Enjoy a Gossip Girls afternoon for you and three friends from Paul Edmonds worth over £300 - and six Biolustré treatments for runners-up, each worth £60
Sarah loves a fabulous new mascara, rosy lips and glistening skin.
Lancôme Hypnôse Onyx mascara, £19.50. Lancôme is rightly fêted as the premier company for mascaras, and this new addition to the Hypnôse collection - created for BAFTA (the British ‘Oscars’) - is just totally fabulous. The slatey-green-black colour I tried (there’s three: onyx, platinum and silver) looks divine, lengthens, thickens and - all in all – gives a most gorgeous eyeful! It’s not officially waterproof but it certainly doesn’t slide down and give you panda eyes, unlike many I’ve tried recently. So, if you want to star in your own BAFTA-winning performance… go get the technology! From department stores nationwide, and on-line here.
Bobbi Brown Creamy Lip Colour, £14. We just love Bobbi and her products and this new lippie collection feels like the best yet. The colours are intense but not dense - in fact they almost have a sheer quality to them because they look so light. They are really moisturising due to shea butter and other botanical conditioners. And the colours… well, I am totally in love with Rose Petal, a perfect rosy pink with a slight shimmer (the left of the two colours here). But there are 14 to choose from, some matte, some shimmery – so plenty for everyone to choose from. Bobbi now has a UK website: www.bobbibrown.co.uk, and you can find this on-line here.
Origins Raffe Body Brush, £10. At long last, the perfect body brush – and, believe me, I have tried a lot over the years I’ve been dry skin brushing, which is (as we keep saying!) the best thing ever for smoothing cellulite and conditioning skin, as well as detoxing. This Japanese sisal brush isn’t too sharp so you can give yourself a really good brisk going over from feet up (always towards the heart) – without yelling in agony. The design makes it easy to handle, you can really attack everywhere at all angles, and the price makes it a real Beauty Steal. NB brush daily before your bath or shower and you’ll be stunned at the difference in how you look and feel; it’s fab for a morning when you feel blah, too. Find it on-line here.
Kimberly Sayer Ultra Light Organic Facial Moisturiser SPF25, £22.90 from www.lovelula.com (£21.75 with your special discount; just enter bb08 at the checkout). Just to remind myself as well as you that I liked this moisturiser so much last summer that I must order it again this year from the wonderful Lula. I have been trying out other SPF25 moisturisers and one’s too heavy and the other doesn’t smell nice etc. etc., so I’m really looking forward to using this again. Just click here to go through to the site.
Taer Icelandic Bath Therapy Glacier Bath Oil, £35 for 100 ml., (£33.25 with your exclusive discount from www.victoriahealth.com, with free postage for online orders), if you click here. Friends told me how amazingly reviving it is to have a bath with this incredible blend of oils (peppermint, fir needle, sweet birch and fennel, plus organic Icelandic yarrow and horsetail extracts) - but foolishly it took me months to try. All I can say is, please, believe me – the hype is right! You know those days when you have 51 impossible things to do and then need to shine in the evening? No problem! Just soak in a warm bath with a couple of capfuls of Bath Therapy and you will float in and swan through anything, totally invigorated. As well as restoring tired achey bodies and minds, it’s said to open up airways (great for colds and flu) and help water retention and cellulite. I would like it permanently on tap please….
Jo . . .
Legendary trichologist Philip Kingsley (and his wife Joan), new Guerlain goodies and a fabulous fragrance from Ormonde Jane.
Philip Kingsley Grooming Brush and No Scent No Colour Shampoo and Conditioner. I have wayward, thick hair – a wonderful legacy from my mum, but most hairbrushes like Mason-Pearson’s (and all other bristle brushes) just skim uselessly over it. So I’m hugely grateful to the legendary Philip Kingsley – congratulations on 50 years in the trichology world, Philip! – for creating this wonderful brush, which sweeps through my thick curtain with ease leaving it super-shiny and groomed, and is small enough to slip into a handbag. It’s normally £12, but you get a 10% ‘insider’ discount at www.HQhair.com, making the brush £10.80; find it on-line here.
