My post comparing the Harrods GlossyBox with the Anti-Ageing Latest in Beauty box is still my most viewed post on my blog. So, I thought I'd bring you another post, comparing the latest boxes from both companies. Perhaps, if this post is as popular as my last one, I'll make this a regular feature.

The April Glossybox's theme was natural products. I absolutely loved the box and I'm planning on keeping it to store all my samples in as it'll go really nicely in the room I store all my beauty bits and makeup in (our second bedroom, which is a home office cum dressing room!). GlossyBox costs £10 a month plus £2.95 P+P, and for that you get 5 samples. My understanding is every month there is around 10-14 samples, of which you receive 5, so there is a bit of pot luck involved! Here is my box:







I just loved the packaging this month! Here are my 5 treats:







Overall, I'm really excited by the products I received which were:

• Burts Bees Milk and Honey Body Lotion. I've sampled this before courtesey of Latest in Beauty, but this is a much heftier sample so I can really give it a whirl. I do find it leaves my skin very soft, but it does feel slightly strange and powdery on my hands after I've applied it. However, hands can easily be washed and I do like the way it leaves my skin elsewhere on my body!
• Caudalie Vinosource SOS Thirst-Quenching Serum. I'm so excited to try Caudalie products. I think this will be a serum I use in an 'emergency' to revive my skin, which is one of their suggestions.
• Monu Rich Collagen Cream. Great for fine lines apparently, of which I have far too many! I suspect this might be too rich for most of my face, so I think I'll use to to treat the lines I have on my forehead and also on my neck and decolletage.
• Inika Certified Organic Eyeliner in Purple Minx. Not a colour I would have picked and I don't tend to use pencil eyeliners, but I have tried it today and it is really nice. Not fiercely pigmented but this means its very suitable for daywear.
• Figs & Rouge lip balm. I received one of these from Latest in Beauty (I think!) once before but as I use hundreds of different handbags (ok, that is a *slight* exaggeration...), I do like to load each one up with a lip balm and a hand cream so no matter which bag I grab I'm prepared! This is a cherry& vanilla scented lip balm and very good it is too!

I'm very happy with the contents of my GlossyBox. Looking at all the samples they had, I would have liked to have tried the Monu Reviving Mist and the Philip B straightening balm, but I'm not sure what products I'd want to swap out to have them, so I think I'm just trying to be a spoiled brat. The May GlossyBox will mark their first birthday, so I imagine they will have something exciting up their sleeves for subscribers!
Over to Latest in Beauty. At the end of April they brought us the CEW Beauty Awards Box. Described on their site as 'the Oscars of the beauty world', these products were all rated very highly by Cosmetic Executive Women (CEW) members. The box contains 8 samples from a possible 9 and was £8.95 plus £2.95 P+P. Here is the box:




I don't mind that the box isn't particularly exciting, if all the beauty boxes were pretty enough to keep my house would be overrun with boxes!

And the contents are here:







I'm made up with my products, which are:

• Elemis Pro-Collagen Body Cream, a firming body cream. Again, I think this will be best on my decolletage, the rest of me either doesn't need help or is totally beyond help!
• Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish, which is surely THE cult product (which is why it won most revolutionary beauty product in the last 20 years!). It came with a free muslin cloth and also some samples of Liz Earle skin tint which was gratefully received!). I also received a sample of this with a magazine last month and I'm super excited to finally try this amazing product. I can see me becoming instantly hooked.
• Percy & Reed Dry Conditioner, I'm a dry shampoo addict, so I'm really keen on trying this out. My ends get quite dry and I'm hoping this will really pep them up!
• Benefit The Porefessional. I have horrible large pores and I've heard amazing things about this product so I'm keen to try it out!
• L'Occitane Immortelle Brightening Hand Cream with SPF15. My hands have really been suffering lately so I am grateful for all hand creams I receive! And I'm fast falling in love with all things L'Occitane.
• Nails Inc Porchester Square nail varnish, which is an absolutely gorgeous colour and absolutely brilliant for day-to-day wear as it'll go with every outfit conceivable!
• Elie Saab Eau de Parfum, which I have sampled before with a Latest in Beauty fragrance box, and really liked.
• Mont Blanc Legend Eau de Toilette, which is one for the boys so this has been passed over to my OH!

This is yet another excellent box from Latest in Beauty and I'm going to really enjoy using each and every sample!

So, which box was my favourite? To be honest, it's too close to call this month, I'll need to declare it a draw. Both boxes appealed to me enormously and I'll definitely get good use out of everything in both.

Did you get either of these boxes? What did you think of them?

