Secrets of a Beauty Junkie.............

‘Beauty comes from the heart – not a jar’ – Lulu Gunniness.

Hidden in every girls bedroom, bedroom and (in my case) it even over spills inot the kitchen are our little secrets. We all have them, those tiny essential (often with huge price tags) that make us look and feel like super models, or, on a Monday morning just human is good enough! Yep, our product addiction is ever growing. From oils to crèmes and lotions to gels we want and need it all. Yep ladies we have a hidden product junkie lurking inside of us. With boxes overflowing with guilty treats we have worked hard for such as St Tropez, Space NK, Jo Malone, Nars, Clarins. Elemis, Bumble&Bumble, Percy&Reed and Kiehls, it is hard to imagine a morning routine without them. Lotions to make our skin smoother, potions to make our skin firmer, oils to make us look younger and fillers to make our wrinkles disappear. Products to make our skin glow, make up to make our skin flawless and hair products to make our hair bigger and glossier.

As little girls we are surrounded by Barbie, Girls Worlds and Fashion Wheel (who remembers that?!) These play ground toys set us up on the life long road to beauty product heaven. In a far gone time where we gave our Tiny Tears a felt tip, hot pink, lip colouring, Barbie a DIY hair cut with mum’s kitchen scissors and applied Tinkerbell make up to our five year old skin, we began to learn the beauty skills many of us still use today. Heading in to our teenage years, part time jobs funded our obsession further with Collection 2000 and Spectacular make up in acid colours, bottles of Impluse by the dozen and magazines. Lots and lots of magazines. Sugar, Shout, Bliss, J17, basically any magazine that had a freebie was desperately sort after. It didn’t matter what it was, all we know was that we needed it! Hair products, make up, moisturisers we wanted them all. In the days before full time jobs, forty plus hour weeks and the adult world it was our only window into adulthood and the treats one day we would buy ourselves.

My earliest memories of a beauty routine was being 5 years old and the mothership putting Oil of Ulay (as it was called then) on my face because my skin looked dry. But it was the euphoric high of owning my first jar of Nivea, not long after that, that started my lifelong addition with beauty products. Even now the lemony, fresh smell of Nivea transports me back to being a child feeling very grown up to be applying face crème and seeing the instant greasy glow appearing. Twenty five years later and not much has changed, except Nivea has been replaced with Kiehls and thick crème has been replaced by complex oils that we are assured by marketing gurus are infused with all sorts of amazing miracle products that WILL make us look ten years younger. But wasn’t has changed is that delightful sense of anticipation and split second of wild belief that this product will change your life. Or at least make you look like a super model for the day. And that’s the real beauty of beauty products. It’s the memories that they create. It’s the Jo Malone body scrub scent that reminds you of a first date, the heavy musk of Estee Lauder perfume that reminds you of your mum putting it on in the car whilst driving you to school and the Toni&Guy hairspray that fills the room before your girly night out. The life long memories no photo could possibly catch but truly make your world a more beautiful place xX

Secrets of a Beauty Junkie.............

‘Beauty comes from the heart – not a jar’ – Lulu Gunniness.

Hidden in every girls bedroom, bedroom and (in my case) it even over spills inot the kitchen are our little secrets. We all have them, those tiny essential (often with huge price tags) that make us look and feel like super models, or, on a Monday morning just human is good enough! Yep, our product addiction is ever growing. From oils to crèmes and lotions to gels we want and need it all. Yep ladies we have a hidden product junkie lurking inside of us. With boxes overflowing with guilty treats we have worked hard for such as St Tropez, Space NK, Jo Malone, Nars, Clarins. Elemis, Bumble&Bumble, Percy&Reed and Kiehls, it is hard to imagine a morning routine without them. Lotions to make our skin smoother, potions to make our skin firmer, oils to make us look younger and fillers to make our wrinkles disappear. Products to make our skin glow, make up to make our skin flawless and hair products to make our hair bigger and glossier.

