Okay, I know what you’re all thinking: ‘a BB cream review? Have we time travelled back to 2011?’ No dear readers, we have not, so stop being so rude and pay attention. View Full Post
Outfit of the Day: ASOS Mirror Print Skirt
Lush Caca Brun Henna Review.
‘Ello lovely human beings,
Today is a slightly different post to our usual blog frolics. Today, I am discussing hair, hair dye and my first venture into the world of henna.
Backing up a little bit, my hair career (is that a thing?!) has been extremely varied. I started off a little ginger curly haired afro child, migrated to a strawberry blonde (with the help of highlights!) in my teens, bleach blonde and vibrant red at uni – finally settling on brunette when I graduated and decided to become a grownup. Here’s a little collage for your viewing pleasure.
I’m really loving being a brunette at the moment, but I have found that my hair’s condition hasn’t really got any better. Because my hair is quite light naturally, I look genuinely ridiculous when my roots start to come through. This means I have to dye my hair every month or so to keep myself looking less like a middle aged man and more like a 21 year old girl. Obvs this is WUBBISH for my hair and has meant that I decided to move away from chemical dyes.
I hotfooted it to Lush because I heard they did henna dye and after a rather complicated explanation from the lovely sales lady, I bought what looked like a smelly green bar of chocolate. I got it in the shade Caca Brun, which is just the plain brown henna shade. Whilst being somewhat intimidated, I also felt very smug and convinced that I had become some kind of Buddhist hippy in the space of about 10 minutes.
According to my new best friend at Lush, the henna takes about 5 hours to develop and is extremely messy so I prepared myself as fully as possible to do the deed a couple of Sundays ago.
This was my henna kit! Not as extensive as some blogs I saw, but it was actually fine and I’m glad I didn’t have too much crap around! The stuff really is messy…
Hair grips | Chopping board | Knife | Gloves | Shower cap | Pyrex bowl | Kettle | LOTS of newspaper!
The general idea is that you grate the henna, mix it up with hot water to form a consistency of thin yoghurt and then apply to your head while it is still very hot. You obviously don’t want to scald yourself, but the henna becomes hard and thick when it dries, so virtually impossible to spread onto your head! I forgot to add a grater into this picture, so took another one to be thorough and in case you have forgotten what a grater looks like.
You can see how weird the henna looks in this picture – it’s so green! I mixed it up with hot water and it formed a liquid, which can only be described as looking like baby poo. Needless to say, I was very apprehensive about putting this stuff on my head.
I ploughed on though, and whacked loads of it on. They recommend starting at the back and working your way across the head, so this is what I did. I also concentrated on my roots, because that’s where I wanted most of the colour.
At the end of it, this is what I looked like! I piled the henna-ed hair on top of my head to make putting the shower cap/plastic bag on easier. It also made me feel like I was going to a fancy ball.
I am a moron, I am sorry.
I popped on my shower cap AND a plastic bag because I was worried about dripping. I looked genuinely mad.
A few things I noticed while hennaing my hair. It is REALLY heavy once it starts to dry/harden on your hair. In fact, I felt like I was carrying an extra person around all day. I was basically Professor Quirrell. It also drips, a lot. I ended up wrapping an old towel around my plastic bag head because even with my precautions, it dripped lots! Other than that, it didn’t stain my skin at all (I wiped all the bits on my head/ears) and it didn’t stain my kitchen either.
It also smells quite strange. Not necessarily unpleasant, just a little bit like wet hay, incense and cats.
Five hours is also a long time to wait. I discovered that Safe Haven is a terrible film.
So, what was my verdict?
Ah, henna. You cruel, cruel mistress. After all that effort, smelling of cats and discovering that who I thought was Nicola Sparks was actually Nicholas Sparks (WHO KNEW?!), the henna basically did nothing to my hair. My roots are now a delightful shade of weak tea, resembling nothing brown in the slightest. My hair, if anything, is a muddier colour than it was before. I didn’t even feel the lovely conditioning feeling that everyone raves about when using henna.
This is a useless picture I took on my iPhone but hopefully you can see the tragicosity that was my hair. Double vom.
IT BASICALLY WAS 5 HOURS OF MY LIFE WASTED THAT I WILL NEVER GET BACK. And I had to throw away my pink pig shower cap, which had ears and a tail and amused me on Monday mornings.
Back to the drawing board it seems…the drawing board being a cute salon in Oban, Scotland. They fixed my hair and now I look like this, marginally better I think!
Excuse the pout, I thought I was Kate Moss for a minute.
