HOW TO LOOK THE BEST AT EVERYTHING: BENEFIT.

*Published in order to celebrate my new job at Benefit Cosmetics*

Benefit is one of the worlds best make up brands; founded in San Francisco by two sisters - I think the brands been developed with the right brains - two women! How to Look the Best at Everything is one of their multiple kits with miniatures of a few products, and this kit is all about perfecting that base. It comes in three shades - light, medium and deep. I have the medium shade kit.

The kit contains a miniature Porefessional, which is an award winning primer. It's a pro balm which helps to reduce the appearance of pores on the skin - it can be used alone, underneath or on top of your make up. It's a skin colour product which means it blends seamlessly into the skin going completely unnoticed.

The product I was most eager to try in this kit was the Hello Flawless Oxygen Wow foundation. The medium kit comes with the shade 'I'm So Money Honey' which is a perfect match for me. It's a light coverage foundation, but with the right application (a brush or a beauty blender) can become buildable and create a medium coverage. It also contains an SPF 25 which is brilliant for a foundation.

The Boi-ing concealer is an industrial strength concealer which is brilliant for concealing imperfections. This kit comes with shades 02 (the most popular shade of this concealer), and 03. This cream concealer can be applied with your fingertips or a brush and is easy to blend out. I would have also used this underneath the eyes but the shades I have are too dark - eager to try shade 01 for that reason!

The final product in the box is Hello Flawless powder. The medium kit comes with the shade 'I'm Cute as a Bunny Honey'.  This has an SPF 15 and can be worn alone for a satin finish. You can use the brush for a light coverage or apply with a sponger for a heavier coverage.

How to Look the Best at Everything retails at £25.50. It's available at Benefit counters worldwide. Have you tried any Benefit products? What are your favourite?

CLEANING YOUR MAKEUP BRUSHES.

Probably the most tedious part of any make up artist/enthusiasts job is cleaning their make up brushes, but it's also one of the most important. Not only have these brushes been in products of varying colours and textures, they've also been on somebody else's face, taking in dead skin cells and remains of any other products they've been using.

I've tried multiple methods of brush cleaning; using regular shampoo, baby shampoo, a solid antibacterial soap, liquid soap and I've tried various specific brush cleansers, but I've never really found anything I fell in love with  (I refuse to try the Olive Oil technique I've seen everywhere, I don't really agree with putting something you use for cooking on your face). At first, I fell in love with the Dr Bronner Magic Soap but although it was incredible and smelt amazing, it was too thin a consistency and I'd end up using too much all at once, and then I discovered the Beauty Blender Solid Cleanser, (available on Beauty Bay, Cult Beauty, and Net-A-Porter to name a few) almost like a solid brush cleaner in a pot, designed to wet and swirl your brushes around inside in order to fully deep clean them. This cleanser retails for £14 so is pretty pricey for the 28g of product that you get. I've recently found a dupe for this product; the Freedom Makeup Pro Studio Brush Bath which retails for £7, and is probably almost double the size. This is available on the Freedom Makeup website, or in Superdrug, which is where I purchased it.

When I first saw the Real Techniques Deep Cleansing Gel, I had high hopes, being a huge fan of their other products. I was also intrigued because it claimed to be a deep cleansing gel, as opposed to the spot cleaners that many brands release. The Deep Cleansing Gel is designed to be used in a similar way that we would use shampoo on our own hair. I like to squeeze a small amount of gel into the palm of my hand and swirl a damp brush around in the product, lathering up the bristles. I then like to use a running tap (brush head facing downward in order to avoid any water build up in the brush ferrule as it can loosen the brush hair) to cleanse away any of the product, repeating these steps until the brush is clean. At first I tried the cleanser with my smaller, eye, lip and concealer brushes; the gel texture was able to cleanse the brushes with ease, removing a significant amount of product almost straight away. However I found this was not the case for larger, more denser brushes; it only seemed to be removing around half of the product, much of which was remaining deep in the root of the brush hair and meant that I had to use twice the amount of product. Besides this, I love the smell and the feel of the fully cleansed brushes once they are dry so I decided to continue to use this for smaller brushes, and leave my larger brushes to a solid cleanser as I feel that is a much more effective way of cleaning them. I can imagine this works brilliantly with the new Real Techniques Brush Cleansing Palette, which I'm very eager to try! For only £6.99 this is a really good product for deep cleansing your make up brushes. It's available pretty much everywhere that stocks Real Techniques brushes; I've seen it in Boots, Superdrug and ASDA which is where I got mine!

Both of these brush cleansers are brilliant for the price tag and for their easy availability in drugstores across the UK. They also both keep your brushes feeling softer for longer which is incredible for me as I have quite a few make up brushes that I don't use all of the time. 

Have you tried any of these, or found any products you love for cleaning your make up brushes?