As little girls we are surrounded by Barbie, Girls Worlds and Fashion Wheel (who remembers that?!) These play ground toys set us up on the life long road to beauty product heaven. In a far gone time where we gave our Tiny Tears a felt tip, hot pink, lip colouring, Barbie a DIY hair cut with mum’s kitchen scissors and applied Tinkerbell make up to our five year old skin, we began to learn the beauty skills many of us still use today. Heading in to our teenage years, part time jobs funded our obsession further with Collection 2000 and Spectacular make up in acid colours, bottles of Impluse by the dozen and magazines. Lots and lots of magazines. Sugar, Shout, Bliss, J17, basically any magazine that had a freebie was desperately sort after. It didn’t matter what it was, all we know was that we needed it! Hair products, make up, moisturisers we wanted them all. In the days before full time jobs, forty plus hour weeks and the adult world it was our only window into adulthood and the treats one day we would buy ourselves.

My earliest memories of a beauty routine was being 5 years old and the mothership putting Oil of Ulay (as it was called then) on my face because my skin looked dry. But it was the euphoric high of owning my first jar of Nivea, not long after that, that started my lifelong addition with beauty products. Even now the lemony, fresh smell of Nivea transports me back to being a child feeling very grown up to be applying face crème and seeing the instant greasy glow appearing. Twenty five years later and not much has changed, except Nivea has been replaced with Kiehls and thick crème has been replaced by complex oils that we are assured by marketing gurus are infused with all sorts of amazing miracle products that WILL make us look ten years younger. But wasn’t has changed is that delightful sense of anticipation and split second of wild belief that this product will change your life. Or at least make you look like a super model for the day. And that’s the real beauty of beauty products. It’s the memories that they create. It’s the Jo Malone body scrub scent that reminds you of a first date, the heavy musk of Estee Lauder perfume that reminds you of your mum putting it on in the car whilst driving you to school and the Toni&Guy hairspray that fills the room before your girly night out. The life long memories no photo could possibly catch but truly make your world a more beautiful place xX

Successful women can still have their feet on the ground. They just wear better shoes........ #iwd12

Dedication - For all the women, who went before us, to fight for our independence and freedom. Who enabled us to stop us being one dimensional, so we no longer had to define ourselves as just a wife or girlfriend. The women who enabled us to be free to vote, have an education and make as many choices as we wanted.

In the year 2012, we, as women are privileged enough to be able, should we want to of course, have it all. And that is the key phrase, if we want to. We can if we want, we can opt out if we want. The choices are endless and often totally overwhelming. Since our 1950’s sisters before us cut the apron strings off, dared to leave the family home and headed on the road of independence, high on the success of the women’s indispensable role played in the recently ended world wars, we have been faced with endless challenges, won many personal wars and done a man’s job, all in high heels.

.And what changes the world has seen in such a short time. It is almost irrelevant whether you love her or hate her, but the point is that Margret Thatcher was the first woman in power. The first woman to condemn, rule and command a male dominated world and, despite her many failings, she did it with a certain style and grace. She appeared at times, ruthless, cold and calculating but the UK’s first lady was never with a hair out of place, suit sharply cut and heels always high. Born into relative poverty in the sticks of Lincolnshire, she educated herself and got the hell outta there. Girl power was clearly alive and well years before the Spice Girls were ever even born! Not since Emily Pankhurst threw herself under a horse have we lived in an era where there are so many inspirational women.  Anita Ruddick, Marilyn Monroe, Cupcake Brown, Vivienne Westwood, Marie Curie, Nigella Lawson, the list is endless, non exhaustive and ever growing.

We are living in a society that is privileged enough to have such amazing female role models. No longer is a woman defined by her man and family. We work harder, often harder than our male counter parts, sadly even more often for less money. We put ourselves through an education to gain the jobs we want and fund the life style we crave. Long gone are the days of waiting for our husbands pay raise to buy us a new handbag, instead we put on our lipstick, put our shoulders back and  worked the extra hours to buy it ourselves.

