Boux Avenue

Boux Avenue describe themselves as being Born out of a love for lingerie, nightwear and all things beautiful with a desire to bring traditional service, superior fit and outstanding quality to modern and luxurious surroundings. And I have to say I agree with them!

Where else could you (these days) place an order at 10:13 on a Saturday morning and have it delivered before 10am on a Monday morning? That just doesn't happen for the most part unless you are willing to pay extortionate delivery fees, or collect from the store yourself 

So anyway, On Saturday I received an email informing me that I had won a £10 gift card to use with Boux Avenue and so I set off to investigate if there was anything I could afford to get with just the card. The first thing I checked was the postage, after noting it would be £3 I realised I would have £7 to spend. At this point I wasn't too hopeful of being able to find anything for that price, the website has such an elegant and sophisticated feel to it that I assumed it would be out of my budget even if I were to add a payment to the gift card.

I am very pleased to say I was wrong and not just a little wrong, there were many things I could have chosen which were under the value of the card, it was getting quite difficult to pick something out until I hit the Lingerie Accessories section, there I found a possible solution to my main problem with bra's! 

I have, for as long as I can remember, always had a problem with my straps falling off my shoulders and down my arms. I have combated this by tying them together at the back (well, OK, having someone else tie them for me!lol) but these bra converters sound like a good solution for me as well as being useful for in the summer for wearing differently shaped tops while keeping the straps safely tucked away!

After seeing these and deciding I just had to get them I started the ordering process. It was very simple and worked really well. At one point I was asked if I wanted it wrapping or not (green issues about waste) and part of me felt I should say no to the wrappings but the bigger part of me wanted to be girly and have them and I did!

This morning when it arrived it was so pretty, I felt so special opening the boxes, especially the last one, to fine the converters nestled with some scented rose petals. I really cant commend this company highly enough and I really do recommend you take the time to have a look at them and see what they sell, a purchase from them is so much more than just home shopping. They have an impeccable service which really does make you feel like a valued customer and I will be back.

Website: http://www.bouxavenue.com/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/bouxavenue

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BouxAvenue

Palmolive Thermal Fresh

I received this shower gel last week to test out and I figured I'd add my thoughts about it here as well for my blog readers as well. I took 2 pics to see which I liked best then couldn't decide as the one with flash shows the label better but the other one shows the colour more true to how it is so anyway, here's what it looks like:

The first this I noticed about this was the almost total lack of scent, there is a hint of something there but it is so faint and delicate that I found it impossible to explain what it is and this to me is a huge downfall already as I love scents and when in the shower I want to be enrobed by a wall of them and enjoy each and every one as I work my way through the products I use. I love having scents layered on me starting at the point of getting clean and fresh,

The scent aside, I found this to be a very good shower gel, it is a little runny but used on my puff it was fine and produced an amazing amount of the softest bubbly foam I have had from a gel in a long time. It was a very rich foam, almost whipped in texture and felt very moisturising on the skin. After rinsing my skin felt soft and just right, some of these mineral shower gels have left my skin feeling tight in the past but this one didn't have that affect, it just left my skin feeling good.

So all in all, I don't think I would buy this variety again as the scent issue is a big one for me but I will be looking at the rest of the range and especially the Aroma Therapy varieties to see if I can find a good match for my preferences there :-)

Nelsons Arnicare – Bath & massage balm

I was recently sent this lovely product to test and give my views on prior to it’s launch next month and have been testing it out for the last couple of weeks and have found it to be incredibly helpful for me.

I tend to suffer with restless legs at night which leads to every few weeks I will suffer cramps in my calves waking me for a few days running. Once I received this I decided to try it out on those cramps, rubbing/massage doesn’t really help much other than to ease the current cramps and let me get back to sleep again.

I was woken earlier this week with my calf muscles cramping badly, I reached for the balm and poured a small amount into my palm and set about massaging to release the cramp and ease the ache it leaves behind. The first thing to notice is the smell, it’s faintly lavender and slightly medicinal but not unpleasantly either. I found the balm quickly warmed and was absorbed easily into my skin but still leaving me slick enough to continue rubbing. I found that my cramp eased and the aches were gone in a much quicker time than normal and after washing my hands I was quickly on my way back to sleep. Most surprising for me was that I next woke in the morning, usually I am woken several times a night with cramps once I have had them once and usually it continues on for the next 2/3 nights. The next night I thought about it and decided to try massaging the balm into my legs before going to sleep, I did and found I slept straight through, on the 3rd night (when I would usually still be being woken) I decided to not use the balm and see what happened and again I slept through with no recurrence.

