This article was written for Annabel & Grace, which is now part of Rest Less.
What are you doing right now in the bathroom? Having a beauty feast or famine?
Deep cleansing your skin, painting your nails, curling your eyelashes may all seem trivial beauty regimes. They may have once been the norm but now they feel like part of a bygone lifestyle. Maybe now is the time to go on a beauty detox. Ignore the pasty, peeling, dry patches of skin spreading to meet each other. Allow those chin hairs to grow just to see how many there truly are.
However I found myself reaching for a skin mask when I heard that Boris had been moved to intensive care. It was a reaction in order to check out of this life we are leading. It enabled me to lock myself away for 20 minutes indulging in some luxury. I was also able to meditate, to empty my mind of all the horror stories that keep ‘pinging’ into my life. And at the end it was my skin that was pinging and my mind felt cleansed.
I used The Garden of Wisdom Pore Cleansing Powder. It is all about natural, gentle skincare on a budget. The Pore Cleansing Powder is formulated with nourishing kaolin clay and gentle zinc oxide. It’s suitable for all skin types and quickly gets to work removing dirt lodged in your pores. Just dip a damp pad into the powder and apply the paste for ten before rinsing it off. Both the results and the feeling of the application is super satisfying.
In the morning I still religiously cleanse my skin and apply a minimal make-up. Yesterday I painted my nails. What is the point, those of you who have opted for the beauty famine, ask? The short answer is that there is no point really. However it is my way of saying life goes on and to try to block out the horror of this chapter of life that we are currently living through.
This morning I got What’s App messages from two girlfriends. We are part of the What’s App group named, ‘Henley Blondes’. We had been laughing that, with the current lack of visits to the hairdresser, we would soon have to rename our group, ‘4 Shades of Grey’. I had suggested they try the Josh Wood Home Colour products and yesterday their parcels arrived. I asked them this morning if the products had worked. They both said, ‘their hair felt soft and glossy’. We will be HousePartying later and I will let you know what their hair is looking like. “It hasn’t turned green”, they both said reassuringly, remembering teenage reccés with home hair dye. There was a distinct lift in their voices as they apparently felt more glossy too.
If you are worried about giving your hair a trim then here are some great tips from our friend, Tricia Cusden, of Look Fabulous Forever – click HERE
I remember my grandmother, a lover of a good beauty feast, always had beautifully painted nails and only days before she died, at the age of 98 years, she was having a manicure. She said to me, “If I am about to meet my maker I want to look my best.” I loved her so much for that attitude, to always make the best of oneself.
So when I woke this morning and found an email from Nailberry in my inbox telling me about their pick of Spring’s prettiest polishes (nail) – Pomegranate Juice, Flocon and Berry Fizz, I actually clicked on it and found myself thinking about summer parties.
On a more practical level I am doing a ‘Marie Kondo’ of my bathroom and it is the most enjoyable and cathartic exercise. It involves me finishing off all those jars of bath soaks and body moisturiser before binning them. I have come across some old favourites that I had forgotten about. It is a real beauty feast.
One of them was Guerlain’s Midnight Secret – Guerlain’s secret formula to help you recover from lack of sleep. It’s a cocktail of effective ingredients helping to reduce the appearance of puffiness and smooth away visible signs of tiredness so you wake up looking rested, with a revitalized complexion and smoother skin. It used to be my post party, do not go to bed without it cream, and it still works. I may not be partying right now but virtual drinks parties are taking their toll on my skin.
I then filled my bath with Badedas rich bubble bath – a favourite indulgence of my parents. Their last bottle must have been sitting in my cupboard for years. Father Christmas always used to put a bottle of this in my father’s Christmas stocking. The fragrance takes me back to my childhood and my father filling a bath after a long day working on the farm.
My mother used to say that, having lived through the war, her generation appreciate the luxuries of life whereas we take them for granted. Nowadays every high street is full of beauty salons and skincare shops. At the tap of a few buttons one can have a parcel of beauty goodies dropping on to our doormat. However, maybe now, as I use up all my beauty products in a more medicinal way, I can hope that we will return to a life where we appreciate our good health more. We will also remember to be eternally grateful to all those that strive to keep us healthy and safe.
#NHSHeroes #lockdowneffects
If you want to have another Beauty Feast click HERE.