Magical morning make-up fixes for your romantic mini break
AFRIEND, who recently started seeing a fresh romantic prospect, will be spending the bank holiday enjoying a red-hot weekend away. And what a perfect spring ritual this sort of steamy jaunt is.
A decade into my own relationship, how I remember the thrill of some new erotic excitement to dress — and get undressed — for. The nights of passion, followed by mornings of wanting to look like the world’s most ravishing natural beauty. Cue a quick sprint to the bathroom to brush my teeth, conceal unslept under-eyes and pinch my cheeks.
Many friends newly solo in mid-life are embarking on these sorts of adventures. Read on for the subtle sleights of hand that will render you a morning-after sex goddess.
1. A BIT OF A BLUR
WITH any luck your make-up will be worn away by amorous activity, so all you’ll need is a speedy cleanse and freshen in the morning. For a quick confidence fix, Trinny London Miracle Blur (€32, brownthomas.com) is a godsend for instantly erasing crevices, be they wrinkles, pores or acne scars.
Housed in a little pot, this creamy, colourless wonder blends seamlessly into the complexion.
2. COVER UP
LEGIONS of sleepovers have benefited from a whisk round with Maybelline’s Instant Anti-Age Eraser Concealer (€12.99, boots.ie) first thing. The applicator sponge splodges on pigment to conceal dark circles and anything else you’re keen to minimise.
I love Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty Pro Filt’r Instant Retouch Concealer (€27, boots.ie), for a naturallooking, but creamily luminous, under-eye zhuzh. Its 50 (50!) hues won’t crease, or look like make-up. While Jones Road The Face Pencil (€28, jonesroadbeauty.com) comes in 21 shades for tiny corrective dabs, via a crayon that can be hidden in your palm.
3. EYE-OPENING
YOU may feel exhausted, but you don’t want to look it, so do as VB does and deploy Victoria Beckham Instant Brightening Waterline Pencil (€31,victoria beckhambeauty.com) along the lower inner lid to fake hours of saintly sleep. Pick a good waterproof mascara like Ilia Beauty Limitless Lash (€33) which offers great volume.
And fill in any eyebrow gaps with the shinily hair-like Ilia In-full Micro Tip Brow Pencil (€28, iliabeauty.com).
4. GET THAT AFTER GLOW
NYX Professional Make-up Smooth Whip Matte Lip Cream (€9.99, very.ie) sets into an incredibly sexy stain, if you take the tiniest amount and daub on to your pout, or you can brush speedily onto your cheeks. My shade is Berry Bed Sheets — fittingly enough, the perfect 18th-century courtesan purplish-pink. Yours may be the brownishred Chocolate Mousse depending on what your skin tone suites but there will be a shade for you in the range.
5. THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
PACK Clean & Clear Advantage Rapid Gel (€5.99, boots.ie) to swiftly deal with any erupting hormonal spots and blemishes; Eucerin AtoControl Acute Care Cream (now €13.95, look fantastic.ie) to counter stubble rash, and Batiste 24H Active Sweat Activated Dry Shampoo (€4.99, boots.ie) for the perfect bed head — because you’re going to be far too preoccupied to find time to wash your hair.
Then, you’ll simply need some ravishing body cream — use the gorgeously soft Cicabio Crème+ Ultra-repairing Soothing Cream (see panel right).
And don’t forget phials of your favourite scent. Brown Thomas and online boast miniscule flacons of Escentric Molecule concoctions (from €25 for three, in iris, patchouli and mandarin, escentric.com) to render their wearer irresistible.
Or, I used to conceal 10ml spritzes of Ormonde Jayne’s tobacco leaf, leather and sandalwood Montabaco (€70, ormonde jayne.com) about the bedroom, festooning my love interest’s pillow, shirts and luggage, so I proved unforgettable.
Manipulative? But, of course!
the photo albums we used to post on Facebook. Fifty images all from one party uploaded with no filters, no edits and captions like ‘what comes before part B?’ (Answer: Partayyy!’)
There’d always be a few pics you had to beg your mate to take down — the bad angles, the awful clothes, the inappropriate poses.
Older generations had the opportunity to mess up with no permanent record. Maybe the story becomes gossip and, if you’re famous, ends up in a bestselling memoir, but that’s about it. It’s much harder for the young to hide — you can’t just tear up a physical photo. If it’s online, it’s everywhere, forever.
I think the ease with which your mistake can be shared and follow you online, is one of the reasons so many Gen Zs are choosing not to drink (a study for the Portman Group showed that 39 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds are teetotal). Yet, looking back on the photos I remember desperately and unsuccessfully trying to get erased from social media, I’m surprised that none of them bother me like they used to.
There’s a photo of me joyfully dressed as a fly.
At the fancy dress party in question, a boy told me I looked like a drag queen, so the next day, I tried to remove any trace of it.
It’s still up online and I now see I look fabulous and no longer take that as the insult it was intended to be.