Outfit of the Day: Primark Tie Dye Midi Dress
Hello fellow voley girls,
Once again, I am writing to you from the land of bag pipes and tartan wearing fools. I saw some grand scenery yesterday and frightened my family by shouting ‘FLY YOU FOOLS, THE ORCS ARE UPON US’ and legging it down the road. The things I do to amuse myself and others. I’m somewhat worried that my parents think they have raised a lunatic. They would be correct in this thinking.
This is just a little outfit of the day and one that I have been wearing quite a lot since I bought it for practically nothing a few weeks ago (£5 from Primark, ring the merry bells of England!). I really love it – the fit is pretty flattering and it’s a nice casual one to whack out for work/dinner and everything inbetween. My only beef with it is that it is a bit too long. I meant to force my mother at gunpoint to shorten it for me but then I remembered that I don’t have a gun/she isn’t my slave. I still might get her to work her magic, but the length has actually grown on me now so I may just leave it (cool story, Lauren).
I jazzed up the tie dye with some gold jewellerry, a messy topknot and some nude lipstick (e.l.f, £1 I recall). I’m not sure why I have such a pervert face in this picture, I do apologise.
My shoe situation is dire as I forgot to bring anything normal to Och Aye Land, so I just have a pair of standard black pumps to protect my hooves. They are the reason my legs look about zero inches long. I couldn’t look anymore like a midget if I tried.
SEO Tips For Fashion & Beauty Bloggers Part 1: SEO and Your Blog
Good day you lovely lot! Today we have something very different than our usual fashion witterings for you. Since we started our little blog back in May, we’ve noticed a lot of talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and you all seem pretty interested to know more about it and how you can apply it to make the most of your blog.
Lauren and I work in a marketing agency and SEO is a big part of our daily jobs, so we thought we could put a couple of posts together to give any of you who are clueless about it a very basic overview. I will state that we’re both in the early stages of our careers, and so aren’t claiming to be in any way absolute experts in the field. Our own blog isn’t even SEO’d as much as it should be, mainly because we can’t really be bothered and like to do this more for fun. But there are a few simple steps that we follow to add some SEO benefit to our blog that you can also do to your own.
This first post is going to contain SEO tips in relation to your own blog, but we also have a second one planned. That will be focused on how SEO agencies are approaching bloggers, and what you need to know about sponsored posts, do-follow links and all that jazz – this is something else which we’ve seen spoken quite a lot about on Twitter and various sites recently, and so can help clear up one or two points there too!
So without further ado, let’s get this motherbitch started.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. To put it basically, SEO is about making your blog as search engine-friendly as possible. Ever wondered why some sites always appear at the top of the search pages in Google? SEO is the main driving force behind this.
The two main prongs of SEO are on-page optimisations and off-page optimisations. On-page, as the name suggests, is everything on your blog that can help Google to ‘see’ you and rank you higher in results. Off-page is what goes on outside of your own blog that can still help you, such as having links to your blog on other people’s websites and blogs.
What Can You Do?
Choose Your Title Posts Wisely
You fashion and beauty bloggers are a creative lot, and something we all see a lot are blog posts with imaginative titles. Song lyrics that sum up your mood or outfit are nice from a creative point of view, but don’t help you much in terms of SEO. Try to include some keywords in the title of your posts. For example, if you do a review of the Barry M Gelly Polish, then title your post ‘Review: Barry M Gelly Polish’. We know it’s pretty Snoresville, but people search Google using those words and so your blog is more likely to come up in the results. Quite a bit of our traffic comes from search engines, and we think this is largely down to our boring-but-literal titles.
Also, think about how you personally use search engines. A lot of searches start with phrases like ‘how to’ and ‘what do’, so incorporate these into our post titles if you can. For example, if your outfit post features you styling a pair of dungarees then titling this post ‘How To Wear Dungarees’ or ‘What to Wear With Dungarees’ could really help you.
Include Some Keywords
Similarly, you should try to include a few key phrases within the body of your post. If you want your review to rank higher, then including a few instances of the phrase ‘review of [product]’ ‘[product] review’ can help. This doesn’t have to be difficult or impact on your writing style – just an introductory sentence such as ‘Here’s my review of [product]’ can help.
Avoid the temptation to start over-stuffing keywords into your posts though. ‘Here is my [product] review. I hope you like my review of [product]. I enjoyed writing this [product] review. [Product] [product] [product] REVIEW REVIEW REVIEW’ will make Google HATE you (nothing personal, Google just hates people very easily).
