Mood-Boosting Beauty Treats For Every Budget

There’s nothing quite like a wee beauty treat to perk oneself up. Whenever the world may be feeling rather grim and grey, it’s like the industry magically takes note and suddenly products with a particularly joyful feel appear. Whether you feel like adding in a pressie to self while you’re doing the groceries or are up for a more spendy purchase, we can happily report that, across the budget spectrum, bold colour, easy to use textures and delightfully sunny scents abound. Go on – you deserve it.

NARS Orgasm On The Beach Cheek Palette

I have but five words: get. This. On. Your. Face. Alright then, and a few more: come for the sleek, mirrored, rose-gold packaging, but stay for the six incredibly wearable, lighter than air powders contained within. Incorporating shades from champagne to bold raspberry, this palette will bring much needed vibrancy and luminosity to every skin tone, especially after we have spent so much time plodding around indoors.

Revlon Ultra HD Snap! Nail Polish

Again, the packaging lured me in here, and again, happily, the product lives up to its housing. Shaped like an oversized pill bottle with lids that match the polish colour, there’s a fun, mod-ish vibe to this new vegan, naturally-derived collection. The creamy polish doesn’t disappoint, with a proper punch of pigment and decent wear time. I can’t go past shade 031 She’s On Fire, a wear-with-anything orange-hued red.

Bottega Veneta Illusione Tonka Solaire For Her and Bois Nu For Him

When I am in the mood for serious beauty spending, I favour a benevolent approach: if I am treating myself, why not treat someone else, too. Enter Bottega Veneta’s elegant new paired offering, Illusione, featuring ‘Tonka Solaire For Her’ and ‘Bois Nu For Him’. (A quick note here – I’m a woman who is usually more drawn to traditionally masculine scent notes, and would cheerfully wear either of these options. As with all things in beauty, choose what you like and wear it happily!) The matching heavy glass cubes with marble-effect lids are true design objets. Bois Nu, in black and grey, is simultaneously spicy and refreshing, while the all-white Tonka Solaire is green while also being warm. Fragrances like these don’t make demands, but they might easily persuade one to wear them while eating oysters and drinking Champagne, ideally somewhere with crisp white tablecloths and a maitre’d who knows your name. Yes, the old bank account may be slimmer, but my finely honed ‘one for you, one for me’ beauty treat moral code is satiated.

Makeup by Mario Master Crystal Reflector

Widely known as Kimmy K’s makeup artist, Mario Dedivanovic is an expert at painting gorgeous faces. Now with his very own line, Makeup by Mario, some of that expertise is available to us at home. Influenced by beauty writer Laura Kennedy’s recommendation in her column in The Irish Times, my first foray into the curated range was the Master Crystal Reflector in Quartz, which I in turn recommend be yours. A minimalist white square opens to reveal a generous pan of sparkling white, like virgin snow in a makeup Narnia. Designed to be used anywhere on the face, a fool-proof, at any age, with any level of makeup love way to use it is to gently tap into the centre of the eyelid to bring a gorgeous luminosity to any look… or to an otherwise bare face. Feeling emboldened by this easy success, my next experiment is going to be adding it over the top of a matte watermelon lipstick.

Loungeface Lash Mascara

One of the original beauty vloggers, Lauren Curtis amassed a huge following thanks to her upbeat demeanour and unabashed love for A Lewk… often anchored by A Lash. So it makes perfect sense that the first product she has released for her brand, Loungeface, is her very own mascara. Loungeface Lash, housed in a rubberised, easy to hold pink and white tube, is a tubing mascara that is up there with the most impressive ones I have ever tried, most for three times the price. The curl it gives is particularly striking, as is the depth of inky black colour. My biggest bugbear with tubing mascaras is that, though they are sold to us as being easier to remove than their traditional sisters, in reality, trying to truly remove every fibre with only water is often more faff than the tried and true formula of micellar lotion on a cotton pad. Not so here, though; Lauren recommends splashing lashes with warm water and then waiting thirty seconds (the waiting is key) before gently rubbing lashes between fingers to ease the tiny spider legs off, which worked a treat.