In another photo at an ‘anything but clothes party’, I could see love bites visibly on display on my neck, from a boy I wasn’t yet ‘seeing’. I thought people would view me as a slut if they saw it, so again tried to erase it. He’s now my fiance so the images make me laugh.
Another shows me at a foam party, and, when I saw it, I begged my friend to take it down because I thought I looked fat and had a bit of belly showing. This last one flummoxes me the most because I look tiny in the photo.
Today, much bigger than I was then, my first thought is that I would kill for the figure I used to be ashamed of, and my second thought is that in ten years I’ll probably look back on the body I have now and wonder why I ever felt anything but love for it.
I once tried to have a physical photo taken down. My grandma had put up a photo of our family on her mantelpiece. Everyone else looked adorable but I was smiling so hard I had a double chin and all my gums were showing.
‘Please don’t put it up’ I begged. ‘I don’t look pretty.’ ‘Who cares about pretty? You look so happy,’ she said leaving it up.
Now, looking back on the pictures I tried and failed to have wiped from the internet, I think my granny’s words ring more true than ever.
As you get older, looking back on ‘happy’ seems far more valuable than ‘pretty’ — even if there were times when you looked a little worse for wear.
I’D TAKE IT OFF MY PARENTS’ WALL
Julie Cook
THE image is of a young woman smiling, clutching her graduation scroll and proudly wearing a black mortarboard. It symbolises achievement, the end of my university life and the attainment of my bachelor’s degree. And I hate it. I always have from the moment I clapped eyes on it. In fact, I hated this picture — taken in 1999, when I was 21 — so much that when my mother put it up in her living room, I asked her to take it down. She refused, slightly hurt, and when I begged, merely rolled her eyes at me.
And so, if friends or — God forbid — boyfriends came over, I’d do it myself. I’d take it down and shove it in a drawer, deliberately bashing it in the hope the frame would break. You see, I don’t look like that. I certainly don’t look like that now and I didn’t think I looked like it then.
Round, chubby face; vacant yet simpering expression; slight crosseyed, badly dyed, red-brown hair. Oh God, I hated it.
When my godfather proudly put the same picture on display on his sideboard, I couldn’t use the direct tactics I had at home, but instead attempted a subtler approach. ‘I don’t really look my best there,’ I told him, willing him to understand the fragility of my ego.
‘But it’s your graduation photo,’ he replied, as if what I looked like didn’t matter at all.
He saw the mortarboard. I saw someone who needed to be taught how to put make-up on and how to smile so she didn’t look like a gullible 14-year-old.
One time when I visited, I very nearly put the wretched photograph in my handbag, but instead made do with placing it face down on his dresser in what I hoped was a clear enough signal.
It was there again, in all its saccharine, pallid-faced glory the next time I visited.
I still hate it. I have a version which I keep hidden in the darkest corner of my garage, in a box covered in cobwebs.
My parents’ copy, however, is still on the wall in my childhood home, a quarter of a century of lowered self-esteem later.
HOWLERS – EVEN OF GORGEOUS ME
Samantha Brick YOU could be forgiven for assuming that someone as gloriously gorgeous as moi couldn’t possibly take a bad picture even if her life (or ego) depended on it. Well, you’d be wrong.
When it comes to my looks and physique, I have lashings of confidence with a teeny pinch of vanity, but there are times when a picture has been posted online that doesn’t meet the mental image I have of myself.
Sometimes I’ve done a double take along the lines of ‘surely that can’t be me’, because a picture has been nothing short of horrendous.
Friends or acquaintances can be naughty, choosing to post images which flatter them and most definitely not me.
The trouble is, once the visual clangers are out there, there is very little you can do to pull them back in.
I am very mindful of this. I never post images without someone’s permission. If I find cute teenage pictures of me with my school friends, I never share — not least because one wore Deirdre Barlow glasses and another had one of those godawful 1980s perms.
The same rule of thumb, however, is not observed by my husband, Pascal.
Pascal is a keen photographer. Never a day goes by when he’s not pointing his Nikon at yours truly, directing me at a beauty spot or pulling me in for a selfie.
My husband is also an insomniac. This means that he frequently posts pictures on his Instagram page in the early hours of the morning, before I’ve been consulted about his choice.
I’ll wake up to ‘likes’ of a picture of me not always looking my best.
As a result there are some real horrors on his feeds.
Take the head and shoulders snap of me when we’d just met (and before social media really got going).
Gurning, with my gums on display. A frightful Tango tan. It’s only in midlife I have come to recognise that I don’t suit Ronseal-coloured skin.
And then there’s the haircut. I might have thought I looked like Rachel from Friends, but in fact I looked like Rachel from accounts.
And yet I suppose I should be grateful my husband loves me enough to see past these photographic howlers.
His feed is a celebration of our marriage, not a tribute page to my beauty. I can live with that.