One of the biggest revelations for me from my recent sojourn to London was getting to try Top Shop’s range of makeup. One of my very first (in fact embarrassingly fast after we landed) trips was to the Top Shop flagship store on Oxford St, where I was, literally, like a kid in a candy store. The nail polishes are like yummy gum drops, the range of lipsticks is to die for, and they have all these cool lip markers and chubby lip and eye crayons in all sorts of amazing colours.

So I picked up quite a few pieces whilst I was there and then as soon as I got home I did some fancy rearranging and muscled them into my kit, and now with summer shoots coming up, they are doing me proud.

My absolute favourites are the nail polishes and the lipsticks. When I was in London I was on a job with a top manicurist – I won’t say their name as they have a contract with another company, but they were raving about the staying power and the colour selection of the Top Shop polishes, comparable to some much more expensive brands on the market.

I snapped up the nail polish in Late Show, a bright purple which for some reason reminds me of Willy Wonka (don’t worry, that’s a good thing!) as it’s the exact shade of his jacket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

PS How crappy is that machine in the Willy Wonka YouTube clip? It looks like something that Sooty and Sweep might have put together. But I digress…

and Easy Breezy, the perfect turquoise robin’s egg blue which I pulled out recently to use on a Virgin Suicides shoot as it’s 70’s girlish innocence in a bottle. It’s the colour of the dance (if a 70’s high school prom could be a colour) from the Sofia Coppola film.  It also fits perfectly with the season’s blue obsession. It’s like a mintier version of Chanel’s Nouvelle Vague from a couple of season’s ago. Delish.

This season nail colours have all been a bit off, a slightly kitchsier, more interesting take on classics and these were no exception. I’ll be doing more Top Shop beauty reviews over the next few weeks as I’m yet to find a product from the range that I don’t like – and they’re a bargain as well. Top Shop, you can do no wrong!

 www.topshop.com