This isn’t my first time at the rodeo when it comes to writing about Murad’s brilliant Retinol Youth Renewal range. I covered the relaunch at around this time last year (you can read that post here if you fancy) and it’s one of the ranges I refer to by default when people ask me for retinol recommendations. The main reason being that it’s powerful stuff, offering up proper, visible results, yet it seems to be tolerated by all but the most sensitive skin.

I mean you still have to go slow and steady with the range – it tingles, it goes straight to work, it’s not messing around – but if you’re sensible and don’t try to go from Total Retinol Virgin to Nightly Retinol Fiend in the space of a fortnight you’ll be A-OK. My preference, if I haven’t used retinol products for a while, is to start off with every four nights for a couple of weeks, move to every three nights for another couple and then stick to every other night for the duration of however long I manage to keep it up for. (I tend to back off a little during the warmer months.) This tends to keep any dryness or itchiness at bay – if I go straight in with all beauty guns a-blazing then you can guarantee that my face will be falling off by week two!

I digress. I’m supposed to be talking about Murad’s Retinol Youth Renewal Eye Serum here and the fact that it’s a total game-changer when it comes to using retinol around the eyes. If the rest of the range (a face serum, a sumptuous, buttery night cream) has been sensitively formulated then this eye serum takes things one step further. Not only can it be taken all around the eyes, including the lids, it includes non-greasy moisturisers to provide lightweight hydration for up to twenty-four hours. I love the fact that it’s safe to be used on the lids – every year my eyelids are more and more wrinkly and it would be nice to nip that in the bud for a while, before they start to resemble little testicles.

My eyes are notorious when it comes to overreacting to strong ingredients yet they have no problem with the Murad eye serum even when used nightly. Now you might not be an eye cream sort of person, preferring to use your usual face cream or treatment all over instead. What I will say about strong retinol products is that I find they are sometimes a bit…enthusiastic…to take up to the eye area. Many a time have I woken up to see my little red “burn” patch has reappeared beneath my right eye – a relic from my modelling years when someone changed my eye makeup fourteen times in eight hours and basically took the top eight thousand layers of skin off – and so I try to be careful and relatively discerning when it comes to treating the eye area.

More on Murad Youth Renewal Eye Serum

And so, in conclusion, if you are looking to invest in a results-driven eye treatment that has been specifically formulated for the eye area then Youth Renewal Eye Serum is a fine place to start. It is an investment – the eye serum is £72, night cream is £70 – but the firming and plumping benefits are noticeable.

Murad use a three-pronged approach to delivering the retinol, with an “instant”, fast-acting retinoid, a slower release retinol and an ingredient to sort of “prep” the skin for the retinol so it’s a pretty sophisticated formula with a gentle, non-aggressive touch. Powerful enough for tackling the established lines and wrinkles and loss of firmness but also great for preventative measures too.

You can find the whole Youth Renewal range online here – if you use the code RUTH25 then you get 25% off*!

*excludes winter sale items, kits and new product launches.

The post Murad Retinol Youth Renewal: The Game-Changing Eye Serum appeared first on A Model Recommends.

I’m sorry, but the part of me that likes things to be in order has to post this video despite it being a whole season old. (Admittedly it’s only a very tiny – tiny – part of me that likes things in order, because mostly I live in chaos, like one of those long-bearded inventors from the movies, with piles of books everywhere and mugs on the windowsills and holes in the ceiling where my experiments have gone wrong.

Or the beauty equivalent of all of this.)

Anyway, I’m about to post up the contents of my winter makeup bag and it just wouldn’t do to have a season missing, so here’s What’s In My Makeup Bag: Autumn 2020. God that feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? When we were planning for the family Christmas – the festive “light at the end of the tunnel” – and laughing off suggestions that things “might not be back to normal” by spring…

Highlights of this video – because it’s all still relevant, it was only eight weeks ago! – include the Soft Matte foundation from NARS, which everyone seemed to rave about but didn’t float my boat that much, and the Vieve makeup range. Enjoy – product list is below the video pane.

You can find the whole back catalogue of What’s In My Makeup Bag posts by clicking here.

NARS Soft Matte Complete Foundation £28.00*: https://tidd.ly/2J4e2kA  at Boots

Charlotte Tilbury Filmstar Bronze & Glow Palette £49*: https://bit.ly/2UOI8uL at Feelunique  (I chose shade Fair/Medium)

 Vieve Makeup*: https://bit.ly/3pObxn2

My Kit Co at Beauty Bay*: https://bit.ly/2UQAsZe (I’m using the 1.15)

Tilbury Eye Colour Magic Liner Duo in ‘Copper Charge’ £21*: https://bit.ly/3pUFORw at Feelunique

Real Techniques Eye Shade & Blend Brush Set £8.99*: https://bit.ly/3l0w0BO at LookFantastic

Guerlain Maxi Lash Mascara £28*: https://bit.ly/3fqWnPV at Feelunique 

Hourglasscosmetics Ambient Lighting Powder Palette £61*: https://bit.ly/3pRCfvm at Cult Beauty

Glossier Boy Brow Grooming Pomade £14.00*: https://bit.ly/2UP1Q9L at Glossier

Tilbury Lip Cheat Lipliner in ‘Iconic Nude’ £17*: https://bit.ly/2ULX4tP at Cult Beauty

Becca cosmetics Pearl Glow Lip Tint in Rose, £19*: https://bit.ly/2URNzJm

Chanel Les Chaines de Chanel Illuminating Blush Powder in ‘Rosebud’ £52.00*: https://bit.ly/2UMRRld at Feelunique

The jumper is quite old now, sorry, it was a limited edition Boden one! 

