Collection 2000 Pump Up The Volume Mascara

I’ve been using the Maybelline Cat Eyes mascara for quite some time now and as mine was running out, I decided it was time for a change. When looking around in Boots, I found the Collection 2000 Pump Up The Volume Mascara on offer for £3.99 which actually only had £1 off. Still, I didn’t want to buy something really expensive and figured that this was worth a shot.

Collection 2000 claim that this mascara ‘delivers up to 12x more volume to give the impression of false lashes without the fiddling. Intensely volumising mascara for bold, fanned out lashes. The Unique curved brush holds extra product for maximum coverage’

The mascara comes in a black and yellow mascara tube, which has a screw top lid. The top of the lid has a bit that is clear although I have no idea why, The packaging is bright and stands out on the shelf, which is partly why I was drawn to it. The front of the tube has the Collection 2000 brand name and the name of the mascara. The back of the tube has the product information, such as a description of what it does and the barcode.

This mascara is available in three colours: black, ultra black and waterproof black. I chose the ultra black because my eyelashes are so light normally. Another reason why I chose this mascara is because I could see by a display that it had a traditional type of brush. By that I mean it isn’t one of these new, horrible plastic brushes. I just don’t get along with them. When you unscrew the lid and pull out the mascara wand, you’ll be able to see the big, thick brush at the top. This is a much thicker brush than I am used to using and it took me a while to get used to it without getting black all over my eyelid.

Just the Mascara

I do use eyelash curlers before putting on mascara so this should be noted when talking about the results. After curling my eyelashes, they were very curled before putting on the mascara. As I said before, the brush is extremely thick and there is a lot of product on it when you pull it out of the tube. As I applied the mascara to my eyelashes, I could see them drop quite quickly. Although the mascara is extremely black, it is also very thick and maybe this weighed my lashes down compared to other mascaras. Although my eyelashes did stay more curled than without curlers or mascara, they definitely did not look like falsies.

With a bit of eyeliner

I’ve been using this mascara for a while now in the hopes that maybe I just get more used to it but so far, this hasn’t happened really. The mascara still goes on extremely thick and while it doesn’t clump, it doesn’t do what it says it will either. I can’t see that this mascara does anything other than make my lashes a lot darker as it certainly doesn’t volumise them by much. Even though this was a cheap mascara, I was still expecting better. I know that from now on I won’t be trying anything cheap again because my lashes are just too straight to risk it! 

Pay Day Purchases #1

Although I am pretty much broke most months before my wages hit my bank account, I've decided to treat myself to at least one thing new every month. Hence, the Pay Day Purchases post. As I'm a student and I'm paying for my wedding in Florida in September, I never have much free money but I miss buying new make up and beauty products. Most of my eye-shadows are in big paletts, mostly Urban Decay. However, these are a bit big for taking on holiday sometimes and I wanted some individual eye shadows that I could carry around more easily. Having seen so many bloggers recommend MUA, I figured it was about time I tried the brand. 

So, I bought 4 single eye-shadows in shades 1, 2, 11 and 12. 

I also bought a MUA 3 in 1 Extreme Contour Liner. I'm used to using a pen when it comes to eye liners so I'm looking forward to seeing how I get on with this one. 

As well as some new make up, I bought some face masks from Superdrug as they were 4 for 3 and with this horrible weather we've been having, my skin is a bit drier than normal. 

So there we go, my first Pay Day Purchases post. I hope you'll all like reading these and I'll obviously be reviewing the products I buy at some point as well!

Wilko Tropical Shower Cream Coconut

Another product which I decided to try from the Wilko range of bath and shower products is the Wilko Tropical Shower Cream Coconut. As usual, this can only be bought in Wilko shops or online and will cost you £1 for a 250ml tube. These have also been on offer for ages at 2 for £1.50.

Wilko describe the product as; “Tropical coconut shower cream, you'll love the way your skin feels after every moisturising, tropical-scented shower.”

The shower gel comes in a plastic tube/ bottle, which stands upright on the flip top cap at the bottom. The tube is covered with a white printed on label, which gives the product information and description along with a picture of a coconut cut in half with drops of liquid coming off it. I like the picture on this product as it really does make the shower gel look tempting… and also made me want coconut. I think that this product is a lot plainer looking than others in the same range but only because it is white rather than a bright colour.  

The cap at the bottom of the tube is quite stiff which makes it a bit hard to pop open. This isn't the best idea for when you're in the shower and already have wet hands. I tend to leave the cap slightly open all of the time now without clicking it back shut after every use. The shower cream squeezes out of the tube easily enough and it comes out in thick amounts so not too much at any time. As I said before, the colour of this product is white and the shower cream does like quite plain and boring because of this.