Yep. I'm a bit of a stuck record when it comes to Latest in Beauty, but I don't care. I love those great people and all the beauty items they send me in the post in exchange for a few of my hard-earned pounds. In the last few weeks I've bought 3 boxes (excluding the Anti-Ageing box I already blogged about!), and I'm going to blog about two of them today. The first up is the Editor's Choice box which was released at the beginning of last month:





It did contain a few duplicate items, the Eve Lom mask, the Divine Cream and the Emma Hardie serum all featured in the Anti-Ageing box. But I'm absolutely fine with that, it gives me more opportunity to sample these products before deciding whether or not they work well enough for me that I opt to buy full sized versions. The AD skin synergy is a new product to me and I am a fan of serums at the moment, so I'm excited to try this out (it needs to join a bit of a queue behind the other serums I have to sample!). I am really pleased with the nail polish colour from Miners, will be great on fingers or toes in the summer! (If we ever have a summer!). This box cost £5.95 +£2.95 P&P and was worth over £30. I really liked this one!

Whilst unable to possibly wait for another beauty box to arrive (I subscribe to GlossyBox and make it my duty to buy as many Latest in Beauty boxes as I possible can!), I decided to create my own beauty box from the luxury samples pages at Latest in Beauty. Here's what I got:





As you can see, I ended up buying an extra AD skin synergy serum, but again, it'll give me the chance to really try it out before making a decision on whether or not to buy a full sized version. The This Works body lotion came with the Anti-Ageing box as well, but you know where I stand with duplicates by now! I'm really excited to try the Bamford shower gel as I've heard great things. As I have oily/combination skin I'm hoping the Dr Nick Lowe moisturiser can work some magic under my makeup. And the Jo Hansford shampoo and conditioner duo are brilliant sample sizes. My only experience with Jo Hansford products came before I went to university and I decided to dye my hair a sensible dark brown, using a Jo Hansford dye. What I got was 'complete goff black' hair, which took an age to fade out. WHOOPS. But I'm trying the shampoo and conditioner out with a totally open mind. That hair dye experience was 9 (!!!!!!) years ago, and a shampoo can't turn my hair black anyway. The irony was, I'd wanted black hair aged about 16 and tried 3 times, unsuccessfully, to turn my hair black. A few years later I stopped trying and bam! Full on black hair.

I can't rave about Latest in Beauty enough, as you know by now. Next up to blog about will be the fabulous CEW Awards Box, which I will do next week. Seeing as my GlossyBox vs Latest in Beauty Box post has the most views on my entire blog, I might pit April's GlossyBox against the Latest in Beauty CEW box. What do you think?

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The first thing I should say about this recipe is I cheat at every turn possible. If there's a gadget I can use to get out of doing manual labour, I'll definitely do it. I appreciate that I'm an extremely spoiled lucky girl who has brilliant kitchen gadgetry. All of this can be done without these gadgets, however. I love to cook, but lets face it, who has time to be in the kitchen all day, every day? Not me, sadly. So if I can cheat my way to a tasty tasty meal, I'll do it.

This french onion soup recipe came from a Morrisons magazine years ago. My OH was the first of us to try making it and its a staple soup in my repetoire. Its not a fully traditional version of the soup, but it is less rich and less high fat than the original. If I'm really cheating, I'll buy a cheese-topped baguette from the supermarket and have that with this, but as I've been off and I've had some time, I decided I could make my own bread. Well, I could throw ingredients in my breadmaker and get it to do the hard work, but you know what I mean! This to me is comfort food at its finest. Its also pretty cheap, assuming you have a fairly well-stocked store cupboard.

For the bread you will need:
Strong white flour (I used one with seeds and grains in it, which worked really well)
Dried Yeast
Sugar
Salt
Cheddar Cheese
Cooked Bacon, chopped
Tap water

For the soup you will need:
3-4 red onions (I used a net of 3, along with a half onion I had left from a dinner earlier in the week)
3-4 white onions (I used a net of 4 today)
2 garlic cloves
1L beef stock
Half-fat creme fraiche
Chives

I put the bread in the breadmaker last night and stuck the timer on so it would be ready this morning.



This was the recipe from the booklet that came with my breadmaker. I opted for the 'large' loaf.




Here are all the dry ingredients in the pan, after this I sloshed in the water, pressed the buttons and let it do its thing! My breadmaker has a special chute in the lid where I put the chopped bacon. By selecting a 'raisin' cycle, the chute opened and dropped in the bacon at the appropriate time! Amazing!



And here's the breadmaker last night, on its countdown, doing its thing!

