It's that time again where we all get a bit reflective as the year draws to a close, and rightly so! What better time to look back at your achievements to see how far you've come, and your "not so great" moments so you can learn from them and then lock them away in a box in your mind marked DO NOT TOUCH!
For me, I can happily say that 2017 has been my best year yet. Hands down. No competition.
In our heads, by now we would like to have all presents wrapped and under a perfectly decorated tree, with the house clean, and you're plopped on the sofa guzzling mulled wine watching Elf.
In reality?
You're frantically running around like a headless chicken trying to buy all your presents on Christmas Eve. Sound familiar?
I've been in both situations over the years, and however much you'd like to be all organised in plenty of time, life gets in the way and next thing you know it's Christmas on Monday and you've done nothing.
Thanks to the wonder of next day delivery, you can rest easy for a little while longer, so if you're clueless about what last-minute stocking fillers to get your friends and family this Christmas, I've come up with a little selection for you to browse through.
It's crazy to think this is my last group gift guide! There will be one more after this about stocking fillers and last-minute presents that will be going up at the end of this week, but this is the final one for a specific category member! It's strange to think that a week ago I was sat surrounded by products trying to figure out how the hell I was going to put this all together.
But I have, and I've loved every minute! I'm also pretty impressed that I've been able to produce 4 blog posts in the space of less than a week when normally I struggle to post once a week at the most.
Make sure you're all caught up with my other gift guides for friends and sisters, grandmas and mothers-in-law, mums and last-minute stocking fillers.
For me, men have always been really hard to buy for. I've grown up surrounded by picky men, which makes buying them gifts for birthdays or Christmas a right nightmare! This has meant though that I've slowly learned what works and what doesn't when it comes to presents.
Take a scroll down and see if you pick up any gift ideas for those men in your life that are hard to buy for.
Happy Monday everyone! It's been so exciting sharing these gift guides with you, and I hope you've been enjoying them as much as it was to put them together. If you've not caught up with my other gift guides, do take a look! There's one for friends and sisters (with a giveaway too), one for grandmas and mother in laws, one for men who are hard to buy for and one for last minute stocking fillers.
This time, we're focussing on gifts for the main ladies in our lives- our mums. My mum is one of my favourite people to buy for as I love spoiling her rotten after all the things she's done for me.
Normally with mums, you might know their taste pretty well, but sometimes it's quite hard to think of new gift ideas if you've been buying gifts for them for a long time. It can be really easy to end up repeating a gift without even realising.
So here are some Christmas gift ideas for mums that you might want to treat them to, and drumroll please...there's another giveaway! Be sure to enter after you've read this post.
Welcome back to my second Christmas gift guide! If you missed my first one on gifts for friends and sisters, you can take a look at it here. There's also one on mums too with a little giveaway at the end, as well as one for the men in your life that are hard to buy for and last-minute stocking fillers.
This guide is focussing on grandmas and mother in-laws! This group is more likely to have sophisticated traditional tastes and can sometimes be very particular in what they like! If you know their taste, go in the direction of homeware and beauty products in their favourite scents.
There are loads of products on the market at the moment that look really luxe for an affordable price, as well as gift sets that contain loads of products for half the price they normally would be.
So if you're looking for some ideas for your grandmas and mother in-laws that you may not have thought of, keep reading!
It's that time again where you start pulling your hair out trying to think of what presents to buy your friends and family.
You end up scouring site after site and battling the crowds in shopping centres sometimes without having a real idea of what you're looking for. That may be because the people you need to get presents for are really difficult to buy for.
I've had quite a bit of experience with buying for picky people, so throughout the year if I come across any present ideas suitable for someone I'll pop them in my note section ready for this time of year.
I've got 5 gift guides for different categories of your friends and family coming to you this December: friends and sisters, grandmas and mother-in-laws, mums, men that are hard to buy for, and last-minute stocking fillers.
So if you're struggling with gift ideas for your family and friends, I hope these might help point you in the right direction this Christmas. Plus there's a little giveaway waiting at the end of this post for you!
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| Tongariro Alpine Crossing |
I'm presenting myself with the mammoth task of creating a budget breakdown for each of the countries I visited on my 5-month backpacking trip. When I was planning our budget, one thing I found really helpful was to look at other budget guides to work out how much money we'd need to travel around each country.
It felt reassuring reading them as I knew those people had actually experienced living on that certain amount of money, and I knew what I was going to expect to be paying for different things.
I'm starting off this series with the first country we visited - New Zealand.
To give you a brief overview - New Zealand is expensive, especially compared to Asia. You're probably looking at the same sort of prices as Australia if a little cheaper. When we visited New Zealand in 2017, the New Zealand dollar was about twice as much as the British pound, to give you a reference.
It's pretty easy to remember, just half everything and you'll roughly be paying that amount.
All of the pricing below will be broken down into daily prices, and then summarised for a month's stay.
So if you're thinking about travelling to New Zealand here's how much money you'll need based on my personal experience of what we paid!
