Nails

Finally last night got round to sorting out my poor nails. Have a very serious casualty on my right hand having done a bit of hand to headboard combat changing the bed in Room 7 on Friday, its fair to describe it as a stub. So no choice had to be pale nail varnish, cant have vampy dark nails that are stubs unless you are actually a goth.

Actually am seriously into the very on trend pastel nail varnishes at the moment which is new for me, normally much prefer a darker polish.


This is a No. 17 nail varnish from their new Candy Collection, this one is Parma Violet and I love it!

Have gone over to the cheaper polishes recently after some real disappointments with more expensive stuff. Bought a gorgeous Bloom purple shimmer which applied like a dog - streaky, sloppy, just vile and it cost £8. Managed to get a reasonable coat on once and someone saw it and comment on how nice it was and then said "is it a Barry M?"!! Imagine my horror, Barry M - make-up for 12 year olds, I don't think so love. Then I got over being a complete nail varnish snob and had a look at the Barry M nail paints and was amazed - bought Racing Green - deep, sparkly Emerald, sparkling purple (much better than the Bloom equivalent) and one other that I cant remember and was instantly a convert - 3 polishes for £9! Went home and chucked the Bloom in the bin! Have since bought Barry M Raspberry, Mint Green, Turquoise and Cobalt Blue and love them all. Em is currently sporting a fab manicure of alternate nails done in Mint Green, Turquoise and the Parma Voilet as above, seriously on trend for Spring - will try and add a photo later!



Notice Em's hands not quite feeling the love. Those poor poor cuticles!

Decided to pull out all the stops and do a full manicure last night. So first cuticle removal, use Boots Expert cuticle removing cream, its nice and gritty and you can give your nails a good buff with it too before gently pushing back your cuticles with an orange stick. Good wash to get that off and then a slide round with a glass nail file, always glass never those nasty gritty disposable ones which just shred your nails - have a Ruby and Millie one and its the one nail product I think is worth paying for, flipping expensive at £13 but they last ages (provided lumox of a husband doesn't stand on the damn thing) and can be washed to keep them nice and hygienic! Such a fine finish they actually leave a gloss on your nail tips so you know it is helping to seal the layers, v important if like me your nails flake. I used a Nail Dr's base coat that acts as a ridge filler to hide the worst of the damage where my nails have flaked. The nail varnish is well pigmented so its opaque in two coats, but needs both to even out its slight streakiness. Then topped the whole lot off with a coat of Boots Expert Strengthener and ran a bit of Boots Expert nail and cuticle oil around the cuticles. All done!

I am a huge fan of the Boots Expert range, all the nail products I have used have been fab and are generally considerably cheaper than other similar products. I also keep a tube of the lip balm in my skin care bag and religiously apply a slap of that after toner and before serum and moisturiser - I give my lips a bit of a massage with it each morning, gets the blood flowing and seems to help plump them up a bit, never a bad thing!

And to finish a nail varnish top tip - if you do your mani in the evening and wake up to sheet prints on your nails dont panic! Whack on a quick coat of clear polish and wola glossy, smooth nails with no sheet marks!

Any nail top tips you want to share - god mad, knock yourselves out, its good to share!

Come home Steve...

I need to do my nails! A week of laundry, making beds, washing dishes and cleaning has really taken its toll and my nails haven't had nail varnish on them for a week, almost unheard of! Steve due back at 6pm this evening so I will hand him the iron and nip off to sort out my poor working hands and will follow up with a nail related post ............ watch this space!

In the mean time a quick snap of Em's body art (sounds so much more refined than "tat" don't you think?!) I'm 44, when I was 18 the only people with tattoo's were sailors, hookers and vile people. I reacted like a 44 year old mum when Em announced her intention to mutilate the body I have spent almost 18 years protecting, nourishing and loving. She reacted like a 17 year old. Bit of a Mexican stand off - isn't parenting teens one long game of brinkmanship? At least with teen sons its easy - threaten to tell them their birth story! Girls not so freaked by that.

I googled "what to do when your teenager wants a tattoo" (thank god and all that is holy for google!) The first piece of advice? "Don't say no". I was off to a flying start, dont you think! She was clearly googling "how to make my mum do what I want, all the time, with very little argument" or similar because we both sat down and had an adult discussion with some compromises. This is the result.


Of course I now have to confess to thinking it's rather cute! Oh and that's ink, not blood on her neck btw! I think.
Have a fab weekend x

Charles Worthington Dream Hair - on trial

Am usually a salon product only type of person when it comes to my hair. My hair is my crowning glory and where I let my control freak run wild. Getting my arse exercised into shape is waaay too much like hard work so my hair takes the brunt, most fat girls have great hair and nails - check next time you are shopping, the stuff that's easy to fix we fix, unless we are inherently lazy and then that's a different kind of fat. Whole other story.

So salon stuff all the way and had been using Paul Mitchell Super Skinny £10 ish for shampoo and £11 ish for conditioner. It was nice but a bit boring. On Sunday spent a little more than I had envisaged on make up (see UNE post!) so thought I should be a good girl and buy cheap hair stuff. Spent ages scanning all that Boots had to offer and having opened and sniffed so many bottles of shampoo was starting to develop holes in my septum I found the Charles Worthington Dream Hair stuff which quite frankly smells delish. I am Taurean. (hence being "well upholstered". Like a bull.) Taureans are sensuous types, we like taste, texture and smell a whole big lot (see Prada post!)

So I got the Charles Worthington Dream Hair Shampoo, Conditioner and Vitamin styling spray based purely on its smell. Decided there was no way I could post about this til I had used it for a week - you don't care how it smells, you want to know if it works, right? So this is a mid-test round up and so far I am thinking this stuff should come with a good hair day guarantee. Loving it.

