Boy howdy am I happy to be sharing this with all of you: I was lucky enough to get to try out the new limited edition eyeshadow collection from Aromaleigh and it is awesome!! It’s called Victoria’s Revenge and has a gothic victorian steampunk nightmare theme that is dark, mysterious, and FUN!

After several attempts at getting my less-than-stellar camera to photograph the sample bags, I decided I’d point you to several other bloggers who have succesfully photographed the sample collection. Please visit Fresco Phyrra, or Lazy Beautiful, or Painted Moogle to get a look at all the shades laid out and swatched.

So far, I’ve tried Infernal Chaos (a taupe color on me) with Brazen & Bitter (coral-y red), a fabulous combination. Infernal Chaos is probably the least must-have color, unless you really love to collect taupe shades. Brazen & Bitter is probably going to be a must-have though, as it’s a very wearable red color – a lot of red eyeshadows make my eyes look bloodshot when they’re not. Not this one!

The pictures here are Mourning’s Whimsy (bright purple with blue and violet sparkle) with Poison Utopia (black with sparkle). I used Fyrinnae’s Nijiro on the brow bone, and black eyeliner. I LOVE Mourning’s Whimsy! This is a great sparkly purple color! Poison Utopia is a little more work – just a little bit chalky as black shades tend to be. Love the sparkles though. I’m using Fyrinnae’s Pixie Epoxy for the first time today as well, and I’m totally in love with it! The sparkles all stayed where they should and the colors are so much richer than with just primer alone. Love!

I can’t wait to try out the rest of the colors. I will try to get a picture of each combination to share. This beautiful collection is two thumbs up!

I’ve got a lot of stress going on in my life right now, job stress mostly, and fun beauty stuff always cheers me up. So this 5 Things is about the stuff I’ve found lately that is just perking up my day!

1. Shrek by OPI nail colors. I am just loving these fun, bright colors! I have Who The Shrek Are You? on my toes and I’m going to do a mani today with What’s With The Catittude?

2. Aromaleigh Victoria’s Revenge Limited Edition Eyeshadows – I was lucky enough to receive samples to review and share with all of you, and boy howdy are they GAWGEOUS! Expect multiple posts soon.

3. The new Badger Balm Lip Tints & Shimmers are so fabulous! These double-ended goodies boast beautiful sheer lip tints with ultra-moisturizing cocoa butter and olive oil. Love them!

4. FLOWERBYKENZO La Cologne is Kenzo’s newest fragrance, a citrus twist on the original FLOWERBYKENZO scent. I like the bitterness of the petitgrain paired with the powdery notes of the original. I’ll be reviewing this in full soon!

5. Fyrinnae’s new Lip Lustre shades are so pretty! I ordered Puppy Love and Ultra Phantom, and of course now I notice there are another FOUR new ones! Gah!! Next order, next order…

I really love a good hand cream, so it’s always fun to try new ones. LillyPilly, a company from Australia, uses unique native Australian plants to enrich their line of hand creams and body washes. The company is named for the Lilly Pilly tree, which produces berries that are a rich natural source of vitamin C, antioxidants and exfoliating fruit acids.

Lilly Pilly extract is blended with vitamins A and E, omega oils and Aloe Vera to provide extra antioxidant nourishment for your skin. Other native Australian ingredients in the LillyPilly products include Bush Tomato, Quandong and Tasmanian Kelp, which are known for their ability to nourish, moisturize and care for your skin.

The three creams in the line are Tea Tree with Rosewood, Kakadu Plum, and Eucalyptus with Nerolina. Each retains the distinctive scent of the featured ingredient, but none of them are particularly strong or overwhelming. The overall impression I have is a clean, herbal scent from each one. What I particularly like is the creamy texture. It’s light, but moisturizes nicely.

Overall, do check out LillyPilly if you are looking for a fun gift for someone, or just a nice hand cream for yourself!

I really love peonies. I think they are such pretty flowers, and they are a favorite fresh flower scent, for me – right up there with roses, and lilies. Rarely, however, have I met a perfume claiming to be peony-scented that I thought actually WAS peony-scented. Until now – L’Occitane’s latest offering is Peony Eau de Toilette, and I think it’s great!