So if you're thinking about travelling to New Zealand here's how much money you'll need based on my personal experience of what we paid!
I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but I have a lot of perfume. It's not been something that I was aware of until I really looked at how many bottles I had standing on my shelf, but I just seem to accumulate them! This is mainly due to people buying them for me as gifts, winning them in competitions and through samples. But am I complaining?! Definitely not.
The one thing I love about owning so many bottles of perfume is that I can choose a scent to fit my specific mood that day. I can flit from floral to musky, daytime to evening, powerful to light without having to stick to one scent! There are a few that I always enjoy wearing that bit more than some of the others I own, so here are my favourite perfumes I'm reaching for right now.
Just to give you a heads up, I'm not an expert in perfume, so I've tried to describe each perfume in the best way I can.
Just to give you a heads up, I'm not an expert in perfume, so I've tried to describe each perfume in the best way I can.
If you've been here a while, you may know that I'm a big lover of Bioderma. Ever since it cleared up an eczema outbreak around my eyes, I have been in love with their products! The micellar water has become a firm favourite in my everyday skincare routine for removing my makeup and is always a repeat buy.
Due to the insane amount of cleansers in my beauty cupboard I haven't had a chance to try out their foaming cleanser- until now.
When I started trying this, I was fighting another bout of eczema around my eyes and had stripped back the number of products I was using. I needed something that wouldn't flare my eyes back up to the puffy red things they had been previously. Luckily I had the cleanser from their Sensibio range to hand, and it went down a treat!
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| Being a Hobbit for a day at Hobbiton in New Zealand |
I started planning for my 5-month backpacking trip around New Zealand and South East Asia a year ago. It's still so strange to think that I've been and come back- the time has just flown by as it always does. There was so much build-up and planning beforehand that it crept up on us and after we had booked the flights to New Zealand, the few months before we went were a complete blur! Now if you're planning a trip longer than 5 months then you may want to give yourself a bit longer than 6 months before you leave, but this is essentially the main process we went through to go from deciding to go traveling to sitting on a plane.
Now that I've got used to the good old British weather (she says begrudgingly) I've had to get used to living in jeans again. When you've been used to living in shorts or just a bikini, it feels pretty criminal to be hiding your legs away. But I've slowly been discovering old wardrobe favourites that I've forgotten about and pairing them with new favourites. There's nothing like having a shopping spree in your own wardrobe when you're broke!
Since I've returned from backpacking, I've truly come to realise how much your body changes while travelling. For a start, you will lose weight, regardless of your metabolism and how much you eat! In Asia especially, portion sizes are smaller and you soon get used to this as your stomach shrinks. You're also going to be doing a lot of walking in sauna like temperatures which will shed the pounds.
As well as hair (which I will be touching on in an upcoming post), your skin takes a massive hit. Getting minimal sleep from long distance travel, moving continuously between air conditioning and 30-degree heat, and dipping in and out of salt water and sand equals dry, dull skin. So while you may be coming back with a glorious tan, your skin is crying out for some well-earned pampering.
I guess another hello is in order! The last I spoke to you was 4 months ago, which in terms of my history of consistency is pretty tragic, but also not surprising. I've been away, you see. But if you stuck around this blog and my social, you would know this already. Instagram has become my happy place of traveling spam and is one place I've really loved using whilst I've been away. It's become a place of showing memories that I will probably never forget for as long as I live. It's also been amazing to speak to fellow travelers and pick up tips and recommendations. But one thing that it did most importantly was to make me feel close to home even though I was sometimes over 11,000 miles away! Home seemed like a strange place to me, I felt I still had my roots buried in the English countryside but I was being pulled away to rainforests and elephants, mountains ranges and deep oceans.
First of all, hello! It’s been so long since I’ve sat down to do some proper writing, mainly because I’ve been making sure I’ve been enjoying every bit of each place we’ve visited that I simply haven’t had the time to do anything! This was especially the case in New Zealand as we were driving around most days, and in the evenings we only had time to eat, plan our next leg of the journey and then sleep…but you will hear a lot more about this in upcoming posts.
Hey everyone, and hello February! The time this year already seems to be flying, or is that just me? It honestly doesn't feel like I've got a firm grip on 2017 yet, but I think this year is going to be like that all the way through for reasons that I'm going to touch on in this post. Because this year is no ordinary year...
I know, yes. A bold statement. But what's wrong with feeling a little bold once in a while. It's a new year so time to start things off with a bang! I am yet to do a proper reflective 'start of the year' post- I have done a video and will be writing it's blog counterpart very soon. In the meantime, let's get cracking with my first beauty post of the year...
Have you eaten alcohol? A strange thing to say, I know, but recently I've been discovering different recipes that include alcohol as one of the main components, not just as a splash for flavour. This is mainly thanks to my mum, who loves trying out new recipes (especially ones including drink). At this time of year, we're normally left with a bit more drink in the house due to Christmas and New Year, and believe me when I say we have a lot of bubbly at the moment! We've been trying to find ways to get through it (besides drinking it and becoming alcoholics), and one of these ways is in desserts!
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