I’m starting a new set of recurring blog posts: Fashion Focus, where I’ll write about the cute dresses/shoes/makeup/hairstyles that I come across. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, but (again) never got around to it.

To start things off, here’s a product I adore: Lush’s Honey Trap Lip Balm. It contains honey, white chocolate and shea butter to give you smooth and deliciously yummy lips. It’s by far the best lip balm I’ve ever used and it smells gorgeous.

I’ve also tried the other two lip balms (Lip Service and Whipstick) mentioned on the Lush site, but they didn’t suit me as well as Honey Trap. Lip Service is specially for dry, rough lips and it really moisturizes a lot. The main ingredients are cocoa butter, shea butter, and tangerine oil. Whipstick is for those people who are allergic to cocoa butter and lanolin, and smells like chocolate orange. I’m guessing I’m not that much of a fan of these two, because of the orangey/tangerine smell they have. If you don’t mind that though, I suggest trying them out, cause (smells aside) they’re great lip balms.

There were also two other balms, but I can’t find them on the UK site (they are still available on the US site though and I saw them last week in one of the actual store). Lip Squeak smells like apple pie, and contains apples, vanilla, lemon and poppy seed oil. Lite Lip is a lighter type of lip balm which contains marshmellow herb, rose and cocoa butter.

Each of the lip balms cost £4.40 ($8.75), a bit pricier than your standard Nivea/Labello lip balm, but completely worth it. If you want to try them out, just go to one of the Lush stores; the store clerks are always helpful and ready to let you try out stuff (if you’re not too sure about a product, just ask for a sample to take home; they’re really great with that).

Lush Lip Balms – UK Store, US Store

Tuesday evening I managed to go to another London Bloggers Meetup. This time the event was sponsored by Fashion Targets Breast Cancer (FTBC), a campaign to raise funds for Breakthrough Breast Cancer. They gave a short, but interesting talk on what FTBC is and how you can help.

FTBC was setup in 1994 by Ralph Lauren as the fashion industry’s response to breast cancer, raising money through high-street items. The new FTBC range features designs from Topshop, River Island, Marks & Spencers, Warehouse, Coast, Laura Ashley and Goodone. From each purchase from the FTBC range, 30% is donated to Breakthrough Breast Cancer to help the charity with its research, campaigning and education work. 

The latest campaign from FTBC is the Million Model Catwalk, an interactive website with a competition. The idea of Million Model Catwalk is that you can upload a photo of yourself, stick it on a model’s body, choose clothes for your model to wear from the FTBC range and see your model walk down the catwalk.

After the talk there was a giveaway of a couple of FTBC T-shirts and I won one of them. Yay! Here’s how it looks like:

I really do like this top and I actually wore it for the remainder of the evening. The rest of the event I spent talking to and catching up with (mostly) familiar faces and some new ones. As always, this London Bloggers meetup was a lot of fun and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

I’ve only recently begun wearing knee-high and thigh-high socks, but I’ve gotten completely addicted to getting these socks in all different colours and patterns. Now this recent etsy find though has got to be the cutest I’ve come across!

Tattoo socks! How cute are these? There are a couple of different designs available (check out the esty store for the others), I featured my favourites here.

(Yay! You found the hidden treasure! Leave a comment behind with “your hidden gem of London”)

The socks are available in 4 different body colour shades (ultra pale, light mocha, deep mocha, cafe latte) and white. The design is printed in black on one sock; you get one printed sock and a blank sock to create an asymmetrical look.

There are two sizes/lengths for sale: knee-high socks for $13 and thigh-high socks for $18. Shipping is only $2.80 per order.

Via Why Me?

Yes, as the title of this post proclaims, the plague that is Hello Kitty has now also spread to wedding dresses. I’m guessing they were thinking: “hey if Disney can do it, why can’t we?”

The most expensive of the bunch goes for about $4000 and is pink, pink and… well, pink:

The rest are not as exuberant as that, but also not what you’d typically think as a wedding dress. This next one has big heart stuck on your bosom, with more hearts surrounding the hem of the dress:

Even without the little Hello Kitty logo, I’d be hard-pressed to wear this dress. The fur is just too much (or not enough, I can easily imagine winter dresses with fur, but then it’s actually practical), it’s the “I want to be a cuddly toy!” dress: 

Hmm. As a “fancy dress” dress this would be fine, but a wedding dress?

