Monthly Archives: November 2018

On… looking human with a newborn

I have an eight-week-old baby. (YAY ME.) He is absolutely lovely and delicious and, as far as newborns go, excessively easygoing. But it’s still been a pretty intense few months, because I also have deadlines. It’s actually easy to write with a newborn. It is. Truly. They eat, more or less, every three hours. Then they sleep for two hours. So you can write in that two-hour period, and then feed them and gaze at them adoringly until they sleep again. If they’re fussy, you can pop them in the ergo, and keep typing. That’s all there is to it. (This is assuming you don’t have a nightmare hellbaby who screams all the time. Ned was like that. But Arthur, blissfully,  is not.) While we’re on the subject, writing with a toddler is a fucking nightmare, because toddlers are tiny cavemen with giant egos. But newborns are easy.

However. I’m the don’t-expose-a-newborn-to-outside-germs-unnecessarily type, and my baby is the fuck-your-bottles-I-only-want-the-boob type, which means we are pretty much at home ALL the DAMN TIME and so doing anything apart from eating / sleeping / writing is challenging, if not impossible. All of this is a very boring and long-winded way of saying: I’m doing a lot of home grooming in order to look human.

This lovely dpHue gloss allegedly extends the lifespan of highlights, so is hopefully helping me to avoid the hair salon. I also use this as a conditioner once a week to keep the ol’ tresses bright and sunny rather than dull and brassy. My hair got all dry during pregnancy, so I put this It’s A Ten stuff on right out of the shower, before I blow dry. And then, on dry hair, I swear this Mise En Scene shit has magical bouffy-shiny properties. And of course, my hair probably needs a trim. (It always probably needs a trim). This collagen protein thing swells the hair shaft so it looks slightly less bedraggled. (Why does shaft always sound so filthy?) (I know why, I know why.) (Because PEEN.)

The skin on my body is dry AF after having a baby. Always is. I think it’s a hormonal thing; it gets all burlap-esque. I’ve been using this AHA moisturizer and it does some magic tingly exfoliating shit and I swear to go, leaves my skin all creamy and even-toned. And the skin on my face is recovering from a ghastly bout of pregnancy-induced melasma over the summer, so I’m alternating Clark’s Botanicals Smoothing Marine Cream and this lovely French Ystheal retinol. You can’t use retinol when you’re knocked up, and I’ve been knocked up on-and-off for about two years when you think about it, so retinol and I have some catching up to do.

My nails are terrible. I cut them short with toenail clippers and never think about them.

I look tired all the time, because, um, I am quite tired all the time, and I’ve made peace with that fact. I’ve been fantasizing about getting fillers in the dark troughs under my eyes. In my fantasies I don’t become blind from it, which is apparently a legit risk, and the reason I won’t be ever doing it. So instead, I’m splatting this on and smushing it around with the NuFace in the hope that it pushes my jowls up into my eyebag troughs. (Does the NuFace really work? IDFK darlings. It is extremely expensive – but I *think* it helps with puffiness.)

What else is there? Oh, I know. Make-up. Most days I cannot be bothered, but when I can, I just want to look fresh-faced and put together, and not like this. I discovered this Hado Labo face mask during a late-pregnancy-insomnia-fuelled Reddit deep-dive – and it’s genuinely GREAT! It plumps out pores and leaves your face all smooth and dewy and divine. Then I throw on this SPF, which has a very subtle glow, and use my fingers to push NARS concealer around my chin and nostrils and eyelids, with a little extra Cle de Peau concealer on any particularly blotchy bits. Then lots of Bobbi Brown Pale Yellow Powder with this brush, then some of this nothing-looking-yet-totally-something NARS Impassioned blush. Hourglass Platinum blonde, some L’Oreal Voluminous mascara, and Bobbi Brown Baby matte lip stain stuff. This is not a make-up look to get excited about, but it makes me look like a human in about three and a half minutes. And that’s a win.