If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I host a yearly blogger sleepover in Glasgow for some of my blogging friends. This year, we returned to the luxurious Grand Central Hotel for food, pampering and lots of chat.
Joining me for my sleepover was Lori (Glasgow Beauty Blogger), Lynsay (Miss West End Girl), Ayden (Little Blog of Horrors) and Lisa & Sami from Beauty Aesthetic.
One of the main highlights of the night was that Benefit Cosmetics joined us to give us all one of their famous Brow Wax & Tints. My favourite Benebabe Emma from the House of Fraser Benefit Boutique in Glasgow spent a couple of hours with us and we had a lot of fun. Everyone was so pleased with their brows – look at our happy faces (first image from @hellorogue) posing with our Soap & Glory face masks on. No Clogs Allowed (£11.50 from Boots) is a clay mask that really heats up to deeply cleanse your pores – our skin felt so soft afterwards.
The other beauty treat we enjoyed was DIY gel nails with Sensationail’s Polish to Gel Transformer Starter Kit (£49.99 from Sensationail) and Brushworks’ manicure tools – we especially loved the exfoliating cuticle sticks (£2.49 from makeupbrushes.co.uk)! We all very kindly got all of these products from Sensationail and Brushworks to take home each too. The Sensationail kit is so handy – you can basically transform any of your favourite normal nail polishes into gel polishes that you can cure in their lamp, just by mixing your polish together with their clear magic polish. You get your favourite colour, plus all the shine and staying power of a gel polish.
The backdrop to everything was a stunning, very luxurious, snowy, 6ft Christmas tree from Treetopia – I’ll be featuring this more in a post tomorrow, but it was their Frozen Fir Flocked Artificial Tree (£358 from Treetopia). This tree looks amazing, but it covers everywhere in white dust when you are putting it together – I had to get housekeeping up to hoover before the girls arrived. You have to suffer for beauty sometimes though don’t you?!
Also to keep up entertained, Hobbycraft provided us with lots of crafty
supplies to make some Christmas tree baubles each. Stay tuned to my blog here tomorrow for a tutorial on how to make these baubles and a closer look at what they looked like on the tree.
All of this fun required lots of food and beverage fuel to keep us going. I put together a Pick ‘n’ Mix bar, Tyrrells sent us some of their new sweet and slightly ‘sparkling’ Bellini Cocktail Poshcorn, Butterkist sent us lots of their crunchy and classic Toffee Popcorn and the lovely Grand Central Hotel provided us with some delicious canapes – I could have eaten the breaded black pudding bonbons all night long.
Grand Central Hotel also kindly gave us some lovely Prosceco, but the alcoholic drink we were really wowed by was the amazing 6Somewhere French Cidre that we enjoyed. The Premium Sweet Normandie Cidre variety is my favourite and is just like drinking fresh sparkling apple juice. The cider is all natural and made only from cold-pressed apples in two cideries in Normandie, France. It’s completely delicious and definitely the nicest and most flavoursome cider i’ve ever tried.
We also had lots of delicious and healthy soft drinks (although I did squeeze some Diet Coke in there too). Naturelly Jelly Juice are a cross between a jelly and a juice in texture – very refreshing when cold. They are made from natural dietary fibre and fruit juice (there’s no gelatine in them so they are suitable for Vegetarians), but what’s especially great is that they are all natural and contain no nasties or articifical ingredients.
Other fruity drinks we enjoyed were Rejuvenation Water and Virtue Energy Water. Virtue Energy Waters are natural energy drinks (these definitely helped us when we were flagging at the end of the night). They taste like sparkling water with a slight hint of fruit. Each can contains the same amount of caffiene as a cup of coffee, but all from natural sources such as Guarana and Ginseng. There is also zero calories, zero sugar and no sweeteners. So much nicer and healthier than a can of Red Bull!
Rejuvenation Water are also an amazing healthy drink that won a 2016 Great Taste Award. These fruity waters are Derbyshire spring water enriched with Amino Acids (the building blocks of protein) and mixed with natural fruit juice. They contain no added sugar. The flavours are really interesting, but Apple & Mint was our favourite – so refreshing and cooling.
Finally, we also enjoyed the fantastic creation that is Botonique. This delicate, sparkling drink was created by a wine merchant who wanted something non-alcoholic, sophisticated and crisp to drink in-between glasses of wine to slow their alcohol comsumption down. It is botantically-flavoured and tastes really complex. Better still, it’s also packed with vitamins and nutrients which are depleted by drinking alcohol. Such a great idea!
We all had such a great time and it was a perfect start to the festive season! We went to bed happy, full and clean, thanks to the Bee Good Clean Sweep Christmas Gift Set (£11.50 from Bee Good) left by each bed. The Honey & Wild Water Mint 3-in-1 Cleansing Water was perfect for tired and slightly tipsy girls to check that they had removed all traces of face mask with.
Nearly everything at the sleepover was sponsored and not paid for by us, but all opinions are my own.
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