‘I got a tattoo – guess where?’
God blessed me with a grand thick head of hair which hairdressers either love or despair over because it takes so bloody long to dry.
I’ve said it before but at this stage of my life, I’m not into high-maintenance and booking regular month-to-month appointments for nails, pedicures, neck massages and physiotherapy for my back.
Instead, I like my Saturdays and Sundays to be completely free so I can respond to spur-ofthe-moment plans and react to weather, hastily cobbled together lunch dates and walks in city or county. Be an adventurous spirit, I say. Live in the moment. God knows, I was on the ‘Mammy’s taxi’ circuit for long enough, I just want my weekends to start on a Friday with a free sheet.
That said, appointments wise, I do so love a good bouncy blow-dry done expertly in the hair salon, and wait until you see my byline picture in Weekend magazine on Saturday. It’s the result of four hair brushes and lots of root lift, something I’m constantly trying to emulate with DIY enthusiasm at home.
For this stage of my life, I rather enjoy changing up my hair colour too. I’ve lived three decades as a dark brunette, one decade as a constantly morphing red head and currently, I’m an ash blonde with dark slices underneath.
It’s like I want to be blonde but I don’t want to be. The darker slices just make things more interesting. Blonde with a twist.
The fact that I can manage my hair at home is a major bonus and it’s how I want my days to be. My mum and aunts were of that generation of tight-permed heads so they never dreamt of washing their own hair and their best beauty friends were their rainhats dotted around the house and in bags, in case it rained.
I’ve lots of friends who push the very most out of their hair salon blow-drys because they are secretly curly heads at heart, but you would never guess that from their sleek, straight tresses.
Anyway, last Monday I headed off to lunch at a chic house on Carlisle
Street for the launch of the Bank of Ireland new mortgage campaign ‘making a house a home’. It was held on the street my mum lived on when she first moved from Cork and into ‘digs’ with the Kirwan family. A home away from home.
It probably would have been just too much synchronicity given that it was the actual day of her anniversary but as it happened, it wasn’t the same house, just a few doors up.
Arriving with a ‘meant-to-be’ smile on my face, I met the VIP ‘house warming’ guest, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and we chatted about everything from the height of dado rails — they should be one third of the wall space — to becoming grandparents.
The apple of his eye is his grandson, Albion, who is almost two, much the same as our Miss Lily, and calls him Guv, as in Guvnor.
After lunch, I interrogated Laurence on my current interiors obsession: to paint my sitting room black, a la Blakes Hotel in Chelsea. For years, I was always out-ruled when I produced a copy of World of Interiors featuring Anouska Hempel’s beyond gorgeous hotel with its dark walls, calm intimacy and subtle layering.
That night I was sitting on the couch, surveying the walls, in particular the corners, which Laurence said would disappear with a dark colour, when I was encouraged to go and look at Triona McCarthy’s Instagram, where she had posted a ‘story’ from that day’s lunch.
I saw it straight away and gasped in horror. From her pew sitting behind me while Laurence spoke, she’d taken a full sweep of the room and the shot panned onto the back of my head. OMG, it looked like I had a giant bald spot on the back of my head! Not a small niggling spot, the kind that sends vain guys racing for a hair transplant, but a patch the size of a small saucer. Instinctively, I reached for the back of my head — hair still there. I raced off to find a make-up compact with a mirror and positioned myself in front of the hall mirror for a better view. Turns out I’d been too busy marshalling the front and the fringe, I hadn’t noticed how the family’s signature ‘double crown’ was parting so much, and with the light colour, was creating the illusion of a bald spot.
There was nothing for it but to dig out some hair rollers. Not the bedfellows I had been expecting. Clearly I need to hoosh the hair over to the right and create a ‘sweep’ in a kind of female comb-over.
I may be bringing rollers to bed now but I draw the line at hair nets, eye patches and gloves filled with hand cream.
You probably can’t tell but I’ve avoided having any ‘work’ done on my fiftysomething face. I did however have PhiBrows microblading, where individual hair strokes were lightly drawn in semi-permanent ink — basically, I got tattooed. Weeks later I read how Helen Mirren also had microblading done, and we are on the same page. Waking up with eyebrows makes such a huge difference.
Did the eyebrow embroidery hurt? Not really. The brow artist had a very soothing voice and when she promised it would take years off me, I was in that chair in a flash. I was never going to boast Cara Delevingne brows, but I like how they define my face and were calculated based on my face symmetry.
In my latest beauty adventure, I went into a store to buy a bra and came out with a set of semi-permanent individual lashes. I loved how, combined with the Phi eyebrows, this meant I was ‘ready to go’ in the morning. As expected, with time they slowly fell out and a friend suggested I wear goggles in the shower. I thought she was mad, but I gather a lot of women do this, to save these add-on eye lashes which, I have to say, help enormously to ‘open the eye’. What is it about middle age — your eyes seem to get smaller, just when you are seeing the world more clearly? I, for one, have no intention of adding swimming goggles to my beauty kit but the last time I was in the dentist’s chair, I started making eyes at those protective glasses I had to wear. I think with a pair of those I might be a candidate for another batch of eye lashes. Eyes wide open! Watch this space!