Soft and Romantic Valentines Day Makeup Tutorial Urban Decay Naked Palette 3

You're thinking that Valentines day is approaching and you want to look cute for the day! Well I have you covered, today I uploaded a super sweet Valentines Day Makeup tutorial that is effortlessly beautiful and chic! Panic over! For this I used my beloved Urban Decay Naked 3 palette, and today it makes its debut to my YouTube, although it's had a special place in my heart for a while now.

  The Naked palettes aren't the cheapest palette available, so check to yesterdays post for a super detailed run down on what the palettes are about, what one is best for you and whether they are worth it.

I couldn't resist this tacky photograph effect! Love heart confetti all over my face, what could be better?

Creating a pretty and glamorous up-do in 2 minutes or less!

I have no real flair for hair, which is why as soon as I had the chance, I* took a pair of shears to my hair and cut it all off so that I could get back to the short and sassy hair that I love, and the impact that it has had on my on a day to day basis is just astounding.
Call me vain, but it has made a difference to my life.
Having to grow my hair out for a wedding meant that for the last 6 months leading up to the big day I just came to hate my hair, I didn't feel like myself, I never knew what to do with it, washing and drying it was such a laborious task - it's cut and uniform length really made me feel very dowdy at times, now I feel like I am fueled on helium, my hair is light and moves and has such a lot of natural volume that I don't really have to do much for it to look polished.

I'm not super sassy with hair styling, or even hair care. Caring for long hair is a hell of a lot different to caring for shorter/medium length hair. So the only real problem with my hair is now that it looks pretty much the same every day (which it did when it was long, but I suppose I had the choice of hair up or hair down). It's too short to go properly into a ponytail, which is hardly the height of fashionable hairstyles anyway, so I decided that I would give it a try to essentially randomly pin up sections of my hair, twisting some into pin-like curl formations on my head.

I got better and quicker with this as I'd do it and I loved how it looked a lot more intricate than it was. So I figure this is just ideal for situations when I'm looking for something a little more dressy than 'hair down'

*it wasn't actually 'I' but a trained hairdresser, thank goodness

New video makeup tutorial Miley Cyris wrecking ball!

She may not be everyone's favorite gal, and even less so idol or role model, but I wanted to create her pretty makeup look, don't worry I don't hop into my white y fronts and swing around.
It's very simple, and very classic to wear a bold red lip, a flawless pale face and black liquid eyeliner. It does make her blue eyes pop!

Making an egg-less Egg salad!

 This was such a creamy delight, I wasn't expecting it one bit, and how perfect for the shining sun!

Here is how my eggless Egg salad went down:
Take a generous palm full of cashews
3/4 cup of water
Half a squeezed lemon (or just a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice if you have it)
3/4 teaspoon of Tumeric
1 clove of garlic
and blend blend blend!

Get whizzy with it until it looks creamy and delicious, and pour over delicious raw veg. I used a chopped red pepper, it was seriously delicious, refreshing, light but filling and dare I say it again... so creamy!

Nuts are the wonder ingredient to get your sauces and soups creamy without the fat and calories of using milk, cream and yoghurt!

Enjoy in the sunshine!

Raw Vegan Red Pepper Soup recipe

Is this just a fad?
Yes.
I'm trying a raw vegan diet for 7 days only. I love bacon, I love bread and I love nutella too much for this to be a lifestyle change. I'm told this could help clear up my skin, or if not it could at least make me feel better, more energy etc etc
A week may not be enough for it to kick in, or I may end up extending it if I really enjoy it, but I doubt it!
Here was my dinner tonight, it was really delicious and soo much easier than actual cooking - certainly a perk of going 'raw' the food gets to your plate within 5 minutes.
This is the red pepper soup recipe that is 100% from www.therawtarian.com
Head over to there for the full recipe, but this is how it went down for me...

I took a 1/3 cup of plain cashew nuts and soaked them in water for an hour so that my little smoothie blender would blend it up easier.

Then I took a red pepper and washed it, then I cut up 3/4 of it roughly, and 1/4 of it finely.

I threw the 3/4 roughly cut into the blender, along with all the drained cashew nuts and 1/2 mug water.

I added a pinch of dried mixed herbs just to give it a little kick (not in the original recipe)

I blended it up for about 2 minutes, until it's almost completely smooth, there shouldn't be any little grittiness of nuts

 I scattered the 1/4 of finely chopped peppers in the bowl of soup, this recipe makes enough for one person.

It tastes really good, I can't believe how creamy it is, all because of the nuts. Also, the red pepper makes it really naturally sweet too. But I do recommend adding the herbs for an extra something.

Then for dessert, it just so happened that the supermarket were selling 300g grams of raspberries for £1 because they went out of date today, so I snapped those up and ate the whole bowl! Raspberries are my favourite!

