBay, check to make sure they're unused before you buy them).

Hopefully this post was of some use and if not, consider it the smallest haul ever! Have you tried any of these products?

Beyoncé's The Mrs. Carter Show World Tour

As I'm sure some of you did, my brother and I recently went to see Beyoncé in concert at London's O2 Arena. Getting tickets was a bit of a nightmare so we were very lucky to get them really! I was obviously expecting Beyoncé to be amazing live but seriously, I can't even put into words how good she is. So good. 

We arrived at the O2 a bit before the concert to go to the Gourmet Burger Kitchen in the O2's Entertainment Avenue, which is basically a strip of shops and restaurants inside the arena. If you've never been to GBK before, you really should. It's exactly what it says on the tin - really nice burgers, and the food is actually pretty inexpensive too. I had their chicken Avocado Bacon burger which is ah-mazing if you love avocado. 

Then, obviously, we went into the concert. Some guy I hadn't heard of called Luke James was supporting her; he was a good singer but pretty nondescript in my opinion. 

There was a break for a bit and then Queen B herself came on, strutting her stuff to Run the World. I must admit, I didn't think some of the first few songs she sang were the most obvious ones to do on her world tour but they were good anyway, and she did all the big ones like Single Ladies, Love on Top and Crazy Right Now.

Halfway through the concert she moved onto this stage in the middle so we were even closer to her!

Unbelievable levels of sass.. 

This was obviously during Single Ladies. Even though other people were, I didn't really feel qualified to be twerking in front of Beyoncé!

She finished with Halo which made a good end to the night. Also, every good concert should have confetti at the end.

I'm sure the tour is all sold out now but if you ever get the chance to see Beyoncé live, you should absolutely go. I think a lot of singers can't sing and dance live but she really can and she still sounds amazing! 

Have any of you seen Beyoncé live before?

PS. Sorry for the lack of posts recently, it sucks but obviously A levels have to take precedence at the moment. Not long now until they're over!

Monthly Summary: April 2013

I know I say this every month, but April really has flown by! Despite having to spend a lot of time revising for my A levels at the moment, I actually seem to have done quite a lot of fun stuff this past month. It's been a good one. I'm kind of sad for it to end actually as the ending of April brings me ever closer to my exams and even worse, leaving school.. I'm so not ready to leave! Anyway, on a slightly less depressing note, I'll talk about what I got up to in the surprisingly sunny month of April.

Doing

As I wrote about here, I went to Newcastle at the beginning of April for a university open day. It's such a cool, lively city so I could definitely imagine myself being at uni there!

I also went to my grandparents' diamond wedding anniversary lunch which was all kinds of adorable. It was the first time my whole family had been together in forever so it was really nice to see everyone again. You can read more about that here.

As light relief from my revision, my mum and I spent the laziest and most relaxing day ever at a spa. I was under strict instructions from my mum only to read the trashy magazines and not take Doctor Faustus with me! You can see the full post on that here.

It was my childhood BFF Laura's birthday on the 26th so I drove up to Wales to celebrate with her. She had a party in a local school hall then we went to a club which was far less disgusting than my local one. Overall, a good night! I hadn't seen Laura since August last year which is ridiculous so it was really nice to see her.

Watching

I went to see As You Like It at the RSC a couple of weekends ago which I really enjoyed and would 100% recommend if you're passing by Stratford! I wrote a full post about that here. Completely unrelated to the play but the weather was absolutely lovely that day!

Perhaps slightly less high-brow but just as enjoyable, New Girl came back onto British TV last month and I've been loving it. I'm a massive Zooey Deschanel fangirl so I kind of watch it by default, but I genuinely do enjoy it as the humour is just lighthearted and silly. Even though I vaguely know what's going to happen in future episodes of New Girl (damn you, internet!), I'm really enjoying watching it and I can't wait for some of the things I know are going to happen to happen!

Using

I've been a little more experimental with my beauty products recently and so I have discovered some new gems which have worked their way into my daily routine: the first being Philosophy Purity Made Simple Cleanser which I won't go into massive detail about because I've written a full post on it which is coming soon but in short, I love using it for removing all of my makeup at night.

The second product is the much-hyped Real Techniques Stippling Brush which seems to be just about the only thing I haven't written a blog post on this past month.. I've really been enjoying using this to buff foundation onto areas of redness on my skin which gives a much more natural finish than applying foundation to your entire face.

Listening

I didn't do this in my last monthly summary post but I thought it would be cool to include a playlist of the songs I've been loving each month. I'm not pretending these are the coolest/most recent songs out at the moment, they're just the ones I've been listening to!

• Just Give Me A Reason - P!nk ft. Nate Ruess
• Panic Cord - Gabrielle Aplin
• Chocolate - The 1975
• Radioactive - Imagine Dragons
• Pompeii - Bastille
• Hall of Fame - The Script ft. will.i.am
• Recovery - Frank Turner

So, that's the end of another month. May is going to be a pretty busy month for me, my French oral exam is today (wish me luck!) and of course I need to be revising for the rest of my A levels too. Fun fun fun.

Did you do anything interesting in April?