LUSH Cupcake Fresh Face Mask

I take a lot of my beauty advice from bloggers and YouTube beauty gurus. It's fabulous to live in a day and age when product reviews are right at my fingertips, so if you know what's good for you, you'll take advantage of that.

LUSH is already one of my favorite stores - I love their bath bombs SEW MUCH - but it can be daunting to branch out to try some of their large array of handmade goodies. There really are a ton of different types of products that LUSH carries, and since some of them can be a bit pricey it's important for me to really know what I'm getting into before dropping my hard-earned #DollaDollaBills on them.

But after seeing MissGlamorazzi raving about LUSH's Cupcake fresh face mask on more than one occasion, and having read a great review about the LUSH Oatifix face mask from a local Vancouver blogger (Jayne at Cosmetic Proof), I felt pretty good about going to pick up both of those products within the last couple of weeks. Today I'll tell you about my experience with Cupcake!

This fresh face mask was designed for oily, troublesome skin. I don't know if my skin is "oily" but it's certainly troublesome.

From the LUSH site:

Cupcake is our one Fresh Face Mask that was created for a bit of fun. At the time, our inventor’s daughter was a young girl having slumber parties with her girlfriends every weekend, so he whipped up a chocolate mint mask for young, oily skin (officially solidifying him as the coolest dad ever). If you suffer from oily or spotty skin, slather it in this cocoa concoction. With spearmint oil to cool, vanilla absolute to calm redness and Rhassoul mud to deeply cleanse- Cupcake is a sweet savior for young faces. Smothering yourself in chocolate for clearer skin? Every teenage girl’s dream.

Um, yeah. My 29-year-old dream, too. Chocolate-mint is my FAVORITE flavor in the world. I saw nothing wrong with smearing a little of it (or a lot of it) all over my face. So following the instructions on the container, I made sure my face was clean and then used about half of the 60g pot on my entire face, avoiding my eyes and mouth:

At first I was all, 

"Ooooh!!!! This is exactly like wearing a tingly face mask of chocolate mint cupcake batter!" 

That's really exactly what it smells like!

But after leaving it on for a few minutes, it became clear that it... still really smelled exactly like chocolate mint cupcake batter. Like, riiiiight in my nostrils. Reeealllly strong. This face mask's scent means business, people.

After about 7-10 minutes or so, I used a washcloth and warm water to rinse the mask off. I think I was hoping that my face would instantly feel... something. Softer? More hydrated? Squeaky clean? Something! But it didn't... no instant gratification there. There weren't any discernible instant benefits, but there was something I noticed a little while after removing the mask:  I COULD STILL SMELL THE CHOCOLATE MINT.

Guys - believe me when I tell you that chocolate mint has been my favorite flavor combination my entire life. My parents would tell you that mint chocolate chip has always been my go-to ice cream combo. (I've mentioned that here, here, and here.) So for me to say that I couldn't handle the potency of Cupcake's smell says a lot, I think.

It was definitely too much for me, so within about five minutes of rinsing off the mask, I had to apply a nice layer of Arbonne night cream to my face to try to cover up the smell of Cupcake. That worked, more or less.

I still have one more mask's worth of product left in the pot, so for the sake of not wasting my money I'm going to use Cupcake at least one more time. If any miraculous revelations about the product make themselves known after that application, I'll be sure to update you... but for now I'm going to go ahead and say that due to the overwhelming scent of this product, I won't be repurchasing it. However, scent is such a personal thing - and some people have stronger olfactory sensitivities than others - that I wouldn't go so far as to NOT recommend that you try this out. After all, many people love and repurchase this product all the time!

