20% off Benefit with a Bob & Berts' hot drink purchase

Menarys is a complete beauty lover's dream right now. We called down for some coffee & cake in Bob & Bert's & spied a fantastic offer for one of my favourite beauty brands, Benefit.

When you buy a medium hot drink, you will get a voucher for 20% off a Benefit purchase over £20. The voucher lasts until 31st August, and the girls at the counter told me there are new lip kits with lip liner & lipsticks in one hitting stores around the 25th.

What to buy: any of the new wave of Benefit expert brow products that launched last month. The girls will help you select the right colour & products for splendid brows every time. I have the Goof Proof pencil, and it's my new go-to brow product.

There are also a selection of Benefit gifts. I love these and have a couple. They have small versions of the post popular products & allow you to try them without having to buy full size, and double up as travel makeup kits. I bought the 'Do the Hoola' kit in Gatwick Airport & highly recommend it. Bangor have it in stock.

The next fab offer to share with you is the Menarys' Clarins' gift event. It begins this Thursday and lasts two weeks. When you buy two Clarins products, one being skincare, you will receive a gorgeous beauty bag (not the one shown, the one on the leaflet) and you can choose four free mini-products to take home.

Choose from One Step Cleansing Water, HydraQuench Cream, Extra-firming Night Cream, Gentle Refiner, Beauty Flash Balm (I love it), Eau Dynamisante, Instant Smooth Perfecting Touch and finally Wonder Perfect Mascara.

Plus, if you buy an extra skin care product on top of that, there's an extra gift for you worth £22.

What to buy: Clarins Double Serum. It's won a tonne of awards and even out sold Boots' very popular serum last year.

Now this is a biggy. The YSL concession in Menarys' beauty hall has 30% off. That's 30% off EVERYTHING. If you are a YSL beauty addict you'd be worth your while popping down and buying your whole year's worth of products and get a third off it all. Stick it on the credit card (just don't blame me later, I'm such an enabler!)

What to buy: If you are new to YSL & want to try something, why not go for their super product, Touche Eclat? Hailed as a wonder product when it launched, it's spawned a dozen copycats & an entire range of its own. But it's the original under-eye brightener that still wows, and with 30% off its a great time to try it.

Finally the Lancôme counter has a similar offer with 25% off EVERYTHING.

What to buy: the new Grandiose Liner. A clever, new product with a swivel tip for easy eye lining. I reckon even I could do a cat eye flick with this magic wand and at 25% off.

For readers outside Northern Ireland, I'm sorry this post can't help you. Menary's is your Mum's age group's department store and Tempest curates brands like Miss Selfridge, Topshop, Phase Eight and fashion brands for teenage girls up. My local Menary's/Tempest is in my home town of Bangor and I've been in it quite often recently with Michael as our favourite new coffee chain Bob & Bert's have taken over the cafe concession upstairs.

The small beauty hall in Menary's has a decent sized Benefit counter, and I noticed last week they still had one lone bottle of one of Crescent Row's original trio of scents, 'Something about Sofia'. It's a perfume I've owned before, back when they were new, and a friend Clare told me it had notes of Parma Violets about it. I've tried several violet scent recommended perfumes since, and Sofia still comes closest. As you know I'm rekindling my search for beauty products to make myself into a big Parma Violet, so I wanted a new bottle of this. When I saw it was £29.95, I did what every Internet-savvy lady does, I went home an searched for a cheaper price. eBay had none, the main websites were all sold out, Amazon had a bottle for £100! So I was back down to the only place I saw my one last bottle this week to get my mitts on it.

Menary's always is worth checking for a discount, so I asked one of the beauty hall girls was there a voucher or deal I could us to make this purchase. She helped me right out. Currently if you make ANY purchase you get given a voucher to use throughout this month as often as you wish, on two brands of your choice. There is no minimum spend, but you do have to buy something to get the voucher- as they need a till number etc. before they can issue you one. The beauty girl kindly told me even if I bought a £1 lip balm I could get my hands on this voucher to then get 20% off my Benefit purchases, so I bought a £1.29 Yankee Votive Candle and I was all set.

The voucher can be used on as many purchases as you want until 4th October, and you pick which two brands you want to use it with. So my bottle of Sofia was just under £24.

I also asked the Benefit girl for a good sized sample of Porefessional. I had tried a little same I got at the House of Fraser event last week, and was impressed, but I want to try a decent sample of it before I would shell out £24, or whatever it will cost with my voucher. It seems to work well to minimise my open pores around my nose, so it's tentatively on my shopping list.

Anyway, this face below is the face of a child who has just been told, "okay, you may use my 100 colour eyeshadow palette to paint my face". He used the neon pink eyeshadow on me, and my lipstick looked like Miranda Sings.