No-Wire Wall Lights, Book of the Month and the Skincare I Keep Coming Back To...

August has raced by in a blur of work deadlines and brutal heatwaves and constant kids’ activities. I feel as though it should have been a slow and sultry month, where we all dozed in hammocks and made homemade lemonade and wrote lazy journal entries saying things like,

Peter and Olivia have left for their beach house, now, but tomorrow Mama arrives and she is bringing with her the new dog. And, with any luck, a ham and a pork pie and some fat old cucumbers. I would so much like a picnic.

Alas we only have one hammock and it is rusting away in the shed. And I don’t know a Peter and Olivia with a beach house. But you get the gist. Slow and sultry, that is what I wanted. Instead my month was like being thrown into a chaotic wok.

Here are my favourites, including the skincare I keep coming back to, the very best solution to wall lights if you don’t have the wiring for it and my book of the month…

AD: this post contains a paid collaboration with Renew & Me, a brand I have faithfully used (including as a paying customer) for years. Some outbound links are affiliate links.

Renew + Me

You need only look in my “empties” box to see how much of a fan I am of Renew + Me. This is a personalised skincare brand that, after an online consultation, tailors a (very, very) highly potent skin cream for you to use nightly. The fact that the cream is tailored to your specific needs is what’s important here, because it means that the product should be well-tolerated by your skin and provide you with precisely what your skin requires. No guessing, no trawling through Reddit threads or standing in the skincare aisle feeling completely overwhelmed by all of the thousands of products laid out around you.

(I have an exclusive offer from Renew + Me below, so stay with me!)

Renew + Me empties. Just a small selection.

I’ve been using Renew + Me since launch, which - if I remember rightly - was over two years ago. Before that, I used the personalised cream from their sister brand, Skin + Me, for another few years, so I can safely say that I have tested it to its absolute fullest.

And I can tell you that it is not great to love a singular product this much, not when a large proportion of your job involves testing out a variety of skincare products from different brands! When you keep coming back to the same thing again and again, month after month, year after year, it kind of limits what else you can try out on your face.

I have tested other high-strength products containing retinoids, but my Nightly Active Treatment contains gold standard actives that are up to twenty times stronger than high street retinol and - more importantly - it has been formulated with my particular skin in mind. It has been personalised.

I think that it’s testament to the Renew + Me product that it’s the one I always return to. My base camp. My skin never feels more balanced, more evenly-toned or more smooth than when I’m using it.

I feel as though we’re all pretty well-versed on the retinoids side of things at this point - there’s pretty much nothing they won’t tackle, including fine lines, lack of firmness, unevenness of tone and even spots - but I need to tell you about a couple of other ingredients that are in my Nightly Active Treatment from Renew + Me, because I hadn’t paid much attention to them before this summer. More fool me.

Wind your brain back, if you will, to when I talked about my outbreak of summer-related spots. I wrote about them here. Well, when that happened - and this is the third year in a row that this Hot Skin Fallout has occurred - I decided to look a bit more into the ingredients I could use to support my skin barrier, calm the redness and fade the marks that the spot outbreak had left behind. The ones that came up again and again as being powerhouses for this task were niacinamide and azelaic acid and, me being me, I immediately set about purchasing three or four different serums that rate highly for these ingredients.

Guess who already owned three or four (at least) other serums with these ingredients in? Yes, me. (I could now set myself up as a niacinamide and azelaic acid dealer from my work cabin, I have so much of it.)

And also, more importantly, guess who already owned an amazing product that not only contained these ingredients, the hallowed niacinamide and azelaic acid, but combined them with her potent-as-anything retinoid, and also formulated all of these things into a beautiful rich and nourishing base cream that acts as a protective shield?

ALSO ME.

And yes, I am talking about my Renew + Me Nightly-Active-Treatment, obviously. It has taken on a whole new level of brilliance, in my eyes - I loved it before, but I have a renewed appreciation of just how clever this product is. Tackling everything from fine lines to dullness to lack of firmness but also supporting the skin barrier at the same time, helping with clarity, calming redness and fading out marks and imperfections?

Bloody hell!

