I’m laughing as I write this, because I’ve been offered the ‘health and beauty’ option in this Paypal salary for a year competition. You’d have to know me in real life to know quite how ridiculous this is, as I’m not a make up person, not a perfume person (it makes my skin smell funny, not good, in my humble opinion!) and not someone who primps and preens myself much at all. Mostly I wear something I bought about 3 years ago, I still have my hair in the style I wore it at school, I’m not known for putting a face on.
So I wondered what I’d get excited about when it came to blowing, or spending wisely, £40,000 on health and beauty.
I know what Max would say; he’d say beauty is in the eye of the beholder and to put it in the savings account where it will grow healthily and be a thing of beauty for the accountant… but he’s not a man who can be reliably trusted to trim his ear hairs and he’s no fun at all at spending money unless it is on motorbikes 😉 so I don’t think that counts.
Perhaps I could tempt him with some pretty underwear from FigLeaves though – lord knows, 7 months into TTC-ing, anything would help. (Possibly either of us looking like the couple on the website actually…) Note to self: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…. *repeat until suspension of disbelief* 😉
Obviously, I’d need to keep up the endless supply of vitamins I’ve taken this year, (which I may say I think have contributed to me not getting post natal depression for the first time ever, which is laughable really, when you consider the circumstances…) I could go to Lloyds Pharmacy for those. Who said romance was dead? 😉
One thing did occur to me though, as I browsed the sites I was offered and that is that my utter lack of interest in make-up, pretties and the like has a negative impact, I feel, on my girls and their right to develop in any way that suits them. I am not role modelling. I am the mother of 4 girls and I owe it to them to have the opportunity to explore a side of them that I simply don’t have. I might have been different with an older sister, someone to show me around make up and hair styles, but perhaps not – my younger sister seemed to manage it okay whereas my mum, who never goes out without make up, evidently failed entirely to pass on the interest to me! So perhaps what I should do is give each of the girls a sparkly make up budget for Superdrug – hmm… I think perhaps that could have the potential to bankrupt me quite quickly! I seem to remember my friend and I frequenting Superdrug in the olden days and spending our pocket money there and later, when it became the place I had my first Saturday job in, I discovered you could buy nearly anything. Come to think of it, that’s probably the last time I spent an entire weeks wages (£18.32 for a Saturday!) on pampering myself!
I know what Fran would choose; she’d go for a pair of glasses that can’t be broken, squashed, sat on, chewed, eaten or spirited away to another dimension. I wonder if Boots Opticians sell those ones? If ever there was a girl who needed to be able to perform the “Reparo” charm, it’s Fran!
I think I can say, with fair certainty, that £40,000 would not actually change our life completely, and we’d probably end up using it to ‘make life easier’ – and one thing that would make life much easier would be doing away with the constant recycling or deciding to throw away or not dilemma of old clothes. I end up keeping boxes of them to hand down to the next daughter, which I then lose and don’t use anyway. So I think I’d kit all the girls out with a high quality capsule wardrobe, one that would be timeless and hard wearing enough to see through all 4 of them, barring accidents and disaster! I get very tired of trashy looking clothes that dress up little girls as mini adults but I think all of them would be able to find a wardrobe at asos. Don’t even start me on trying to find decent winter footwear for girls who don’t go to school but also don’t want to look like…. perhaps that is best not said 😉 (I believe you might find a post in the archives on that subject which once got quite heated though!)
Find out more about the Paypal Win £40,000 competition and Enter now for your chance to win. You will be in with a chance of winning £40,000 by simply buying anything using PayPal, and the more times you buy, the more chances you get. (Remember it’s a weekly draw).
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I am the mother of 5 girls, 3 of them are teens. I am like you, a no make-up, no ‘pampering’ kind of woman. However, my teens have had no problems with discovering the joys of copious amounts of black eyeliner and mascara! My only regret was that I couldn’t help them with tips on how to apply make up. I bought them a couple of beauty books one Christmas, and now the girls give me advice!!