From all the dresses in the bunch, I like this one the most. The Hello Kitty is almost unnoticeable and it doesn’t feel to costume-y. Still it doesn’t look like your typical wedding dress.  

[Via Wedding Bells Blog]

By now you should know my addiction to Threadless T-shirts. They have some of the cutest/weirdest/geekiest tees out there. Ever since I bought my first one 1.5 year ago, I’ve been wanting to get more. So far I’ve got 6 tees myself and have bought 6 tees for other people (they make great Christmas presents).

So why this post? Threadless has another sale going on! And this time tees are going for $15, $10 and even only $5. Now that’s a bargain! Here are some of my favourite tees:

Beastly Planet:

The Food Chain:

Well, This Just Really Sucks…:

The Sound of Colour:

Infamous Mishaps Throughout History:

So head on over to Threadless to get yourself some brilliant T-shirts!

I’ve got a wonderful pair of black knee high leather Aerosole boots (see the black pair in the image below), but a couple of weeks ago I tripped when stepping off an escalator and I may have damaged the heel. I’m not sure yet if it’s possible to fix it; it’s like the inside part of the heel broke (just a little bit though), so it’s slightly wobbly.

They haven’t died completely yet, but the past couple of weeks I’ve just been too scared to use them, in case I damage them even more. I know I should get around to bringing them to a shoe repair, but I just haven’t found the time or the right place. So in the mean time I thought I’d look for another pair shoes! (yeah, no time to bring the old shoes to a shoe repair, but I do have time to go shoe shopping)

I didn’t want a replacement to these boots though, more something that would complement them. So while the old ones had high heels, I thought I’d look for a robust flat pair that would stand a bit of rain and a long day of walking around. 

Now most of you may know my problems with shoe hunting (see previous posts). One of my feet is larger than the other, so I always have trouble finding the right shoes. I’m already quite fussy when it comes to the type of shoe (it has to meet my requirements exactly), then add to that the trouble of two different sized feet! 

I almost had given up on finding something, when Cristiano noticed a small leather shop with shoes for sale. I ended up with these boots:

Here’s another photo:

They’re exactly what I was looking for! Flat, black, they look like leather (they’re actually rubber), robust, rain proof, comfortable, in other words: a nice new addition to my growing shoe family (I don’t have that many pairs, only six, and that’s including my wellies and running shoes).

I’ve never been the type of girl that spent hours daydreaming about and planning her wedding (I much rather daydreamed about… ooh, wait a minute, that’s a good idea for a blog post, you’ll just have to wait and see). I am though a sucker for pretty dresses and some of these of Disney Fairy Tale Wedding Dresses are just gorgeous (and some are just plain hideous).

There are six character lines to choose from: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Jasmine, Ariel and Belle. The idea is that each line of dresses ‘captures the unique spirit and beauty of each Disney princess’. Each Spring/Fall line has 3 different styles (so far in total there are about 9 different dresses per character). Here are a couple of the dresses:

Cinderella is ‘classic glamour’.

Sleeping Beauty is ‘regal radiance’.

Snow White is ‘sweet elegance’.

Jasmine is ‘bohemian chic’.

Ariel is ‘sexy and sultry’.

Belle is ‘stylish sophistication’.

Check out all the dresses at the Disney Fairy Tale Weddings website.

(Photos courtesy and copyright of Disney)

A couple of weeks ago I won a Tokyoflash watch via a contest on Geeks Are Sexy (btw those geeks rock!). It arrived last week, so I thought I’d do a small review of it.

The watch I got is of the red Tibida design and it looks great. It has a polished stainless steel case with a red face and a polyurethane wrist band. The cool geeky thing about Tokyoflash watches is that they all have a unique way of displaying the time to you. In Tibida’s case there are four different display options: hour-centric, minute-centric, binary and date.

In the hour-centric mode, the bottom half of the display (the two 5×3 LED grids) is used to show the hour, The minutes are showed in the top half (the 2×6 grid) with each LED representing 5 minutes (so 8 LEDs on is 40 min). WIth the minute-centric mode, it’s the other way around. The bottom half is used for the minutes, the top half for the hours. Here are examples of both of them:

The binary option is (of course) the geekiest of the bunch. It doesn’t use the bottom half at all, only using the top 12 LEDs to show the time in binary. Very cool, but not that handy if you quickly want to know the time (at least not yet for me, still have to train myself a bit better). The last option, date, simply shows the date today, with the month in the top half and the day in the bottom half.

