Welcome to this month's set of bandwagons I've been jumping on; it's time for a monthly favourites. Being back to school I've bought myself a treat or two when it comes to the beauty section and although there's now a large hole in my purse, there is no longer a hole in my heart.

I've been reading reviews upon reviews to find the best highlighter on the market (and in my price range) so this month I have included two highlighters.

First of the highlighters is the Mary Lou Manizer highlighter from The Balm Cosmetics.

Debenhams- £15.75

 I've heard so many good reviews for this product from both my friends and from other bloggers so I decided to give it a try.

This highlighter offers quite a subtle glow to wherever you apply it which makes it a really good everyday highlight. Something I would say about this product is that you need to have quite a lot on to notice a difference in your skin as it isn't particularly pigmented.

This highlight has very cool undertones and is definitely a lot more white when compared to other highlighters on the market such as the MAC Soft and Gentle highlight as this has more pink undertones.

The colour of this product is so beautiful and is a white/gold shimmer which when caught in the sun is so pretty.



The second highlighter in my favourites is the Sleek Highlighting Palette in 'Solstice' which contains 4 separate highlight colours in a handy palette.

Boots £9.99 Top Left-Ecliptic Top Right-Hemisphere Bottom Left-Subsolar Bottom Right-Equinox

[From Top to Bottom] Equinox Subsolar Hemisphere Ecliptic

It's Surprising for a budget highlighter but I have to say that this is undoubtedly the best highlighter I have ever used and yes, that includes being better than the Mary Lou Manizer mentioned above. Every single one of these shades offers amazing pigmentation so you barely need any product to create an amazing shimmer.

There are 3 different types of highlight in this palette- The shade Ecliptic is a cream formula which has purple undertones in when applied to the skin. There are two baked powders which are the two metallic shades- Hemisphere and Equinox and there is also one silky shimmer powder- subsolar.

If I had to find a flaw in this product it is that the palette is slightly too small, especially when using a highlighting brush because the two baked powders can very easily mix with each other when you're trying to use one of the shades.



My third favourite of this month is a massive bandwagon that everybody seems to be jumping on- the Too Faced Better Than Sex mascara.

£17.10- Debenhams

Yesterday was the day I've been waiting for since I sat down and took my first French exam 100 days before. Results Day.

My school opened at 8AM for us to go and collect our results although I was awake and nervous several hours before, as I walked in I met up with a few of my friends who had massive grins on their faces as they had done really well and I was so happy for them because they've all worked so hard for the grades they achieved.

I was given the dreaded brown envelope which contained months of hard work, sweat and most definitely tears. I was almost sure that I'd failed three subjects: English Literature, General Studies and French but when I opened my envelope and looked at my results I was over the moon to see that I'd passed everything. My results were as follows:
 When I opened my results I was so pleased with the grades, my mock grades gave me the final push I needed to prove to myself and other people that I could do it. I've really struggled through a few subjects over the past 2 years of GCSE- Maths, Chemistry and English. Although I feel like I'm a lot better at Maths than I am English we've had 3 different teachers over the past 2 years and each of them have been as bad as each other. My friend and I tried our hardest to achieve an A in maths and I was completely overjoyed when both of us got it. Even though I got an A in both of my English exams I'm still more than happy that I never have to do it again, I'm one of those people who enjoys learning facts and being able to apply these facts to my exams. In English however there's barely any facts to learn you just have to be able to explore your own thoughts and feeling toward the question that is being asked and as somebody who isn't very creative this isn't something that I do particularly well. I've struggled with Chemistry for the past 2 years and I had a breakdown on the first week of year 10 because I didn't understand a thing the teacher was talking about. I dreaded going to every single lesson, the lessons were boring and the teacher just confused me but one of my friends gave me a pep talk before the exam. She told me that if I didn't understand Chemistry from the start of year 10 I was never going to understand it so I should stop trying to understand it and just learn the facts which sounds as though she was telling me to give up but she wasn't. I took her advice and just learned the facts, I read the revision guide again and again until I'd learnt the facts, I didn't understand why any of these reactions were happening but I knew that they just happened. This helped me get through my exam because I stopped stressing about why things happened and I had to understand that as I far as I was concerned they just happened for no reason.

