Skincare

Christmas Gift Ideas for Her

Every year during the festive season, we all face the same struggle asking ourselves the same question; what on earth do we give to our mothers, sisters and best girlfriends (yes girlfriends, we're expecting gifts from you too!) So this year at The Amazing Blog we've come up with a great collection of gifts ideas that we think will suit even your fussiest of friends.

The first gift idea we would like to share with you is from one of our favourite brands Heathcote & Ivory, we'd like to suggest their Heathcote and Ivory Sakura Silks Exquisite Spa Set. This set comes in a stunning and colourful hexagonal tin box - which we think will make a glamorous storage box afterwards. When lifting the lid a gorgeous floral and zesty aroma gently pervaded the office - we were in love! This gift set contains three products; a hand cream, bath salts and a body butter.  The hand cream is formulated with shea butter, vitamin E and panthenol, green tea, jasmine and cedarwood. Together these ingredients intensely nourish hands and cuticles leaving them velvety soft and delicously scented. The Sakura Silks bath salts are the perfect way to indulge and pamper your body at home and help create a luxurious and relaxing at home spa experience.  Finally, the body butter is a rich moisturising cream made with a unique blend of essential oils including lemon, lime and sweet orange. Shea butter and vitamin E are known for their hydrating and protecting properties smooth, soften and provide the extra-hydration skin needs during winter.  All of these products are paraben free. You can purchase the Heathcote & Ivory set here for £15.

We think that a fragrance or perfume is a nice treat when it comes to a Christmas gift. With this in mind, we'd like to suggest the newly launched Change perfume created by the actress Lisa Riley.  Inspired by celebrating a new chapter in her life, the Change perfume is a versatile and memorable fragrance which will suit almost everyone with its floral and oriental notes. The top notes are mandarin leaves and mulberry flowers while the middle notes are tuberose, orange flower and jasmine; and the base notes include sandalwood, Tonka bean and patchouli. These luxurious ingredients work to create and rich and sensual perfume that is timeless and transcends all seasons. You can purchase the perfume here for £14.99 + p&p.

 

We think that owning a beautiful silk scarf is an investment as well as  a classic item for every woman's wardrobe. So we've chosen one from Libby by Design, these are all limited edition handmade silk scarves. Each of these designer scarves are made in England, 100% silk, and hand finished with rolled borders. Every piece is unique, some even have themes from Rudyard Kipling, but all take their inspiration from in the style of Indonesian batiks. We have featured our favourite “How the leopard got his spots” which is a versatile 98cm silk square that can be worn in numerous ways. These scarves are the perfect accessory for brightening up either a heavy winter coat or worn as a sarong on a sandy Caribbean beach. Purchase your scarf here for £174 with SPECIAL OFFER of 15% off if you order before Christmas!

 

For another Christmas gift idea, we were rather taken with this Morris and Co design inspired lavish body gift set. One of our favourites of this year, is their Pure Morris The Collection, this includes a travel size shower cream and a body lotion, together with a full size hand cream. The shower cream is a gentle body wash that is formulated with vitamin A and E, kelp, silver birch and thistle extracts. These ingredients deeply cleanse the body while keeping skin balanced and hydrated. The body lotion is also infused with the same extracts, but in addition there is also almond oil and cocoa butter which help to soften and smooth the skin leaving it velvety soft. The hand cream is formulated with natural ingredients including shea butter, jojoba oil and macadamia oil making it a deeply nourishing cream to protect hands during the winter season. The products come in an intricately embossed tin. The Morris and Co Pure Morris gift set can be purchased here for £22.

