(1) Saturday’s face (2) My forth edition of  my The Beauty Bargain post (3) Outtake from yesterday’s style post (4) The trusted trio (5) The weekly blogging/youtube discovery (5) This week’s obligatory selfie (6) A look into my good pal Laura’s staples (7) A somewhat inaccurate depiction of the hurricane

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Another week has passed, another three standout products have emerged. This week has been hot and humid, again, until Saturday when we got hit with the hurricane, some lost power and it was windy as anything. It almost getting to the point that the hurricane/wind situation was favourable because it meant that it wasn’t muggy and ridiculous. I’m not the kind of girl that can be a productive human being in the heat so it was nice to be able to wear full length pants without sweating up a storm, even while lounging in front of my fan. Weather and all that jazz aside, the beginning of the week was busy for me in a nice way – I was a nice functional social human being but an exhausted one at that.

I would be tempted to say that this was a shopping-heavy week as I did come out with a good (but not insane) number of purchases, but in truth it happened on Monday (one day) within a few hours. However, I don’t regret it at all. It being the pieces I picked up at American Eagle and Club Monaco, a few drugstore beauty bits that added up, three products from MAC that I provided an overview of here and the two beauty bits that I had been lusting after for ages from Sephora. It’s really not as bad as it sounds; I hadn’t been to the actual mall where MAC, Sephora and all that jazz is in ages so I did the damage that would usually be spread out among three trips into one.

For what felt like the 493489nd time, my lips were chronically dry, sore and somewhat chapped, at the beginning of the week and to sort it out, I used my Cicaplast Baume once or twice for reparative purposes but then went in consistently with my recent acquisition, the affordable Nivea Shea Butter and Vanilla Balm; after a few days, things were looking far less flaky and with this balm they’ve continued to improve. It appears that something I was using in the past few weeks wasn’t agreeing with my lips and the EOS balms weren’t exactly helping matters – retract what I said about it being the ideal balm for under lipsticks. With pot packaging, the thicker balm seems to hydrate instantly (once you open the jar that is) but tends to leave an unattractive white cast so it’s not one for aimless reapplication. In other words, I’ve been really loving it this week.

I seem to be following the pattern of picking three product yet again but I swear that it was accidental; the second two were both products that I’ve talked about in posts this week but they were results of that shopping trip. I declared my love for the L’Oreal Glam Bronze Mono in Universal Sun in my latest edition of The Beauty Bargain this week, despite having picked up a different shade than I intended to. The formula of the velvet-matte bronzer is luxurious and impressive on all fronts and the red-hued shade leans quite warm but really adds that natural bronze look to the face. I’ve even been foregoing blush whilst wearing a more wider application of this bronzer but it’s definitely not the ideal contour in my opinion and it won’t suit my fair skin in the cooler months.

I’ve not been as vocal about it around these parts but I’ve fallen equally in love with the MAC Pro Longwear Waterproof Brow Set in Quiet Brunette (discussed here slightly); I’ve been intrigued by the idea of a tinted brow gel for some added brow definition with some crazy hair-taming power for a while but every shade seems much too warm for my weirdly ashy brows and when I asked about this one, I wasn’t expecting much and I got more than I was asking for. The formula is waterproof and the small brush is easy to use and adds the illusion of thickness in the hairs and this shade is amazing – it doesn’t look particularly ashy in the container but it suits my medium toned brows to perfection on its own in a subtler way. It also takes like a minute to do my brows with it and that is rather appealing.

A few days back, I accidentally found myself searching the popular beauty page on Bloglovin’ and it ended up being a happy accident because I found myself clicking on a new blog and a fabulous one at that, whose writer also makes lovely videos too – that blog would be Beauty Life Michelle, a fabulous Irish gal living in Australia. She’s entertaining to read and watch and I found myself enjoying her Everyday Makeup For Pale Skin video tremendously.

What were your weekly highlights?

Maggie, x.