August 16, 2016

Menarys Mega Beauty Event- 20% off Benefit*, Free Clarins Gifts, 25% off Lancôme & 30% off YSL

August 16, 2016/ Claire Spence

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.

October 02, 2015

Two Days Left to Take Advantage of the Clarins #Feed10 Gift at Menary's

October 02, 2015/ Claire Spence

There's only today and tomorrow left to get to your local Menary's store, visit their Clarins concession and pick up their free Feed 10 gift bag.

Buy two Clarins products, one being Skincare, and they'll gift you everything shown in the picture above. Great sized samples to try out and find a new favourite. You're also doing a good deed as for every #Feed10 gifts given out, Clarins will feed ten vulnerable children worldwide.

Heres a quick look at each of the free products.

Moisture Rich Body Lotion. Very smooth and easily absorbed, this is pretty much a full size product.

Hydra-Quench Mask. Creamy, gentle and a pleasant scent.

Exfoliating Gentle Refiner. I really like the texture. The microbeads make you feel like you're really giving your skin a total freshening up.

Relax Bath & Shower Concentrate. I'm not a bath person, but I'm going to let my son keep this for his bath times.

Hand and Nail Cream. Another product I don't use personally, but my Mum loves a good hand moisturiser, so I'll pass this along to her.

The lovely Jennifer at Bangor Menary's also gave me the current Clinique Bonus offer when we visited last Saturday. Unfortunately that was the last day of that current offer, but they usually always have some sort of offer running, to try your local Menary's to see what offer followed up this one.

The reason I'm still featuring it is because I was really impressed with the Clinique Long Last Lipstick in the shade Blushing Nude.

My usual nude lipstick is Naked Beige by Soap & Glory, but this is a very close match and the texture is a real jump up in quality. It's very creamy & feels great on. I think I'll swap over to this for my day to day lip, and buy it again when the sample runs out.

So visit your local Menary's for the Feed 10 Clarins offer until 4th October, and check out the other beauty concessions for their individual current offers. I would post about Bangor's Fashion Night Out next Thursday, but their PR lady says it's practically sold out already. If you see me and Smix at it, say hi!

September 13, 2015

Wonderfully Cute 'Dear Zoo' Storage Boxes. Oh, & Breaking Bad Themed Ones Too!

September 13, 2015/ Claire Spence

Rod Campbell's animal illustrations will hit most of us with a huge wave of nostalgia, being nestled in the pages of children's book favourite, 'Dear Zoo'.

Many of us not only remember Dear Zoo from the warm & cosy bedtime story time of our childhood, but also from owning a copy of the book now to share with the kids we have of our own.

The Works isn't a store I'm in regularly, but I needed to buy some storage and I had previously picked up Hungry Caterpillar and London Underground print boxes there maybe three years ago now for £10 for the two.

Brilliantly the offer is still the same price. They are collapsible and fairly sturdy so I use mine to store papers like bank statements, tax credit letters etc.

They are a suitable size to keep in your living room, to tidy away all the kids' toys quickly at bedtime, so you don't feel like you're sitting in a day nursery when it's time for telly, relaxing and grown-up time.

They cost £7 each, or two for £10. I didn't see the Breaking Bad versions in my local Bangor branch, but they do stock them on the online store, and there are two designs. Great for chucking the otherwise cluttered pile of DVDs and Blurays beside the TV in. Could be a good Christmas present for the untidy Breaking Bad fan in your life!

If meth-themed storage isn't your thing, then there are a dozen or so other patterns in the cube, collapsible box range.

I was after a particular type of box, for storing my daily-use makeup, so to take advantage of the 2 for £10 offer I chose an owl & the pussycat collapsible box for Michael to keep his room tidy with.

The boxes that suited storing my makeup best were these two cute, vintage-look, floral suitcases, which came as a set for £7, or mix and match in the 2 for £10 offer.

You can see the pile of various makeup and hair products I use every day behind them in the photo below. Having that cluttered collection sitting there was annoying me, and I didn't want to put it all away in my drawers on the other side of the room, and get it out again every morning and night.

The large case stores everything I use in the morning. Foundation, mascara, primers etc are loose, then all my eyeshadow products or anything that's a bit messy I can keep in the original vintage Ladybird book makeup bag.

The smaller of the two Is just the right size for my hair products and my nighttime routine bits as well.

The boxes are a good size and they look more presentable in the corner of the room than a pile of bags.

I like to think this storage will suffice for a good length of time, but considering I've gone from just a tiny bit of foundation & mascara a day, to about twenty products in the daily routine a year on, I could need bigger boxes by this time next year.

I've seen beauty bloggers post about little sets of drawers that are sometimes on wheels for storing tonnes of products, so that will probably be the next step for makeup mad Claire.

With the mix and match offer you can get storage for the whole family. As well as the large cube boxes and my choice of two cases, there are also slightly different shaped suitcases in sets of three.