Here's a bit more info about Cupcake Fresh Face Mask, to make sure you've got all zee facts:

• Due to the fresh ingredients, you have to keep these face masks refrigerated. There's even a little mini-fridge right in the LUSH store where they keep the masks!
• This mask has a quick expiration date! Again, due to the fresh ingredients.
• You can't buy this product online - it's in-store only, because it needs to be kept cold.
• This mask is vegan.
• In Canada/US, a 60g (2.1 oz) pot of Cupcake Fresh Face Mask retails for $6.95.
• If you bring back 5 of these little black empty pots, you'll get a free face mask! #RecyclingIsSexy
• Here are the actual ingredients in Cupcake:
• Rhassoul Mud , Glycerine , Linseed Infusion (Linum usitatissimum) , Talc , Cocoa Powder (Theobroma cacao) , Cocoa Butter (Theobroma cacao) , Fresh Mint (Mentha arvensis) , Sandalwood Oil (Santalum austro-caledonicum vieill) , Vanilla Absolute (Vanilla planifolia) , Spearmint Oil (Mentha viridis) , Peppermint Oil (Mentha piperita) , *Limonene , Perfume

If you were to read the reviews of this product on LUSH's site you'd see that most people really enjoy this product - some even say that it's a real pore-minimizer. So I feel kind of like a weirdo for not loving it... but to each her own!

The good news is that I also purchased another LUSH face mask - Oatifix - and had a much better experience with that one. Stay tuned for a review of that mask!

Have you tried Cupcake? If so, I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

What is your favorite LUSH product?

Do you have a favorite face mask - of any brand? I'm all for trying out more!

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{Linking up with I Feel Pretty} Disclaimer: I purchased this face mask myself!

Annabelle Chai Chai Chai Eyeshadow Quad

About a week before Christmas, an unexpected package arrived in the mail for me from Groupe Marcelle Inc. (maker of Annabelle Cosmetics and Marcelle) - a bundle of beauty goodies!

Inside the package of stooooof was an eyeshadow quad (in the color Chai Chai Chai), a retractable eyeliner (in the color Chocochip), and three of Annabelle's fun TwistUp Retractable Lipstick Crayons (in colors Plump It Up, Fuchsianista, and Cherry). I'll have a separate post soon dedicated to those lipsticks because those are pretty fabulous.

The first of these products that I actually took for a spin in public was the eyeshadow quad, which I rocked for a night out in Vancouver last Saturday with my friend Rose. {She posted an Instagram pic of us here.}

So firstly - it's difficult to pop this quad open because the package is very smooth, and there's no "lip" to latch onto or push upwards on. I always feel like I'm going to break a nail getting into these shadows. If I had on fresh nail polish and tried to open this, it would surely end in disaster. Also, if you've recently applied hand lotion - good luck getting into this quad.

BUT! Once you get the quad top popped open, things are smooth sailing from there.

The eyeshadow quad comes with two small shadow applicators, but I'm pretty sure most people don't use these little foam things and opt to just use their own eyeshadow brushes - right? That's what I did anyway. Chai Chai Chai contains a cream shadow, a gold, a bronze, and a brown. Beautiful colors for blue eyes!

There's a handy little diagram on the back of the package that shows where you should place each color:

I more or less followed that guide for my eye look when I went out in Gastown with Rose last week, but I went light on the brown color. Cue the bathroom selfies: 

These shadows are quite decently pigmented, but beware of fallout! Make sure to tap off the excess shadow before you bring your applicator up to your eye.

If you're curious, here's what other beauty products I'm using on my face in these pics:

- Aveeno + Marcelle DD Cream combo on my entire face (read about that here)
- eos lip balm in Pomegranate Raspberry (my favorite eos balm - find out why here)
- Benefit Cosmetic's Watt's Up highlighter on the very highest part of my cheekbones, as well as on my brow bone and in the corners of my eyes (this was part of my birthday present from Sephora)
- Mary Kay mineral cheek color in the shade Sunny Spice (also very nice for fair-skinned, blue-eyed girls!)
- Maybelline's The Rocket mascara
- In the above pics (but not the below pic) I'm also wearing the new eyebrow makeup that I picked up a couple weeks ago from the lovely ladies at 4 Angels Beauty Care
- Before I went out that night I also added a swipe or two of Revlon's Sunbaked ColorBurst Lip Gloss to my lips. That product was part of my #blogvancity swag bag and it's my FAVORITE lip gloss now.

