Beauty bible

New year, new you? Think again

‘NEW YEAR, NEW YOU.’ It’s enough to make you lose it, right? It’s enough to make you put your gym card through the shredder, extend the elasticated waistband deadline to, oh, March, and mainline those unpronounceable Lebanese cashew-and-ghee-based sweets nobody has dared open since Christmas. Because beside the heavy drinking and eating and sloth-like tendencies, what the heck was wrong with the old you?

I don’t believe that reinvention mentality is helpful. And neither does psychologist Dr Amy Johnson, whose selfhelp bible, The Little Book of Big Change, is one of the best on how to shed bad habits I’ve read. ‘The “new year, new you” thing is well-intentioned and clearly taps into a lot marketing-wise, but inherently you’re saying that the old you was bad and weak,’ she tells me. ‘We’re actually all inherently bad-habit-free – we just get stuck in a way of thinking that makes it harder than it should be to put those habits behind us.’

Johnson believes putting too much effort into change is one of the biggest mistakes we make. ‘That “I’ve got to beat this into submission” thinking isn’t helpful. Really it’s about swapping the habits that aren’t doing anything for us any more for beneficial ones.’

Reject anything that’s part of the detox school of thought and therefore needlessly punitive, faddy and ineffective. There is only one detox I subscribe to and it’s the one my long-time hair colourist at Daniel Galvin, Victoria Thear, makes me have every month in order to strip away any build-up and restore brightness. Which is basically what all your gestes beauté (what the French call ‘beauty habits’) in 2018 should achieve.

So instead of angrily scribbling out the old you like some petulant toddler, laugh off the ‘new year, new you’ guff and get yourself some new gestes beauté. Make sure they’re pleasant, non-punishing, time- and cost-effective and, most importantly, highly efficient – like the six I’ve sourced here.