In a final stroke of utter genius, the personalised Nightly Active Treatment is supplied in a special click-and-twist doser that dispenses precisely the right amount of product each night at strengths my skin can tolerate. No waste, minimal packaging (which is an absolute breath of fresh air, isn’t it, these days?) and no-double guessing the amount of product I need to apply.

So, despite me being a total Beauty Magpie and always wanting to try the newest thing, and despite me actually needing to be always trying the newest thing because I write about beauty and it’s sort of part and parcel of that particular job, I have spent an inordinate amount of time using Renew + Me as my sole nightly product. That should say it all, really.

If you’d like to give Renew + Me a try, they have given me a special code - RUTHSAVE - that gets you your first month of Nightly Active Treatment for just £6.99. That’s over 75% off. Just click here to get started! They’re so confident you’ll see results that they offer a money back guarantee if you haven’t seen any by week twelve.

The process for getting your dermatologist designed Nightly-Active-Treatment is quick and straightforward (I actually really enjoy the questions part, they’ve made it very streamlined!) and you are fully supported by the dermatology team throughout.

I think that it very much replaces guesswork, having a cream personalised to your exact needs, and stops you from having to buy a load of different things that may or may not be right, may or may not be working… A sound investment, in my opinion.

Renew + Me

Kindle Paperwhite

My old Kindle Paperwhite (circa 2013) had a small split in the screen and every time I read a book on there I was heavily distracted by this intense pinpoint of light that was bursting forth towards my retinas. (Retinae?) I put up with it for around ten years but this month, after loading it with books for my holiday, I thought enough is enough! and treated myself to a new one.

I only really use a Kindle on holiday, which is why I put up with a damaged screen for a decade, but when I do use it on holiday, boy do I use it! And I must say that thirteen years is very, very good going for a tech product - had the screen not had this small dink in it I imagine it would have kept going for another thirteen. When you look at how quickly iPhones become outdated, or how often the screens crack or what have you, the Kindle seems such good value.

Good old Kindle. What I actually want to say, though, is that there is (I think) a huge difference between the entry, base-level Kindle and the Paperwhite version. I ordered the cheaper one for a hundred quid because I thought that it would still be miles better than my old Paperwhite, being new and all, but actually the screen on my Paperwhite (minus chink of holy light beaming through) was far better.

The base Kindle screen looked like a photograph of the Paperwhite screen, if that makes any sense. A Paperwhite screen looks very much like an actual sheet of paper. It really, really does. The whole effect has been brilliantly executed.

But I couldn’t handle the normal, base level Kindle screen at all, it felt stressful to my eyes. And so I returned that and upgraded to the new Paperwhite, which is a slight improvement to the old one but hardly discernable.

(If you have an old Paperwhite and it functions perfectly, I would confidently say that you will have no reason to upgrade that baby for the next decade. I just can’t imagine how they would improve on it. Yes the screen is bigger, but it’s not a life-shattering difference.)

I bought my new Kindle Paperwhite here. I got a three month free subscription of something called Kindle Unlimited, which has so far let me download eight books for free, which would have cost me about eighty quid at the airport, so I am well chuffed with that. Has paid for half the Kindle, more or less…

Stylish Wall Lights: No Electrician Needed!

I think wall lights are my favourite type of light, in terms of the quality of illumination and the warmth of it and the flattering nature. Table lamps are all well and good, but a wall light is a) slightly higher up, so you can also actually see things in the room rather than feeling as though you’re at a seance and b) tucked out of the way, so that it’s not creating extra clutter or requiring its own little table and so on.

(Not that I think of table lamps as clutter, I LOVE table lamps, but you have to impose a limit on them otherwise you collect too many and end up looking like you’re running a lamp shop.)

But the problem with wall lights is that you need the wiring for them. And so many houses don’t have it. It seems that when many people re-do their houses, more often than not they stick eighty spotlights in the ceiling and NO wiring for anything else, because wall lights just aren’t in their orbit, and then you buy and move into said house and it’s just too much of a faff to rewire it so that you can have wall lights - the wiring has to be chased in, the room has to be re-plastered…

Anyway, there’s a solution to this problem, if you want beautiful wall lights but don’t want to spend thousands of pounds on an electrician and plasterer: plug-in wall lights. Apologies if I’m preaching to the converted here or stating the obvious, because you may well have seen plug-in wall lights before (I had one in my bedroom in the eighties) but they vary dramatically in quality and I feel as though I’ve found an amazing option.