The scent of coconut is quite strong with this shower cream but it is also very refreshing at the same time. When used on a puff ball, the cream lathers up very quickly under hot water. There is also quite a lot of lather with this one and noticeably more than when using other Wilko bath/ shower products. The rich lather feels great on my skin and the scent of coconut is lovely, especially during my morning shower. I feel as though this is a shower cream which wakes me up more than some others. After rinsing off the cream, this makes my skin feel really soft and moisturised as well as clean and refreshed.

This coconut shower cream is one of my favourites from Wilko and I’ll definitely be buying it again. 

Not long left...

I can’t believe it’s the middle of February already! Where is this year going? For me, it being this time of year means that it is nearly time for me to finish university. As I don’t have any exams this year I am finishing right at the beginning of May instead of the middle of June like I normally would. I only have a couple of little bits of my dissertation left to write and one more essay and that’s about it, other than a couple of other little bits and pieces which are done weekly. Anyway, because we only have a few months left, this week my flatmate Kate and I had people round for Pancake Day. To begin with, we decided to treat ourselves with a bottle of Proseco and the lovely box of chocolates Kate’s mum left the other week! 

As you can see, we probably aren't the most stereotypical student and we do like to have something nice in the house!!

Next came the pancakes. Kate, our friends Laura and Danielle, and myself made the most humongous batch of pancake mix I have ever seen. We all contributed something which resulted in there being a table full of awesome toppings as well as a tub of ice cream which you won't see in the picture below. It was so much fun all having a couple of turns at making our own pancakes and then digging in and experimenting a little bit with the fillings. Although I'm at work a lot and don't get to do this kind of thing often, I really will miss having people round and having nights like this. 

Yum!! What did you all do this week and how did you spend Pancake Day?

Boots Natural Collection Wild Strawberry Face Mask

My soon to be mother in law bought me a lovely gift box from Boots for the Christmas just passed. I love anything bath/ shower related so she did well to pick me a Boots Natural Collection strawberry set. One of the products inside the set was a Wild Strawberry Face Mask. These are also available to buy individually from either Boots stores or online. For a 10ml packet, it will cost £1.

The Natural Collection range has quite simple packaging and this product is no exception. The face mask comes in a thin, pink sachet. On the front of the sachet is the Boots logo, product name as well as a picture of a woman with the mask on her face (although her face also has actual strawberries on as well). The packet is nice looking and also very girly. Because of the way the packet looks, I think this will do well with younger girls and would be perfect for a sleepover.

The sachet opens easily, with a slight cut taken out one of the sides. This is where you can tear the sachet open to reveal the face mask. However, I would say that if you wanted to use this while in the bath, it would be a bit trickier to open the sachet with wet hands. Inside the sachet is a thick, light pink cream which is easily squeezed out. You can faintly smell strawberries as you open the sachet but the scent doesn’t hit you immediately and it isn’t too strong either.

Boots recommend that you apply the face mask to areas excluding the eyes and mouth and then leave it on for 20 minutes. After putting on the mask, covering near enough my whole face, I waited for it to set. However, unlike other face masks I have used in the past, this one didn’t dry up like I was expecting it to. Yes, my face got a little bit tight but nothing close to what I was expecting. Even after the 20 minutes, the face mask was still slightly wet. Removal is super easy and all you need to do is rinse off with a flannel then dry your face as normal.

While this face mask didn’t do amazing things for my skin, it did leave me feeling refreshed and smooth. I really liked the smell and it didn’t dry my skin out which was good. For £1, this is a good face mask but I dare say that there are better out there for the same price.

Amazon Kindle/ Kindle HD charger

After buying a cheap charger for my Kindle Fire HD and realising they just did not work well together, my fiancé bought me the official Amazon charger for Christmas. At first, I was reluctant to pay the £17.99 for the product, which is why I ended up with something that didn’t work. Although Waterstones do now sell Kindles, the charger is currently only available through Amazon.

Firstly, I think that this should have been something you get with the purchase of a Kindle. Being a tablet that does run down the battery quite quickly if not only using for reading, the USB charger is not adequate enough for my charging needs. Anyway, this charger comes in a little black box with the Amazon and Kindle logos on it. Inside the box is the plug, which does not have a cable on it. This plug is designed to be used with the USB cable provided at the time of purchase. The USB cable fits into the underneath of the plug, so to not stick out at all or get in the way. As plugs go, this one looks quite sleek and nice but then I would hope so for near enough £18.