So far I’ve just been listing facts, not really giving my opinion on it. To be honest, I’m not completely convinced by it. It’s a very cool watch, but I’m not sure it’s the best fit for me. For starters, the wrist band isn’t that comfortable. The problem is with the area where the face connects with the band; instead of forming a smooth round band around the wrist, the top part is on a slightly weird angle (as if the band doesn’t want to bend that way). Now it could be that my wrists are just too skinny or the plastic is still too stiff, but at the moment it won’t fit comfortably around my wrist. Weirdly enough it does fit around my wrist; normally, I have to puncture an extra hole in the band. I think though the Tibida will fit fine if you have a bit more wider wrist than me and maybe given some time it will fit me better too.

Another thing you must realize with this watch is that the LEDs only go on when you press the button. So that means every single time you want to look at the watch for the time, you’ll have to press that button. Besides that you can’t look at it from an angle, cause otherwise the LEDs don’t make much sense. You really have to look straight at it. They’re not really problems or “end-of-the-world” bad, but it’s a new type of flow you have to get into. 

On a personal note, I discovered I don’t use my watch to know the exact time, I use it to know how much time has passed or will pass. For this, I’m so stuck in my ways with an analogue clock, my brain is so used to processing the angles and quarters of a clock face. For instance, when I know something will take 15 minutes to do, but don’t know what time to start it, my mind will be constantly updating the image I have of a clockface and moving the quarter around.

Anyhow, the Tokyoflash watch doesn’t completely suit me… as a watch. I don’t see this replacing my standard (but boring) analog watch. But as a geek accessory though it’s fantastic. Plus it’s almost the right shade of Miss Geeky red, fitting perfectly with some of my clothes. While not completely what I expected I do love it, so expect seeing it on me at a future geek event!

Pssst, there are even more watches on the Tokyoflash site. Some of them are way crazier…

I came across these cool jewelry designs called Batucada jewelry. They’re from an up-and-coming design company in France and some of the stuff is just so pretty.

The jewelry is made from an synthetic Eco-friendly rubber, creating a tattoo-like appearance when worn. Because of the material it’s also waterproof and sweat proof. They’re perfect as casual, but trendy everyday jewelry. 

Most of the designs are available in 5 different colours: classic black, moka, silver, gold and shiny purple. Furthermore, two bracelets can be attached to each other to form a choker.

Although they’re a French company I couldn’t discover any European sites that sell them. I did though find a US store that does called Brooklyn5and10. There all the necklaces cost $34.95 and the bracelets $19.95. Sadly they only deliver to the US (shipping is about $10), so I’ll have to wait till I find a store here.

Check out the Batucada website for more cool designs.

For the past five years, I’ve always owned at least one pair of black knee-high high-heeled boots, which act as my main every day shoes. I’m very picky concerning my boots and each of my past pairs have to be exactly as I want them. They have to be black leather; no buckles, laces or other extra stuff on it; preferably a zipper on the side; rounded nose; high heel, but no stilettos, then again also not too big and lumpy; not too wide; and, most importantly comfortable (if I’m going to walk around all them, they better not only be pretty). Add to that the fact that my feet aren’t the same size and it’s pretty difficult to find a pair of great boots.

So I know all about the woes and troubles of finding shoes that fit and that’s why I like Duo Boots. While not perfect for me (they don’t sell different feet size shoes), they do sell boots where you can specify your calf size and shoes where you can specify your foot width. I know a lot of people who would love this service and it makes sense. It’s all about supplying shoes that fit a person exactly, instead of settling with something that kind of fits. 

It helps that the shoes are also gorgeous. As I said before, I’m most of the time pretty picky, but here there a couple of boots I fallen straight away in love with. They’re a bit on the pricy side, but then you’ll get a pair of boots that fit perfectly on you. For me, that extra cost is completely justified if that means more comfort and less pain. 

Duo Boots are based in the UK with stores in Bath, London, Edinburgh and Manchester and there’s also one European store in Amsterdam. They also have an online store and (if you have a credit card) will ship all over the world.