LIDL

Beauty For a Snip! Cien at Lidl

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Despite being rebranded, I have long admired the cotton pads for sale in Lidl. Iseree, Cien? Eh, just don’t take away my love, dudes.

Beauty products come and go in the global discount supermarket chain, but Cien‘s new line that’s taking up permanent residence from now on.
CIEN makeup launch
I’ve given the lippy a good going over, as well as the lip gloss, and both are excellent. I esepcially love the Rich Magenta (fourth from left) because it is just the right amount of pink without being too hot or too rosy.

Equally welcome is the new haircare range:
CIEN haircare launch
You can get the full whack for less than a sevener, and it is really stands up to anything that you’d buy in the €15-20 range, particularly for a keratin-infused concoction. In this case, the Intensive Repair Mask is my fave, as I love little better than a good hair mask; take this one for a spin if you are a fan of co-washing, it is so good.

For those of us who like to impulsively fling a new lippy into the trolley, you {we!} can now do this with abandon…

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{Co-washing, you say? It’s using conditioner only, without shampoo, something that those with fine and super curly hair swear by. My version is more like condition, shampoo, condition, and it’s worked a treat. I also find that this gets the best out of those good-for-you, but hard-to-use sulfate-free shampoo/conditioner duos. I find them pesky because of the low-lather, which makes my fine hair explode like bamboo shoots tossed into a wok. As ever, YMMV.}

Lucky Thirteen of 2013: Iseree Cotton Pads, The Unsung Hero

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ISEREE cotton pads €.79These are 79¢. For 120 pads.

I was happy enough to leave it at that and post. I mean, even for Lidl, that is so cheap. Also: cotton is compostable/recyclable. You can do allll your face stuff — cleanse, tone, micellar water, pore minimiser — willy nilly, safe in the knowledge that you are being thrifty and green.

I’ve also found that these are the same all the time, which is not always the case with value brands. You buy a thing, and get used to the way it is, and then somebody takes a notion to either make it ‘better’, or more likely, try to make it even more cheaply, and the quality is destroyed — not the case here, which is great.

120 ÷ 3/day = 40 days of cottony goodness. I mean, approximately. Then there are the days when you have to use a million of them to remove the sparkly nail varnish whose base is apparently super glue, the days when you go a bit mad with the smokey eye, the days when your skin just feels… dusty, or something, and you’ve just got to use that cleansing water yet again.

Heart u Iseree Cotton Pads! Don’t ever change. And I mean that.

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That’s .79 euro-style cents, peeps.

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Actual Bronzing from Actual Sun!

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I can’t get a good picture of my arms, which, after only like 45 minutes sitting in the sunshine at lunch, are warmly light brown.

I mean, not like a celebrity tan — which is a good thing, depending! — but more like I am a living, breathing human being, and not a pale pod person who still has to wear her fat coat to the stable. Wearing a down jacket in May! I ask you!

Since we are set to get the stones split by sunshine over the next few days, I am sure that most among us are going to be gasping to take advantage of it. This is as good a time as any to shake my finger at yees all re: SPF. Frankly, I am shamelessly using you as a surrogate, because as I have said before on this site, I am a lazy arse when it comes to sunscreen.

Not anymore! I am going to go on an SPF binge for as long as we have the rays beating down upon us. Eau Thermale Avéne have a new suncare line that is going to get a look in tomorrow, when I prepare to go horseriding, and I’ve also got some goodies from Cien, the house brand from Lidl,  and we’ll see how we get on with that. I’m sure I’ve got more, but I am posting from the library in Dun Laoghaire, and can’t remember what else I’ve got in the press.

Seriously, I swear, my arms are nice and toasty. It may just be from the flourescent light in here, though. Eh, I don’t care, because you know what the colour of my arms is? The colour of HOPE.

♥Day: If I was Your Boyfriend, Etc, Etc

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Oh holy niiiiiight, is this not over yet?

In my personal experience, a special nightie on the special night is always a gift For Him. LIDL are doing a line in Satin Negligees for €5.99. At that price, you can have a bodice-ripping good time. Just me?

