Patisserie de Bain Handcream Collection

Looking after my hands is as important to me as looking after any other part of my body. Your hands play such an important and vital role in life, that sometimes they need a little bit of love and attention. Whether you are using them to gesticulate, write, type, washing up, clean or even make food, your hands are hard at work for hours and hours everyday.

Patisserie de Bain offers a cute little hand cream collection of mouth-watering sounding creams which sound as though you want to eat them.  Each hand cream contains Shea Butter and Glycerine to help moisturise and soothe those poor hard working hands. I am one of those people who loves hand cream and goes through tubes of it every year. On my desk at work there is no less than 4 tubes at any one time, each promising to do something different. I am also quite partial to a hand scrub and I shared a new one from Lush just a few days ago here on my blog.

Those three scents are:

• Sweet as Cherry Pie is just stunning. It smell reminds me of fresh ripe cherries that have just been cooked in a pie as it happens and in the background is a slight sprinkling of vanilla to add to the sweetness.
• Cranberries and Cream is quite a sweet scent, much sweeter than I had anticipated and the fruity scent you associate with Cranberries is most definitely present with the cream part being much more dominant than in Sweet as Cherry Pie
• Sugar Rose is perhaps my favourite of the three, it combines rosehip, grapes and sugar cane which is just heavenly and for me the right sweetness to not be too vanilla based or too perfumed.

Priced at just £9.99 for this little set, it is a lovely treat for your hands or indeed someone elses.  Each tube is 50ml and can be purchased separately for just £3.99.

Makeup Revolution V Real Techniques - Brush Cleaning Tools

Brush cleaning day, usually Sunday, is one of those chores that I huff and puff about having to do. It is one that only I have created and therefore only right I clean the brushes. Having read some horror stories in the media about infections from dirty brushes, I have embraced this chore much more regularly than I used to, but I still dislike doing it intensely and as soon as someone invents a self-cleaning brush, the happier I will be. In the meantime, anything that I can use to make this chore a bit more exciting will capture my attention and currently there are two items that have done just that. The Real Techniques Brush Cleansing Palette and the Makeup Revolution Pro Cleanse Brush Tool. 

The Real Techniques Brush Cleansing Palette, which you can find in Superdrug for £12.99, look a bit like a soap dish, maybe that was the intention, who knows but it is beautifully bright pink so you can’t miss it and it makes the task of cleaning brushes so quick and easy it is much less of a chore. Using it is really simple, you just need to wet your brush, add some brush shampoo, whichever one you use and then rub the brush along and around the little knobbly bits a few times and you are done. Inside the dish there are some different sized knobbly bits (I am sure they have a proper name) and they are for different sized brushes, so no brush is left unclean. 

Makeup Revolution, not one to be without something funky have their Pro Cleanse Brush Tool, which again you can buy online or via Superdrug for just £4.99 and this little gadget works similarly to the Real Techniques dish. Bright purple in colour this time, it is designed to fit over your fingers this time and instead of having knobbly bits, it has groves and they work in the same way and are different sizes are different brushes. Again you need to wet your brush, apply your brush shampoo and swipe the brush backwards and forwards along the grooves, as you do so, you can see all the makeup ‘stuff’ that has been lingering on there run off into the sink and within seconds your brush is clean and ready to be left to dry.

So there you have two tools to help you clean your brushes and they both have plus points and both have minus points.  The dish for Real Techniques is pink so that is always going to be a hit, but... tend to find myself cleaning the dish as much as the brushes, given the amount of dirt and grime and stuff that comes off the brushes, I don't want it lurking in the dish when I grab my next brush, so I wipe the dish clean with an anti-bac wipe after cleaning each brush and start again. The Makeup Revolution Tool fits over your fingers and doesn't get the chance to grab onto any gubbings off the brushes, it has long since run off into the sink.  The knobbly bits for Real Techniques are brilliant and do help with the cleaning of brushes and it does speed up the job, the same for Makeup Revolution, but with Makeup Revolution, i'd have liked a few more smaller grooves for my smaller brushes please.

All in all, both tools help make the job of cleaning brushes quicker, easier, less of a chore and worthy of owning and whilst I am a fan of both, Makeup Revolution is a third of the price and is worthy of purchasing for a hassle free, faff free brush cleaning tool.