Guest Posting
A lot of beauty and fashion bloggers love guest posting on one another’s blogs. Not only is it a great way to reach a new bunch of readers and spread word of your blog, but it’s also got SEO benefit. Search engines take into account how many sites link back to your blog – it’s generally considered that the more sites linking to you, then the more important your blog must be, and so the higher you’ll rank. So writing a guest post for someone else and linking back to your blog is really useful.
However, there is a focus on quality not quantity. Spamming sites with your link won’t get you anywhere – in fact, sites and blogs that have a lot of backlinks from really low-quality sites, or ones that are completely irrelevant to your niche, can be penalised by the big G (Google, not God… we don’t know where he stands on spam).
Use Your Google+
Some of you may have Google+ and dismiss it as the most boring and useless of the social media accounts. Most boring? Definitely. But most useless? Definitely not. There’s a lot of buzz around at the moment that suggests that the more authoritative someone’s G+ profile is, the higher that whatever they write will rank. This is because they’ll be seen as somewhat of an ‘expert’ in their field, so Google will push their posts to the top. Linking your G+ account to your blog can make your face pop up in results pages, like this:
Yes, I do feel famous sometimes.
Other Resources
We hope you’ve found some of these tips useful, and feel free to share this post out to other fashion and beauty bloggers who might be a little baffled by this SEO business. There are a few other articles dotted around the net that you might find helpful:
Business 2 Blogger – Simple SEO Tips for Bloggers
Pro Blogger – SEO Tips for Bloggers
If you want to geek up and find out more about SEO in general, then this Wikipedia article is a good place to start, while the Beginners Guide to SEO can give you a really in-depth learning.
Stay tuned for our Part 2!
Accessorize Merged Baked Blusher: Review
Good day, homegirls,
This is somewhat a late time to be getting on the Accessorize blusher wagon. In fact, I think I may have missed the first 10 wagons and I am now on the Night Wagon, which is crowded with drunk hipsters and mad people scoffing Subways.
Even so, I thought I would get involved and review my Accessorize Baked Blusher, mainly because I love it. I want to marry it. You think I am joking, but I’m not. We’ve planned a small ceremony on a beach in Cornwall; I’ve yet to find a dress.
For those who haven’t tried this blusher yet – you are lunatics. I know the packaging is quite alarming and there isn’t really any need for the butterfly pattern (Claire and I were discussing that butterflies are basically tarted up moths), but the product inside is top notch.
I have the Baked Blusher in Scandal, which makes me feel quite the wanton woman. It’s a lovely deep rose coloured shade, with gold shimmer marbled into it. This gives it a lovely shimmer that isn’t too full on – it’s excellent for summer especially! I would say that for girls who prefer a matte blusher, this one probably isn’t for you. But if you enjoy cheeks that look like they belong to the disco ball family (in a good way), then definitely think about getting involved!
This is what it looks like on my face.
I’ve had my Accessorize blusher for around 2 months now and it literally looks as if I haven’t used ANY of it. I’m not sure if it’s the ‘baked’ element to the product or if it is actually magic, but I can see this lasting me a very, very long time. It costs £6 from any Accessorize store (and online) but you can find these little bad boys at Superdrug too.
Has anyone else used this blush? Thoughts?
Outfit of the Day: The Mirror Edition
You know how people say that as a parent you just feel permanently guilty and worried that you’re not helping your kids enough? I feel that way about this blog – does that make me terribly sad? That question is strictly rhetorical, don’t answer. Anyway, I’m aware that I haven’t done an OOTD post for ages, and have felt very guilty about it. So I finally set up the tripod and camera at the weekend to capture my oh-so-fascinating outfit and what was I greeted with on the display screen? Battery Depleted. SUPER.
So, like the absent father that I feel like, I’m trying to make amends. To give you a rough idea of outfits I’ve been loving lately, here’s a selection of rubbish mirror selfies that I’ve uploaded to our Instagram account @StylingoUK over the last couple of weeks.
Midi Dress – Primark / Cross Belt – Primark / Watch – River Island (similar here)
I featured this midi dress in my June haul post last month, where I said how rubbish it had looked in the changing room and that it would probably be going back. Well, wasn’t I just being a Negative Nancy. After trying it on properly and jazzing it up with a belt and better shoes, I now love this dress and it’s one of my staple work dresses (I took this at work, hence the attractive toilet shot). A good example of why it’s a good idea sometimes to buy things and try them out at home before making your mind up about them.