I actually don’t want to share it with you, because I need to order four more for The Dorset Nest, but I’ll put my your needs before my own and tell you: it’s the Jim Lawrence plug-in wall lights, namely in the style “Brooke”. These come in black or antique brass and look absolutely gorgeous in any sort of traditional or cottage-y setting.

The beauty of them is, is that you buy the shade arm only and so can choose from an endless variety of lampshades and, depending on your vibe you can make a wall light that’s whismsical, or elegant, or traditional, or even one that looks like it’s been lifted out from a fairy’s cottage in a secret glade. The world is your oyster, when you start looking into lampshades.

I go for a 20cm lampshade with this wall light and my favourites are from Pooky and from Next. The ones from Next are, for the price (twenty quid) absolutely brilliant. I love the frilled shade striped ones, but they have loads of different fabrics and designs.

The wall light arm itself is just under a hundred pounds, but Jim Lawrence things are worth every single penny in my experience. Exceptional quality and attention to detail that goes way, way beyond any cheaper imitation.

And the cord is braided! Very important detail, that, because the cord is essentially going to be trailing down your wall, to the plug, and if it’s a cheap shiny plastic thing then it will look awful.

So there: a beautiful wall light wherever you have a plug. No electrician, no plasterer, just add a lampshade (the fun bit) plug it in (I mean, some might get a thrill) and go.

Jim Lawrence Brooke Plug-In Wall Light - here

Pooky 20cm shades - I have bought two of these candy stripe ones

Next 20cm shades - here

Unearthed Spanish Tortilla

Why have I got serious deja vu all of a sudden? Have I written about this before? YES! Oh God, sorry. This just shows how much I’ve fallen in love with this particular foodstuff.

I’m going to paraphrase what I wrote the other week, because this lunch option is worth repeating. (Daily, in my case.) It’s so easy, full of protein and/or potato (reckon it’s probably more potato than protein but when was that ever a bad thing):

These ready-made Spanish tortillas are bloody amazing for people like me who want a quick lunch but don’t want to put any more effort into preparing it than simply opening the fridge.

Lunch is often my downfall: if I can’t immediately fathom what it is I’m going to have, then I take out a block of cheese and the butter and I spread the butter into a white roll, fill the roll with cheese, maybe some sliced tomato if I’m worrying for my general health, and then I stretch up to the cupboard that sits above the fridge, out of child-reach, and I get myself a packet of Walkers Salt & Vinegar crisps (the elite crisp and I won’t take other suggestions) to add texture, crunch and variety to the plate.

The Unearthed Spanish Tortilla saves me from myself. There it sits, all fresh and lovely and air-sealed, layers of cooked, salty potato trapped in the firm, eggy goodness. Perfectly seasoned. So much protein! Just slit open the lid with a knife and cut the tortilla in half and tip one half of it onto a plate with the aforementioned tomatoes that would have gone into your cheese roll, add some rocket dressed in good balsamic and extra virgin olive oil! A ten second wonder.

Find the Unearthed Tortillas here online. You will not regret. Unless you hate eggs. And potatoes. In which case I cannot help you.

The Artist

Book of the month? The Artist. If this is Lucy Steeds’ debut novel (it is) then I am so excited to see what she does next. And I never feel that way. Or rarely, anyway. This is the perfect late summer read, you need to get it in time for the last blasts of heatwave, if any more are coming our way!

Set in post-war Provence (and so beautifully, evocatively drawn), it’s about a reclusive painter - one of the world’s most famous - and his monstrous, unpredictable ways. When a young journalist comes from England to interview the painter, he becomes entwined into this heady, insular world with its temper flares and hot, airless rooms and plates of rotting food and sneaky cigarettes.

He also becomes entwined with something else but I won’t spoil it for you, it’s just such a good read - somewhat predictable, but it felt exactly the sort of smoothly-executed read I needed this month. The Artist is here online

(Edit: this was written before I’d read both Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell and The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I need time to mull these over a bit more, but they would both be contenders for the winning spot, I think. Choices, choices. So many good books, so little time.)

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