5 TIPS TO ALL YEAR 11'S:
I thought I'd mention 5 important things that I learnt in year 11 that I feel like everybody should know.

1. REVISE EARLY.
I'm one of those people who likes to revise everything and go through my revision guide from page to page. Even if I think I know the topic I'll still go over it again just in case there is any extra information that I could remember that could give me some extra marks. I started revising after February half term for my exams in May and even so I don't think this was early enough. By the time I got to my last few exams I felt completely unprepared compared to the first couple so I'd say you need to structure your revision to make sure you cover all of your subjects even if you think the exam is really far away and you don't need to revise yet. You do.

2. DO NOT RELY ON YOUR COURSEWORK.
I went into every exam thinking that even if I failed I still had the coursework I'd done to fall back on and it could bring my grade up. Don't do this. My advise is go into your exam thinking that your coursework is a grade C or D and that you need to get an A* in your exam to help bring up your grade. In my Health and Social coursework I was told that my coursework was an A* and it turned out to be a B when it was sent off which goes to show that if I'd taken it easy in the exam and not put 100% effort in then my grade wouldn't have turned out the way I wanted it to.

3. LISTEN IN YOUR LESSONS.
As much as I enjoyed sitting next to my friends in my lessons I know that I would have achieved much better grades if I concentrated a lot more and kept the gossip to the corridors at break and lunch time. I know that some lessons are tedious and it's so easy to get distracted and start talking to your friends about the latest episode of 'Pretty Little Liars' but in the long run if you don't get the grades you want then you're going to regret not listening to your teacher when she was teaching you how to do the question that comes up in your exam every single year and those were the marks you needed to bring your exam from a fail to a pass.

4. KEEP YOUR FRIENDS.
I find that the most important thing at school is your friends, as stressed as you are and as much as you bite at them when they do something that annoys you, you need to know that you wouldn't be able to get through your exams without them. You have to remember that they are also taking the same exams as you and they're probably just as stressed as you are- even if they don't show it. You need to appreciate you friends during exam season and you need to let them know that you appreciate them before it's too late and you've lost them. I honestly couldn't have got through my exams without my friends and our Starbucks dates on the weekends for a few hours while we tried and forget about exams.

5. HAVE TIME TO RELAX.
Revising none stop is a really unhealthy thing to do throughout exams and no matter how stressed you are about needing to learn everything on the syllabus you also need to de-stress and do something you enjoy. My main piece of advice here is you set yourself time to revise every night, for example revise from when you get home from school until 6:30PM and then run a bath or do a hobby such as going for a swim or watching your favourite TV series to get your mind off revision because it's going to be impossible to remember 5 or 6 pages worth of stuff every night and you're going to make yourself ill. Learning facts is ten times easier to do when you have an open mind and you're not stressed.

To any other GCSE students reading this- I hope you are really happy with your results and good luck in the future :)

It's that time of the year again where we hang up the bikinis and swimsuits and get out the jumpers as it veers towards winter once again.

I'm heading into sixth form this year and although I am nervous I also have to say that I'm really excited to start studying the subjects that I want to study rather than sitting in an English lesson bored out of my mind studying Shakespeare. This year I'm taking Biology, Psychology, Geography and PE. At my school we're advised to take either 4 or 5 subjects, one of which we are able to drop at the end of year 12 so we only end up with 3 or 4 subjects going into year 13. Three out of the four subjects that I'm taking next year I have already done at GCSE so I know that I enjoy these subjects. Psychology however, I've never done before so I'm excited to start learning a new course yet also worried that I'm not going to like it as I've never covered or even looked at any of the syllabus before.

