‘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
No comments:
Post a Comment