Chanel Les Beiges

I actually wasn't going to blog about this product - my sample was literally a tiny sample sachet that I picked up from DJ's. I'm not swinging past a department store that often these days, but I'd received an email about the sample just days before I was in the city.

I used to be the queen of collecting these kinds of things ... and also the queen of never ever using them (I was saving them all up for some kind of 'special occasion'). I'm now pretty focussed on using samples - and when I don't have something new to play with I have an impressive backlog in the bathroom cupboard ... :D

Les Beiges is Chanel's new 'Healthy Glow Foundation'. The lady at the Chanel counter picked out shade no 30 for me and this was actually a pretty good match. Les Beiges comes in 14 shades and I was very impressed that the woman who served me picked an appropriate shade very quickly. If I were to buy this - and I am very tempted to do so but $89 is quite a lot of money - I would spend a little time checking out a couple of the other shades although I do think I'd end up using no 30!

The fact that it is SPF 30+ is a good thing. I personally now probably wouldn't consider spending money on a foundation or moisturiser that didn't have some kind of protection. Like every Chanel product I've ever owned, the scent was lovely - very light floral, nice and sophisticated. This is something I really wish some of the cheaper brands would get their heads around!!!!

before

after

Performance wise I loved this. My one sachet I managed to eke out over multiple uses so the coverage was very light - which is what I like. I thought it did a great job of evening out my skin tone (see the photos) with a very natural look. Absolutely what I am after.

In a few spots it did 'catch' on patches of dehydrated skin. This seems to be a problem for me with pretty much every liquid foundation ever. However, it didn't settle in fine lines, it didn't settle in pores and it lasted well without tending to greasy or shiny patches (please bear in mind I do use very light coverage!).

Over the few days of using it, it caused me no skin problems at all.

Aside from that tiny bit of catching (which if you look hard enough in the photos you can spot!), I loved this and had a serious moment of considering buying it. We'll see what happens next time I need foundation ... but at present this is a serious front runner.

If you have tried this and committed to a full size purchase, please let me know your thoughts!

I've included this post in Ingrid's Monday round up of beauty posts.

February Feet

After a month of 'resting' my toe nails it was off to see Jess at Joop and pick out a new colour for February. I had decided on a bright pink but on flicking through the swatch of colours ended up choosing this: Red Baroness (CND's Vinylux again).

I don't think the photograph does this colour justice - it's a proper red with just a hint of sparkle to it.

The last lot of of polish wore so well - in the end I needed to take it off not because it was chipped but because my nails had grown enough for it to start to look a bit odd!

Looking forward to similar performance this time round!

Python - Initialising nested dictionaries

This is something I will never remember ...

In Python, if you're using a nested dictionary you need initialise the first dictionary before you can assign the second. If you think about it it makes sense, but if you're just writing code ... not so much.

You might be tempted to write:

myDict[someDict][0] = blah

as obviously that's a perfectly acceptable way of doing things. Sadly, that will throw a TypeError because myDict[someDict] is actually None. You haven't initialised it.

So what you need to do is:

myDict[someDict] = {}
myDict[someDict][0] = blah

As always, thank you to stackoverflow for fleshing out the deficiencies in Python's doco.