What I do enjoy about going back to school is back to school shopping and because I'm now going into sixth form the ragged uniform has been abolished and now we're able to wear what we want- within reason. I also love stationary shopping and the prospect of new pens and paper really excites me and every year I have the new school year resolution where I attempt to make all of my books and folders as neat as possible although this rarely ever happens.

Without further ado I'll get on with what I've bought for this coming school year.

 I have to say that I have a soft spot in my heart for new pens and no matter how many of the beautiful Stabilo pens I have sitting on my desk I had to try and reason with myself that I do, in fact, need more. The Helix pencils in the top left hand corner were £1.50 from Wilkinson's for a pack of 12 and I have to say that these are very good quality pencils. Helix is probably most well know for the math sets which I had throughout secondary and I no longer need as I haven't taken maths for A-level but I wanted to see if the pencils matched the quality of the maths set which I'm sure they will. I also bought some stabilo highlighters (top right) which were £2.69 from Staples and I thought these would be really handy for highlighting worksheets as this makes it easier to understand information. I also like these highlighters because they're nice and thin which makes it easy to slip into my pencil case and they wont take up too much room.
The Stabilo fine liners in the middle are undoubtedly my favourite back to school purchase, I was going to buy the 30 pack from amazon for around £12 but this 20 pack was in Wilkinson's for £5 which I think is such a good deal considering they're usually a lot more expensive in other high street stores. The BIC ball point pens were also from Wilkinson's and these we're £1.50- the same price as the Helix pencils and these are my favourite pens, they last for so long and they're such good writers. The BIC coloured pencils are from Ryman Stationary and they were £3.99. I thought these would be really good for Geography and also for making some good revision notes when exam season starts again.

I tend to go crazy in the accessory section of the back to school part of the shop as I realistically have about 30 rubbers sat in the bottom of my desk but here I am again buying a new one to start the new year. The ruler was 79p from Ryman Stationary, the pritt stick was £2.29, again from Ryman Stationary. Everything else here was from Wilkinson's- Own brand sharpener- 35p, Helix rubber- 50p, Pencil case- £1.20, Stapler- 75p and the staples were 50p for 2500.

Overall I'm impressed with the price and quality of everything that I bought and I'm looking forward to starting the new school year and I hope anybody reading this is also excited if you're also starting back.

Hi Guys,
It's been a while since I've uploaded a blog post and I just wanted to post a little something to show everyone that I'm still alive!

On June 24th 2015 after a whole school day of exams I ran out of school to the car which was parked around 1/4 of a mile away where my Mum was picking me up so I could get the train from the city centre around 3 miles away. School finished at 3:10 and the train was leaving at 3:38. Risky I know. There was no time for error, I was scared about traffic and anything that could possibly stop us from getting to the station on time but that was what made it even more exciting, The risk factor. I quickly got changed in the car trying to hide so nobody could see me from the outside and panicked.
"Mum! Where are my shoes?" I practically shouted.
"They're in the boot, I'm not having glitter all over my car." I breathed a sigh of relief, hopefully nothing was going to go wrong, this was a day I'd planned for ages.
The only thing that had gone wrong so far was my Sister saying that she had ordered a tutu for me but two days before the concert she told me that she may have accidentally forgot to click 'buy'. I made her go into town to buy one from the only costume shop in the city which was £6.01 more expensive than if she had ordered it but whatever, Taylor Swift is totally worth it.

The train arrived on time and my sister and I stepped on going to find our reserved seats that somebody was sitting in... The volunteered to move which made me feel a lot calmer as I didn't want to make a fuss.
And that's where the fun began. We had 3 hours on the train and not much to do.
After doing me make up I realised that I needed to write lyrics on my own- The traditional Taylor Swift thing to do and without a picture I had to trust my sister to do it properly. She didn't. And there was no hot water on the train to get it off so I have to make do with cold water and soap which didn't work very well but it didn't really matter because we had planned to get some food from McDonald's before we went to the concert and I was sure that they would have hot water in the toilets.

The train came to a halt earlier than I had thought so I had to cram everything into my bag and run off. Then we had a problem. From a small city that I lived in to Manchester with crowds. We got lost... More than once.