Peony is a fresh floral scent, with a generous dollop of citrus in the top notes and some rose to beef up the peony scent. It also has some green notes that remind me a bit of fresh cut grass. Officially it has sandalwood and musk, but honestly, I don’t get a lot of either of those notes. This fragrance is all about the top and middle notes, without out a lot of base notes – which is also my one complaint.

Peony is lovely. It’s a floral that manages to remind me of actual fresh cut flowers, lightly misted with dew, and it is just one of the most cheerful and happy perfumes I’ve run across in a while. I just wish it had more staying power – it fades too quickly for my taste.

But not to fear, there is a portable roll-on handy for frequent touch-ups throughout the day. Also, you can spray yourself liberally with the EDT and it won’t be overpowering. This will be a great fragrance for summertime, when the weather gets hot, as it never gets heavy or cloying.  It gets an enthusiastic two thumbs up from me!

I love tinted lip balms, I love lip balms with mineral sunscreens, and I love when you combine the two into one perfect product! Softlips is rocking my summer this year with their new Pure products, including three shades of tinted lip balm, three shades of lip gloss, a lip butter, and a lip scrub. Everything but the scrub contains a zinc-based spf 15 sunscreen! Woohoo!

A few years back I complained about the lack of lip products with sunscreen that DIDN’T contain a chemical sunscreen. I don’t have it in for chemical sunscreens, I just really hate the taste. I can always tell when they’re present by the icky, slightly bitter taste. Yuck! Besides, I want broad spectrum protection, and zinc oxide provides that, and works as soon as you apply it.

Fast forward two years, and suddenly we have a LOT more choices on the market! Good times! Each of the new Softlips Pure balms and glosses include an SPF 15 from zinc oxide. Sweet!

The tinted lip balms are great – the colors have nice pigmentation, but are still sheer enough to be just a tint. They taste good (vanilla-berry), and have nice lasting power, and keep things hydrated with coconut oil and beeswax. They don’t get melty in my pocket (I hate that!) so basically, they’re a total win for me. Love them!

The lip gloss is also exceptional. It’s very nourishing, the colors are very flattering, and how great is a lip gloss with spf 15? Awesome!!

The lip butter provides nice hydration in a clear formula with spf 15 – a great choice if you don’t want the color but do want the protection. Nice!

I’m not a huge fan of lip scrubs because I don’t find them super-useful (I brush my lips with my toothbrush, takes care of dead skin bits) but if they are your thing, get this one. It tastes good and works well and is inexpensive to boot.

Basically, I’m loving the new Softlips offerings. They’re inexpensive, pretty, functional, natural… Summer lip care really doesn’t get any better than this. Two Thumbs Up!!! You can find these in the natural beauty care aisle in select Target stores nationwide.

I was messing around in my perfume collection the other day and realized I’d never written about this perfume! Gasp! I really like it a lot, so I’ve been totally remiss in not sharing it with all of you.

I bought Queen by Queen Latifah perfume back in February. I have admired Queen Latifah for a long time – she’s a great singer, actress, and beautiful woman. I was really excited to check out her perfume when it launched last fall – I figured it wouldn’t be another boring fruity-floral like so many other celebrity perfumes, and I was right! Queen is warm, rich, sweet but spicy, and not boring at all. The notes include golden tequila and cognac, bergamot, mandarin, baie rose, jasmine noir, coriander, patchouli, sandalwood, vanilla, tonka bean, incense and musk.

Queen is a gourmand fragrance that nevers goes too far into cupcake territory. The bergamot and mandarin make the opening lively, and the florals keep it pretty. The vanilla stays present throughout the scent but is more sophisticated and not too sweet. Queen is a sexy perfume, and one of the few that I own that really says EVENING to me as opposed to daytime. I spray on Queen after work, when it’s time to relax and enjoy the night.

I don’t love the bottle, but its not that bad. I listened to an interview with the Queen in which she said she wanted the bottle to be bold and strong, like her. The dark red, square shape with gold accent is definitely bold, and matches the fragrance well.

I give Queen by Queen Latifah two thumbs up. Incidentally, it smells good on men too