Cooking up a storm

Want something super quick and easy to eat that tastes good and is good?

Well look no further than Chef Alexia to help you out on a Thursday night.
You will need:

5 or 6 of those little mushrooms

Half a mug of peas

A small onion

Any type of pasta, spaghetti or gnocci

A can of tuna (optional)

Pesto sauce (optional)

-Boil a pan of water and cook your pasta or gnocci, while that's cooking chop up your onion and mushrooms into little pieces.

-Drop the onion into a hot pan for a little bit (use rape seed oil, it's even better than olive oil for you!) then add mushrooms and peas or any other veg you want to throw in.

-Once it's all cooked in the pan, drain the pasta from the pot, then throw everything back into the pot and mix it around, add your tuna and pesto sauce at this point too and mix mix mix

Done!

Voila!

Bon Apetit!

The last one to get NAKED

Alright so I'm a liiiiiittle (a lot) late on this ol' Bandwagon, infact I'm one whole generation behind since they now have version #2 of this beauty staple. I purchased my first ever Urban Decay Naked Palette today, I spend a hell of a lot of time at beauty counters and cosmetic stores but I'd never came across a phsyical Naked Palette before, even at Urban Decay counters in Boots.. ludacris I know.
Anywho I got mine from Debenhams for £36.00, then I saw online they had £4 off the Naked 1 & 2 palette which I did not get to take advantage of, insert sad face! But maybe you can!
So even if you've seen pictures like this a thousand times before, the velvety lovliness of the palette never gets old, it's like a hot melting caramel pudding for your eyes! Or my eyes at least...

I love that the case is velvety and all luxurious looking... but I imagine it will get dirty quickly, I also love the free primer potion... things I don't love:
The mirror is a little small, I see this was rectified with the Naked 2
also, the brush is a bit..rubbish, I love that it's cruelty free, but it feels a bit synthetic and cheap, so I'd rather it didn't come with the brush and instead they knocked a few £££ off the overall price!

That's the Naked Palette at a glance!

Hey...am I doing 'it' right?

When I think of scrapbooking I think of little old ladies crouching over a table of war time photographs and musty magazine cut outs. Which maybe isn't such a kind perspective
But when I came across a bundle of just 'stuff' I had no idea what to do with it all. It included so many train tickets that I couldnt even count, cute little messages from friends, snippets and treasured photographs.

I wanted to combine them all together in a fun way than just sticking the photographs in a photo album and putting the knick knacks in a dusty shoe box.

And the solution was...scrapbooking!

I don't know if I'm 'doing it' right I wikipedia'd 'scrapbooking' to see if what I considered scrapbooking was the actual definition and quite frankly I'm still not sure!
But from what I gathered it is basically, a mish-mash of collages, little embellishments and snippets on a page and two approaches can be taken

1.A neat pristine and rather expensive looking approach with clean and concise scrap books

2.Or the 'Alexia' approach where I basically cut up everything in sight and purpously tear pictures to give them a breezy rough edge to cover up my horrible cutting and slap it all down on the page where I think it looks good

For now, I'm quite happy with my approach! And the scrap book cost the grand ol' price of £3-ish which is cheaper than a photo album and much more fun!

So there you have it, perhaps I am a convert and I join in scrapbooking alongside the war time grannies from my head.

5 minute up-do!

My sister came over the weekend for a friends birthday at a nightclub called 'The Sugar Hut' I think it sounds like the inside would be covered in sweets, but it's not like that at all; it's been made famous by a really popular television show here called 'The Only Way Is Essex' it's like a reality show (but I don't think much of it is really real)

She wanted a pretty hairstyle, I usually do a lot of 'down-do's' on her, long loose curls and lots of volume- that sort of thing, but today we were feeling an up-do, so an up-do we did!

I was meant to take pictures as I went through but we were short for time so I only have the before and after- but luckily, it's so darn easy that I can explain it without the visual aids!



1. Separate the top section of hair and backcomb underneath to act as a kind of 'cushion' for the smooth top part of the hair to be laid over to make an automatic quiff! Pin it in place and smother in hairspray!

2. Gather the rest of the hair into  tight and low ponytail, use a plain and simple hair tie

3. Take the ponytail and flip it and push it through the hair behind the pony tail, to make a kind of 'fancy- twist' ponytail

4. take the ends of the hair and flip it again, although instead of pushing it through hold it flipped inwards and pin until your hearts content and its held in place. Add another layer of hairspray, focusing specifically on the bun.

5. Finsh of with pretty itty bitty hair clips that match what you wear, my sister was wearing a dusky pink dress so I pinned 2 mathcing hair slides into the bun

 The finished result!

There you go, hair stylist (haha) and customer!
I know-I look like a vanilla popsicle next to my sister!