Boots Beauty Haul & New Advantage Card App

As a long time lover of Boots beauty shopping, I was incredibly excited when they contacted me to say they've recently launched a new app that goes alongside their wonderful advantage card to bring Boots customers even more amazing offers than before. They'll still be sending their vouchers through the post throughout the year but now you can get even more great deals with the click of a button - there's everything from personalised offers based on your spending habits and updates on the best current deals they have on offer. You can also shop directly from the app which makes life a lot easier as its very easy to navigate. 

Another thing I LOVE about this new app is the fact is shows you how much money you have stored on your advantage card. Before this app it was always a bit of a struggle to work out how much was actually on there and the only time I ever really knew was when I bought something in store and checked the receipt afterwards.

Here's a little collage of what you can expect the app to look like. Pretty cool isn't it?!

After telling me all about their amazing new app, Boots said they would send me a voucher so I could put it to use and see how much money I could save using the various offers available. I was obviously more than willing to get stuck into the challenge and when my voucher arrived in the post, I was straight to Boots like a woman possessed, pursing all the lovely makeup counters and having great difficulty in deciding what I wanted to buy. Seriously, I could spend thousands in that place.

  

So as you can see from the photo at the top of this post, I got quite a lot of new things. I'm not going to talk about them all in greath length or I'd be here all day and this post is more to discuss the new app would be epicly long so I thought I'd just pop a list of the things I bought below with links in case you want to check them out yourself. I'll be doing full reviews of them all very soon too so keep your eyes peeled!

Seventeen Skin Wow Primer | £5.99 | Link

Seventeen Gel Colour Nail Polish | Firefly | £3.99 (bought on a buy one get one 1/2 price offer)

YSL Rouge Volupte Lipstick | No. 34 Rose Asarine | £24.50 | Link

No.7 Pop & Glow Cream Blush Stick | Classic Rose | £9.95 | Link

Collection Eyeshadow Pencils | Vintage Blush & Hot Chocalate | £4.99 each (bought on a 2 for £5 offer) | Link

L'oreal L'Extraordinaire Liquid Lipstick | Fuchsia Drama | £8.99 |  Link

Revlon Photoready Foundation | Natural Beige | £12.99 | Link

Revlon Colorstay Concealer | £6.99 | Link (Bought with a buy one get one 1/2 price offer)

Barry M Gelly Hight Shine Lips | Alpha Bright Red | £4.99

Bourjois double pencil sharpener | £3.49 | Link

Bourjois Java Rice Loose Powder | £9.99 | Link

No.7 Beautiful Skin Cleansing Water | £9.50 | Link (bought with a £5 off No.7 skincare voucher)

The Vintage Cosmetics Company 'Gracie' Eyelashes | £6.00 | Link

Bourjois Colour Boost Lip Crayon (not photographed) | Link

In total I spent £125.38 but with all the apps, I got it all for £100 which is how much I had to spend on my voucher. Now although most people, myself included, could never go and spend £100 in one go, if you were to spend a similar amount over the course of a month or two, you could be saving yourself a fair amount of money as well as gaining lots of extra advantage card points. Before I began this little experiment, I had about £2 on my Boots card (it was a brand new card as I lost my old one) but now I have almost £10 thanks to all the offers featured on the app like ‘double points when spending over £20 in one transaction’ and various others. Points do build up quite quickly if you’re a regular Boots shopper and I intend to not spend a penny of mine until Christmas when I’ll be stocking up on their 3 for 2 gifts! Does anyone else do that? 

Will you be downloading the new Boots App? Have you tried any of the products I bought?

Lots of love,

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Haul | Boots Bits & Bobs

I was planning on posting another '2013 favourites' post today (I've still got my favourite hair, skin and body care products to share with you all) but I don't want to bore you with too many of those posts all at once so I thought I'd break things up a bit with a little haul and I'll be back with the faves over the weekend. So, this is what happens when I need to buy some new conditioner from Boots. I end up buying more things that I didn't really need but couldn't resist. Brilliant willpower there Kayleigh - well done on spending unneccessary money yet again.

As I said, I needed some more conditioner and as I have long, thick hair and go through conditioner like there's no tomorrow, I decided to buy a couple of large bottles in the hope they'd last me for longer than a week. I bought V05 'Give Me Moisture' conditioner which is a repurchase for me as its one of the only conditioners that actually detangles my knotty mane. Actually, while I'm on this topic, do any of you know of any miracles for detangling hair? My hair is like a ball of tangles after I've washed it and I'm desperate to find something that will prevent me having to sit detangling my hair for a good 30 minutes after getting out of the shower. As well as V05, I also picked up the Herbal Esssences 'Bee Strong' conditioner as I've heard good thing about it and its also promoted by Nicole Scherzinger who has 'Schamazing' hair and is a good advert for the brand. I'm an advertisers dream I swear - stick a celebrity on the bottle and I'm all over it.

