Smells Like Christmas 3 - The Spitalfields Candle Company

All this week, and next, I'm talking about how to decorate your home (and yourself!) in scent ready for the festive season, bringing you my picks of the best scented products around.

Today is the turn of the gorgeously sharp and citrussy Spitalfields Candle Company in Orange and Clove, which is bright, beautiful, and extremely cheerful. I found that it evokes wonderful memories of spiking oranges with cloves to make pomanders as a child!  The scent is almost photo-real in its intensity, and manages to be both nostalgic and utterly modern at the same time. It should burn for around 50 hours in the large size, and 12 in the smaller, the big candle costs just £25.

The Spitalfields Candle Company has grown from making candles for friends, to a market stall and now into thriving online business, which is wonderful.  All their candles are handmade, organic, and contain only the finest essential oils for fragrancing.  No synthetics here.  You should try them, it's the next best thing to getting the orange oil under your fingernails yourself ...

Spitalfields candles are also available from Planet Organic.

 The Fine Print: PR sample, but I'll be making a further purchase soon.

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Mother Hair Interchangeable Straighteners

I have a lot of hair.  A LOT of hair. It's wavy and annoying, and difficult to tame when it's going off on one, so I use straighteners to help me out a lot.  The only trouble with my beloved Cloud Nines is that I only have the narrow ones, and buying a set of wide ones to go with those seems like too much trouble. Not to mention extravagant!

This is where the Mother Hair interchangeable styler comes in, as it is a professional salon-quality straightener, that comes complete with both narrow and wide plates:

The straighteners are titanium, and heat up to a whopping 230 degrees via the digital controller:

They're easy to use, the on-off switch and the heat controllers are on the top, and are difficult to get to in normal use, which is handy.  The plates are also very easy to change, you press the buttons on the side, and pull.  I recommend that you do NOT do this when they are hot though, seriously.

 
I find that there is a slight gap between the plates in use, meaning that they "float" a little over the hair, rather than tug on it, which is nice, but this might be a bit of a problem for people with thicker hair than mine, when you do need to build up a bit of tension to get the hair straight. For my needs (fine hair but a hell of a lot of it) though, they work just fine.

Priced at a fairly reasonable £140 for what is essentially two sets of straighteners in one, you could do a lot worse for your Christmas presents this year! 

The Fine Print: Press sample.

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Smells Like Christmas 2 - Melt Christmas Candle

This week and next I'm showing you the best way to scent your home (and yourself!) ready for Christmas, and bringing you the best in Christmas smells traditional and modern.

Today it's the turn of the Christmas Candle from Melt, which is a blend of cinnamon, clove, vanilla, nutmeg, orange and spice, which is a traditional blend of ingredients that gives an almost "mulled" scent to the air surrounding it, whether it is burning or not. It burns well and cleanly, and promises to last for around seventy hours.

Melt are well on their way to becoming my new favourite candle company, these days. I adore their easy to navigate website, and I like how each fragrance is available in a range of sizes and colours and their prices are extremely reasonable, costing from £7.50 for a travel candle in a tin (22 hour burn) to just £32.50 for a "tall & fat"candle, which should burn for 160 hours.  The "luxury glass candle" you see in the main picture there is just £21, which is little short of a bargain.  I don't think the candles are organic - at least I can't find mention of it on the website - but they are hand-poured, and made without synthetic ingredients.

I've had a couple of candles from Melt now, in a variety of fragrances, and have loved them all. In particular I've really enjoyed the bright and lovely-smelling Verbena and Clary Sage and I'm giving serious consideration to using their candles to fragrance the venue for my wedding reception at the moment too ..



The Fine Print: PR Sample.
 
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Monaco Beauty Trolley from Beauty-Boxes.com

  
This is the Monaco Beauty Trolley from beauty-boxes.com, and she's been on my beauty wishlist for longer than I care to remember, certainly since before I became a beauty blogger! Now I have one finally, and I'm wondering what took me so long ... Makeup storage has been a problem for me for a very long time, I've been collecting makeup for the best part of 20 years, after all!

The Monaco is a professional trolley, designed with hair stylists and makeup artists alike.  It consists of two parts, the lower, deep section, which you can set up as you like with the included dividers, and the top section, which is a more traditional kind of train case.  It comes complete with a spare lid so you can use the two sections individually:

I'm absolutely in love with this, I keep it in the living room next to my desk, and I keep the top filled with my foundation collection, and the bottom has all the stuff I haven't got around to reviewing yet ...

It's fairly hefty, reaching about 2 & 1/2 feet tall, and it weighs a good 20lbs empty, but it feels good and sturdy,  and as I won't be dragging it around airports and the like, the weight doesn't bother me too much.  It holds a fair amount too:

I like that the bottom section is deep so you can keep taller products in there, and that it comes complete with a tray for smaller items too.  You also get a carry-strap for carrying around the top section as a case if you so wanted.

It also comes a luggage handle, so you can pull it around with you.  There's a lot of good detailing:

I really wasn't expecting the snakeskin effect on the leather covering the case, so that came as a really nice surprise, it's lockable, and easy to take apart and put together, I really love it.  It'd make the perfect present for someone who is obsessed with makeup, and it makes a great talking point!

You can get this in black or baby-pink too, and it costs £127.45 from the Monaco Trolley page at beauty-boxes.com.  But, if your needs are lesser than mine (and they most likely are), then beauty-boxes.comhave a fantastic range of other storage products for your makeup, so you can't go wrong ...

The Fine Print: PR Sample.  I LOVE IT.
 
