How to be Adored:  A Girl’s Guide to Hollywood Glamour by Caroline Cox (Quadrille, £12.99 – or £8.43 at amazon.co.uk if you click here).  As someone whose concept of beauty was shaped by endless black-and-white Hollywood movies (watched from the sofa with my mother on Saturday afternoons), this is right up my boulevard:  all you need to know about recreating movie-star glamour, from how to wash your face like Audrey Hepburn, speak like Grace Kelly, what to do with your body type (whether it’s Mae West-curvy or Katharine Hepburn-boyish), how to descend a staircase movie-star style or do your lips like Joan Crawford – and countless more delicious nuggets of beauty wisdom to dip into, in bed.  (With your hands slathered in cream but encased in white cotton gloves, preferably.)

L’Oréal Glam Shine Volumizer 6h, £7.82, from www.boots.com.  This is most definitely the lip gloss which I’ll be slipped into my evening bag as the party season approaches:  a gorgeously gold-flecked gloss (my favourite shade is Endless Carmine – a very-this-season burgundy), in which the shimmering particles create an illusion of fullness.  Two ingredients – menthol and something called ‘polypol’ (I’ve had to put my natural-beauty-leanings aside for this) give a slightly tingling feeling – rather nice and fresh, actually.  (The 6h refers to ‘six hours’, we think – though like most glosses, it actually doesn’t last anything like that long.)

Myface.cosmetics MyMix Foundation, £12.71 (at www.boots.com;  click on the product name to find it).  From the range created by make-up genius Charlotte Tilbury, a genius base (at a fantastic price):  with a dewy finish (very like my favourite but discontinued Armani version), it pulls off the trick of being sheer but amazingly concealing at the same time.  The perfect everyday, workaday base, from this absolutely brilliant, great-value range (can’t recommend too highly that you check the whole lot out next time you’re near a big Boots, because touching and trying is believing, with Myface).