BLOGMAS DAY 18| £20 MAKE UP CHALLENGE

December 18, 2018

You may remember a couple weeks ago I featured Skye in my first Blogger of the Week post and she is featuring again! We are super late to this trend but we wanted to do something fun and decided to create some Christmas looks for £20 or under!

So my items would have been £26.28 but because I chose to order through Superdrug I managed to take advantage of their 3 for 2 offers so I actually only spent £19.98! I had a rough idea of what I want to create before buying everything – I wanted a smokey, bronzey, glittery look which to me is just very basic Christmas party vibes!

So first up is foundation since there was no budget for a primer! I chose the Revolution Pro Foundation Drops in the shade F2. I chose this foundation because it is my current favourite (and I was running out anyway). This foundation was £7 and I could have definitely spent less for other foundations but I know that this one matches my skin tone perfectly and gives a really good high coverage base!

Concealer killed me a little. I normally use some kind of liquid concealer because I feel like they are easier to work with however with my budget I could not find a liquid one and had to settle for the MUA Hide and Conceal Stick in the shade fair. This concealer surprised me actually. I really thought it would be super dry but it was much creamier than I expected. That being said, it looked pretty bad. It sort of clung to my skin and balled up – not a great look!

Of course we need to set this and believe it or not I have never used a loose powder before. The MUA Professional Loose Setting Powder was just £4 and I figured what better time than now to give it a go. Other than the obvious factor of it being messy, it smelt pretty bad too. It shows up pretty white on your skin rather than translucent but that could be user error I guess! For sure, it is not something I would buy again.

My next step was bronzer, blush and highlight and this little trio from Revolution seemed like a good option. I went for the Revolution Sculpt & Contour Kit in CO1 and it wasn’t that bad! I mean the bronzer didn’t really show up and the blush was subtle but it was alright for £3.50.

Next up is the interesting part… brows and eyes!

For my brows I usually use the Nyx Micro-Brow pencil and so when I quickly realised I couldn’t afford a pencil I panicked a little. I picked up the Collection Eyebrow Kit in Blonde for £3.99 which I felt was extremely good considering you have 3 brow powders, a brow gel and a little brush to apply it with. These shades are all highly pigmented and a little goes a long way. The brush that comes with it is too soft in my opinion making it hard to be precise and as for the gel… useless. As you take the wand out of the tube it seems to complete scrape off all of the product leaving the wand clean and dry – maybe it was a bad one??

I mainly chose to buy from Superdrug because I knew they had eyeshadow palettes for cheap however I also realised most of the ones I have purchased their were around £8 and I definitely did not have the budget for that! I found the MUA 6 Shade Palette in Glamour Gold for £3.50 (I actually got it for £2.80 because of the deal). My issue was I couldn’t seem to find a palette that had matte and shimmer shades so I made the executive decision to buy an all shimmer palette and make use of the eyebrow and contour colours from the other palettes. These shadows were not very pigmented and it took a fair bit of building up to get proper pigment but it is something to be expected.

The eye look step by step;

I used the lightest shade from the eyebrow kit and ran it through my crease
I repeated this process but with the medium shade from the kit
I took the darkest shade from the eyeshadow palette and put in on the outer third of my eyelid and blended it in with the medium brown shade from the eyebrow kit
I then took the lighter bronzey/gold shade and put it on the centre of my lid
I then took the white shimmer shade and filled in the inner third of my eyelid
I put a mixture of the darkest brown from the eyebrow kit and the darkest shimmer shade along my bottom lashline.
Since I didn’t have the budget for eyeliner I took the darkest shade from the eyebrow kit and ran it along the outer third of my lashline.

This eye look was not great but it was okay. The colours were not very pigmented nor blend-able either which made it really difficult to make a truly cohesive look. That being said you could definitely make it work if you were on a tight make-up budget. The darker colours definitely showed up more than the light ones – and that was using a lot of product!

I’m pretty fussy when it comes to mascara which is down to having short and straight lashes that fall really quickly. The Miss Sporty Fab Lash Mascara in Extra Black was £2.99 and while I don’t love it, I don’t hate it either. It’s a good everyday one that can stay in the collection!

To complete the look I thought a bold red lip would be perfect – a sparkly one at that! I opted for the I Heart Revolution Metallic Dragon Lip Gloss in the shade Faraway Flames. Okay so it wasn’t actually sparkly and it wasn’t a red either but I still love it. It is more of a metallic dark berry shade rather than red as it appeared online and it is more of a liquid lipstick than a gloss but for £1.50 I am not going to complain too much!

And here is the final look! What d’ya think?