We finally found the shopping centre with the McDonald's in and straight away we went to the toilets to try and get the lyrics off my arms which worked (yay!) and then went to stand in the queue for McDonald's where my sister tried to put the lyrics back onto my arms after showing her a photo which allowed her do it properly this time.

Walking out briskly with my 3 chicken selects I gasped, looked at my sister and said "Where is my wristband?" This was a big deal, when you plan something for ages you don't want anything to go wrong you start to panic when something that doesn't really matter happens.
"I think it's in the toilets" I said, so back we went.
Usually my sister would have just told me to get on with it and stop being so stupid because it's only a wristband but she knew how much this day meant to me so we went back to the toilets were cleaning signs and a barrier had been set up to stop people going past a certain point. I went through anyway. No wristband in sight so I came to the conclusion that someone else who was going to the concert must have taken it so we walked out. As we were walking out we came across a trolley with cleaning things on and I thought that the cleaner may have packed it up but it wasn't on there either. As I was looking on the trolley a women with a cleaning uniform came out of a room and I asked her if she had picked it up.
"Yes!" She said which was like music to my ears.
"It was left in the sink so I picked it up" She said as she went back into the room and picked it up from a shelf.

Wristband back on my wrist we made our way (again) to the concert venue- Manchester Arena. After getting lost many time and trying to follow other people who it turns out weren't going to the same place as us so we looked at a map and a guide who was hanging around must have seen us looking confused and pointed us in the right direction of the Arena.

We finally found the Arena and after standing in the queue for a little while we were let in. It was hectic in the Arena but luckily I knew which merch I wanted and went to the merch stand in the entrance who were selling the tour books. I bought a book and straight away we went to the proper merch stand. We waited in the queue for around 15 minutes and finally my turn was there. I asked for what I wanted and was greeted with "Sorry we don't have it in that size but if you go to the stand down there they might have it in your size".

I sighed. My sister and I walked to the next stand where I couldn't be bothered to stand for ages so I kept trying to push my way through as soon as somebody came out and I was only there for around 5 minutes and I got the top I wanted while my sister went to get some drinks for us.

We arrived at where we were supposed to be sitting and put on the light up wristbands, took a few selfies and waited for the show to begin.

Vance Joy Started to show off with his songs, warming the crowd up for Taylor Swift. After playing his last song the crowd got excited and then the real show began!

My costume for the tour

Living at the top of England means barely even seeing the capitol of my own country which can only mean one thing... Being a tourist in my own country!!

Getting dropped off at the train station at 8:10 A.M on a Tuesday morning nearly killed me in itself but then having to wait an hour for the train with nowhere to sit down definitely killed me. Finally, 4 and a half hours later we arrived at kings cross station, London.

The main difference between London and up here is the speed of everyone walking, jeez, I don't understand why people walk so fast when there is going to be another tube along in 2 minutes. Being on the topic of tubes, there is nothing I hate more than lots of people in one place and over average temperatures of which the underground is both of them so it's definitely not for me. Having said that , it is the most efficient way to get around London and for that reason I did use the underground system.

Day One:
I didn't take any photos this day because we weren't really doing much, we arrived at about 1:30, got something to eat, and then just strolled down Oxford street and booked a show.

Day 2:
We went to see 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' at the 'Theatre Royal' on Drury lane which was INSANE!! First off, the actual theatre was so beautiful, I'm not one for design but the architecture of this building was incomparable to anything I've ever seen the only dates I know about this theatre is that it was built in 1674, obviously it's had a bit of work done but the actual building still stands strong. Next off, The show. I haven't much to say about this, I was left pretty much speechless at the time. When I first heard we were going to see 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was a little hesitant and sceptical as to whether or not this would actually be any good considering 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' is a children's' film but all of my doubts were cleared the very second the first character stepped foot on the stage (which was the chocolate seller). I 100% recommend going to see a show, I've heard great things about others too, it was well worth the £70(ish) ticket price for the 3 hour show.