Prada Infusion De Tubereus

Read about this online on Saturday and it sounded so lovely decided I had to try it on Sunday. The last time I read about a perfume and knew it would be perfect was Thierry Mugler's Alien - it was and I was obsessed with it for about a year and for me it will always remind me of our trip to Australia as I bought myself the shower gel and a replacement perfume in Dubai airport and every morning our bathroom smelt of Alien. It was the one perfume that I could guarantee that pretty much every time I wore it someone would comment on how lovely it was. I have the original Prada and I love it so I had a feeling that this would be a fave too.

Actually whilst typing this have just realised that the new Prada is similar in packaging in that Alien was in an Amethyst coloured glass bottle supposed to represent a precious stone and the perfume itself was lilac in colour, oh just noticed having uploaded the photo that this one is a lilac coloured perfume too! The packaging of the Infusion De Tubereus is right up my street - purple and Art Deco and utterly beautiful, you'd have to keep the box long after you had used the perfume!



Tell me that isn't beautiful?

As for the fragrance itself. It is divine. It is a floral but not a sweet cloying one, more oriental than sweet, when I was wearing it yesterday I was thinking it was a fat, voluptuous scent, which seemed strangely apt! The proper description, courtesy of boots.com is:

"An unexpected mix of Tuberose from India, Petitgrain Bigarade, Blood Orange from Italy and Dynamone combine to create Infusion de Tubéreuse, a delicate impression of this traditional scent. A playful tuberose mosaic inspired by an archive Prada print has taken over the presentation box, its charming naivety a reminder of the playfulness within. Instead of green, the leaves appear to have been dipped in a degradé mauve ink."

I loved how this smelt on me, the top notes were delicious - I could quite literally taste them in my mouth and then as the perfume dried down the smell was heady but not over bearing, the sort of thing that if someone walked past you wearing it you would follow them with your nose, actually quite a clean "powdery" without being old lady scent. Gad I am terrible at this aren't I - find it in Boots and give it a sniff! This is my latest "small object of desire". Something that I will lust after until I own it - which is very likely to be May 14th! God sometimes you just gotta love birthdays!!

UNE Make up

A new blog! About make up! Hardly high brow I know but so right up my street don't know why it has taken me this long!

Anyone that knows me, and frankly no one that doesn't is probably ever going to find this blog!, will know that I am make up obsessed with a special emphasis on all things nail related - years of nail biting to blame for that! I can think of nothing nicer than treating myself to a must have sheer lipstick (don't do gloss or creme lipstick) when things don't seem to be going my way, smile and everyone thinks your nuts, slick on a new lipstick and who cares what they think? I am an advertisers dream with the eye of a magpie, although would never buy something because of the packaging I would definitely not buy if the packaging was naff.

Today was on the hunt for a mascara. Not strictly true. I was going to Boots to buy a new L'oreal Telescopic mascara because the one I currently own is a year old, ye gods its a wonder I haven't got a permanent case of conjunctivitus, or however you spell that. Anyone en route to the L'oreal stand I spotted the UNE stand.

Have tried to find out a bit about this online but information is a bit lacking, apparently it is actually from Bourjois (which I think is linked to Lancome?) and has an emphasis on natural products and using organic ingredients. So knit your own lippy kind of stuff. Not really an eco warrior and it certainly wasn't this "ooh lets all save the planet and looks lush whilst we do it" philosophy that grabbed me, it was the shades of the eye shadows. They are all very muted and earthy and I had decided, this morning, that at 43 slapping on sparkly silver eye shadow was quite frankly laughable and I was starting to look like a transvestite version of my former self. Time, I thought, for some grown up make up - leave the sparkly stuff to Emily and her friends. I had looked at some Revlon matt eye shadow in Superdrug and was more inclined to paint my face with wattle and daube than something that dry and dreary - eye shadow as a metaphor for mid-life anyone?

The UNE eye shadows were a revelation, they are soft and blendable and sexy in an understated kind of way (you can see where I am going with this - if they are and I wear them, so will I be!) So first selected shade S15 which is a soft greyish brown at the front of the photo.



Its lovely and smudgy and then I decided that I would need a light base colour so next was S02, at the back. Note packaging - mirrored case and a teeny brush. TBH if you were going to apply the shadow with the brush you would need a week and the patience of a saint, I had neither so you can see the lovely great finger marks already in my shadow.

Then I spotted the sheer lips balm (weird plural there on lips but it is what it says on the tube!) Sucker for colour and sheer so this was a must have too in shade S03.



And then I slung in eye liner in S15 to go with the darker eye shadow. On reflection I might have been better going for a darker eye liner but I didn't want anything too harsh. The eye shadows are £8.99, Lips balm is £4.99 and the eye liner is £7.99. And anyone that mentions any of this to Steve will be boiled in oil, do I make myself clear?



Hope you like the new blog! The comments section is there to be used, I love feed back!

Post edit: If you do buy these eye shadows do make sure you have an eye shadow brush - they are very finely milled and then pressed I think, which makes them really soft and blendy but they cake up if you whack your greasy digit in them. Even if you aren't eating chips whilst applying your eye shadow. Cos who would do that? Anyway, yea use a brush. Or raid your daughters make up bag and wash and wash and wash some more the eye shadow brush you bought a million years ago that suddenly disappeared. Once you have got all the bronze sparkly eye shadow off YOUR brush, hide it at the bottom of your make up bag and prepare to lie through your teeth! In short these shadows apply much better with a brush and the one in the case is cute but utterly useless!