 

For the glamourpuss in your life, we think that the Rouge Bunny Rouge Surprise Eye Shadow Palette will be an excellent choice. Rouge Bunny Rouge is a favourite here at TheAmazingBlog; this international make up brand always keep us up to speed with their new launches. So we were happy to learn about the Surprise Eye Shadow Palette which contains five long-lasting shimmery shadows including a highlighting shade, three smoky neutral tones and one frosted iridescent shimmer eye shadow. NB: This quintet of colours are a 'surprise' so we cannot show you the exact selection of colours (the image above is just the palette casing).  Lightweight, creamy touch offering an extended 8-hour wear, the eye shadow formula is made to stay put and to look freshly applied all day long. All refill shades are made to fit perfectly into this Limited Edition. The palette also comes with a free decorated presentation box which makes it an even more impressive present. Purchase here for €50.00.

We hope we're provided some good inspiration for gifting your loved ones, as well as yourself of course! 

APEX High Performance Bio-Serum by Lamiderm Skincare

Apex High Performance Bio-Serum By Lamiderm Skincare

The Amazing Blog is here to bring you an exciting new skincare product that has arrived in the UK with an unsual and unique hero ingredient. The US brand LifePharm Global Network has launched Lamiderm APEX High Performance Bio-Serum an innovative product which help us tackle the ever-foreboding issue of ageing skin. Distributed here in the UK by Discover 9 whose mission is to help individuals attain optimum health and wellness. 

So a little bit of background first. The production of lysyl oxidase decreases (LOX) as we age, and it is this LOX that naturally activates collagen, elastin and fibronectin. It is these skin fibres that keep us looking young and our skin firm and lifted. The APEX High Performance Bio-Serum actually helps to supplement the body's LOX production for improved collagen, elastin and fibronectin at the cellular level which in turn helps to promote the body’s production of LOX. The unique key ingredients for APEX High Performance Bio-Serum is harvested from LifePharm fertilised Avian egg extract and is the first known skincare product to utilise this revolutionary ingredient and the science is explained here .

Additional to the fertilised Avian egg extract, the APEX Bio-Serum formula also includes a 'radiance complex' for brightens the skin which is comprised of seven Swiss alpine plants and have been scientifically proven to improve cellar health. Vitamins C, E and CoQ10 are included too for protection against photo-ageing, whilst a blend of five fruit extracts support cells shield the complexion from pollution and UV radiation. What we particularly like is that the serum's carrier is a nutritious concoction of Aloe Vera juice, sunflower seed and coconut oils.  

As they say, the proof is in the pudding: 87% of users reported smoother skin, 88% more supple and healthy skin and 86% tighter and firmer skin after twice daily use. We certainly could detect a subtle change in skin texture; however, we think it needs more long term use for more significant results as we only used it for a couple weeks. What we also like about this serum is that it is not tested on animals, it is hypoallergenic and is free from all sulphates. You can see for yourself by purchasing the serum through their website here for £64.97

Cinere - 100% Natural Cleansing Gel & Extra Rich Nourishing Cream

We at The Amazing Blog as regular readers will know, are always on the look-out to discover new natural skincare. When we received Cinere 100% Natural Cleansing Gel and Extra Rich Nourishing Cream we were very pleasantly surprised. Cinere is a skincare brand that attaches great importance to holistic beauty. Their claim is that their natural skincare is among the purest and most effective in this sector. Using both their passion for natural ingredients and their expertise in science and dermatology; the brand created products with the some of the finest essentials oils and ingredients.                                                                                                                                              

Cinere 100% Natural Cleansing Gel is formulated to deeply cleanse and detoxify skin while removing dirt, make-up traces and impurities. Perfect for oily skin, the gel has oil balancing properties that help reduce oil production and prevent the appearance of blemishes and blackheads. Enriched with active herbal ingredients including lavender oil and chamomile extracts, which are known for their protecting and healing properties.  This cleanser purifies skin and leaves it moisturised and velvety smooth, so in the long term, skin looks brighter and more radiant

The Cinere Extra Rich Nourishing Cream is made to suit all skin types; it repairs and transforms dull and tired looking complexions into radiant and glowy skin. Cinere's Extra Rich Nourishing Cream feeds the skin with its key ingredients of wheat oil, rice protein, shea butter, rose oil, and edelweiss flower extracts. This cream that not only 'nourishes' the skin but improves its appearance, boosts collagen production and enhances skin elasticity. The moisturiser also helps reduce signs of ageing by plumping up and smoothing fine lines and wrinkles.