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Smells Like Christmas 1 - NEOM Christmas Wish

It's December, and to get into the Christmas mood this year, I'm mainly scenting the flat with the flavours of Christmas.  We don't have much of a budget for decorations, and, being the creativity-free zones that we are, scent works much better for us.  So, for this week and next, I'll be bringing you a series of mini-reviews of the products (including candles, body products, and other fragranced products) that most bring to mind the smells of a traditional Christmas.

 

 And where better place to start than with the ur-scent of Christmas, the NEOM Christmas Wish Candle? A 3-wick behemoth, this burns for up to fifty hours.  It is scented with mandarin, cinnamon and tonka, and it sits where ever you put it, gently scenting the air with spices even before you burn it.

I adore the NEOM formula, which has to be one of the cleanest burning wax blends on the market, and the scent blends are amazing.  This is the most pricey candle I'll be showing you, at £42, but I buy one of these every year, and have never regretted it.  Each of the candles sold makes a donation to the Make-A-Wish foundation, so it's doing good, too.  Plus, it will last you right though the festive season and well into the new year, it's a great investment.

What's your favourite scent of Christmas?
   
The Fine Print: Purchase.

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Wedding Prep with Braun Gillette Venus Naked Skin IPL

Following on from my last Wedding Preparation post where I talked about the Slendertone Face, this week I'm going to talk to you about armpits.  Specifically, my armpits.  I spoil you guys, I know.  You see, my wedding dress has no sleeves, and I've now spent approximately two thirds of the entire wedding budget (not even nearly joking) on shrugs, boleros and other items in an attempt to hide my bingo wings, and then I remembered that I need to do something about my armpits.

 You see, in winter (for I am the laziest of people) my armpits get neglected.  It's a benign kind of neglect, admittedly, I keep them clean, and feed them all the deodorant they can eat, but they get tucked up in sweaters and left to ... well ... fuzz up for about four months.  No chance of that this February, for, whilst I have no objection to hairy pits in general (and I don't, mostly), my fuzzy pits decidedly will not go with the official #LippieWedding colours.

Yes, we have an official colour.  Shoot me.  You wait till you find out we have a theme for the music. Oh. Bum.

Anyway.

Pits.

    
So, when Braun  and Gillette got in touch about their Gillette Venus Naked Skin IPL kit, there is a small chance I discussed my dress-pit dilemma, and they agreed to let me trial the new system, which you can see above.  I've had an IPL unit before, and gave up with it very quickly, as the cord between the base unit and the handset was far too short, which meant I had to use it bent double, and that got old very quickly.

No such problems with the Venus Naked Skin system, there's a good couple of feet of lead there, which is very handy.  And the window for the laser is pretty big too:

So, what is an IPL system?  Simply put, IPL stands for Intense Pulsed Light, and the system works by essentially exposing your hair follicles to an extremely bright light, which interrupts their growth cycle. In effect, this means that hair grows back finer, and eventually, with repeated use, the hair stops growing entirely.  

The system works best when there is a big difference between the colour of your hair, and the colour of your skin, so, the darker your hair, and the paler your skin is, the better the system is likely to work for you.  It doesn't work well on darker skins, but there is a colour guide on the packaging that gives examples, plus the unit comes with a skintone sensor too, which measures the melanin in your skin, and decides on the best level of light for your skintone.  Hopefully this means you will never burn.  On my armpits, I use level three, which is one of the lower power levels.  Oddly, my armpits are darker then the rest of my arms, but I figure better safe than sorry, frankly.

 To use the Gillette Venus Naked Skin system, you shave the area you wish to treat - this feels a little counterintuitive for some reason, but it is basically so the light finds its way directly to the follicle area - then apply a thick layer of the provided conductive gel onto the area (pits, in my case), but don't rub it in, it's there both to amplify the effect of the light, and cool the area down, as intense lights get hot.  You then put the light sensor nearby, and press the button at the top, which tells the handset which level of power to use.

  Once the system tells you it's okay (you get a steady white light on the handset), you apply it onto the first place you wish to treat, and - looking away - press the button.  There will be a slightly red flash, and you'll get a warm sensation in the spot you've just treated.  Give the handset a few seconds to recharge, then repeat the process right next to the last spot you blasted.  Carry on till you've treated the entire area, but don't overlap spots.

And that is basically it!  I treated both my armpits in less than 20 minutes and I was very impressed with how simple and easy it was.  Also, it didn't hurt, which was nice.  Will it keep the fuzzies away?  Well, it's got ten weeks to sort those out!  Hopefully, just having to use it once a fortnight won't be too onerous ... The Gillette Venus Naked Skin IPL system costs £399.99 from Boots at the moment, I'll keep you posted on how I get on.

The Fine Print: PR sample.  Armpit stories all my own.  You're welcome.

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Jo Malone London Christmas Crackers

There's nothing quite like the cream and black livery of a Jo Malone London package to get the heart racing, and a gift of one of these crackers is a lovely treat for any Jo Malone fan.

Containing a miniature Lime Basil & Mandarin cologne, a tiny orange blossom body creme, and a weeny Pomegranate Noir bath & body wash, these are a little treat for anyone who appreciates a small but luxurious treat.  On the pricey side at £28 each, they're nonetheless a cute and aromaful present for a fragrance fiend in your life.

  
I've been layering the Lime Basil & Mandarin over the Orange Blossom Body Creme, and the combination works very nicely.  It makes up for the lack of party hat, at least ...

So, what are you getting for Christmas? 

The Fine Print: PR Sample.  I'm a heathen and cracked it open early ... 
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