An Annabelle/Marcelle Cosmetics associate emailed me back in late November, asking if I'd liked to be placed on their media list. I didn't become a blogger to receive free stuff, but if blogging about the things I love ends up getting my name put onto a list of people who should be sent gifts.... well then I'm not going to argue.

I'd sent Groupe Marcelle some information about myself - my skin tone, eye color, products I like - to help guide their discretion about any products to send me, and they did a great job with these picks! This Chai Chai Chai quad is great if you've got fair skin and blue eyes - and the color options in this eyeshadow quad are versatile enough to make lots of different kinds of looks. I look forward to playing around with it more! There are some other color options of these palettes, too. You can find them at London Drugs for $10.99 (not an affiliate link).

Do you ever use any Annabelle or Marcelle Cosmetics products?

If you're light-skinned or blue-eyed, do you have a go-to eye look?

How are you feeling today?

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{Linking with Monday Must Haves}
Disclaimer: I received some of the products mentioned in this post for free, but all opinions are mine, all miiiiiiine!!!! MUAHAHAHAHA! See my Disclosure Statement for more information.

Radiant Orchid Nail Polish - Revlon Top Speed Orchid

Pantone named Radiant Orchid as the Color of the Year for 2014, and I was not disappointed in that choice! There are several nail polishes in my stash that fall under the "orchid" category, so I thought it would be a fun mini-series to show you some options for Radiant Orchid nail polishes.

I'm starting the series today with Revlon's Top Speed polish in the color (surprise, surprise) Orchid (#555):

Revlon's Orchid is filled with micro flecks of silver that give this polish a metallic sheen on your fingers. It was actually really hard for me to tell if the flecks were silver or gold. Ultimately I ended up settling on silver... I think.

Orchid is very bright and pretty to look at, and those afore-mentioned flecks catch the light enough to make this a sparkly-but-not-glittery, polish:

It applies very nicely - doesn't streak at all.  It's also very opaque - you could definitely get away with one coat if you were in a rush, but I like to do at least two coats... to make it easier for me to peel off the polish as soon as my OCD-esque finger-fidgeting happens to call for it. What, you don't peel your polish off and arrange it into tiny piles? Weird.

This is one of Revlon's Top Speed fast dry polishes, and most "quick dry" polish formulas do tend to dry out a bit faster in the bottle. So always make sure to keep the top off the bottle for as little time as possible while applying. Replace the top and give the polish a good thorough mixing (by rolling between your palms, NOT by shaking violently!) after every couple of nails to keep the formula from becoming too thick while you're using it.

My only complaint about this polish is that it's very sensitive to texture beneath it - meaning that it accentuates any ridges or uneven prior-coat applications on your nail's surface. So there's that.

Do you own any orchid polishes?

Are you a fan of the Radiant Orchid choice for Pantone's 2014 Color of the Year?

If you are thinking about picking up an orchid polish but aren't sure which one to go with, stay tuned for more of my Radiant Orchid nail polish picks!

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{Linking up with Beauty Buzz, The Nail Files, What I'm Loving Fridays,  and Friday's Fab Favorites}

Pre-Christmas Trip to Whistler + Christmas Day Feasting!

Since flying back to Massachusetts from Vancouver is so insanely expensive around the holidays, Dave and I have stayed around BC for Christmas the last two years. It is, of course, not ideal for us to be away from our families for the holidays, but we have definitely made the best of it!

Last year we took an awesome (but at times terrifying) trip to Banff, Alberta for the weekend leading up to Christmas, which you can (and definitely should) read about here: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3. Tons of amazing pictures of mountains and blue skies and mountains and sleigh rides and mountains. Go look.

This year we splurged on a hotel room in Whistler, BC for the night of December 23rd, and turned the entire trip into a hiking/snowshoeing/hot-chocolate drinking/lights-seeing/eating extravaganza!

