Claire Joanne

I'm one of those that has never tried anything from Lush, yep I can hear you all now with "whattt...you've never tried stuff from Lush?!". I guess it's just because I have the very annoying "sensitive skin" and if something doesn't agree with my skin it sure as hell lets me know about it, but in 2016 I am gonna make sure I at least try 1 thing from Lush...so I have made up a little wishlist of all the ones I want to buy first.

Each year I usually do a set of Acrylic nails on myself with some sort of Christmas design on them, but this year I have opted out of Acrylics (mainly because I just haven't got the time to sit and do them!) and just to keep with my natural nails and paint those with nail varnishes I already own in Christmassy colours......is christmassy even a word??

Well its officially that time of the year where in my opinion its totally acceptable to be playing the Christmas music, and I don't mind a good Christmas song! The Christmas movies will be the next thing out for me so this is where Netflix will also come in handy haha. Most of these songs are the good old classic ones, and at the very bottom of the playlist i also have a bit of Leona Lewis with her song "One More Sleep" which is a very catchy song.

This gift guide is mainly aimed at younger kids...can you tell I find it so much easier buying for my 4 & 5 year old niece's?! All these products are from the Tesco's website and were all in stock when I made this list up, so if they ain't in stock on the website then there's still a chance they will be available in store.

As you already know I have a blogging schedule for this blog, which means Mondays are Nail related, Wednesdays are Beauty related and then Fridays are Lifestyle related blog posts.

During the winter months for me I tend to notice I always start to get really dry skin, not too sure if its the weather that's doing it or its just the way my skin is. But either way it drives me mad it's just like why can't our skin just be one kind of way instead of a combination of different ways!

I'm one of those that loves to bake stuff and loves to try out baking new things (as long as I like the sound of it that is haha). I could easily spend a day just baking one thing after another which isn't always a good thing when your trying to eat more healthy!

Now I've never been one of those who gets up at stupid o'clock on the day of Black Friday just to grab a quick bargain...or two, and this year was no different! But that still doesn't mean that you miss out on all the good deals that are happening to be around.

A few weeks ago now you may remember I did a blog post on a Gift Guide For Her: Under £20.00 and I did say I would be doing a couple more gift guides in the lead up to Christmas time. So in the 2nd part of this blog series as I'm gonna call it, today's gift guide is gonna be for the male figure in your life whether this is a boyfriend, brother, dad, friend, nephew or anything one else I may have missed out on all these gifts featured here cost £20.00 or under and are all available via the Boots website.

Whilst down in London recently I went out shopping for a few bits, and whilst walking round Tesco's I came across an aisle that was full of stuff for £1.00. I was intending on buying a lip balm of some sort as my lips get really dry as the cold weather starts approaching, and I came across lip balms by the brand Lip Silk and they really reminded me of a lip balm that I had been looking at online a few weeks before.

These 5 blogs that I am gonna recommend to you all are blogs that I follow on BlogLovin' and are ones that I always read. I may have only commented a couple of times on their blog posts but not all of them, but do rest assure that I read every post! I really have got to get better at commenting on other people's blog posts as I'm a nightmare in doing so.

As some of you may or may not know, I am a qualified Nail Technician who is able to do both Acrylic and Gel nails...although I much prefer using acrylic than I do gel.
I've been qualified for about 3 years now and passed my course with a distinction which I was rather happy about, as I was one of those that left secondary school half way through year 10 and never got my GCSE's...naughty I know.

So in today's blog post I thought I would just share a few pictures of some of the nail's that I have done either on myself or on other people, obviously these ain't every set of nails I've done but just a few that I've picked out.

Just lately I've been trying to read more than I have been, I used to read all the time then I just stopped and I'm not sure why. So I've decided to try and read between 1 and 2 books each month usually just to wind down before bed as I spend way too much time on the laptop of a night time and usually don't end going to bed until about 3am, and always end up regretting it the next day when I'm struggling to stay awake lol.

Now I've always been one of those people who love a good pen, you know they type of pen that makes your handwriting look really neat....yeah thats me haha. Infact I think I just love stationery in general, before any of these blog post's even get typed up, they are written out in a notebook and it's only then I will edit them as I'm typing them up to schedule.

So in today's blog post I thought I would share with you the last few bits of stationery that I purchased and where I got them and for how much.

Just lately my skin has been a right pain in the backside and as really been playing up bad, I've had quite a few breakouts around the chin area and I'm not too quite sure why.
So I decided to switch up my morning and night skincare routine just incase it was my skin getting too used to products I was currently using.

Whilst having my niece's and nephew, Megan, Louie and Mia up to stay with us for a week, it only made sense to do some baking with them. We chose to bake some cupcakes with vanilla extract mixed in with them and then topped with a mint green buttercream icing and a few decorations.

So here is the recipe that I use whenever I choose to make some cupcakes:

A couple of weeks ago now The Body Shop were doing an offer that was just too good not to take advantage of, the offer this time was if you spent over £50.00 you could get £25.00 off of your end total, which I personally think is brilliant.

This weeks NOTW: Nail Of The Week is a nail varnish by Tanya Burr and its in the colour "Midnight Sparkles". I'm a big fan of these nail varnishes so much in fact the last NOTW I did was also one by Tanya Burr but in the colour Penguin Chic, you can read that Nail Of The Week HERE.

I was recently contacted by Hannah from Blossoming Gifts asking if I was interested in doing a collaboration with them in their Autumn flowers range, and loving fresh flowers of course I agreed to do the collaboration with them, as now the hayfever season has chilled itself out I can start to enjoy fresh flowers.