Flash forward to this morning, when I made my soup. Here's how! First you assemble your cooking ingredients (yep, loads of ingredients!):




Then you break out the second cheats gadget, the Kenwood Timer Chef, and attach the food processor attachment, with the cutting blade inside:




You then peel and half your onions. If they won't fit down the chute, as some of mine didn't, cut the bigger halves into quarters. You then fire up the machine and push all the onions down the chute of the food processor until you have lots and lots of finely sliced onions:




Yep, it took me 1 min 25 seconds to chop up 7 1/2 onions! In fact, this was a bit slow on my part as I hadn't cut all the onion pieces down to fit in the chute, so I had to sort of force some of them down! You can of course finely slice all the onions by hand, but lets face it, who wants to do that?! You then pop your largest saucepan on the hob and splash a bit of oil in it (I used bogstandard olive oil but any flavourless oil will be fine), when the oil has heated up (keep the temperature fairly low), tip all your onions in. You will be faced with something that looks like this:




The onions will wilt down eventually. You now want to slow cook the onions for 20 minutes, you don't want them to get any colour rather just soften down.You don't need to stand over the onions for the 20 minutes, but you will want to be around to give them a stir every now and then so they all cook down evenly. After about 10 minutes (so halfway into the cooking), they will look like this:




After another 10 minutes, slice two cloves of garlic up into small pieces and pop them in with the onions. Give the mix another 10 minutes of cooking. Here's the garlic going in:




After the 10 minutes or so is up, the whole thing will be a big sticky soft lump in your saucepan. The onions will have leaked out some water and so will be swimming in a small amount of onion 'stock'. This helps with the flavour! Here's what it'll look like:




Doesn't look particularly inspiring but bear with me! Next, crack out the beef stock. I always use stock cubes or stock granules. For this particular soup, Oxo beef stock cubes are my go to. The Knorr beef stock cubes aren't dark enough to give this soup the colour it really needs. I use 5 stock cubes to make the 1 litre of stock you need:




You make up the stock and add it to the saucepan, give everything a stir then simmer the soup for a minimum of 10 minutes to bring everything together:




Meanwhile, as soon as the breadmaker beeps, the bread is done!




So you squee with excitement (this is an optional stage!) and turn it out onto a cooling rack to cool:




When you're ready to serve up, spoon some soup into a bowl and top with a heaped dessert spoon of creme fraiche and snip over a few chives. Serve with a lovely plate of freshly made bread:




Eat, enjoy and feel smug! The leftover soup will keep for a few days in the fridge, and also freezes well too. In fact, like most leftovers, this soup tastes better the next day. I've taken this to work quite a few times and its always brought me some comfort at my desk on a busy day.

I will leave you with  grauitous picture of my bread. I'm really glad I tried this seed-y flour rather than plain strong white flour. The bread wasn't enormously cheese-y or bacon-y, but had just enough. My OH suggested this would made delicious cheese on toast, so I think tomorrow we'll eat our soup leftovers with cheese on toast with this bread! You can undoubtedly make this bread by hand, and making bread by hand is very satisfying. The best starter recipes are from Delia Smith, here is the white bread recipe and here is the wholemeal recipe. You can then start to add things and adapt things to suit you once you've mastered these. I spent about £3.50 on the ingredients I didn't have lurking in my cupboards, and this will last two of us for two days and probably one final portion for me, so that's pretty good value!





Please let me know if you try this recipe, I'd love to know what you thought of it!

Another mini-hiatus on my part. Apologies, its nothing personal! Work became beyond busy in the last few weeks. But now there's a lot of change ahead and the best part of all this change is being granted a week of gardening leave. I don't need to return to the day job until May 9th. I definitely needed a break. The stress has definitely taken its toll on my skin, my hair, everything. So whilst I do need to spend my week catching up on some essentials (changing my ISA, closing an old credit card account down, getting a better deal on my broadband, going to the dentist! And pardon the irony, but part of my gardening leave will need to be spent doing some gardening. My garden looks like Day of the Triffids) I will also be spending some time pampering. Nothing too crazy, just a fringe trim, eyebrow threading, a few face masks from my collection. But aside from that, I do want to line up loads of blog posts to keep my blog looking good for as long as possible! I've certainly got loads and loads to blog about.

And today we begin with one of those rather hyped products, the Revlon Lip Butters. I managed to pick these up in Scotland when I was home last month, and got them with a No7 nail varnish as part of a Boots 3 for 2. I picked up Peach Parfait and Berry Smoothie. Here they are:



And here's the lip butters up close, with Berry Smoothie on the left and Peach Parfait on the right:







They're both really wearable everyday products. The Peach Parfait colour is a little more shimmery as you can see, and is also a more natural colour on the lips. I'm definitely more of an eye make-up girl so I like a more muted, natural lip product to go with. Plus, I'm a disaster area, so wearing a strong red lip tends to end up with me smearing it all over my face anyway! These are very moisturing as well, as one would expect when its a lip butter, and don't dry out the lips the way I find some lipsticks do. Its halfway between a gloss and a lipstick and I'm definitely a fan. Here's a couple of swatches, please excuse my terribly scaly looking hands, I slapped on so much handcream after seeing these pictures!

