Estee Lauder Blogger Event: Prosecco, Face Masks and Freebies...Oh My!

It's not very often that I get to describe a Thursday evening as fun-filled and glamorous (I mean, usually I'd be in my pjs by 7pm with a Mini Milk, watching Take me Out). But last night I was lucky enough to attend a fabulous Estee Lauder blogging event courtesy of their counter in Boots, Cribbs Causeway.

For a while I was afraid I wouldn't be able to make it, what with the exhaust literally falling off my car and the motor giving out in one of the windows so that it wouldn't go back up. Luckily the garage managed fit a new exhaust in time for me to make it to Bristol, albeit with a black bag taped to the side of my car in an attempt to keep the rain out. Trying to pay at the Severn Bridge was a nightmare I never want to have to repeat.

But it was definitely worth all the drama when I finally got there (slightly frizzy and dishevelled as I was since the black bag only held out for the first 15 miles of my journey). The event was held at Scavi and Ray, a chic prosecco bar in the Cribbs Causeway Shopping Mall that Carrie Bradshaw herself would be proud to be spotted at. We had an array of delicious nibbles and adorable little bottles of prosecco with straws, which went down a treat!

First we heard about the history of Estee Lauder, who was, in fact, a real-life woman and a sassy, ingenious girlboss at that! She was the first to give out free samples and gifts with purchase. You guys, we owe that woman so much!

And then we got into the products. I felt like a small child on Christmas morning!

We tried out some of the products from the Advanced Night Repair range including the foil mask made famous by Victoria Beckham. I used it on the back of my hand and even now, almost 24 hours later, one hand is still smoother and more fresh-looking than the other. My hands look they they belong to two different people!

We also got to try out some of the products from the Genuine Glow range, which was super exciting because a) it's designed specifically for us millennials and b) everything is pink! For me the stand out product was the Eyelighting Creme for Eyes and Face. The glow it gave my skin was so beautiful without any of the harsh shininess that you can sometimes get with cream highlighters. I fell in love!

From there we went and got colour-matched for the famous Double Wear foundation, which I've been desperate to try for goodness knows how long. Here's a fun fact: Estee Lauder have 44 different foundation shades. 44! That means there's a shade for everyone and no one has to settle for a colour that's a little too pale or a tad too warm. It's the utopia of foundations!

I had a little sample of Double Wear to bring home with me along with a goodie bag bursting with products I can't wait to try out. By this time next week my skin will be so smooth and radiant that no one will recognise me!

And the lovely ladies at Estee Lauder are so generous that they want all you guys to have a free gift too! Just take this picture (you don't even have to print it, you can take it on your phone) to the Estee Lauder counter at Boots, Cribbs Causeway and you'll get a free gift with any purchase!

I'm so glad my dodgy little car got me to Bristol last night because it really was a lovely evening. Thank you to all the ladies from the Estee Lauder counter for being so friendly and especially to Karen for organising such a lovely event! All in all the evening was a fantastic opportunity to meet some lovely new friends, learn more about a fantastic brand and fall in love with some new products.

Seriously, I've already started writing my Christmas list!

The Ultimate University Check List!

For many of us university is our first taste of independent, grown-up life. Suddenly you're solely responsible for buying your own food (and working out how to cook it without giving yourself food poisoning), paying your own bills, ensuring your passport doesn't end up discarded on the bathroom floor of a dodgy night club that smells like mouldy cheese etc.

Seriously, adulting is hard you guys!

To ensure the transition from your parents' spare room to a home of your own (if one can honestly call a 4 square foot box with a wet-room a home of one's own) as easy and successful as possible, it's best to be prepared. For anything!

You'll be surprised how often even the most obscure objects come in handy while you're at university!

And, if nothing else, being the girl who had everything made it really easy to make friends in the first couple of weeks. Whenever my less prepared housemates needed a spatula or some safety pins, I could come to rescue. After all, nobody wants to traipse to Tesco halfway through pre-drinks because no one in the flat had the forethought to bring a corkscrew.