I also decided to try the Una Brennan Vitamin C+ Brighten Cleansing Oil (currently on sale at Boots) as cleansing oils are my preffered method of cleansing and I've heard good things about the Una Brennan range. The only thing I'm not impressed with is the packaging (no pump) so I'm hoping I can figure out a way to use it without it spilling everywhere. If any of you know of a pump I can buy that will fit on this bottle, let me know.

My favourite purchase of the bunch and one that I'm so excited about is the Yankee candle as its the first one I've ever bought! Every time I go shopping, I always spend a good chunk of my day sniffing all the Yankee candles in WHsmith (I know, weirdo!) and although I'm not keen on spending a lot of money on candles, I had a bit of Christmas money to spend so thought, why not? I went for the scent 'Clean Cotton' which is definitely the best one I've smelt yet as it smells exactly like you'd image, clean and fresh. I love the smell of fresh laundry so I've been loving burning this for the past few nights in my living room - there's nothing better than a fresh scent filling the room! The size I bought is one of the regular tumblers as I couldn't jusity spending £19.00 on one of the large jars - even though I was tempted!

Finally, I picked up two products that I've wanted to try for a long time from the Rimmel 'Scandal Eyes' range. I bought one of the Shadow Paints in the shade 'Golden Bronze' which is a liquid metallic eyeshadow (I'm very intrigued by this one) and one of the Shadow Sticks in the shade 'Bulletproof Beige' which I thouht would be nice to use in the innter corners of my eye and under my brow bone. They're both products that are unlike anything else in my collection and I've heard good things about them both from other bloggers. However, its just my luck that when I got home from Boots and after taking these photos, I realised that the shadow stick was actually snapped when I bought it so when I came to do a swatch, the top of the crayon fell clean off. I'm hoping I'll be able to sharpen it so I can still use it but seriously, how annoying is that? Boo!

So there we have it - some of my most recent beauty purchases! I've also picked up a few things from MAC, a new hairbrush and the famous Ben Nye Banana powder so keep your eyes peeled for reviews of all of these things! If there's anything inparticular here that you'd like to know more about, let me know in the comments below.

Have you bought anything from Boots recently? Have you tried any of these products?

Lots of Love,

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Beauty Haul

I did it again, I bought more beauty products that I quite frankly didn't need. Seriously, someone needs to stop me! I do have an excuse though (I like to tell myself this so I feel better about my inexcusable spending habits) as Boots lured me in with their 'too good to say no to' buy one get one half price offer. I'm beginning to realise I should avoid that website at all costs.

I didn't go to the website with anything in particular in mind but there was a few products I'd heard a lot of good things about and they suddenly popped to the forefront of my mind whilst having a browse around. I decided to pick up another Collection Lasting Perfection concealer as I bought the wrong shade the first time around, the new Seventeen Phwoarr Paint concealer, Max Factor miracle touch creamy blush in the shade 'soft pink' and a Loreal Infallible eyeshadow in the shade 'Sahara Treasure'. I've read lots of good things about these products so I'm excited to give them a whirl. I've tried a few of them and so far so good, apart from the Collection concealer which broke me out. Boo! 

I then picked up the Maybelline Pure BB Cream after hearing the lovely Tash from Its Simply Beauty raving about how wonderful it is. I saw her applying it in a You Tube video and it looks great on her so I'm looking forward to giving it a proper try. I've used it once or twice and like it on first impressions but I'll use it a few more times before sharing my thoughts. I also bought the Loreal 'Skin Perfection' correcting day moisturiser as it had money off and my auntie recommended it to me. She has fab skin so I took her word for it. I've also been really impressed with their Skin Perfection micellar water so I wanted to try something else from the range. I've used it a few times now and I'm pretty impressed with the texture - it sinks in really nicely and creates a nice base for my makeup. Again, I'll report back with my thoughts after using it for a little while longer.

Whilst browsing around the Boots website beauty section I spotted an advert for new Rimmel Apocalips shades and I was instantly intrigued. I don't know about you but I wasn't even aware they'd released new shades as I haven't seen any hype surrounding them on blogs or any talk on Twitter. Maybe I'm just totally behind on the news but either way, I was pretty excited to see a new selection of shades available. I decided I HAD to get my mitts on one of the new shades so I picked 'Across the Universe', a deep red which looked perfect for A/W. I won't say anything else as my next post is going to be a full review of this so you can read more then. 

