Illamasqua Pristine Black Lipstick

Illamasqua are my overall favourite cosmetics brand for many, many reasons - the most simple one being they make both conventional and unique products that are consistently amazing quality.

They also have a great £5/£7/£10 sale going on right now which I have taken advantage of to try more of their products, particularly their vampire pale foundations/concealers (which I will review separately).

Amongst many things I picked up Pristine - a "pure black, matte finish" lipstick for £7, and promptly decided that it was the appropriate thing to wear to the dinner party I was hosting that night.

First things first: it's definitely not matte - or even demi-matte - it felt and wore like a satin lipstick which would be great for those with dry lips but cut down on its wear time massively. Pristine also had good pigmentation - especially considering it's unconventional colour - but did have a slight tendency to feather and smudge (I was not wearing lip liner).

Illamasqua vs Mac lipstick bullets - my only fault with Illamasqua is their bulky and often impractical packaging

Overall it was comfortable, opaque with average staying power and a much better black lipstick option than my OCC Lip Tar in Tarred.

I paired it with my usual face and an amped up version of my favourite gold, bronze and black eye makeup (product list below) and slung a gold headpiece on for good measure. My current loves in life are obviously unconventional lip colours, headdresses, stiletto nails and - as always - ugly jumpers.

Dark Greek Goddess? I don't really know what I was going for here

FACE:

• NARS Oil Free Primer
• NARS Sheer Glow in Siberia
• Illamasqua Hollow Cream Pigment Contour
• Illamasqua Delirium Cream Pigment Blush
• NARS Albatross Highlighter
• Illamasqua Concealers in 105 and 115
• Laura Mercier Translucent Setting Powder

EYES:

• Illamasqua Brow Cake in Motto
• NARS Smudge-proof Eyeshadow Base
• Stila Magnificent Metals Foil Finish Eyeshadow in Comex Gold
• Inglot gold and bronze eyeshadows (from my 10 pan custom palette)
• Sugarpill Bulletprrof eyeshadow
• Laura Mercier Tightlining Cake and Activator
• DollyWink Eyelashes
• Benefit They're Real Mascara

LIPS:

• Illamasqua Pristine

And in case anyone's interested this is what I actually look like the majority of the time:

And this is my most recent manicure (I tried to do an ombre with these colours but I'm terrible at nail art).

Saskia X

PrettyTrivialities@gmail.com

Stiletto Nails

I compulsively bite my nails and it's disgusting. What's equally disgusting though is that anti-biting polish that always manages to ruin the taste and my enjoyment of finger food, so what's a girl to do?

Glue tiny pieces of plastic to her fingers apparently. Normally this is a pretty expensive solution as on the high street a pack of fake nails is between £5-10, but while googling 'Stiletto Nails' to decide which side of the line between 'LOVE' and 'HATE' they lie for me (spoiler, I love them in all their Disney Villain gloriousness) I discovered eBay.

A pack of 600 assorted sized nails came to the grand total of £4.50, so of course I impulse bought them.

Louboutin Stiletto nails - black with gold glitter on top, red underneath 

They came unpainted in an opaque off white colour (although I could've opted for clear), and being ludicrously excited to finally have nails to paint I chose a moderately ambitious Christian Louboutin inspired manicure. The loose gold glitter that gorgeously adorns my nails now also coats my furniture. C'est la vie.

As well as being pointy they are also ridiculously long

The reason there's a hammer in the above two photos is because I don't plan ahead: giving myself a manicure before assembling my new Ikea furniture. I wanted to remember them in all their freshly painted glory before I destroyed them with my ill-informed carpentry. Surprisingly my new nails were not nearly as impractical as I'd imagined them to be as both my manicure, the furniture and my sanity were all still intact at the end of my first ever DIY house project.

Also, they matched my eyeshadow perfectly

And here's the manicure I gave myself yesterday morning: metallic duo-chrome gold and green, I keep catching glimpses of my nails out of the corner of my eye and mistake them for those beautifully iridescent beetles.

Yes, that is a hand made Bedouin bangle

I then realised my nails were a  near perfect colour match for my eyes when I was struggling not to impale myself while putting in and removing contact lenses. I have iridescent beetle eyes apparently; that's sexy right?

#instagrammingthis

So all in all what's the verdict for Stiletto nails? Personally I love them as they are strangely high fashion in a James-Bond-female-antagonist way,  not nearly as impractical as they look nor in the least bit fragile. They also taking scratching itchy skin and scalp massages to a whole new level.

However things I would not recommend doing with these nails:

• Inebriated contact lens removal
• Boxing (or just punching anything really)
• Rock climbing

So essentially there goes my social and sporting life for the sake of some bad-ass nails. But I'm OK with that since I'm still partially crippled from the knee surgery that inspired me to start this blog.


Saskia X

PrettyTrivialities@gmail.com