On the left is the Peach Parfait and on the right is the Berry Smoothie. I'm a big fan of these, I definitely recommend them. They are the only lip butter-type product I've tried and to that extent I would be interested in trying other brands, but I can definitely see me re-purchasing these in the future.

Do I have a favourite? Probably the Berry Smoothie, but I use them both equally. I'd like to pick up Candy Apple and Pink Truffle as well as I think they'd be great additions to my ever-expanding make up collection.


Have you tried the Revlon lip butters? What did you think?

I am a hoarder. I have a lot of 'stuff'. My OH affectionately calls it 'bits and pieces', but I suspect he only refers to it so kindly to my face! Im naturally untidy by nature as well. Its been a long-standing joke that I am not far off turning into Mr Trebus and its a joke I can't really argue with. So I am trying, genuinely trying, to be tidier and declutter a bit.

I've been checking out blogs for ages now trying to get to grips with how to store my make up, my perfumes, my various beauty products. I decided to join the masses and buy some Muji acrylic storage. As I was in central London on my birthday, my OH and I braved Oxford Street to pick up the bits and bobs I wanted the most.

Whilst I was there I saw what I assume should have been a drawer insert, an acrylic box with partitions. I immediately realised that, stood up rather than lying flat ,it would be an excellent storage option for perfumes or nail polishes. So I picked that up amongst the other bits I wanted (more on them later!). I'm happy to say its worked really well, I'm really pleased with it:





It fits all but two of my perfumes, one which sits on an acrylic shelf next to this, one which sits on the top of it, like so:





Eagle eyes amongst you will see that between photos I decided to swap two of my perfumes around! I'm happy that it makes things look a lot better than they did. I'm not 100% happy with how its all set out but its better than before, where everything was just lying around.

As I'm sure you can guess, I decided to buy *those* acrylic storage drawers from Muji. Unfortunately, everyone in the world has decided to buy them too, so I could only get one set of two drawers with the flip top lid (the plan was one of them, and at least one two drawer set without the flip top lid). I had to trot round to the Carnaby Street branch to get the flip top lid drawer set as well. Whilst I was there, the lovely shop assistant informed me that Muji intend to release a proper duplicate of the Kardashian sisters makeup storage. This made me very excited, so I asked her when this would be. She said she wasn't sure, but it was going to be this year. So I haven't bothered to buy any more storage drawers at the moment, because I would really like to wait for a multi-drawer set from Muji instead! The shop assistant said she wasn't sure what price it would be, but that it would be a lot cheaper than the one the Kardashians use. yes, I *might* be a Kardashian superfangirl, but don't hold it against me So, yes, I'm going to keep my eyes and ear peeled for any Muji news. If anyone hears anything about when it'll be released, please let me know. I don't want to end up stalking this nice shop assistant from Muji Carnaby Street, I suspect it'll only end in a lifelong ban from all their stores!!

So, the rest of my makeup storage purchasing is on hold pending an announcement from Muji, but I am continuing with my quest to generally have better storage for my billions of items. At the moment, I have turned my attention to an area of our second bedroom, just below my window, where I have some storage baskets sitting on the floor. The area looks very messy and I'd like to put some storage there. My problem is that the windows are very low in our house, so I only have 60 cm of 'height'. My storage can be up to 160cm long and probably no more than 50cm deep. I'm struggling to find the perfect thing. I can't decide if it'd be ok to have something slightly higher than where the window starts or if that'd be terrible. I kind of wanted to stick an Ikea Expedit of some description in the space (the 4 cube square one, natch), maybe two next to each other, but that's going to be too tall. Or maybe two of three of this Lack side table in white (I have a thing for white furniture), the fact that its on castors would be good given the space it'd be fitting into. I definitely want something open, or where I get the option of purchasing boxes to go into it, but don't have to. I'd like to store handbags in some of the holes, and then maybe my wicker baskets in others. Then use the top to store my hairdryer and straighters on, almost like a dressing table but not (they generally live on the floor at the moment, especially my hairdryer as it doesn't fit on my skinny little mantelpiece. The other option is to swap my current Billy bookcase out of the space right next to the window and move elsewhere and pop in the white 8 cube Expedit, which I could then fill with my bits and bobs, keeping the space below the window lovely and clear. Ohhhhhhh, decisions.

If you haven't fallen asleep with boredom, I'd love your thoughts!