Another option is the use of Friday’s Veuve Monsigny Premier Cru Champagne from Aldi, which is not gender specific. As far as I know? Dudes like the bubbles, too, right?

If your fella likes to look after his skin, Clarin’s are doing an excellent promotion, because you get a gift, too. If you buy a Beauty Flash Balm Gift Set (€35.58) you get a free Clarins Men’s gift for him (this offer is available at all good chemists.) Or! Buy two products from the Clarins Men’s skincare range, maybe the Super Moisture Gel and/or the Super Moisture Balm and get a bonus gift for yourself (this offer happens in all good departments stores.)

There’s a whole bunch of good stuff on hand in Debenham’s: Marc Jacobs, who is a personal fave of mine, has a new cologne by called Bang Bang (€52.14), which is mostly sandalwood-y and musky, and there’s a John Rocha Manicure Set (€31). All the necessary tools are contained in a brown leather kit; you may like for yourself, at the end of the day.

I don’t know… Dudes I knew were always happy enough to get a CD, or I would ask them what thing they wanted. Such things were rarely red, or heart-y. Or I’d swing by Ann Summers and get something dirty, but silly.

They all liked getting cards, though? Real ones, not the ones from the internet. I think dudes are pretty easy as far as this goes. I don’t know, I think I am being sexist in every single way possible: that gals are the only ones who care, and the guys just play along, thereby stomping all over the lads with the loving natures and making the ladies all gimme, gimme… And I think this is where the whole ♥Day thing gets such a bad rap, this manufacturing of ‘Romance’ and it has to be such a big deal, and everybody is grumpy.

Eh, who knows your fella better than you do? Not me, for sure… but the Marc Jacobs stuff is really delish.

Haiku Review: Madame Glamour

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Oh, Madame Glamour!
As cheap as chips, and fragrant —
You fade all too soon.

Lidl, who do so much for us already — the ‘American Style’ peanut butter is a guilty pleasure, and they do a delicious bottle of prosecco for, like, no price at’all — have given us a bargain fragrance that does not smell cheap.

Smelling cheap… well, it’s best to be avoided, isn’t it? Oh, God, the scents I used to wear in my misguided youth! I like to think that Coco by Chanel came along just at the right time to save me from all those drugstore brands {chemist! the power of nostalgia! I forget my new words!} that came on strong and faded away in the blink of an eye, or rather, the twitch of a nostril.

Lidl’s brand is called Suddenly: Madame Glamour. I take the colon to be implicit, because otherwise this has two names. Anyway, UK-based Lidl enthusiasts have been merrily spritzing away with this, to the tune of £2.90-ish, since May, and the perfume arrived on Irish stores just in time for Christmas. It’s been making a splash, both over there, and here:

Two independent consumer panel blind tests carried out in the UK by the Perfumer’s Guild on the Lidl Suddenly Madame Glamour perfume against the hugely popular designer branded perfume revealed incredible results – 50 women in the first test voted overwhelmingly for the Lidl Suddenly perfume with 89% saying they would prefer to wear it over the designer brand.

And, 90% of the 100 women who blind tested the perfumes in the second round said they also preferred the Lidl perfume. A blind test was also carried out on Newstalk’s Tom Dunne Show on Friday 2nd of December with the Lidl fragrance beating Chanel again live on air.

I love the design of the bottle: it’s delicate and feminine, and perfectly handbag-sized. The thing is, you will have to have it to hand, because otherwise, you’ll find that in a short time, you will be fragrance-free. Which is not the point of wearing fragrance.

Okay, seriously, at €3.49, you can buy enough of these to rig up some sort of perpetual spritzing machine, but is even that low a price a waste of dosh? I wouldn’t go that far, because the scent, which apparently contain ‘citrus and floral notes, incorporating bergamot and jasmine’* is really refreshing, and… optimistic. Yeah, it is really quite youthful, yet confident, and I love that about Madame Glamour. I suppose if there was a body cream of the same scent, that layering might help with the staying power… just an idea…

*I would like to learn more about how fragrance works. Is there a course I can take???