So, to make sure you have absolutely EVERYTHING you could possibly need for your big move to university, I have the ultimate check-list for you.

Documents:

• Acceptance letter from the university
• Student loan documents
• Any housing documents/home insurance documents you may have
• Bank account information
• Medical information/prescription medication information
• Passport 

Review: BBC's Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets

Recently I've been trying my hand at cleaner eating. I've been doing my best to avoid processed food and to fill my plate with food that comes from the Earth as is instead of food labelled "pierce lid several times before microwaving on full power for four minutes", but I'm not quite there yet. The occasional biscuit (or seven), chocolate orange yoghurt or french fry still manage to find their way into my mouth.

Hence cleaner eating. Cleaner than it was, but not exactly clean clean.

I'm still new to the world of clean eating and I'm still trying to get my hands on as much information as I can to inspire and educate me. So when I saw the BBC had brought out a documentary called Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets, you can bet I was all over it. I like to be well-informed!

Unfortunately, this documentary does not seem to share that passion for being well-informed.

According to the BBC, this 34 minute long documentary follows Youtuber, Grace Victory, as she "investigates Britain's latest extreme diet craze", which kind of threw up red flags for me straight away.  After all, if clean eating is eating whole foods in their most natural state without all the artificial colours, additives and chemicals, food that comes from the Earth instead of a lab or a factory, then how is that an extreme diet craze? Surely that's just the natural human diet that we lived on for millions of years before the days of fast food, brominated vegetable oil and GMOs.

But it quickly becomes apparent that the documentary isn't actually about clean eating at all. In fact, throughout the entire programme I struggled to understand what it was about!

Grace says she's investigating "plant-based diets that are dairy free, sugar free, gluten free, meet free, JOY free", but throughout the documentary she jumps from one diet to the next in an almost haphazard way, not explaining their differences and instead sloppily labelling them all as 'clean eating'. Hello! Living a vegan lifestyle is not the same as clean eating. Not all clean eaters are vegan and not all vegans are clean eaters! Nor do gluten or natural sugars have any part to play in whether or not you're a vegan or a clean eater. I'm sure there are sugar free, gluten free clean eating vegans out there (who may or may not have joy in their lives), but these dietary preferences aren't all co-dependent or one of the same thing.

It turns out that what Grace is actually condemning investigating is veganism, which she deems "very middle class" because it's so expensive.

Now, I'm not a vegan myself so correct me if I'm wrong, but a trolley full of vegetables and rice surely can't cost as much as a trolley full of ham, beef and chicken breasts. And, again correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure you'll find that the world over it's the poorest people who are living on a plant-based diet while the middle classes are tucking into their sirlion steak with side of peppercorn sauce. Vegetables are not reserved for doctors, lawyers and Jack Will's wearers.

Grace cites and chats with various bloggers and Youtubers throughout the documentary, including Brianna Jackson. Brianna suffered from an eating disorder for five years and, in an interview with Whole Lifestyle, she says, "if I hadn't found raw veganism, I don't think I'd be alive today...whole unprocessed foods really helped me trust food again". But, rather than heralding veganism as the reason for Brianna's recovery like she does, the BBC documentary almost makes out that Brianna's diet and her illness are connected, using her eating disorder story as a segway into a section on orthorexia.

(In case you're not down with the lingo, orthorexia is a medical condition that causes sufferers to avoid certain foods that they consider unhealthy.)

Brianna is a vegan advocate and certainly doesn't consider herself to be orthorexic. Needless to say, Brianna was more than a little upset when she saw the documentary. You can watch her response video here:


It's clear from the get-go that Grace's intention is to condemn and undermine a lifestyle that she blatantly doesn't understand and openly refers to as "a cult". She openly says "I don't want this lifestyle", she wants the diets she tries (for how many days is never really clarified) to fail and she wants to go back to her old, processed, microwavable ways. And that's fine! You do you girlfriend! (I just ate a Milkybar, who am I to judge?) But if you're going to make a documentary exposing the negatives of something, it needs to be researched, well presented...make some fragment of sense!