The post What’s In My Makeup Bag? Autumn 2020 appeared first on A Model Recommends.

And so here we are, thrown back into the deep pit of lockdown confusion. Each of us with a different and unique inconvenience or disaster: some have lost jobs, some are caring for the sick or elderly, many are suffering with their mental health, lots are working in risky situations or working when they shouldn’t be working. Some people are incredibly bored, others can’t find enough hours in the day to get everything done, there are people who have found their lives largely unaffected and those who have welcomed the changes, others who have refused to make any changes whatsoever…

(A few have “all the time in the world” and are learning how to cross-stitch, speak Cantonese and correctly prune Bonsai trees but we shall ignore them for now.)

My own personal Mastermind specialist subject (Lockdown Edition) is “working from home with two very young kids”, a specialist subject shared by many and only truly understood by those with first hand experience. It’s like being in a high-energy high-stakes gameshow, let’s say Crystal Maze, but a gameshow that never ends. There’s Richard O’Brien standing at the door playing the flute as you try to conduct a crucial work call and wipe a child’s bottom at the same time, he’s constantly telling you that you’re running out of time and that the door’s going to lock and you’ll be trapped in the room…the door’s already locked Richard!

I learnt from Lockdown version 1.0 that to survive being trapped with small children 24/7 you need to consciously kiss any kind of freedom goodbye. And try be OK with that. You have to wipe all plans for any kind of personal development or achievement, even if the height of your ambition is “trying to find some new recipes so that the family can get more nutrients into their diet”.

You have to learn to function on a reduced service – essential tasks only – and not be frustrated if you can’t fit any of the other stuff in. Like sleep. Reading. Leaving the house for exercise. Talking to an adult human that isn’t sick of talking to you.

And that’s just about doable, but bloody hell it’s tiring. Bone-deep exhausting, in fact, and the sort of mentally draining trial of endurance that makes you want to drag yourself up into a tree and hide there for an indefinite period of time.

But anyway, you plough on as best you can through the exhaustion fug, until you see annoying comments underneath online articles saying things like:

“why have kids if you don’t want to look after them?”

“erm, how did these people who are desperate for schools to open not know having kids would be hard?”

and then, the inspiration for this post, one that sent me cross-eyed with incredulity:

“all these parents whining about being stuck with their kids: what do they think people did in the olden days?”

Ah, the olden days. What did people do with their kids in the olden days, “Ducati821”? Enlighten me. Just the fact that you’ve managed to squeeze the entire history of humankind pre-2020 into one easy category suggests to me that you won’t have properly thought this one through.

Is it “the olden days” of the eighties, for example, which I have firsthand experience of? Because I can tell you that we used to spend most of the day playing on bits of old carpet, sliding down an embankment that ran alongside a busy road. We stayed out for hours. In fact, most kids I know who were brought up in the eighties barely saw their parents in daylight hours, unless it was for a quick lunch.

And speak to Mr AMR, brought up in the seventies, who used to play on the motorway with his siblings and walk himself to school. (The way he tells it he was frying his own cooked breakfast at three and chainsawing trees down by the age of six, but I suspect he is prone to exaggeration when it comes to childhood memories.)

How olden days shall we go, Ducati821, because I think you’ll find that the further back you delve, the less time parents probably spent with their kids. In centuries past, if you were rich then you didn’t look after your own offspring at all – poor parents sent theirs out to work as soon as they could convincingly wield a set of dangerous-looking tools. And if the kids weren’t working, they were running about the manure-strewn streets getting kicked in the head by a horse, or shot through the thorax with an errant arrow or enslaved by an evil Sheriff.

Basically, children have for the most part either gone to school or they’ve been put to work, depending on historic era and/or socioeconomic circumstances. Very rarely do people voluntarily decide to spend every single waking hour with their progeny once they have graduated from nappies.

Look at my parents’ generation – their parents used to boot them out of the door at about six in the morning with a heel of granary bread and an apple. And they used to get into all sorts of mischief finding horrendously dangerous places to amuse themselves. Marshes. Train tracks. Quarries.

The parents knew that the kids were up to no good but they kicked them out for the whole day anyway. They basically had the option of swimming in an old, deep sinkhole, swinging from rusty, broken scaffolding or shooting at tin cans with the rifles their dads had brought back from the war. The safest playtime activity was probably having picnics in the scary wood where the “strange man liked to watch them”.

“Will you be away and out of my hair Liam and don’t be getting sucked into that bog like wee Patrick and little Malachy before him and Jerry before him and all of those other poor boys who keep getting sucked into the bog I should probably tell you not to go and play in.”

I digress: my point is that spending all day and every day with your kids is quite wearying. 100% of the time is…a lot of time. No relationship is designed to be that relentless, even if the other person is Tom Hardy. (Ha! Had to get him in somewhere.) You can see why women with many, many children (my granny had eight, that wasn’t unusual or even notable) got the eldest to look after the youngest and then sat there chain-smoking roll-ups and staring forlornly at the mangle.

Tell me, as a sort of sociological/historical factfinding experiment: how much time did you spend with your parents when you were young? Did they constantly play with you, sit and watch films with you, make dens and forts with you, or did you get sent out into the garden/street with your siblings and the boy from Number 9 who was eight years old and owned a replica Rambo knife? (Complete with sewing kit in the handle.) Comment below, please, and update me on your lockdown status: Bored, Surviving or End of Tether.

The post Life Update: This Isn’t The Olden Days appeared first on A Model Recommends.