10 P.M outside 'Theatre Royal' Drury Lane

Day 3:
FULL ON TOURIST DAY!!! (yay)
After having breakfast in our hotel, we wandered into the heart of London, caught an open topped tourist but and spent 4 hours on there (oops). The route was supposed to be finished and done within 2.5 hours but due to it being around lunchtime and the height of the summer holidays, London traffic was hectic as ever, not that I minded, at least we weren't underground plus, this gave me time to get some snaps of the most touristy part of London.




Later on we went down bond street to have a look at what we couldn't (and still can't) afford I nearly dragged my parents into Victoria's Secret to have a look at Taylor Swift's performance dress which she wore for the 2013 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show but considering I had my dad there, I didn't think that was appropriate. While walking down bond street we saw multiple staff members standing outside their shop doors giving free samples of their products to passers by. They must have a knack of knowing who is and isn't a resident of London and who is there just to see how expensive things are. They obviously knew we were just there for a look (no matter how hard I tried to look professional) and hid the products as soon as we were close (the cheek).

Day 4:
This was our final day in London and we were catching the train home at 11:00 A.M. We went to have a look at the Cutty Sark as this was close to the hotel and then happened due to my directions to look in King's Cross St Pancras station for platform 9 and three quarters as I've been a big Harry Potter fan since about the age of 7 (I remember playing Harry Potter with my sister in the school holidays- Using necklaces as time turners)

Unfortunately, due to time restrictions and queues we couldn't get a photo with the trolley going into the wall but I thought this snap was good enough to prove I've been

Overall, my short London trip getaway was so good, and I'll probably go again in a few years (after I've recovered from the heat of the underground)

Recently after trying pretty much everything to try and limit/cancel out the number of spots on my face I came across this simple 'Spotless Skin anti-blemish moisturiser' which was supposed to maintain the moisture levels throughout the day whilst reducing the number of spots. I have to say that this product is so good! It doesn't reduce the number of spots it just helps to prevent them. But for the blemishes... My problem isn't the fact that I have way too many spots; my problem is the amount of space that each spot takes up on the skin. This has improved my skin massively, the spots aren't as visible as they were and the redness around each spot has reduced.

Yes, Yes that is Harry Potter in the background...

This product is so light on the skin and absorbs really fast so your skin doesn't feel greasy. Also the product is really easy to apply and is smooth, it's probably the best facial moisturiser that I've ever had.
I went into Superdrug with the intention to get this and I was really surprised at the price; costing only £4.99 I was sure to get it. Afterwards we went into bodycare as I needed some new shampoo and conditioner and something caught my eye... It was this exact same product but guess what?! IT WAS ONLY £2.29. Even though I spent £2.70 more at least I know where to get it from next time!

Very recently I was lucky enough to win a giveaway (woo yeah!!). As there were not very many entries, I had a good chance of winning but I wasn't that hopeful as I have never really won anything before. It was also quite confusing as instagram giveaways are real and not just a stunt to try and get followers. Being a fan of Taylor Swift this was an amazing thing to win and the giveaway host also put some extra 'bath and body works' things in the box too. As the giveaway was being sent form America and I live in the UK I thought that it would take around 2-3 weeks to be delivered; 10 days later my package had arrived and I was over the moon! I was also really surprised at the delivery price (in a bad way...) the prive was $35.25 just to send it to the UK. I was really happy with the whole contents of the package and as there was nothing...explosive...in the package I am be willing to enter lots more.

As there isn't any bath and body works shops in the UK, the host of the giveaway was willing to send me some little bottles of some of their products. The candle is marshmallow and peppermint and smells AMAZING!! I much prefer hand sanitisers to hand creams as they don't tend to get greasy and your skin absorbs them straight away.

Unfortunately this t-shirt is a size large so I can't wear it in the day time but it make great pyjamas!!

This was originally the tag form the bag but I though it'd look cute on my wall

This was put on my wall too, It was the card from the host and I think the quote is super cute