Organic Weekend - Natural & Organic Products Europe Show

So, a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to attend the Natural & Organic Products Europe (NOPE) show at Olympia, as a guest of Balm Balm, who you've heard me talk about on several occasions before.

Dedicated to bringing together the brightest and the best of organic and natural products, NOPE is a trade show, which allows brands to showcase their wares to interested buyers and suppliers.  They first introduced a Beauty and Spa section in 2008, and that was the part of the show I was most interested in seeing!

Naturally, I made Balm Balm my first port of call, and having a chat with Glenda, Hayden and the rest of the family was certainly one of the high-points of my day.  I'm delighted that they're expanding their range even further with a new facial collection including a super-light and delightfully refreshing coconut cleansing oil which I'll be talking to you about in a bit more detail in a later post.

I then moved on and had a little chat with the lovely girls at Lily Lilo, who spent some time talking to me about a lot of the new products they have coming up later this year, including mascaras, pressed foundations (really interested in those!) and some balms. The brand has really expanded in the last few years, I'm happy to see, and I'll be giving it a proper look-over in the months to come.

I popped over to Melvita who I'm sure you're familiar with by now! I had a gorgeous hand massage, and a nice chat with their therapists, which was really lovely.  I have some products out with some lovely, lovely guest reviewers at the moment, and they'll be giving me their feedback soon!

At this point, I thought I should have a look at the organic food side of things, however, I was distracted by this:

Yup, Heather Mills-McCartney (as was) doing a cookery demonstration.  I didn't hang around long enough to figure out what she was cooking, whilst I was there she was chopping carrots very s l o w l y and lecturing people on categories of vegetarianism.  And Omega three, for some reason ...

I then popped along and had a chat with Phillip Martin's Organics who have a range of hair care, skin care and cosmetics.  Hailing from Italy (Phillip Martin sounds so Italian a name, dontcha think?), the products reminded me a great deal of John Masters ranges, and they look like they'll be something super-interesting to look out for.

I went and found the Spieza stall and chatted to the girls again after meeting them recently at The Vitality Show, this time I actually got around to trying some of the products! I have to say that I think their rose and chamomile scrub is one of the most interesting products I saw on the whole day. Utilising chamomile stamens, it's an great use of what would ordinarily be considered a by-product of organic cosmetic production!

I also had a chat with Sarah of Pai, I've been trying one of her moisturisers since we met, so look out for a review of that soon, and Sarah has also agreed to be featured on my "Lippie Chat" series, so we'll be hearing more from her soon!

There's plenty more, but this is running long, so I'll bring you the rest next week ...

Makeover: Donna

Meet Donna:

 

Donna has the most lovely eyes, but she told me that she's got out of the habit of wearing shadow recently, and was looking to learn how to apply dramatic "winged" eyeliner.  When Donna does apply colour to her eyes she uses a lot of teals and purples, but we discussed something a bit different and decided that orange was the way forward!  I broke out my pro palette and got to work:

As always, we start with the base.  Donna has great skin, with some lovely freckling, so we just used a tiny sweep of Lily Lilo powder foundation as a base and left it at that:

Then we got to work on Donna's eyes.  I used this palette:

Mainly concentrating on the second row from the left there, I used the second and third shades down as a colour wash all over the eyelid area, using the slightly darker shade as a contour in the crease:

The peachy-orange really brings out the green shades in Donna's eyes, yet it's not too in-your-face.  However, I'm disappointed with the quality of the shadows themselves, the colour pay-off is pretty poor, and even attempting to foil with them doesn't improve it very much at all.  I was hoping for a much more dramatic look.  Still, the colour wash is pretty, and works well enough, just not quite well enough.

Then, onto the liner.  For this, I used Urban Decay's liquid liner in Roach, which is one of my favourite shades of all time, it's a gorgeous burgundy-brown shade that's flattering on almost everyone, as it's less harsh than black.  For a really dramatic look, I always draw the liner in a tiny right angled triangle shape right next to the lashline:

I start by drawing the upright at the outside corner of the eye, then draw a line from the inner corner to the top of the line, then fill in the triangle with the coloured liner.  It's a lot more simple than this sounds, and I'll bring you a step by step guide to how to do this soon.

Here's how the eyes looked when I was finished, we used two coats of mascara, and I think this is a great dramatic look.  Yes, it could have been a bit more dramatic, but overall I like this look.  Then I made a mistake, attempting to make up for the lack of drama in the orange eyeshadow, I thought a bright orange lipstick would be in order.  All I did then, was gild the lily:

Actually, the lipstick itself is a great shade for Donna (it's a Stila one, I've forgotten the name of, but I'll find out), it's just too much with the winged liner. We toned it down later with a more neutral lip, and it looked much more in balance.

Thank you, Donna!  I'll not gild the lily next time, I promise.