Sunscreens from French brands are a pretty big deal right now – they have a reputation for being well formulated (no grease! no white cast!) and include super stable and effective sunscreen ingredients. I visited France recently and hauled a whole bunch of French sunscreens to try, along with a few other skincare goodies. Most of these brands are available …
Montagne Jeunesse are a cult UK brand that I hadn’t noticed in Australian stores til recently. They do fun masks with natural ingredients – kind of like a longer lasting, less fresh Lush. Even if you’ve never heard of them, you might recognise their distinctive, Carmen Miranda-ish fruit-on-head packaging: I picked up the Creamy Coconut and Manuka Honey Peel Off …
For years, we’ve been using just 2 solvents, ethyl acetate and acetone, to remove nail polish. But recently a whole host of new removers containing neither of those have made their way onto the market – what are they, and are they worth a shot? Are they really solvent-free? No. Anything that dissolves something else up is a solvent – …
All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a post on BB creams. Fast forward almost two and a half years and the “alphabet cream” market has exploded! What does it all mean? What’s a BB cream again? BB stands for beauty balm, blemish balm or beblesh balm. They’re multipurpose products that provide colour and coverage, as well as …
I haven’t been painting my nails much lately, but here’s some nail art I recently did with my Pretty Serious collaboration shade, Undercover Mermaid. The base is Undercover Mermaid, the black shade is Skinfood Black Stone and the purple/green duochrome is Face of Australia Magneto from the new Dark Side collection. As you can probably tell, I’m really in love …
It’s the second part of my soap making post! Last time we looked at the chemistry behind soap making (also called saponification) – today we’re looking at how to actually make a bar of soap, using ingredients from the supermarket. Related Post: Make Your Own Soap! Part 1: The Chemistry Behind Soap Making From the previous chemistry post, we know that …
In the middle of teaching some high school students about the chemistry of soap-making, I realised that I really, really wanted to try making some soap myself and write about it here. My write-up ended up being really long, so I’ve made it a two-parter – Installment 1 is all about the chemistry, and Installment 2 is about the actual …
The folks at Anatomicals have kindly sent me the rest of the Australian range since I liked the first set so much. Again, I haven’t been paid to say nice things, I am genuinely really impressed with this range! Sassy names, colourful packaging, delicious scents and skin-friendly ingredients – I am totally their target market. My previous review of the …