Beauty inventory 2012: a beauty year in review (Tag)

Recently, I stumbled upon an interesting tag on reviewing the past beauty year: the beauty inventory tag created by Paddy, Jettie and Valerie. Spontaneously, I decided to do this tag as well, because I enjoyed cosmetics and beauty a lot last year. Another name for 2012 would certainly be the beauty year of my life, because I never ever purchased so many cosmetics items (and also not that expensive ones) like last year.

In 2012, I bought a lot of cosmetics items, experimented a lot with colours, my eyebrow shape and anything related to beauty. Amongst others, nearly my whole makeup brush collection has been bought in 2012. In 2011 I only owned very few travel makeup brushes by MAC which I never used. In 2012 I bought a lot of high end brushes - I ended up with quite some collection of MAC brushes. However, I also bought a lot of other brushes. See my favorite new brushes below - this is just a small fraction of the amount of brushes I bought. Furthermore, I used skin care nearly every day (eye care, face care, body care, everything :-)) and discovered that skin care can do wonders to dry skin. I also wore makeup nearly every day (a complete set of products including several eye shadows) and discovered looks that made me look great. I was able to use up a lot of products (see my empties posts) and I also was able to use and experiment with all of my decorative cosmetics items during the course of the last year. However, due to the large amount, some items have been used quite seldomly, unfortunately.

Of course I still do enjoy beauty and cosmetics and I won't stop experimenting in 2013. Nevertheless, I also try to cut down a bit the fraction of time, space and attention that I invest into beauty and cosmetics. Maybe I have got a bit tired of the huge amount of items I tried and used up. As I also found a lot of favorite products, I don't feel like missing out anything when I stick to them for the most part. In addition, I feel the need to shrink the amount of beauty products I own in order to be able to keep enjoying them. More specifically, I need to use up, declutter and to not buy that much cosmetics anymore.

But let's take a look at my review of the beauty year 2012 that just passed. Here are my answers to the beauty inventory tag (Amongst others, I removed a couple of questions that don't fit (e.g. the question about the craziest PR message and the question about the favorite event don't fit because I am not a professional beauty blogger and don't get any PR messages or invitations to events.):

Which new experiences and insights have you been able to acquire in 2012? (concerning cosmetics and concerning the blog)

• Cosmetics: I read about the season colour theory and realized that I am a summer in this colour theory and that this theory is particularly helpful and inspiring when aiming at shrinking a wardrobe and a beauty and makeup collection and it also helps to prevent mispurchases in these areas. Of course, it is just a theory and not each rule has to be followed religiously. Actually, none of the rules have to be followed. But in case you aim for an elegant and decent style that fits any occasion and a very small wardrobe and cosmetics collection, you should have a look at it because the principles are pretty convincing. They made me realize what I subconsciously knew before anyway. Most of my belongings did match my season colour theory type but I also had a couple of mispurchases. So, knowing what I should take care of is a great guideline for any decluttering endeavor and also helps to avoid mispurchases. Before that, I just had kind of a feeling and feelings sometimes are blurred or not trusted. ;-)
• Blog: I started my blog in 2012 and when I started blogging I blogged a lot about beauty. However, I soon realized that I don't want to be a typical beauty blogger. This would cause me to hoard products and to purchase a huge amount of cosmetics items on a regular basis while already owning a ton of them. I realized that I feel too much attracted to minimalism and for me a beauty blogger cannot be a minimalist - each new product has to be swatched and compared to other products and hence, they all have to be kept and organized. Afterwards I was in a bit of a dilemma because I don't want to skip beauty on my blog altogether either as I still do enjoy experimenting with cosmetics. It still is a nice and beloved hobby even though I don't want to spend to much time with it anymore. So, I might try to blog about minimalistic beauty in 2013. Let's see. :-)
  Another great insight I got with blogging is that I enjoy writing and sharing my thoughts with the online world very much. And I'm asking myself why I didn't start to blog years ago.

FlorAyer Day Face Cream Review

In my Pink Box June, there was a 7ml sample of the FlorAyer face cream. I finally found the time and space in my skin care agenda to test it more extensively and here is my review. It is a pretty expensive face cream (around 30 Euro for 50ml) but it is a wonderful face cream with a divine scent that smells in a very soft and sophisticated way like flowers with a slight dominance of roses. It is very nurturing, but not greasy and it feels wonderful on the skin. It is quickly absorbed and it also strengthens the skin from within in a great way. It is a day cream and in the FlorAyer series, there also is a night cream. 

Here is a picture of it:

Traveling Organization review

My holidays were great. It was sunny most of the time and everyone was in a good mood. Here is the view out of the window of our room in the hut:

Isn't this just wonderful? :-)

Here is a collage of 6 pictures I took in my holidays:

As you can see, it was a very relaxing holiday with a great landscape and a lot of nature - but not too far away from civilization. In the black forest there unfortunately is no space anymore where you don't have quick access to anything modern. I even had access to the internet there.