Leather Gilet – H&M / Vest – H&M / Maxi Skirt – Motel Rocks / Cross Necklace – eBay
I wore this outfit last week when I went into Birmingham to meet one of my old uni friends for lunch (FYI, Red Pepper in the Mailbox is THE best place I’ve eaten for a really really long time)(really really). I bought this sleeveless leather jacket months ago and have kind of just never got round to wearing it. I’ve seen plenty of other people wear them, but you know when you get those items you just can’t make work for yourself? I finally bit the bullet and teamed it with my knitted maxi skirt from Motel and I think it kind of worked…
Crochet Top – Primark / Vest – Primark / Denim Skater Skirt – Topshop
Ah, I love my little Topshop skirt; and it came in so handy during the heatwave. I wore it with this crochet tee (which I stole from my sister about two years ago and never returned – thanks Amy, if you’re reading!) for work one day as a simple summery outfit. I’m lucky to work somewhere where an outfit like this is seen as acceptable, I have NO idea how people who work in offices with strict dress codes coped during that heat!
Crop Top – Missguided / Trousers – Primark / Jelly Shoes – JuJu (via ASOS) / Lion Head Necklace – eBay
I love this outfit. It’s a shame that I only wore it round to my mum’s house and so it was just met with the greeting, ‘Those trousers are… interesting’. It will definitely need to be re-worn somewhere that it will get a bit more appreciation. I also wore my new favourite piece of jewellery, the lion head necklace that I first mentioned in my eBay dupes post back in May.
I actually ordered it just after that post went live, but there was an unfortunate incident when it was delivered. You see, I just happened to be quite drunk when I came home and discovered the parcel, and all I could remember the next day was the parcel ending up somewhere and my drunk mind thinking, ‘you’re NEVER going to find that when you’re sober, har har har’. And drunk me was right; I searched high and low for it for days and could not track it down. It eventually turned up two weeks ago, wedged behind the back of my chest of drawers. I do wish drunk me had been more considerate and left a note for sober me.
So, I apologise once again for the quality of these OOTD posts. I will soon fix the depleted battery issue and take my parental blogger responsibilities more seriously. Do you forgive me? Can we go bowling now?
Tag: Makeup Firsts & Fails
Good afternoon you foxy devils. Today, the lovely Zoe Georgina has tagged us to do the ‘Makeup Firsts and Fails’ post, where you reflect on your early experiences with different products and the disasters that you had with them. As a person who generally walks through life from one disaster to another, I thought I’d step up to the plate with this one and share some of my memories. View Full Post
Rimmel Lash Accelerator Endless Mascara: Review
Hello fellow loons and happy Sunday to merry England,
I’m writing to you from the Scottish highlands today, because I have finally decided to leave the streets of Coventry (I have a house, I’m not a prostitute) and spend some time with my delightful family. Needless to say, I’m vaguely baffled by the sheer number of trees and would quite like someone to explain what these giant rocks sprouting from the ground are (…mountains, what?!).
Apart from investing in a kilt, eating haggis and stalking Nessie, it is raining so we are not doing any activities today. Big surprise, I know. Thankfully, we have wifi in our Swedish-style lodge (and a sauna, so you all know what I will be doing shortly after writing this post!), so I thought I’d spend my time off work by catching up on blogging. Claire and I have been busier than Obama this week at work (with quite a few moments we wanted to throw in the towel and become Britney’s backing dancers. Wait…we still want to do that). Claire has managed to be a good egg and blog but I have been very pathetic and rubbish, so I do apologise!
ANYWAY, I hear you thinking “I came here to read a mascara review, not hear an idiot’s witterings about Scotland” (rude..).
I picked up this mascara during the week because there was a jazzy 2 for £10 situation going on with some Rimmel products in Boots. My foundation was one of the products involved in the deal, so it was definitely rude not to get something else.
You may have read our e.l.f makeup haul quite a while ago, but I got an e.l.f 3 in 1 mascara amongst everything else I bought. We were quite excited because the brush was similarly shaped to Benefit’s ‘They’re Real’ mascara and we thought we had come across a dupe. We hadn’t. The mascara is fine, but I do have some issues with it. Firstly, it takes FOREVER to dry on your lashes. If you sneeze or make sudden movements, you may as well give up on going out anywhere because your face will be ruined. Another issue is that because it takes so long to dry, my bottom and top lashes stick together causing me to look like a god damn fool.
BECAUSE OF THESE AWFUL ISSUES…I decided enough was enough. I’ve given the e.l.f mascara a decent trial and I just don’t like it. So I figured a new one was in order and grabbed this bad boy when I was in Boots the other day.
So, what about Rimmel’s Lash Accelerator Endless Mascara?