Finally I decided to purchase the infamous OPI Nail Envy as its been on my wishlist for as long as I can remember and my nails are currently in appauling condition. I wear acrylics all the time as my natural nails are so damaged but I've decided enough is enough and I want to do everything I can to grow my natural nails and get them in tip top condition. I'm sick of spending a fortune on getting my nails done so I'm excited to see how I get on with this. I didn't buy it from Boots as I wasn't willing to spend £18.50 on a nail polish so I hunted it down on ebay here for the bargain price of £9.25 including free delivery. I know ebay can be dodgy but I checked out the seller and they're top rated and a shop that specialise in nail products. The product arrived super fast and everything seems fine with it so I'd recommend checking them out. I'm going to do a 'before' and 'after' post about my experience with Nail Envy so keep an eye out for that.

So that's what I've been buying recently. I know its naughty but who can resist such pretty beauty products? Clearly I can't. Keep an eye out for full reviews of all of these products in the near future if you're interested in hearing more about them.

What have you been buying lately? Have you tried any of these products?

Lots of Love,

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Haul // Boots Beauty

From time to time (okay I lied - ALL the time) I find myself drawn to the Boots website and all their wonderful beauty offers. I don't think I've ever come away from that website without popping something in my online shopping basket. Recently I was having one of those "I fancy treating myself to some new beauty bits" moments and of course my first port of call was Boots. I didn't know what I wanted to buy and I definitely didn't need anything but I hadn't bought any new beauty products for almost a month and I was getting withdrawals. Yes, send me to beauty bloggers anonymous!

Before I tell you about all the lovely beauty bits that wormed their way into my Boots basket, I just want to point out that this post was supposed to go up before my monthly favourites so I apologise that you've already seen the Bourjois lipstick and Loreal Micellar solution. I don't want to bore you with the same products discussed in my previous post but I did buy them recently so I hope you don't mind a Bourjois and Loreal double whammy. Also, I bought the Loreal micellar water from duty free and not Boots but if I were to buy it again, I'd buy it from Boots so I thought I'd pop it in this haul anyway. I won't go into any detail about them here as you can find out what I think of them both in my previous post.

Wow, disclaimer central. Now that ramble is out of the way, let me tell you about the things I've been buying. As I said earlier, I didn't have anything in particular in mind that I wanted to buy but Boots and their beauty offers are bad for my bank balance and I soon spotted bargains all over the place. The first bargain I spotted was Hydraluron. Now, if you're a beauty blogger and haven't heard of this product yet, where have you been hiding? I've heard nothing but rave reviews about this little beauty so when I spotted that the whole Indeed Labs range (the brand behind Hydraluron) had a third off their normal price, I gave into the hype and popped it into my basket. If you don't know what Hydraluron is, its essentially a 'pre-moisturiser' product that contains hyraluronic acid and helps to seal moisture from your regular moisturiser into your skin. Definitely not an essential product but a nice little luxury and I can't wait to see how it helps my dry skin in the winter months.

Next up are two Soap and Glory products which were also bought thanks to an offer too good to resist. Boots were offering 2 for £15 on any Soap and Glory products which in my opinion is a fabulous little deal, especially if you choose more expensive products. I know, how cunning of me ;). The two 'expensive' products I picked were both for the S&G makeup range and both products I've been eyeing up for a while now - the 'Glow All Out' illuminating powder and Lid Stuff 'What's Nude' eyeshadow quad. Considering the face powder costs £11 on its own - I couldn't say no to the eyeshadow palette for only £4 instead of £10. Bargain! I haven't tried the eyeshadows yet but the illuminating powder is beautiful. Keep and eye out for full reviews on both.

Now I'm blaming all you other beauty bloggers out there for influencing these next two purchases - Vaseline 'Aloe Fresh' Spray & Go body moisturiser and 'Cherry Me' baby lips lip balm. Both of these products have been hot on the blogging scene lately and although I've read mixed reviews of both, they're both cheap as chips so I had to snap them up to see what I think for myself. I won't say too much as again, I'll be reviewing these products in full soon but I'm totally in love with one of them.

Lastly, I spotted this Garnier Moisture Match 'Protect and Glow' moisturiser on special offer in my local Boots store whilst buying my mum some last minute birthday presents. It was reduced to only £4.99 and after falling in love with all the cute squeezy bottles and various fragrances (there's a whole range of the moisture match moisturisers designed for various skin needs), I couldn't walk away without taking one with me. I loved the look of them all to be honest but I decided on the 'illuminate' version in the end as I'm always willing to try a product that claims to give my skin that infamous glow. It also helps that it smells absolutely incredible. Seriously, I could sniff this stuff all day. I've been loving this product ever since I got it so expect a rave review soon.

Have you been shopping at Boots lately? Have you tried any of these products?

Lots of Love,

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