On Monday, Dec. 23 we headed north of Vancouver towards Whistler, stopping along the way in Garibaldi Provincial Park to go hiking along the Diamond Head Trail to the Red Heather Hut.

.  vancouver to whistler, with a hike in squamish along the way!  .

.  our hike to the red heather warming hut  .

The road to the trailhead requires snow tires or chains this time of year. We drove up Garibaldi Park Road until we couldn't anymore, then we parked and continued up the road on foot about 2km till we reached the Diamond Head Trail parking lot. That's when our park road ended and a woodsy trail began. There wasn't much snow at first - we began with icy rocks and grass, which eventually turned into slushy snow...

Then slightly less slushy snow...

.... until finally we were high enough that we were walking over real snow, and we donned our snowshoes for the remainder of the ascent.

I loved being surrounded by the fog and snow in the quiet forest. Every once in awhile I could catch a waft of the pine trees, which really made it all quite Christmasy. Check out the furry trees, with moss dripping off of their bark:

After hiking for a couple of hours or so, we took a steep shortcut off of the main trail and made our way through Red Heather Meadow to get to Red Heather Hut - a warming hut with a wood stove and two large picnic benches inside.

.  view of red heather meadow, from inside of the warming hut  .

This was an amazing place to rest, warm up, and enjoy our lunch of Subway sandwiches, kettle cooked chips, peppermint tea and a Mars bar while our boots dried off by the stove. We rested for about 25 minutes before strapping on our boots again and making our way back down the mountain.

After our morning/afternoon of hiking we got back into the car and continued north to Whistler Village, stopping briefly in Squamish for a quick fast food fix ... where we had a beautiful, full rainbow overhead...

Arriving in Whistler, we checked into our hotel for the evening - Summit Lodge & Spa right in the Village. I was immediately pleased with our decision to stay there. They had gorgeous Christmas decorations in the lobby and a friendly front desk employee, who complimented my Christmasy nails (and thus won me over instantly). The hotel also had a heated outdoor pool and hot tub which we wasted little time in getting into...

.  so steamy  .

I'm not usually one to enjoy hot tubs - they're so hot - but the chill in the air made it incredibly relaxing to be sitting in a steaming tub of water while surrounded by wintery mountains and snow.

Our room at the Lodge even had a charming fake fireplace, a balcony with a mountain view, a very reasonably-priced snack basket, and big comfy white bath robes for us! We did our fair share of regally lounging in our robes inside of our hotel room, obvi.

On Monday night we strolled through the Village and were pleasantly surprised by the abundance of Christmas lights all over the place. The Olympic Plaza in particular was very festive. The plaza has a big ice skating rink (complete with huge disco ball) and is entirely surrounded by trees with Christmas lights. You can see a little picture of it here... Not sure why I didn't take any pictures of it myself. Possibly I was too chilly to take my hands out of my jacket.

We went to dinner at Black's Restaurant & Pub, where I mowed down on a Caesar salad topped with garlic prawns, while Dave started with a beet salad and had a rack of bison ribs (!) for dinner. The food was yummy, but the restaurant was a bit crowded. I don't mean it was packed with people; I mean that the tables were all really crowded together and it was hard for everyone (waitstaff included) to maneuver between them. Just something to note, if you're looking for a more spacious atmosphere for your Whistler dinner.

After dinner we walked around a bit more before deciding to go back to the hotel to put on additional layers (it was chilly!) and then heading out again for more walking and some hot chocolate. We sipped our hot chocolates beside the Olympic Plaza's outdoor fireplace and Dave played around a bit on the deserted skating rink before we called it a night.

The next day we started our morning at Dubh Linn Gate Irish Pub - for breakfast, not beers. I had their breakfast wrap (which was just the right size for me), and Dave had their Blackcomb Breakfast (which might have been a bit small for him). Each of our meals came with an Irish potato cake, which was like a little patty of hashbrowns. It was good!