Amazon claims that this charger ‘Fully charges your Kindle Fire or Kindle Fire HD devices in under 4 hours’ and after having bad experiences so far with chargers, I was sceptical. However, this charger does exactly what it says it should do which is fantastic. I sometimes work 13 and a half hour shifts at work and the Kindle battery definitely does not last that long so I needed something that would charge quickly so this charger is actually perfect.

Although this is an expensive plug, it is well worth the money. 

Kindle Fire HD - a (hopefully) non-techy review!

For a long time I had been wanting and iPad or the Samsung equivalent. However, with getting married next year neither have been a viable option due to price. When the Kindle Fire was released, I was immediately interested as the price was much more affordable. Before buying a Kindle Fire though, I made sure I weighed up my options and made sure the Kindle would do near enough everything I wanted it to do. No tablet has a great word document feature and all have notes apps but other than that, to me they are all pretty similar. My wonderful fiancé decided the Kindle Fire HD would be my Christmas present and he gave me it early last November. Now, we didn’t buy from Amazon as I’m impatient so we got it from Waterstones but the prices are the same.

*I appologise now for the quality of the pictures. The lighting in my room is utter crap!*

Buying options

The Kindle Fire HD comes in two varying sizes in terms of storage. You can either get 16GB or 32GB with prices being either £159 or £199 respectively. At Waterstones, you have no option to buy without special offers whereas you do on Amazon. Prices without the special offers are £169 and £209 on Amazon.  The special offers aren’t really special and really this just means that you get adverts on the Kindle unless you pay £10 more to get rid of them. However, you can pay the lower prices and then choose to opt out over the phone once your Kindle is registered. Due to buying through Waterstones, the ‘special offers’ were already on my Kindle but so far, I haven’t noticed anything too annoying that makes me want to pay to get rid of them.

Size and Design

The Kindle Fire HD has a 7 inch screen which for me is plenty big enough. The size of the actual machine is a little bigger, 7.6 inches, with a black border around the screen. The width is 5.4 inches. On the top middle of the front of the Kindle is a 1.3MP camera which can be used for Skype which is a feature I love! The back of the Kindle has on it the logo, the Amazon logo and some basic information such as ‘made in…’ as well as the speaker grates, one of the left and one on the right. If you hold the Kindle in landscape you will find buttons on the left side. The larger button is for sound (above it the hole for speakers and headphones) and the smaller button is for turning the Kindle on and off. I know many people have said the buttons are hard to find but I don’t find this to be the case at all.

The size and design of the Kindle Fire HD is lovely and I think it looks really nice when in your hands. It looks sleek and sophisticated and nothing at all like the older Kindles so it really stands out.

First time user

I have never owned a normal Kindle or a tablet so I had no idea what to do when setting this up. The cocktails beforehand did not help either!! Basic set up is super easy – all you need to do is turn it on with the button and voila! The Kindle is on. To begin with, you will be asked to put in Wi-Fi information, what language you want and your Amazon email address so the Kindle can be linked to it. That was the easy part. After that I had no idea what I was doing but still, even after a few cocktails, it was not that hard.

On the top of the Kindle screen is your menu, where you will find options such as Books, Music, Docs, Web etc. The menu is text only and runs along the top of the screen where you are able to scroll across to more options. Above the menu is the name of your Kindle, time, Wi-Fi connection information and the battery life bar. In the middle of the screen is your carousel, which is where anything opened on the Kindle will go. There is now a huge scrollable list of everything I have ever opened on the Kindle in the middle of my screen which is damn annoying. You can remove these big icons by pressing down in the middle of them and choosing ‘remove from carousel’ but if you forget to do this much, it will take you ages. In the bottom right hand corner of the screen is a little star. By pressing this, you will be able to see your favourite apps or books etc. To choose favourites for this section of the Kindle, do it in the same way as removing them from the carousel and picking ‘add to favourites’ instead.

Kindle as a Kindle

Although I didn’t only want to read books on my new toy, I did want to do that very much. In the top menu, you can go through the Shop to find Kindle books or you can do so on Amazon instead. You need to set up one click buying for you Kindle otherwise you will not be able to purchase books or apps etc. so this should be something you do quite quickly. As your Kindle is synced to your Amazon account, e-books purchased or downloaded for free will instantly be sent to your Kindle and kept in the books sections.