Blossoming Gifts are a new and exciting flower delivery company that are based in the UK and they specialise in beautiful florist designs at a low cost. They offer a wide range of both flowers and gifts on there website and all at affordable prices aswell. With there flower delivery range there is free delivery on all bouquets, and on selected flower bouquets there is also a free box of chocolates and who doesn't love a box of chocolates.

Just lately I've managed to try handcreams from both of these companies, and luckily they are both in the same scent aswell which is Mango.

The Body Shop handcream I received for free with an order I made online a little while ago and the handcream from Sniffy Wiffy came inside the September's version of the Bloggers Beauty Box.
After using them both for a little while, the idea for this blog post came into mind and so here I am currently writing it up.

If you follow me over on Instagram @nailbeautylife then you may have figured out by now that I'm slightly obsessed with coffee.....maybe coffee is the reason I don't sleep too well of a night time?!

I thought it was about time Nail-Beauty-Life had a proper planned out blogging schedule, in the past I posted every 2 days, then I took it down to every 3 days but I haven't really stuck to these when I've been down visiting family in London. 

Today's blog post is a bit of a look back on some old photos, hence the title of the post "Throwback Thursday". I've chosen 4 of my favourite photo's of myself when I was a lot younger than I am now, so I will go through each of them one at a time and if I can remember I will let you know exactly what I was doing in each picture.

This week's NOTW: Nail Of The Week is in the colour "Penguin Chic" and its by Tanya Burr.
I waited quite a while before purchasing any of the Tanya Burr collection, just for the fact that I decided to put myself on a "September Nail Varnish Ban" as I'm always buying nail varnishes and have way too many, so I decided I needed to start using some of the ones I already had first.
By the time the September ban had come to an end Tanya's new range had been released with all new packaging, which meant all the ones in the old packaging went on sale so I ended up buying 2 of the sets of nail varnishes at a bargain price of just £2.00 each instead of the usual £14.99! Bargain!

I thought I would do a bit of a lifestyle post today, introducing you all to my 3 pets of the family, which are made up of 2 cats and 1 dog who go by the name of Gizmo, Milo and Lana. I haven't done many lifestyle posts just lately so thought why not do one as my next blog post whilst I was looking through all my photos that are piled up on my laptop.

This week's nail of the week is one that was featured in my "Autumn Nail Colours" which can be seen here. It's by the brand Barry M and it's one of there Gelly Nail Paints in the colour Lychee.

During the Autumn season I tend to go for either dark coloured nail's or a light browny colour, it all depends on what mood I'm in I think. So for today's blog post I've gone through my nail varnish collection and picked out some of my favourite nail varnishes that I like to wear throughout this season. Some of the nail varnishes that I've chosen do look quite similar but I promise you they are all different once they have been applied onto the nails haha.

First up are my Nails Inc varnishes, I have quite a few by Nails Inc as I love the way that they apply to the nails and usually only need 1 or 2 coats to achieve the full colour, and with a good top coat over the top the nail varnish lasts quite well aswell or at least for me anyway it usually lasts just over a week before I need to re-do my nails.

Today's blog post is gonna be showing you how I edit my Instagram photo's and what apps I use to do it with. Before this all I would do is just crop the photo into a square and just adjust the sharpness on it a bit to make the photo look that little bit clearer.
But then a few weeks ago I decided I wanted to re-image my blogs Instagram profile, which you can find by clicking HERE (if you want to follow aswell to help with my goal of 50 followers that would be nice aswell haha).
So I took to Pinterest and just typed in "Instagram Photo Ideas" just so I could have a look to see what "themes" I could find on there. At one point I think I spent about 2 hours just reading all different pages on there on how best to edit photo's.

One of the reason's for coming down to London for 10 days, was to go out for the family meal so that my sister, her boyfriend and hes son could reveal to all of us what the new baby was gonna be....was it gonna be a boy or a girl.
They found out in the morning but then the answer was all sealed in an envelope to be revealed to everyone else after everyone had eaten which I think was about 8:30pm, so we all had quite a long while to wait haha.
It was the new babys soon to be big brother Charlie that revealed it to everyone that there was gonna be a new little boy joining the family next year which is rather exciting!

The meal was rather lovely, I ended up having a chicken & bacon burger with sweet potato chips and barbecue sauce, it was absolutely lovely! After letting that go down for a bit I then got a dessert of cookie dough cheesecake with ice-cream and chocolate sauce....that was rather sickly though and I only managed to eat half of it, none went to waste tho as my sister finished it off for me haha.

On Saturday 8th August whilst we had family down visiting for the week, we decided to go over to Pontypool Park. We chose this park as the swing park is mainly aged for the younger kids I would say those aged between the ages of 2 and 7 as the only thing that's really there for the older kids is the little skate park that's separated from the park in an enclosed fencing area. So we knew by taking my niece over to this park she would get to go on a variety of things that she would enjoy as she is only 4 years old.

I was recently contacted via email by the team over at Snapfish UK and was kindly offered £40.00 worth of free credit to use on there site to create myself some of there gifts that are listed in there bestsellers category.

Snapfish UK are a online photo company who provide a range of products from small photo prints, to canvas prints, posters, photo books, mugs, calenders and a whole other variety of things to choose from.

I decided to choose a Slim Canvas Print and also a Collage Poster as these 2 products seemed to be the perfect fit for what I wanted to get put onto them. On the Slim Photo Canvas I chose the picture of my niece looking out at the sea with Brighton Pier in the background, and on the Collage Poster I chose a variety of pictures of my niece Daisy as it's always nice to see just how far shes come from when she was born.