Precious Oils: The Body Shop Camomile Silky Cleansing Oil

By Laurin

Two weekends ago, I moved house. In the process of flinging my entire life into twenty cardboard boxes, I uncovered several boxes of old photos I’d dragged across the ocean at some point. Baby pictures, holiday snaps, even old pictures of my grandparents looking impossibly glamorous in the 50’s. I have carried these with me since the day fourteen years ago that I left my hometown with a one-way ticket to London and two bursting suitcases. The Delta check-in agent sweetly looked the other way when I heaved them onto the baggage scales.

I am eighteen in the picture above and I am terrified of fat: both of eating it and of putting it on my face. These are the days of fat-free Snackwell cookies and Molly McButter, a vile yellow dust that promises to taste as delicious as butter, but really just looks like an over-excited daisy got frisky with your jacket potato when you weren’t looking, leaving nothing behind but a sad smear of pollen. I load my plate with plain steamed vegetables and lather my face with a Neutrogena gel that makes my skin feel as though it’s shrunk in the dryer. It makes sense to me at the time. How can you fight oil with more oil?

Thankfully, times have changed. I figured out five years ago that plant oil on my face (and in my mouth, for that matter) is nothing to fear. In 2009, picked up a copy of India Knight’s The Thrift Book and caught wind of DHC Deep Cleansing Oil. Since then, I have been devoted to the oil cleansing method in general and DHC in particular. When I first began using it, it was only available through the DHC website, which made it a difficult sell to anyone without £20 to punt on a facial cleanser that resembled a salad dressing. Happily since then, it’s now more widely available, but I do appreciate that it is still not easily found outside of major metropolitan areas.

The Body Shop, on the other hand, is everywhere. When I was eighteen and snacking on iceberg lettuce leaves during English class, the Body Shop held an exotic appeal, largely because we didn’t have one in Mobile. Since moving to London though, I mostly associate them with fruit-scented lotions for adolescents and Christmas gift sets that inevitably end up gathering dust in a cupboard. My loss, really, for they actually have some excellent products.

The Camomile Silky Cleansing Oil is one of them. I pinched a bottle from Lippie Mansions a few months back and I’ve been using it as my morning cleanser ever since. For £10, it’s seriously good stuff. It’s a paler yellow and slightly runnier than my beloved DHC, but no less effective at removing make-up and leaving your face feeling clean and super-soft. If I’m using it at night, I massage a single pump into my face with my fingers for about thirty seconds, then use cotton wool to remove my eye make-up. I then remove the rest of the oil with a hot flannel. If I remember, I use the Body Shop Facial Roller after removing my eye make-up, but before the hot flannel.

The complaints I’ve heard from those who don’t get on with oil cleansing fall largely into two camps: first, that the oil always runs through their fingers and onto their clothes or down the drain, and second, that it ends up in their eyes and gives them blurry vision. All I can say is that the former has never been a problem for me (perhaps I have exceptionally well-arranged fingers), and the latter stopped happening after a few uses.

Will the Body Shop oil be a permanent replacement for the DHC on my bathroom shelf? Honestly, no. But my preference is largely aesthetic, not based on effectiveness. I like the dark, greeny-gold colour of the DHC, and I like the fact that it smells faintly of olive oil, allowing me to pretend I’m a Greek goddess, rubbing my alabaster skin with precious ointments. But I’d happily buy it if it was the week before payday and I’d run out of DHC. And I’d absolutely recommend it to anyone who wanted to try oil cleansing without splashing the cash for the DHC. It’s a tenner. Take the punt.

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Body Shop Teenage Cancer Trust Concerts 2014

Seriously, I do not know where the time goes ...  It's that time of year where The Body Shop gets their Corporate Social Responsibility hat on, and sponsors a series of gigs at The Royal Albert Hall to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust.  This year they'll be match-funding up to £30,000 worth of donations at the concerts.  Last year, 2013, the series of concerts (which were curated by Noel Gallagher) raised upwards of £500,000 for charity which is a quite magnificent sum!  And, from a person working in the charity sector, trust me, donations like this are simply NOT to be sniffed at. In the current climate, anything that brings in money will help charities do their jobs, and support people in need.  I only wish my charity could do things like this! 

So, who do you fancy seeing?  For me, it would have to be The Cure, or the Comedy Evening (I love a good comedy evening, I do).  Maybe Suede.  But mostly The Cure.  Or the comedy evening ... Anyhoo the gigs run from 24th to 30th March and the tickets go on sale this Friday 31st January.

As an aside, I know it's been quiet here recently, but there is good reason, honest!  Also, there's lots of great stuff going on behind the scenes which will make the quietness a thing of the past, so look out for an exciting announcement (or three) coming soon!

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Body Shop Colour Crush Eyeshadows

As spring has allegedly sprung, I thought I'd break out some colours on the blog - well it makes a change from sludges and reds, I guess!  The redeveloped Colour Crush Eyeshadows from the Body Shop have been on counters for a little while now, they're really pretty and I've actually been impressed with the texture, so I thought it was about time they made an appearance.

As you can see, I was sent quite a collection, here we have:
Top row: Sweet Pea, Boyfriend Jeans & Berry Cute
Middle: Grape Expectations, Berry Cheeky & Blackcurrant Affair
Bottom: Golden Girl & Caramel Flirt

This is a really nice set of colours, they're fairly pigmented, and are soft and velvety in use, I've not experienced much fallout with them, either.

I've swatched them here with my finger over bare skin, so you can see how pigmented they are in normal use - the colours are brighter over a primer, of course, but I know a lot of my readers don't use eyeshadow primers:

Bright, eh?  And even brighter with a primer!  My picks from this set of shades would be Grape Expectations, and Golden Girl (as a highlighter), and possibly Blackcurrant Affair, but that's just me.