As part of your daily routine Cinere recommends that every morning after the Gel Cleanser you should religiously apply their Rich Nourishing Cream as part of your regular skincare regime. We like the simplicity of using these two products to help keep a bright and youthful complexion. You can purchase the cleansing Gel here for £17.50 and the face cream here for £50.

Bath Oil – Olverum

After a long and busy day, we here at The Amazing Blog love to turn off our working minds by taking a soothing and relaxing soak. When we do so, we like using bath products that we are sure will provide us with the care and relaxation we seek. So, when we received the Olverum's bath oil, we couldn't resist the temptation to experience them. The recipe for Olverum’s Bath Oils is a family secret that has been passed down over decades. In the early 20th Century in Germany Franz Otto Klein, a fine-wine maker, together with his wife, an accomplished pharmacologist, travelled the world to source rare and exquisite essential oils.

Through passion and specialist knowledge, they created a luxurious bath oil made with a mix of carefully selected plant extracts each renowned for having specific therapeutic benefits. The natural essential oils include Eucalyptus, Siberian fir Needle, Verbena, Juniper, Geranium, Lavender, Lime, Rosemary, Lemon and Lavandin. Siberian fir Needle is a long-used ingredient used by native women in the forests of Siberia to soothe aching limbs that Franz and his wife discovered on their travels.

The highly-concentrated oil helps to ease muscle and joint pain, and soften the skin. The aromatherapy benefits of the oil relieve stress, relax the mind and body, and promote a good night sleep, which in turn helps to repair the immune system. The unisex fragrance of the product is universally pleasant and is sure to uplift your mood during your evening bath. This oil offers the ultimate bathing experience, your skin soaks up all the benefits of the oil and is left nourished, relaxed and pampered.

Purchase the Bath Oil here for £29 (125ml), £53 (250ml) or £19 for the travel set (3x 15ml).

EE Express Effect by Karin Herzog

At The Amazing Blog, we love skin care brands with high ethics and philosophies, especially if these beliefs are founded in hard-hitting scientific facts; this is exactly what you get with the Swiss skincare brand Karin Herzog. After ten years of meticulous research, Dr Paul Herzog, Nobel Honoree, discovered the family’s secret formula for their miracle skin care products. With all this history and science behind the brand we were more than just a little excited to test out some of their products, and they very kindly sent us a sample of their smoothing face cream called EE Express Effect.

Inspired by the anti-sceptic and hydrating properties of oxygen, the Herzog brand developed a unique formula used in all their products that stabilises active oxygen into the cream. The EE Express Effect Cream removes tiredness and gives skin an instant boost of radiance. The use of both rose and orange water with essential oils, work together to leave skin looking instantly smoothed and visibly calm. We found that the product left our skin looking enviously radiant. This was due to the mix of ingredients in the product that work to even out the skin’s tone and texture. The kaolin mattifies the skin while the hyaluronic acid plumps it, leaving skin glowing and youthful. What’s more this amazing little cream helped to de-stress our skin. The Arnica Montana in the cream reduces signs of stress on the skin, while the sodium bicarbonate purifies the appearance of the skin.

With all this, you’d think it would be near impossible to like the brand and their marvellous products any more than you already do. Well, you would be wrong as they have remarkably high and strong ethics which help govern how they operate. As an independent brand they value the importance of quality ingredients, they are paraben free, vegan-friendly, dairy free, gluten free and cruelty-free. Meaning this brand is for everyone, and can be used by anyone. The products are gentle on skin and still provide visible and lasting effects.

If this sounds like the brand for you, then you can purchase your very own EE Express Effect Karin Herzog Face Cream here for £79.