We had big plans to go snow-tubing at Whistler Blackcomb's Coca Cola Tube Park that afternoon - an activity I was suuuuuper excited about. My parents' house in Massachusetts has a sizable, multi-tiered hill in its backyard. In short, my house was THE house for the neighborhood kids to go for snow tubing, back in the day. We could spend hours out there - gleefully shooting down the hill and then trudging back up it on foot over and over again, only heading inside for short hot chocolate breaks. So when I found out there was a snow tubing park at Whistler, you can bet your sweet ass that it went straight to the top of my list of things I needed to do.

After breakfast at the Irish pub, we took the gondola ride from the Village up to the tubing park, soaring over trees and condos as we ascended the mountain. After disembarking from the gondola, there was still a series of stairs to climb before reaching the tube park. MY EXCITEMENT WAS CLIMBING. LITERALLY.

CAN YOU TELL I'M BUILDING UP TO SOMETHING?

Ugh. Guys. The conditions on the mountain that morning were too slick for adults to use the tubing park that day. Apparently the weight of an adult would make the tubing tracks too long on the icy snow, so... no tubing for me and Dave, unfortunately. It really was a huge disappointment for me, personally, since I don't ski or snowboard... tubing was the activity for me at Whistler. Mreh!

Since we couldn't go tubing, we enjoyed our ride back down the mountain in the gondola and then opted to walk around some of Whistler Village's many random trails through the woods.

.  view of skiers on the mountain  .

After walking around for a bit, it was time to climb into the car and head back south towards Vancouver. We wanted to hit up the Eagle Run in Brackendale before nighttime, to see if there were more eagles to see than there were the last time we were there. There were definitely more this time! Here are some pics of the scenery and eagles there:

By then we were pretty ready to head back to our little apartment in Vancouver, where Dave finished wrapping his presents and then we settled in for a little Christmas Eve Fred Claus action.

On Christmas morning I woke up early to FaceTime with my family on the east coast. Through the wonders of technology, I was able to watch them open up all the presents that we'd sent them. Next we Skyped with Dave's family and got to see them open up all of their presents as well. #AyoTechnology.

After all of that family time, Dave and I opened our own presents together. We got each other (and ourselves) all sorts of little goodies. We like to get ourselves small gifts that we can both use in our apartment - it's fun to wrap them all up and then unwrap them again, even if we know what they all are. It's just fun to unwrap presents, isn't it? :) There were still a few little surprises in there though, don't worry.

Dave then proceeded to work his cooking magic - making us a full breakfast of eggs and bacon. Once we had a good breakfast in our systems, we took a mid-day walk along the Seaside Bike Path, with a little detour into a maritime museum where we looked around at different sailboats and I took some blue-inspired pictures:

.  yes, this is the angle i meant to take  .
.  #art  .

Then it was time to head back home because Dave had big plans of making us a roast beef dinner - you know the kind that takes all day to prepare. No complaints about that from me!

.  this was my view for the next several hours  .

He spent the rest of the afternoon preparing roast beef, roasted potatoes, peas/carrots, bacon-wrapped sausage, gravy, and he even invented a new spin on Yorkshire pudding...

.  the roast beef!  .

.  bacon wrapped sausages, for the win  .

.  the yummy, onion filled gravy  .

.  this is how you make a yorkshire pudding when you don't have a cupcake pan  .

.  slices of yorkshire pudding!  .

Of course he finished up the amazing dinner by making us stove-top hot chocolate for dessert. He sure knows how to feed a girl! He treated me to a similar day of feasting last Christmas, too :)

All in all, our holiday - pre-Christmas and Christmas - was really a lovely one. We got to do some hiking/snowshoeing, enjoyed a special evening in a really nice hotel in a winter wonderland, ate some delicious food, participated remotely in our families' present-opening, and had a full day of Christmas feasting.

I'm happy that Dave and I have been creating special holiday memories while we've been out here in Vancouver... and hope that you were able to do the same, wherever you are in the world!

Oh and... Happy New Year!!!

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{Linking with Tasty Tuesdays}