I have also used the balm to ease the aches and pains associated with exercise and found it to be very effective. I pushed myself on the treadmill this week and by the end of the day one of my legs had become so sore it was painful to put weight on it. I massaged the area that was causing the pain to me and within a minute or two the pain eased right off and I was able to continue on with my day without further pain or effect from the extra exertion.

The balm may also be used in a bath and I can see it being very helpful used that way, I personally do not like baths prefering showers and when I do enjoy a bath I prefer to let the child in me loose and have bubbles rather than oils! But all in all, this is a product that I will be keeping in stock and would recommend trying especially to those who, like me, are just getting into regular exercise and suffer from the aches and pains that make it most difficult to get into a routine.

More information on this and their other products can be found on Nelson’s website alongside some fascinating information about arnica and it’s uses. 

Originally posted on my other blog on August 14, 2010 moved here on Feb 6th 2011

African Black Soap

I did a trade a few months ago with Ben & Jerry’s via a Fairtrade promotion they were running. I offered to send three of my friends a gift in return for some Shea butter and Black soap. I was lucky enough to have my bid chosen as the winning one and duly sent off gifts to 3 volunteers who in turn told Ben & Jerry’s that I had completed my side of the deal and my bid was then accepted as the winning one. It was a fun competition to take part in and I know a few of my friends were also lucky enough to have their bids accepted as well.

I was really pleased to win this prize as I’ve been using shea butter products for some time now and know how nice it makes my skin feel so I was naturally curious about the pure substance and the black soap, I’ll review the shea butter itself once I’ve tested it a bit longer and more fully but now onto my review of the soap.

The first thing I noticed was that there is no real scent to this soap, after years of using various types this came as a big surprise to me and I became a little sceptical about if I would like it as part of soap use for me has always been the smell, it’s always been how I choose which one to buy when shopping and probably the reason for how dry my hands have become! After getting over this and discovering that black soap is not actually black but more a creamy brown colour I decided to test it out and this is where I made the biggest mistake. When you buy the soap you can normally purchase it in either 100g bars or 1k blocks, mine came as bars and I assumed that is how you use it like all soaps but it isn’t! The soap becomes very soft and tacky very quickly when wet and doesn’t dry very well even in a soap dish so I waited it out till it was dry and cut it into 4 pieces which seems to be a much better way of using the bars. The bars cut very easily with a sharp knife, they are a lot softer than they appear!

Now on to using it, it’s only this year that I have returned to bars of soap after years of using handwash. I had forgotten how good it can feel to use a bar of soap, it takes the clean hand feeling to a totally different level that liquids cannot match. Well, this soap actually goes even further than that. Within a couple of rubs of the bar you have your hands full of a rich creamy lather, as you rub it around it feels more like rubbing in a hand cream than using soap, it is an experience that I found very pleasurable and after rinsing and drying my hands I found I did not need to use a hand cream, my hands felt wonderfully moisturised, very soft and smooth. I then set about thinking of a way to test it in the shower (bath would be no problem as you can just put it back on a dish when finished with to dry) The way I came up with was to pull a piece off about the size of a small grape and I pushed this into my shower puff, this worked very well and I found I had the same results again as I did with my hands, my whole body felt wonderfully clean, moisturised and cared for. I then came up with an idea!

I was sure I’d read somewhere online (I’m not sure where) that black soap is good for the hair/scalp so I decided to try it out, I still had some of the piece of of soap left in the puff so, once the puff was full of the creamy foam I rubbed it into my hair, I found it wasn’t like using shampoo, there was no instant lather and to a certain extent I couldn’t feel it on my hair at all. I rinsed off and then discovered that my hair felt much different to normal. My hair is very fine so I’m used to being able to wring it out after washing but I found I couldn’t. I thought for a minute and assumed it meant my hair must have gone really greasy from the shea butter in the soap but decided to dry it and find out for sure what had changed as I could always wash it again and I am so pleased I did! My hair wasn’t feeling strange due to greasyness, it was streange due to it being much much thicker and fuller than it has been since the disasterous bleaching attempt in the 80′s but this time it feels soft and silky and looks really healthy.

I love this product and can see myself using it for years to come, all I will say to you is, if you decide to try it, please make sure you get real African black soap and not one of the cheap imitations that are being mass produced in Europe and America! 

Originally posted on my other blog on August 10, 2010 moved here on Feb 6th 2011