As I wrote this blog I began to think about all the women who inspire me daily. My mum, my sisters, my friends and my colleagues who, despite their own journeys and challenges remain stylish, classy and dignified in all they do. These are the women who make me want to work harder, aim higher and walk taller. Who, by just in being in their presence I feel I could move a mountain and conquer the world. Looking around our own lives we are touched daily by so many inspirational women. I am never failed to see the brilliance of the women in my life and be humbled by their attitudes and ethics. All the mum’s who work so tirelessly to give their children everything they want them to have, often doing the enormous parenting task single handedly and the high flying carer girls who do amazing jobs that make a real difference every day. And the real life super women who do both (you know who you are!) The texts of support, the drunken mid night phone calls, shopping, lunching, crying and laughing, we go through it all together. Thank you all for being you, happy international women’s day you gorgeous lot! xX

L.O.V.E

 ‘Love is a word I don’t understand, the simplest sound, four letters.......’ Marlon Roudette

The longest word in the English language has 189,819 letters and is the chemical name for titin (the largest known protein). Love, on the other hand, is such a small word but yet has so many depths and meanings. It affects us all at points in our lives, it’s often the goal we grow up with, but can we truly define it? Can we capture it? Find the words for it? How can we sum up words for an emotion that has a strength that is so strong and over whelming?  Love has the power to build us and destroy. It has the power to let us go free and the power to trap us in. It can change us for the better and it can change us for the worse, it can consume us and it can frighten us. It can create an intimacy like no other and it can just go with no explanation. One day it’s there, the next it’s grabbed its walking boots and hit the high road. It’s the tears when the love has gone and the hurt when what you thought was real turned out to be a lie. It’s looking at a person you thought you knew only to see a total stranger looking back. At times you give everything and get nothing from love. It can be a cruel task master.

But how do we classify being in love? How do we know? Is it the depth of a conversation about the arts, laughing at films and feeling the excitement of a joint adventure? Knowing that your sharing something you are so passionate about with the person you care about can be an amazing experience. Letting someone in to the inner part of who you are and what makes you tick. It’s the crazy moment when you don’t know if you want to talk to that person all night or just kiss them. It’s wanting to hold that person so close and never let go. It’s wanting to crawl under that person’s skin and stay safe there forever. It’s your tummy flipping when that person says they miss you and knowing you would do anything to see that person smile.

Yet in all this emotion, we live in an age of social networking, where your relationship status is not official until you have updated your time line accordingly and the joined at the hip, loved up obligatory profile picture is firmly in place, you have to wonder, how much of this is for show? Does updating your status every hour with messages of love for your beloved or tweeting saccharin tweets whilst sat next to each other mean you are more in love than those who don’t? It always flickers through one’s mind that is this show for someone else’s attention. Can love be immortalised in the cyber world? Surely it is more than a quick tweet for the world to see? Love has to be more than this, more than romantic nights away in amazing hotels, meals in cordon bleu restaurants, flowers, wine and romantic words. Love is a doing word. It’s a text to ask if you got to work ok, its remembering the little insignificant things, it is loving every part of your relationship even the difficult parts and its laughing together. Its private, it’s just the two of you and it can never be repeated.

As I write this blog, I need to be honest. I have never been in love. The ideas I have discussed here are merely my thoughts, opinions and general meanderings of what I think love could and should be, some of which happens to be based on experience. I must thank all the people who have so generously shared their own personal experiences, answered my unending questions and given their time to explaining to me there deepest feelings.   All I am sure of in the very complex game of the heart is that the man I do eventually fall in love with will be so amazing he takes my breath away, he will let me run free, we will laugh, lots and if he also happened to look like David Beckham, well that would just be a lovely bonus! But most of all I believe love is hope. The belief that one day, the frog you kiss will turn into your prince charming and just maybe that will lead us to the road of love