You might also like to know about a new shampoo and conditioner duo from Philip Kingsley, which he created for his beloved wife Joan. Sadly, Joan was diagnosed with breast cancer and – like many sufferers – found that she could not tolerate scented products while undergoing radiotherapy, so Philip formulated No Scent No Colour Shampoo and Conditioner for Joan. You can find these at www.philipkingsley.com from £4.95 for 75 ml. shampoo, and £5.95 for 75 ml. conditioner - and to add to the feel-good factor, Philip is donating 25p from every bottle to Look Good, Feel Better, the beauty industry charity which takes in make-over teams to recovering cancer patients in hospitals in the UK and internationally, www.lookgoodfeelbetter.co.uk (A 50p donation is made on the larger 250 ml. bottles.)
Guerlain Parure, L’Or and Lip Gloss. Every so often I ‘rediscover’ Guerlain in a big way – a bit like rekindling an old love affair. They’re always there in the background - and I still swoon for Mitsouko fragrance - but in a beauty editor’s life there are always new brands that come along that make you forget, in a rather fickle way, about some of the original greats. So I have been having a play with some of Guerlain’s new make-up, which is now all gorgeous sleek gold packaging (designed by the talented Hervé Van Der Straten, whose sculptural jewellery I used to collect). Parure (also the name of one of Guerlain’s classic perfumes) is a slim-line palette of powder make-up, which can be used with a wet sponge for extra coverage but also works brilliantly as a pressed powder (with an SPF20); it’s priced £33 (but I like the fact it’s possible to buy refills for £23, rather than throw the gorgeous palette away). L’Or is an update of Guerlain’s classic Divinora: an under-make-up base with little flecks of gold in it, which makes skin utterly radiant. And (you know me to be a lip gloss addict from way back!), I’m also loving KissKiss Stick Gloss, £17: a wonderful little swivel-up slim stick of sheer colour, which I’m wearing in rich, just-been-kissed Berry Pure. At Guerlain counters nationwide, call 01932-233887 for locations.
Saaf Body Balm, £32.99 at www.saafinternational.com; click here. Sarah and I slathered our way through over 100 products recently as judges for the Soil Association Organic Beauty Awards (you should have had a bulletin with the results). We got to take home anything that we liked for ourselves after the judging, but trust me: it had to be pretty fabulous for me to bother to lug it from Bristol to Hastings after the judging. This made the cut: a rich, luscious, balm-style body product which delivers the glisten and gleam and skin-slurpingly rich nourishment of a body
oil, but with no muss and no fuss. I am anointing myself with it nightly, and my skin is just wallowing in the rich blend of Essential Fatty Acids, vitamin E, shea butter, all delectably fragranced with mandarin, lavender, patchouli, ylang-ylang and clove essential oils, and certified organic by the Soil Association.
Neal’s Yard Grapefruit & Juniper Firming Hip & Thigh Gel, £25. Summer is a’comin, and with thoughts turning to the forthcoming exposure of my thighs on Hastings beach, I thought I’d try this new cellulite treatment from Neal’s Yard Remedies. I’m not a big one for cellulite treatments normally (and actually, I have barely a dimple – all that body brushing!), but this is so blissful to use that I figure nightly massage can’t do any harm – and it’s leaving my skin super-soft and healthy-looking. It’s got 89% organic ingredients, including horse chestnut extract, butcher’s broom, ivy and gotu kola, with a lovely zesty scent. Find it on-line at www.victoriahealth.com, if you click here…
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Orris Noir. I only wear fragrance for special occasions now, because I found that sloshing it on daily just dimmed the pleasure factor. But this has parachuted straight into my fragrance wardrobe: a luscious, rich, velvety Oriental by the talented Linda Pilkington, for her company Ormonde Jayne, which is spicy with pink pepper, cardamom, iris, incense, myrrh, patchouli - you get the idea: as Linda says, ‘not for shrinking violets!’. (If you are ever in the Royal Arcade off Bond Street, her jewel of a fragrance boutique is definitely worth dipping into.) Orris Noir is £58 for 50 ml. eau de parfum, if you click here.
BOOK THAT MENTIONS US! This book – which is actually called Secret Services: Your Very Own Pocket Concierge - really is a bit like having your own personal concierge – and I really rate author Cary Whitley’s recommendations (they’re much the same as I’d have made if I’d applied myself to the task of creating the ultimate insider directory for everything from house-sitting to getting your linen monogrammed, or where to get a chipped heirloom champagne glass filed down.) And we’re delighted that www.beautybible.com (and The Handbag Beauty Bible) get a mention, too! This is truly a bible in its own right; it’s normally £12.99 but at www.amazon.co.uk you can find it for £11.69 if you click here…
