product review: Badger Lip Balm

This Winter has by far been the worst for my skin.  I've always had fairly dry skin but this season has been out of control.  I have tried seriously a ton of products from high end brands to all organic brands.

I hope to review many of the products I've tried to show what works for me and my dry, sensitive skin.

I have a small addiction to looking up the ratings on cosmeticsdatabase.com to see where my products stand in terms of the chemical ingredients and their risks.

This site brings me to many organic products including:

Badger - Lavender & Orange Lip Balm
$5.00 from Noah's Health Food Store

I have tried almost every single over the counter lip product you can think of, from Blistex to Poly Sporn, from Aveeno to Chapstick and every thing in between.  All of them seem to just mask the problem, seriouisly irritate my lips and make them worse, or get so dependent on it that it really doesn't help.

I got this lip balm from the Noah's near Yonge and Broadway for about $5.  This brand is certified organic, and this particular flavour has the following ingrediants:

*Aloe Vera Extract, Essential Oils of *Sweet Orange, *Lavender, & *Sicilian (Blood) Orange, and CO2 Extracts of Rosehip & *Seabuckthorn Berry.


I really love lavender and that's why I choose this smell, I can barely notice the orange to be honest but overall really like this lip balm. It's soothing and non irritating and so far has been the best i've come across.
 
It was rated a 0 on the cosmeitcs database along with many of it's other products.

weekend obsession

So my friend Kristen introduced me to the world of de-potting MAC eye shadows videos on you tube.  It didn't take very long for me to get to a MAC store to grab a pallete at a pro store downtown. 

I watched several videos and finally came up with a combination of a few to make my own process.

First I set myself up in front of the TV and laid out some paper towel, flat iron, mac eye shadow pots, 15 shadow MAC pallet, waxed paper, and a bead craft set.

From this kit I used the small bead rimmer on the left and the pink and orange plyers in the middle.

First I used the bead rimmer to pop out the inner pot/pan out of the main pot by jamming it into the corner until it popped out.

I set my flat iron to the lowest setting, probably takes a bit longer but I was too scared to burn anything.  I torn up some square pieces of waxed paper and placed them on the flat iron.  Then I put the inner pot on top of that.  It only took about 1-2 mins to get the bottom of the pot soft enough to poke out with the bobby pin.

I let the heated ones to cool and followed this process 14 times more, adding small round magnets from a local craft store under the pan.

Once I had melted the plastic inner pot from the pan, I did the same for all of the empty large pots to peel the lables off with small plyers and applied the label to the bottom of the magnet. 

At first, I tried the method of just cutting the inner pot and using alcohal to deperate the glue at the bottom.  I found that it really ruined the plastic of the pots and using the flat iron for heat was just easier.  Some also used a candle but that just didn't work for me either.

In this pattern 1 4 7 10 13

                      2 5 8 11 14

                      3 6 9 12 15

1 - Orb
2 - Naked Lunch
3 - I pressed a pigment into a pan, saved for another blog post :)
4 - Sleepy
5 - Da Bling
6 - Full Flame
7 - Paradisco
8 - Sushi Flower
9 - Cream de Violet
10 - Juxt
11 - Hipnotique
12 - Aquadisiac
13 - from Faces (Do they even exist anymore???)
14 - Embark
15 - Plumage

Surprisngly, I had more than 15 eye shadows, and had enough plasitc to get 2 free eye shadows. It got so addicting that I ended up buying another 15 eye shadow pallet AND a 6 blush pallete.

These aren't full yet so more pics to come!

C

Nail Colour

I really enjoy fun colours with sparkles lately. I got both of these from Shopper's and I wear the sparkles on top of a lot of other bright colours too....

I really like the brushes on the Insta-Dri polishes, they are square and rounder at the top and just makes things a bit easier.

Gosh - Magic Star

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri - Instant Iris

C