I gather it is a fairly new product, Rimmel are certainly still splashing the word ‘new’ all over display stands. The name promises a lot – acceleration? ENDLESS ACCELERATION? This is too much. Is endless acceleration even possible? I think I need to consult my engineer father on this one. Rimmel say that this mascara defies the laws of lash length. Has anyone got a copy of these Lash Length Laws they want to share?
I’m not usually one to comment on the packaging so I will just say that it looks like a tube of mascara. Which is a plus. I’m glad it doesn’t look like a bowl of cereal.
The brush is quite good, I’m quite the fan. As you can see, it’s a plastic one (do fibre brushes even exist anymore?) and it is fairly small and thin. The smallness is which I enjoy, it means you can get into the corners properly and not worry as much about poking yourself in the eyeball and screaming “HELP! IN THE NAME OF THE GOOD GOD OF MASCARA, WHY?!”
The colour is extreme black, and while I would say it is definitely black, I am unsure how extreme it is. Will report back with more info if this changes or if my eyelashes suddenly become racist.
I’ve included a picture of my eyeballs with one featuring NO mascara and one featuring a couple of coats of the Lash Accelerator Endless mascara. I’m quite pleased and I think this may just be my new go to mascara.
And here is my face with no other eye makeup on EXCEPT the mascara – I’m definitely a pleased Larry.
What do you all think? Anyone else tried this jazzy little Rimmel mascara?
July Haul: Missguided, Primark, ASOS & More…
Forgive me father, for I have shopped.
As it was payday this week, and as I was left on my own today while Lauren swanned off on her holiday with her family (erm, did she miss the part of our housemate contract where it said she wasn’t allowed to go away without me in her suitcase?), I decided to pop into town for the ever mysterious ‘one or two bits’. Of course this always accidentally turns into six or seven bits – but I can’t help that I have a heavy flow and a wide-set vagina no willpower.
I’ve also had a few things delivered the last couple of days, oops…
ASOS Petite Pencil Skirt £15 (SALE) / Missguided Split Maxi Skirt £5.99
This ASOS skirt is my favourite thing that I’ve bought in quite a while. I’m going to Sheffield next weekend for my friend’s birthday and had originally ordered the white bardot dress from Missguided’s value range for that. However, when it turned up with the rest of my Missguided goodies, I wasn’t in love with it and so this skirt was swiftly ordered in its place. The colours, the print, the fit… it simply makes my soul happy. The maxi skirt from Missguided was thankfully not a disappointment like the dress was. I LOVE this skirt and am actually wearing it today (god help any neighbours who would have been walking by at the point where I whipped it off to take these photos). The slit comes to about halfway down the thigh so it’s just about daytime-acceptable.
Missguided Acid Green Skater Skirt £5.99 / Missguided Crop T-Shirt £3.50
Don’t worry, I will iron these before wearing them…
Primark Playsuit £8 / Playsuit Leopard Boyfriend Tee £5
When I went into town I popped into Primark to look at the shoes, and ended up coming away with these. This playsuit was one of those things that you almost don’t want to buy in Primark because it seemed as if literally everyone was snapping one up, but it was simply too pretty to leave without. I also picked up this t-shirt on a bit of a whim. I love leopard print but actually don’t tend to wear it very much (blonde extensions, fake tan and leopard print – it’s even too much for me, and that’s saying something); this print with the leopard faces really caught my eye though. It’s an oversized, boyfriend-fit tee which isn’t my usual thing but I thought it would be good for slouchy days. To be honest I have no real idea at the moment what I’ll wear it with, but I like clothes that also give you a good challenge, like you’re on the Crystal Maze.
Primark Floral Headband – £2.50
Excuse my MASSIVE SHNOZZ but – I’ve finally hopped on the floral crown bandwagon.
Naturally, I ended up picking up a few beauty bits too. My first stop was Poundland, where I found these bendy hair rollers. Next, I swung by Boots and picked up No. 7’s Exceptional Definition mascara to try, after reading some good reviews. Usually I’m loyal to Boots, but I headed to Superdrug too today to investigate the MUA range and instead discovered the Sleek stand. I’ve only seen Sleek online before (probably due to my afore-mentioned Boots loyalty) and so spent ages poring all over their different products before eventually deciding to try their BB cream. With my trip to Sheffield next week in mind, I picked up a new Barry M lipstick in ‘Palest Lavendar’ and of course some new false lashes. I went quite small compared to my usual drag queen-esque lashes, as the lipstick’s quite intense:
And so I came home quite a bit poorer of purse… but richer in mood? That’s a legit justification for spending, right? I’ll be trying and reviewing all of these bits soon and pestering you all with my thoughts on them, YOU LUCKY THINGS.