February Favourites

Welcome to another monthly roundup of favourite things, things that have been slowly pulled from the deep and never-ending quagmire of review samples and new beauty products and inadvisable late-night online purchases. I have to say that there’s a very nice pair of sunglasses included in this roundup; I mention this early on - and with a great sense of genuine excitement - because I rarely find sunglasses that don’t make me feel like a twat.

(This needs a whole separate post, but I have never been one of those people who can just casually sling a pair of shades on and swan about as though everything is totally normal. Everything is not normal! You have put sunglasses on your face and now, depending on the style you’ve chosen, you either look a) like a secret service agent or b) like you’re trying to be famous. It’s all just too conspicuous and attention-grabbing for my liking. It’s why I rarely wear my huge, pink faux-fur coat. I feel as though it signals a person with an inflated sense of station. I can not be alone in this particular hang-up, surely?)

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Small Head Sunglasses

Anyway, these ones (shall we just chuck ourselves straight into the post?) are from Ray Ban and the reason they’re so nice is that they come in two sizes and the small size perfectly fits my small face. Making sunglasses in more than one size should be more of a thing. I like the oversized sunglasses look, but oversized on most people means visor-sized on me. Ski goggle level of coverage.

I wanted some aviator sunglasses but not the classic metal-framed ones that make you look as though you should be riding a Harley Davidson in a ra-ra skirt and denim waistcoat: more modern than that. The Ray Bans I found fit the bill perfectly and were aptly named Bill. Honestly? The model name was off-putting. I have nothing against the name Bill, it’s a solid sort of name, but it doesn’t make me want to spend money in a sexy way. I once returned some jeans that were called Darren. They were actually a great fit, but I just wasn’t sure why every denim style had been given a man’s name, as though I was trying to find the perfect date, not simply a pair of jeans with a non-aggressive gusset seam that wouldn’t instantly give me cystitis.

The Bill in XS are here* - you need to go for the size 56-14 if you also have a petite head. I bought mine in “transparent brown” and I shall be raving about them for possibly longer than you’ll all be able to bear.

What’s next? Ah yes, the end of my Invisalign journey. A great sense of relief, even though the night retainers I’ve just been given to wear for the rest of my life look like something from a medieval torture rack. I’m exaggerating - I only have to wear them for three months - but still. I thought that the clear plastic braces were bad! These ones will apparently help my bite to settle now that I have the composites on the backs of my front teeth.

If you’d like to know more about why I had Invisalign and how the whole thing went, there’s a good section at the beginning of this month’s favourites video that delves into the finer details. I will do a standalone video soon, I just wanted to get my final orthodontist visit out of the way and now that is done, and that I have been awarded my honorary nighttime braces of wiry horror, I’ll film it and post it.

Liquid Gold

A beauty find, now: Alpha H’s Liquid Gold + Vitamin C. If you’re a long-term reader (hi!) you’ll perhaps remember the first time I ever posted about Alpha-H and their hero product, Liquid Gold. It was in 2011.

Here’s the post, if you’d like to briefly travel back through time. I love reading these old blog posts - how novel the idea of a liquid exfoliant was, then! How alarming the concept of wiping an actual acid across your face!

Anyway, the original Liquid Gold was always brilliant. People started overusing exfoliants and going absolutely batshit crazy piling every active ingredient on their skin and that became a problem, but this bottle of glycolic acid, used a few times a week, gave instant glow and a satisfying plumpness to the skin and all of the other skincare in a skincare routine just seemed to work that little bit better.

(The glycolic helps to slough off dead skin cells - sort of nibble away at them - so that they don’t lie there in a useless sort of dust-blanket over the skin.)

The new Liquid Gold + Vitamin C does all of that but with the added brightening power and antioxidant protection of Vitamin C. I would have been wary of this combo and its potential for irritation but I had previously seen nice results with the Murad Vita-C Glycolic Serum (need to write that up, I tested it last year!) which contains the same duo of active ingredients.

I was straight in then, when the Alpha-H sample arrived for testing. My first thoughts were that I loved the fact that the Vitamin C (which I use almost every morning anyway) was incorporated into a liquid formula.

You just plop a bit onto cotton wool and swipe over your face, avoiding the eye area. Done. Exfoliant for mega-glow and then a touch of antioxidant action, all in one go. Can a liquid application like this be as effective, antioxidant-wise, as applying a more robust serum or cream to the skin? I need to find out and report back. But I can safely say that over the three weeks of use (three times a week, morning) I have noticed an extra degree of glow and a feeling that the surface of the skin is just a bit bouncier and livelier. The main thing is that the difference has been visibly noticeable. It’s pleasing. Good discovery.

It’s £51 for 100ml, this stuff, but you couldn’t get through it in a hurry. At time of writing, QVC have a great deal on it and the same size bottle is £36.96 here*.

Living Soda

Down to the kitchen, now (you must watch the video, it brings all of this alive) and I’m afraid I’m going to talk about fizzy drinks again. Oh God, I can hear you moaning, why is she going on about her Coca Cola thing again and trying to give it up and swapping it for other fizzy alternatives? I am going to have to start eating my own limbs from boredom if she keeps this up! I’m going to take a cheese grater to my own skin! I’m going to skewer my eyeballs with the end of my biro!

Last month I introduced you to Hip Hop Kombucha: this month it’s their standard fizzy drink offering, Living Soda, which is mostly made up of juices from concentrate mixed with sparkling water. But also – and I was shocked by this! – 8g of fibre per can. For comparison’s sake, a small serving of Bran Flakes has 5g of fibre. I know which I’d rather consume, what with my addiction to grabbing a cold can of something from the fridge to spur me on through the afternoon.

I have successfully knocked my seven-can-a-week Coca Cola habit down to one a week, apart from if I get my hair done, or my nails, because they always have a cold one ready for me and who am I to refuse such generosity?

The ideal would be to not be at all reliant on carbonated cans of drink for my mental happiness but I have to have some sort of treat to power me through the work day. Everyone else has coffee, or cups of tea. I have my one, lonely, cold can. And now it has fibre, I feel as though I’m almost doing a good deed…

Find Living Soda here*

The Recipe Binder

Silly life update, really, because I don’t talk about family stuff that much but this event pleased me: my nine year-old daughter discovered the recipe binder I’ve had since my teens and she has adopted it as her own and started to write her own favourites onto the blank pages. Obviously I bought this folder in the days before the internet, when we used to tear recipes out from magazines and newspapers or we wrote them down on the pad next to the telephone in the hallway and later stuck them to the fridge.

It made me so happy to see new recipes being added to my folder, which also serves as a kind of unofficial journal, every little magazine snippet or jotted-down method a reminder of a certain dinner with friends, or conversation with sibling, or drunken evening with the book club.

At the same time as making me happy, it also vexed me to see new recipes being added, because I am a control freak and she is nine, and she has clearly not followed the very precise order in which I have entered the ingredients lists and methods and the bullet point system I’ve utilised for neatness and clarity. She has also put a cake recipe into the desserts section when it is obvious that it should have been filed under “baking”, but she’ll learn…

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