Now, while downloading and buying books was extremely easy, even for someone half drunk and who had never done it before, I did have some issues. Books cannot be sorted into folders or categories like the can on a regular Kindle. As an organisation freak, who lives for lists, this was not a good thing for me to figure out. Should I ever have a couple of hundred books on the Kindle, it will take me so long to find the ones I want. I would have thought that as a Kindle, this would have been a feature top of the list to keep. However, after having a strop and not wanting to look at more books, I decided to give it another go and ignore the fact I cannot organise my e-books.

While reading a book, you have options such as bookmark, changing the font style and size, go to which is where you can jump to different points of the book, and notes where you can add notes on bookmarked pages. There is also a feature called X-Ray where you can quickly find parts of the book which mention a certain name, place etc. and even find out biographical information. This is a really interesting feature although it doesn’t work on all books yet.  

For NetGalley users! 
Before trying to send NetGalley books to your Kindle, you must first add their email address to your trusted contacts list through your Amazon account. It took me ages to figure out why the books weren’t being sent and this is why. Also, any books sent from NetGalley will go in the Docs part of your Kindle, not the Books part. I like this though as it means my review books will be kept separate.

Video and Music

Strangely, the Kindle Fire HD is a really good music player. Songs can either be bought through Amazon and sent to the Kindle or imported from your PC or laptop which is very simple to do. In order to do this, you again go through the Amazon website and into your Kindle settings. The screen tells you exactly what to do and you only need to follow the instructions. Music cannot be imported through Google Chrome though so make sure you do it in Internet Explorer or any of the other web browsers which are supported. Any music bought through Amazon can be stored in your Cloud, which is a way of storing content for free without using up the space on your device. The sound quality is amazing and much better than I had expected. Songs come through very clear and the volume is loud enough without being overpowering.

With the Kindle (with special offers) you get a free months trial with Love Film which begins when you start streaming your first movie. The picture quality, much like sound quality was much better than I had expected. Obviously, to stream films you need a Wi-Fi connection. If you have a slow internet connection you could suffer from buffering problems although this is not something I have experienced yet. Films are great to watch on the Kindle Fire HD and while I thought the screen would be too small, it isn’t. Just think of those portable DVD players you can buy, this is very similar to their sizes.

Apps

The Kindle Fire HD, powered by Andriod 4.1, makes it much like a mobile phone. Through the Shop part of the menu, you can search to your heart’s content for fun games and apps to download. The Apps store has a wide variety of games to download such as Angry Birds and The Sims as well as things like a notepad, calculator etc. The range of apps is fantastic although in the same way with phones, be careful which you choose as some are crap while others are great. Read the reviews if you aren’t sure about the quality of an app. 

Any apps downloaded or bought can be found in the App part of the menu or if recently used, in the annoying carousel. Like books, you cannot sort these into any kind of order and are pretty much shown like they are on bookshelves and you need to scroll through to find the ones that you want. While playing games etc, I have found the Kindle to be quick and efficient with loading and I was very impressed. I was expecting some things to lag a little bit while loading but no problems with this so far.

Other bits and pieces

As I said earlier, as a tablet, the Kindle Fire HD does a hell of a lot for the price. You can go online to your favourite websites through the Web function, go on popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook (as well as getting the apps) but you can also read magazines or upload all of your photos from Facebook onto the device. As you can see in the picture, your photos will be shown in different sizes although you can view the full size photo by pressing on it. 

When you buy the Kindle, you do not get a mains charger. Instead, you have to charge through the USB cable supplied which is a massive pain in the arse. Charging takes ages, especially if you are using your Kindle and then, it will barely charge at all. This also means leaving your PC or laptop on whenever you want to charge the Kindle. There are non-Kindle chargers available on Amazon and I will be getting myself one pretty quickly.

Covers are a must!! I have a lovely purple cover for my Kindle but I paid an insane price for it in Waterstones because I was impatient and couldn’t wait for one to come from Amazon, where they are available for a much better price (non-Kindle branded covers anyway). Without a cover, your Kindle will get scratched quickly and I wouldn’t advise taking it anywhere without a cover, especially if you are putting it in a handbag.

Final Thoughts 

While there are a few little niggles I have with the Kindle Fire HD, they aren’t enough to make me regret getting one. Ok, so it takes a while to charge – this can be fixed with a plug charger. The books cannot be sorted – fixed by deleting from the Kindle and being kept in Cloud storage on the Amazon website once you have read the book. This tablet has so many good features to it and considering the price, I am so glad I (or my fiancé) never splashed out for the iPad or Samsung Galaxy.