Overall the documentary is a poor attempt at cramming too many topics (anorexia, orthorexia, veganism, blogger influence, the regulation of the term 'nutritionist', a potato cleanse...whatever that is) into a measly 34 minutes. All these different aspects of what Grace confusedly terms as 'clean eating' are quickly glossed over without any real exploration and then sloppily thrown together into half an hour of misinformed confusion.

Rant over!

Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets is currently available for you to watch (and roll your eyes at as you see fit) on the BBC iPlayer.

Monthly Musings: July

Look everyone! Monthly Musings are making a comeback and, whats more, they've had a bit of a revamp! Please contain your 'oohs' and 'aahs' as far as possible.

July has, for the most part, been a bit of a strain on my poor, fragile nerves because my parents decided to pull apart the kitchen and fit an entirely new one. In fairness, it was crying out for a makeover. Those counters were here when we moved in 14 years ago and they weren't even fashionable then (nor, if you ask me, were they ever).

But, as excited as I was at the promise of an oven that wouldn't burn all my cakes and a Tassimo machine for a never-ending supply of vanilla lattes available in the comfort of my own home, the dusk til dawn drilling, the dust, having to wash all the dishes in the bath and living off extremely questionable microwavable sausages and powdered soups eventually took its toll!

The main thing is I survived! And, beige diet and general kitchen drama aside, July has been a pretty good month!

Magical Moment

At 24 years old I'm still a festival novice. The mud, lack of running water and the whole sleeping on the floor thing really put me off. But this month I donned my wellies and obnoxiously large flower headband and attended the extremely exclusive Wellifest. Never seen it advertised in the Rolling Stones magazine? That's because it's a festival that my (extremely creative and slightly bonkers) cousin, Elinor, throws in her back garden every year. We had bands, we had hay bales, we had pulled pork, we even had an impromptu dance floor! And, amazingly, it didn't even rain...until everyone was a few cans of cider too many to notice.

I had such an amazing afternoon and took so well to the boho-chic festival style that I might even go to an actual festival next summer. You know, if I can get over my aversion to porta-loos by then.

#FAIL of the Month

The sheer amount of straw I managed to get in my Jack Daniels during Wellifest. I mean...how?!

This month I'm obsessed with...

Crips that aren't really crisps.

Since the kitchen has been off limits, I've been pretty much living on snack food (or at least that's my excuse). So imagine my delight when I came across a delicious alternative to crisps that I could exclaim, through a mouth full of crumbs, were in fact pretty good for me...well, better than ordinary crisps at least. This month I discovered a brand called Eat Real, which produces all kind of gluten free, vegetarian and vegan friendly crisps made from lentils, hummus, quinoa and veggies. My personal favourites are the Sour Cream and Chive Quinoa Chips. Nom!

Photo|EatReal.co.uk

If you're reading this and thinking, "quinoa crisps...really?!" then to you I say, "Yes! Really!"
They taste delicious, satisfy my midday cravings and have the same satisfying crunch as those deep-fried potato crisps without the guilt.

Book

This month I've been reading *The Count of Monte Cristo and, to be entirely honest, I think I'll still be reading The Count of Monte Cristo for a good few months to come. It's a impressive 1300 pages long, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's some kind of meandering Victorian novel that spends the first 500 pages setting the scene by describing the colour of the grass and the noise of the birds (though, in all honesty, I do enjoy those kinds of books too). It jumps pretty much straight into the action and it's fast pace, intriguing characters and the unexpected twists and turns of the plot have got me totally hooked.

Photo|BarnesandNoble.com

In case you're unfamiliar with the story, a young sailor named Dantes is accused of treason by his jealous acquaintances and is imprisoned for 21 years before he escapes and vows revenge on the men he thought were his friends. I'm only a third of the way through and I'm struggling to put it down!

