I’m a master of delivering the oft-complicated story of why I’m late for things. It, like so many of my foibles, harks back to school days. Years of being a bit late to lessons and a lot late to hand in homework meant I spent a lot of time explaining things to people of authority. Admittedly, my tales weren’t always convincing, but they were – surprisingly – almost always true. I am genuinely the person whose dog didn’t eat but rather defecated on their homework. (The same dog also ate a string of my au pair’s artisan sausages that she’d lovingly brought back from Slovakia, but that’s a whole other story). I am also a woman who was once a full hour late for a date because a heel had snapped clean off, requiring me to make a last minute dash to Topshop. Things/life just seems to happen at me, and I am accordingly often just a touch (okay, sometimes a bloody lot) late.
This preamble is my way of justifying my absence. Regular readers will be used to my array of apologies and excuses, but I mean them in earnest – in my ideal life, I’d be time-rich, writing missiles here, then trotting off to my job as a Beauty Ed at InStyle (always 5 mins late and toting implausible but actually true reasons for being so, natch), then coming home with both time and vigour enough to walk beagle, watch Grace & Frankie, cook a nutritious meal and have a bath. But I’m not. And beags needs his walk. And work need their allotted hours. And I need time to decompress. And, as a result, I don’t get to come on here nearly as often as I’d like – which is especially annoying at the moment as I’m positively teeming with things to tell you. I’ll start here with a summary and prepare a bunch of posts for the coming weeks so as to atone //
Brown, Again / First things first: I tampered with my hair again. I’m quite unstoppably experimental, I know. This all happened as a result of my editor telling me how genius her colourist, Donald Black, was after I’d had a good grumble about how bored I was of my usual blonde ends. So I trotted to see him at Neville’s, told him I was thinking brown of the more ‘my natural hair, but not grey’ variety, and he obliged me. I’m pleased I did it. Though I don’t for one minute suspect I’ll stick to this forever, I feel at peace with being my natural colour for the first time as a grown up, which surely signals some deeper self-acceptance.
The £300 Hair Dryer / Yeh, £300. Mental, right? Or so I thought until Dyson sent me their Supersonic hair dryer to trial for a video I’m making. Now I have a full on obsession with the bloody thing. Which is unfortunate, because it costs the same as a weekend in Portugal. But if £300 isn’t that big a deal for you, or if you are just really into your hair, it’s jolly good. My reasoning here is a conflation of things I’ve been told (that it measures heat 20 times a second so hair will never burn, that over three years of research went into the design etc.), and also of sheer joy of use – it’s lightweight, the burden of bulk living in the handle so the head is easy to manoeuvre, and just damn clever – think magnetic attachments and an extra long power cord.
Events, People, Places / The good ol’ thing about being busy? When you look through your casual ‘out and about’ snaps on your phone, you realise you’ve actually done a hell of a lot. Recently, that included meeting the lovely Lisa Eldridge at a Lancome event, celebrating the success of Caroline Hirons’s Pixi collaboration with a dinner at the Ritz in very good company indeed (click here to see her vlog which includes the event), hanging out with Ella Eyre for the new podcast I’m hosting for InStyle (I’ll put details up on here when it’s live), staying at The Edition for a work event (the beds: UNREAL. I wanted to stay in it forever), and learning about bridal make-up with Bobbi Brown at Babington House (again: those beds. Christ).
Things I’ve Finished / I am ALWAYS more interested in products that are finished by my colleagues than those that have just been cracked open. For a Beauty Ed/Blogger to get to the end of a pot means really good things. So, three I’ve finished lately:
– Sisley Neck Cream / Seriously, seriously delicious stuff. Light, not gloopy, and a joy to smooth on. One pot in, and I’ve found treating my neck to some skincare has helped reduce those horizontal lines that were annoying me, as well as making my skin look creamier.
– St Tropez Bronzing Spray / Don’t bother with the sheet masks, which I think are a bit too much faff for a tan. Instead, grab this spray, whizz it over clean skin anywhere (including on your face), flap about for a few seconds as it dries, then carry on as normal. Expect a glowing – not tango – bronze shade to emerge after about two hours.
– Bourjois Colour Edition 24H in 7701 / Not finished, actually, but rather dried up to the extent where I have to now gouge at the colour to get any out. It seems to be sold out everywhere as I suspect it was a limited edition, so the closest similar one I can find is a shadow by the Estee Edit, which I’ve accordingly bought two of so that I don’t have to encounter similar tragedy in a couple of years.
Blue Eyeliner, Peel Off Products & Lip Masks / That headline is, my friends, just a teaser – I am now at the helm of the InStyle UK beauty pages, so if you simply miss these missiles and are curious about peel off products and lip masks and other bonkers beauty things, head over there for a chat – actually, make that quite literally: every Friday at 4pm, I go live on the InStyle UK Facebook page to talk through any beauty problems any readers may be having, and show all the newest and most exciting products from the cupboard. If you have any questions, you can fling them my way then, or, as per usual, you can drop me a line here or on insta etc…