The shadows last quite well, but if you wear them on bare skin they will fade rather quickly (within a couple of hours).  At seven pounds per shade, they're fairly bargainacious too ...

The Fine Print: PR Samples.

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I want to: Smell Like a Hug ...

 For all that I love my avant garde niche perfumes (and I do), there are days when all you want to do is smell loveable, the olfactory equivalent of a quick snuggle on the sofa.  For those days, all you need is musk, for musk is the scent of skin and so these are the products I pick:

I'm a big fan of layering my scents, so I start with:

Philosophy Amazing Grace Shower Gel

A softer scent in the shower gel form, than the rather sharp scent you get in the eau de toilette form, this is a gentle, almost flowery form of musk that is, in it's slightly laundry-soap kind of way, rather loveable in itself.  I have a hard time keeping my bottle away from MrLippie.

Khiel's Original Musk Body Lotion

Not all hugs are innocent, are they?  So I follow Amazing Grace with a light slathering of Kiehl's Original Musk Body Lotion, for that little hint of naughtiness under the light and bright musk scents I'll be following this up with. I can't speak for the formula's moisturising properties, as I don't use body lotion as a rule, it's generally something I only use for layering scents with.  That said, this is a nice formula, and I used it for scenting my skin on my wedding day (layered underneath L'Artisan Perfumer's Safran Troublant).

Body Shop White Musk Perfume Oil

Most definitely not the spray eau de toilette!  I find myself using this as an anchor to many floral fragrances, and occasionally as a perfume in it's own right.  It moisturises the skin somewhat, and allows your fragrance "proper" to have something to grip to, moisturised skin holds fragrance better.  In it's own right, this is soft, powdery and rather delicious, and it helps give a sensual base-note to whatever you apply afterward.

Which is (in this case):

 Serge Lutens Clair de Musc

 A bit of an overlooked fragrance from the Serge Lutens line, this sweet, fragrant hug-in-a-bottle reminds me of childhood cuddles from my female relatives.  It's not ground-breaking, it's soft and gentle and rather lovely.  Longevity isn't the greatest, which is why I like to layer it.  This was this close >.< to being my wedding fragrance ...

The Fine Print: Mixture of samples, purchases and gifts.
 
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Body Shop Ginger Sparkle Collection (and a little hint ...)

The sharp-eyed amongst my readers might have noticed a tiny Christmas flavour sneaking into Get Lippie this week,and you'd be right.  I'm only posting about those presents that have genuinely caught my eye though, and yesterday's giant lip balm, and today's giant gingerbread man have both made me laugh so I thought they were worth a mention.

Chock-full of shower-gel, body polish, soap and body butter all in the addictively spicy Ginger Sparkle scent, this comes in at £15 which is an absolute bargain in anyone's book.  They're the usual Body Shop quality, and quite highly scented, so don't buy this for anyone who doesn't like ginger.

Now, no gift guide is complete without the writer dropping a little hint about what they would like, so if anyone was interested in buying ME an early Christmas present this year, I'd like this please:

This little beauty is the Masters of Malt Ginvent Calender which contains 24 3cl bottles of gin.  I like gin.  I like Christmas. And frankly, what could be better than the gift of gin EVERY DAY in the run up to Christmas?  (Actually, I know what the answer to that is, and that would be the gift of champagne every day in the run up to Christmas, but I suspect we'd have to rob a bank for that one to happen).  Anyway, this costs £79.95 AND I WANT ONE. In fact, I WANT TWO.  Make it happen, people.  Pleeeeeeeease?
 
 The Fine Print:  PR sample, and a begging letter.  I like to multi-task.

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Lip Stains

I'm a big fan of lipstains, whilst I don't mind spending time applying my makeup in the mornings, I'm actually very lazy, and re-applying lipstick is something I don't bother doing all that often during the day, so it's nice that there are products you can use that'll stay in place all day.

That said though, I'm always slightly disappointed with products that look a bright rich red in the tube (or bottle) that actually just pull fuschia on the skin.  Yes, Benetint, et al, I'm looking at you!  The Body Shop lip & cheek stain does the same thing, but actually, I kind of like it.

Bourjois Rose Exclusif is actually a lipgloss with "colour-changing" abilities.  Do you remember "Ultra Glow" lipsticks?  They came in green and yellow and blue and brown and the like, and were meant to change to your "perfect" lipcolour in reaction to your body chemistry.  In reality, on me, they just went bright fuschia (no matter what colour I'd started off with) then stained my lips for three days.  Rose Exclusif promises to do a similar thing, only in a gloss.  And hopefully without the industrial staying power.

Here's how they swatch on the hand:

Body Shop tint on the left there, and Rose Exclusif on the right. As you can see, the Rose Exclusif doesn't really stain skin which isn't your lips, which is nice.  Both have a slight scent, and the Bourjois smells very, very sweet indeed.

Remarkably, both go more or less the exact same shade on my lips!  The Body Shop tint is far too pink for my cheeks alas (pink shades on my cheeks tend to make me look like I'm having a hot flush, which isn't a great look, to be honest), but here's the Body Shop tint on my lips:

And here is the Bourjois Rose Exclusif:

I find that if I layer the Bourjois over the Body Shop, then I can deepen the colour, and it lasts all day.  Here's the Rose Exclusif in the full context of my face:

Excuse the mad hair all over the place there, was testing a shampoo that I'll be talking to you about soon.


The Fine Print: One was a PR sample, and one was a freebie with a magazine.  Both are very nice though, regardless.