Happy hump day, fellow beautyholics! Hope you’ve had a good start to the week.

Today I thought I’d do a bit of a Q&A on FAQ about products received for editorial consideration. You’ll notice that when I review products that were sent to me for review, there’s a disclosure at the bottom of the post that the product was sent for editorial consideration. Brands are approaching more and more bloggers these days to spread the word about their product because they realise the amount of influence bloggers have over these brands’ potential customers. Goodness knows how much makeup I’ve purchased that were enabled by other beauty bloggers. 😛

As bloggers learn to work with brands, it’s inevitable that there’ll be questions on how to go about doing it. These are some of the questions I’ve received over the years and I thought I’d share my answers with you today. If you’re not a blogger, it might be interesting to see what goes behind the scenes of reviewing that product that we didn’t buy ourselves. Are the reviews still trustworthy? Read on and find out!

By the way, the reason this post comes in 2 parts is because when I finished writing it, it came up to well over 2000 words! That’s a lot of words to digest in just one post so I’ve decided to post the first 5 Q&As today and publish the rest next week. I’d rather not subject you to an essay today. 😛

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The ubiquitous brown bottle from Estee Lauder has always been a firm favourite of mine. I’ve been using the original formula on and off for over 10 years now and it’s always given my skin good results. The only reason I move away from it is to try other serums in the market; I wouldn’t even leave it if I don’t have to. It’s one of the few serums I recommend to anyone looking for a good one.

When Estee Lauder reformulated their classic brown bottle serum to the Advanced Night Repair Synchronised Recovery Complex II, I was very interested in finding out how it works and if it really was better than the original formula. Now, I have to say that in my quest for better serums, I haven’t used the original formula for almost a year now so I cannot thoroughly compare the version 2.0 side by side in terms of the texture, scent and so on. But I do remember the results of the original formula so on that note, I can do.

When I was packing for my 5-week holiday, I knew that I couldn’t just rely on sample sachets of different types and brands of serums. I needed my skin to at least look presentable for 2 weddings so I decided to bring the full-sized bottle of the ANR 2.0 (I’ll call it this from now on. The full name is such a mouthful!). It was the heaviest beauty product in my skincare bag but I didn’t care. I just told myself that if I wanted good skin, I had to suck it up. 😛

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I first saw the AVON Mega Effects Mascara on Pixiwoo and I thought what the heck was that thing Nic just poked her eyelashes with?! That’s a …what? A mascara??

A few weeks later, whaddyaknow. The good people at AVON kindly sent me that funny-looking mascara to try out. I received it on the day before I left for my holiday so needless to say, I popped it in my makeup bag as well. 😛

I have to say, this is the strangest mascara I’ve ever seen. I’ve never used a mascara that doesn’t come in a wand and this certainly is an interesting one. So what you do is you remove the red cap, hold on to the groove-y red pad (oh you know I have to say it!) and gentle pull it out. I find mine quite difficult to yank out as it’s quite tight so I had to slowly pull it out lest I damage the handle and leave part of the mascara brush in there. The brush doesn’t come in a, well, brush but in short rubbery britles like a comb.

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