Curlee Box

For any regular readers of the Amazing Blog it’s obvious that we love discovering new beauty products. There’s nothing more exciting than receiving a box at your door and opening it to see new products for you to try. That’s why we couldn’t resist the Curlee Box.

Curlee Box is the perfect way to try new hair products without breaking the bank. Designed especially for women with curly and kinky hair, Curlee Box delivers a minimum of 4 full-sized hair care products to your door each month. The best part? It’s only £20. It’s so much fun every month to receive a surprise box of goodies, and the day that The Curlee Box came, we gathered around to see what products we received.

We received five products from the Curls Professional Cashmere + Caviar Collection (try to say that 5 times fast) in our July Curlee Box. Let’s talk about the The Cashmere + Caviar Hair Bath is a luxurious hair bath that gently cleanses with active charcoal while conditioning at the same time with cashmere + caviar extract. Caviar is a rich source of vitamin A and vitamin D along with omega-3 fatty acids which all strengthen and nourish the curls. Now you can feel rather grand by saying you have Cashmere + Caviar in your hair! The Cashmere + Caviar Hair Silk is a great leave-in conditioner for curly hair. We love how it melted through the hair like butter and left it feeling as soft as cashmere. It can be used on dry or wet hair, but we prefer running it through when the hair is damp. Followed by the Cashmere + Caviar Hair Masque  this is a great deep conditioning masque infused with antioxidants and vitamins to strengthen and smooth the hair, ideal as a treatment once a week to help scalp damage an promote faster hair growth.  Next, we used the Cashmere + Caviar Hair Gelle, which provides a light hold to your locks while adding sheen. Cashmere emits high wattage shine, stops frizz and makes tresses more controllable! Last but certainly not least, we used the Cashmere + Caviar Hair Serum, which is a growth enhancing and hair strengthening treatment. It smells delightful and leaves the hair with a natural shine.

Now we feel like queens with the mixture of Cashmere + Caviar in our hair products. The Curls Professional line left our hair feeling nourished, strengthened and like a million dollars. We love how fun the Curlee Box is and how each month we can discover a new favourite brand.  If you’d like to receive new hair care products to your door every month, you can subscribe to the Curlee Box here for only £20 a month.

Desavery – STELLAR Daily Serum

At The Amazing Blog, we love when our skin care products have a great scent. It makes us feel better and more ready to conquer the day. What if your skincare products had ingredients that were scientifically proven to boost your mood and improve your focus? The STELLAR Daily Serum from Desavery does just that while leaving your skin looking brighter than before.

Andrea Dinnick founded Desavery in 2017 on four principles: feel good, look good, be good, and do good.These principles encapsulate Dinnick’s mission of creating ‘fantastic skin care that’s as good for your skin as well as your mood and mind’. Desavery uses ingredients that are effective in improving your skin, but also positively affect your biochemistry. Of these ingredients, many are sustainable such as the brand’s staple prickly pear and vetiver, and five per cent of the company’s profits go to supporting the women who pick and process the prized prickly pear.

This serum is part of the Desavery STELLAR collection, which is intended to give you a ‘rise and sparkle’ feeling and after trying it, we can see why. The formula is packed with antioxidants that stimulate collagen production and cell renewal for smoother skin. Prickly pear, rosehip, and camellia oils further brighten and improve skin plumpness. The ingredients are all certified-organic, but the ones that stood out to us were the mood lifters: clary sage and bergamot. Clary sage, a plant used commonly for its medicinal properties, has been found to have anti-depressant effects and balance hormones. Bergamot is a citrus fruit known to improve alertness, cognition, and lower cortisol levels to make you feel calmer. We have to say that some of us here who tried this serum in the morning reportedly felt most clear-headed and uplifted. We found that it absorbs quickly and is best when used on slightly damp skin.

The product is very aromatic, and you are intended to take deep breathes to capture the beneficial elements of the plants while you perform your skin routine. It also comes in a modern reflective dropper bottle, so it’s stylish enough to leave next to your mirror and reach for every day. You can purchase the STELLAR Daily Serum (20ml) here for £65. A little does go a long way.

Les huilettes - Mon huilette night

After a long and tiring day, we at The Amazing Blog can’t think of anything better than taking off our makeup and applying a soothing night serum. What makes  a night serum stand out for us from other skin care products is that they’re jam-packed with ingredients that nourish and brighten your skin while you sleep. We can never get enough of serums, as each one has specific properties to enhance the skin, such as anti-ageing from les huilettes we are referring to, of course, their very special mon huilette night serum. 

The brand was started in France in 2015 by two long-time friends, Pascale Gal and Claire Auzouy. Gal was a pharmacist with a degree in Aromatherapy while Auzouy had a background in luxury gastronomy. Gal desired to ‘return to a simpler beauty, essential and without sacrifice, summed up in a few principles and gestures’. The pair combined their unique experiences to start a cosmetics company that is 100 per cent natural, vegan, and botanical. Les huilettes is also committed to the environment and partnered with Up2green Reforestation, a French nonprofit organisation that helps replant fruit trees in communities affected by deforestation. 

The Mon huilette night serum is made for all skin types to smooth and enhance your skin’s suppleness. Overnight, it leaves your skin looking more radiant overnight and repairs any signs of anti-ageing such as wrinkles and skin dullness. The formula of a ‘plant synergy of essential and vegetable oils to be effective without fluff’makes the night serum stand out. Essential oils like Italian helichrysum have an anti-inflammatory benefit while myrtle and bourbon geranium have therapeutic aromatherapy effects to enhance positive well-being. Argan and avocado oils deeply moisturise and plump your skin while prickly pear cactus prevents the formation of premature wrinkles and lightens dark circles. These elements result in a light-feeling oil serum that melts evenly into your face and neck and doesn’t make you feel greasy. 

