Instep Desk

There are many of us who want to be updated with all the latest beauty trends and products because ultimately, we want to look good as well as buy all the beautiful shimmery goodness we can get our hands on. While there are some women who have mastered the art of makeup, such as buying the right shade of red and winging their eyeliner like a pro every time, there are others who just can’t keep up. Either we’re lazy, or broke, or clumsy or too busy to organize all our makeup products properly, meaning that there is a large window to get our makeup wrong. Luckily, some beauty brands understand that women like us also exist and they focus their energy on making products that will allow us to do our makeup professionally, at a low cost.

Vamp up your lip colour!

Winter is around the corner and it’s time to go darker but you’ve already maxxed out your credit on corals and nudes. Lucky for you, this magical lipstick topcoat by NYX can make any lip colour one shade darker. So your bright reds can become deep maroons and baby pinks can become glamorous mauves. You can make do with what you have by spending a fraction of what you would when buying brand new lipsticks.

Still making a mess of your eye makeup?

You don’t have a steady hand and your eyeliner never looks like the perfectly winged cat eye you see in pictures. Or your mascara and kajal always bleed, making you look like a ghoul from Sleepy Hollow even though Halloween wrapped up last weekend. There are too many of us who still make a mess of our makeup but the kind cosmetic developers have a solution! A clean-up pencil from Nudestix aims to erase all that mess. This is really handy for women who are still struggling like beginners. The crayon-like shape of the pencil makes it really easy to apply to the affected areas without having to clean your whole eye up. Best thing is, Nudestix doubles as concealer and you can even use it to hide your natural flaws.

Matte attack

If you’re anything like us, you probably love the word ‘matte’ just as much as we do, whether it’s on the nails or the lips. While OPI has mastered lacquers that can be applied as mattifying top coats (they are quite fantastic) we now have the same solution in lip colour. The Smashbox Insta Matte gel is a magical product that will give any lipstick a matte, velvety finish in just an instant. It doesn’t tamper with the original colour and it doesn’t even leave your lips dry and lip colour clumpy. What else could you ask for?

The clean-up sponge

This is perhaps our favourite product on the list because it makes your life so simple. Usually, when you’re working your eye into the perfect shimmery smolder, you have to constantly switch between brushes for different colours or the brush has to either be cleaned (if you’re the sort to not have enough brushes.) Sephora’s Colour Switch brush sponge helps in correcting this little inconvenience as all you have to do is swipe the brush across the sponge and it peels off every little bit of unwanted pigment on the brush.