Youtube Channel

 LeahXO

This month I was lucky enough to be part of a collaboration with a group of small Youtubers. I thoroughly enjoyed it since, not only was it a great way to find some new channels to binge-watch, but I got to meet some lovely new Youtube friends too!

So this month's Youtuber of the month simply has to be the lovely lady who organised the collaboration and got us all together. Leah's channel is all things makeup and beauty related. She has a really sweet personality and a Northern accent that makes me want to listen to her talk all day long. Is it just me or is listening to a Northern accent like cuddling up under a nice, warm blanket somehow? No? Just me? Ok.

Photo of the Month

Here's me living the life of a real-life fairy princess at Welliefest. I AM the Snapchat filter!

Instagram: @aimee_oddball

The soundtrack of my month was...

Miranda Lambert - Gunpowder and Lead

Not that I personally want to go out and shoot anyone (though there were a couple of times during traffic jams...). But there's nothing quite like a good old sassy country song to turn up nice and loud on a summer afternoon.

This month I discovered...

There are only 880 wild Mountain Gorillas left...in the whole world!

Photo|WWF.org

I've been on a bit of a Netflix documentary binge recently (there's only so much time you can waste re-watching That 70s Show after all) and last week I came across Virunga. It's a 2014 documentary film about the work of conservation workers in Virunga National Park, a 7,800 square kilometre World Heritage site in the Congo, which is home to lions, elephants, hippos (basically the entire cast of The Lion King) and 25% of the remaining Mountain Gorillas.

You see the gorillas, how adorable they are, how the conservation workers dote on them and literally give up their lives for them and you begin to think, "Well surely no one's so thoroughly evil to the core that they'd consider hurting these poor, beautiful little balls of fluff."

Cue the arrival of the British! (There's a reason all movie bad-guys have British accents.)

A company called SOCO International barges in and starts exploring for oil (which is totally against international law). Throw in a rebel army, some tanks, a French journalist and a member of the Belgian Royal Family who is prepared to lay down his life to protect the park and you've got yourself one heck of a documentary. It will have you screaming at the TV and despairing at the greed and selfishness of the human race (even more-so than you do when you're fighting your way through the January sales).

Definitely go and check it out!

(Affiliate links marked with *)

My Back to School Giveaway!

I know school just finished and we're all busy enjoying what I guess is technically summer (constant rain and fog aside), but get your brain back into school-mode for a few seconds because I'm running a Back to School Giveaway on my Youtube channel.

I'm giving away everything you'll need to go back to school in style including pens, pencils,
notebooks...excessive organisational goodies. And even if you're not heading back to school in September you can still enter because, let's face it, we all love cute stationery!

You can enter here:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Now, get out there and enjoy summer and good luck in the giveaway!

Boring information:
1. In order to enter the giveaway you must be subscribed to my Youtube channel. Extra entries can be gained by following me on social media etc, but these methods of entry are optional.
2. The giveaway is open until 12am 1st September 2016. The winner will be announced in a video that I'll be uploading to my channel on 2nd September 2016. The winner will be contacted directly via email and will have 3 days to respond before I offer up the prize to another winner.
3. Entrants under 16 years old must seek permission from a parent/guardian because I will be contacting the winner directly.
4. This is an international giveaway. The prizes will be sent via Royal Mail delivery, but it's worth noting that some countries have customs taxes and the cost of this will not be covered. I can't be held responsible for the condition of the prizes once they leave my possession (I will wrap them up nice and tight to protect them against heavy-handed postmen though!)
5. Extra entries can be gained by following me on social media or tweeting about the giveaway, but I reserve the right to disqualify people for entering on multiple different email addresses or not playing fair. I know this doesn't apply to the vast majority of you, but it has been an issue in the past and I want everyone to have a fair shot of winning!