A little goes a long way, and you only need 3-5 drops per use. You should purposely but gently massage the serum into your freshly cleansed face for optimal results. However, for extra pampering and an at-home massage, we suggest you watch their serum application video here . On top of it all, rose and white flower leave a tangy and therapeutic scent on your face to relax you before bed. You can join ‘tribe of huilettes’ and amp up your night skin care routine by purchasing the mon huilette night (15ml) here for 45€

Virginia Stone – ‘Eyes’ for Kavesi

When you’re searching out skincare items, often the three categories you’ll see are ‘dry’, ‘normal’, and ‘oily’. They’re appear all encapsulating, or so it seems. Some of us with ‘combination’ skin at The Amazing Blog and frequently struggle to find the right cleanser or moisturiser that won’t make our skin greasy or dry. The latest product we tried is from Virginia Stone it brings about the idea that finding the right products for your skin may be based on your skin tone rather than these three general categories.

Virginia Stone built her brand on the foundation of ‘passion, purpose, and an unyielding desire to innovate and inspire’. She set out to revolutionise the skincare industry by creating a sustainable luxury brand and adhering to three core values of people, planet, and passion. Virginia Stone, as a company, dedicates itself to global social and environmental sustainability and all of its products are fair-trade, eco-friendly, and vegan. What drew us to this brand was its ethos. It felt simple categories like ‘dry’, ‘normal’, and ‘oily’ do not account for certain skin-tone-specific characteristics such as skin density and sensitivity, SPF requirements, and potency tolerance levels. So, Virginia Stone created three collections: Kavesi for fair skin tones, Jasari for medium skin tones, and Odaja for dark skin tones. We felt these groupings were less arbitrary and more encapsulating, especially if you have ‘normal’ or ‘combination’ skin. 

We tried their ‘Eyes’ for Kavesi in Sand , a 3-in-1 superfood cream with five layers (Butter, Nectar, Tea Syrup, Corrective Complex, Elixir) of antioxidants, vitamins, and nutrients. The formula is also pH balanced and oxygenated to protect your skin from UV rays and pollution, improving your skin’s elasticity and lightening dark shadows. It is designed to stimulate cell renewal, increase blood flow, and improve circulation specifically for fair skin, which is highly sensitive and allergy prone. When we used it, we saw diminished fine lines as well as less puffy and brighter skin like we had used a jade roller. But what stood out to us was the cream’s texture. It’s solid, and you can’t dip your finger into it, but the warmth of your finger picks up the right amount of the product that feels smoother than butter and leaves your skin feeling the same way. The cream is oilier than typical moisturisers, yet it doesn’t feel sticky and spreads well. It leaves your skin feeling smooth and matte, which makes the cream perfect to use as a primer during the day, and nourishes for night time use. 

Finally, we cannot go through this post without mentioning the intricate packaging. The cream comes in a cube that Virginia Stone calls ‘The Luxador’. It’s 100 per cent recyclable concrete stone and has thermal insulating properties to protect the cream’s active ingredients and maintain its longevity. The Luxador is engraved with the company’s simple logo and pattern and has a magnetic stone lid. It’s quite solid and heavy, so be careful if you travel with it or keep it on your bathroom counter for décor and safekeeping.

You can buy ‘Eyes’ for Kavesi (15ml) here for $185. The price is quite high, but you don’t need very much and could spot treat certain areas rather than put it all over your face. 

Lavera – Illuminating Effect Fluid

Since the highlighter craze began in full force, The Amazing Blog joined in trying Benefit Cosmetics’ Watts Up! Highlighter and Rouge Bunny Rouge’s Love Lights Highlighting Powder. Both solid highlighter products gave our cheeks a heavenly glow, so we were excited to mix things up with a liquid highlighter and see the results. We were even more excited to receive the Illuminating Effect Fluid from one of our trusted brands Lavera, which has brought us so many #amazingfinds over the years from the SOS Help Hand Balm to the Powerful Lashes mascara.

The 100 per cent certified organic company has been a leader in the worldwide natural cosmetics industry since its founding in 1987. Its core mission is to create products that are ‘beautiful, natural, effective’ and sustainable. This mission is seen in everything from where the raw ingredients are sourced to product packaging and disposal.

The Illuminating Effect Fluid is no different from Lavera’s other products in its high-quality organic and natural ingredients as well as effectiveness. The highlighter, which we tried in Sheer Silver, has a light and creamy texture with pigments that naturally reflect light. It spreads easily and a little bit of this product goes a long way, even a light layer leaves a bright pearlescent sheen on your skin. While one layer of the highlighter is quite subtle and natural looking in the sun, you can build the product to create a deeper shine depending on if you want to refresh your typical look or make your cheekbones and brow bone pop. You can also use it as a foundation primer or mix it with moisturiser for an everyday glow.

The formula includes actual pearl extract to fresh your complexion and sunflower oil to smooth skin for additional radiance. Jojoba and shea butter help nourish skin with vitamins and minerals, and shea butter has even been proven to help with anti-ageing. It has also been dermatologically tested and is good for sensitive skin. You can purchase the highlighter (30ml) here for £14.90.