Fashion | Things I would buy if I wasn't so poor #1

Welcome to a new segment I like to call "things I would buy if I wasn't so poor"but unfortunately I am so alas these things can not be mine... Well, a girl can dream, a girl can dream. As you can probably see I'm going through one of those 'Topshop phases' where I want to buy literally all the things that they have in store. If you want to buy any of these then I'll link them all below so that I can spend vicariously through you. Also, if you want to follow me on polyvore then feel free! I'll link it here

Broderie anglais bralet top - Topshop - £24

MOTO supersoft skinny Leigh jeans - Topshop - £38

Studded ballet flats - Topshop - £25

Leather satchel - Topshop - £55

Life | Room decoration

I truly believe that the little things you do in a room can make or break a space in terms of decoration. I discovered this after many a conversation with my sister as to why her room always felt nice and very personal to her and mine never did. My sister has a sort of god given gift for interior design. Every room she has had has always been such a lovely space! You could go into any of them and know immediately that it's her room. It has always been my ultimate goal (in terms of room decoration that is), to harness some of this insane power and make it my own.

I finally think that I have in someway achieved this with my room at my mum's house where I used to live before I moved down to London for university. The wall with my bed is by far my favourite in the room. I spent a good few hours cutting out pictures from magazines, some of my favourite picture source magazines include; Clash, Pigeons & Peacocks, the Urban Outfitters catalogue and Nylon. If your not a bit ridiculous like me (I refuse to cut up hardback A4 magazines) then I would also recommend Love, Pop, Dazed and Confused, Vogue and iD, oh and Notion. Side note – if your ever around the Barbican area of London, which I am quite a lot, then get yourself down to the market on Leather Lane, you can pick up magazines like these there for practically nothing. A key thing to take note of when selecting your pictures is another little gem of wisdom from my sister; 'don’t worry about if they all go together or if they all go along the same theme, if you like them all then it will look good'. I follow this when I'm cutting out my pictures and it seems to have worked for me! Oh, and I generally find that smaller pictures look better in a collage, don’t ask me why, they just do.

Back from that slightly related tangent I then stuck them all up on my wall with blue tack. I really love how the wall looks now because not only is it so much better than what I used to have up there which was a load of fashion adverts and editorials that I had cut out of old issues of Elle magazine, once again I refuse to cut up my sizeable collection of Vogues, but it reflects what I like and my personality a lot more now. Also on the same wall I have some of my shoe collection stored in a little shelving unit that I think we got form Ikea ages ago (it used to be my sisters so forgive me if I'm wrong). Again, I believe that you should have things that you like on display in your room so as shallow as it sounds, I like shoes, so I'm going to display my shoes proudly for all to see. (shoe collection to come soon).

In terms of my bed, I love it! I got it for my eighteenth birthday from my mum, I think she got it from Dreams, which is a bed shop here in England. For as long as I can remember I have wanted a metal day bed type of bed and I finally got one! I love how girly it looks as I'm not a very girly girl at all and so I think it gives a nice contrast to everything else that I've got. My bedding is pretty average, I like the whole red, white and blue theme that I have going on because I have a lot of union jack things in my room and so having my bedding be in this colour scheme ties my room together quite nicely I think.

How do you decorate you room? Let me know!

Review | Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse

I have been on the quest for my perfect hair product for many a year now, it all started in about year nine I would say, I was around the thirteen/fourteen age if you don’t get the school system we have here in England. It was at this time that the trend for ruler straight hair was in full swing and like the naïve, young child that I was, I wanted a piece of that pie. I then proceeded to straighten my hair, I kid you not, four or five times a day with a pair of straighteners that I bought from a shop called Ethel Austin for the grand old price of three pounds.  

Needless to say this destroyed my hair. Full on destroyed it. At this age I didn’t know anything about heat protectants or anything like that and so my hair fought this battle against my straighteners alone, and lost. Oh boy did it lose! Since then I've been searching for a way to tame my naturally curly-ish, wavy-ish, frizzy-ish hair without submitting it to the insane levels of heat I used to.

In a glossy box maybe last month (I can't really remember to tell you the truth), I received the Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse. The oil is described as a dry oil that can be used on your hair, face and body. I haven't ventured into using it on my skin yet but I've been using it on my hair for the past few weeks. Now I've used a hell of a lot of different products on my hair, always hoping for something that will tame the damage that habitual heat styling and a lot of bleach will inevitably cause. So I decided to add in this dry oil to my normal after shower hair routine, (I'll do a separate post on that because otherwise this would be way too long!). I was hopeful but as always I didn't place any major weight on this product actually making a significant difference in my hair.

My hair is extremely dry and fragile due to all the bleach I used to use on it but a few drops of the Nuxe oil(seriously two or three drops will do my whole head of hair and I have a lot of hair!) and my hair feels really soft and with a good amount of shine! The smell of the oil itself is slightly strange, like sort of planty but I think the smell is totally worth the results and the smell doesn't linger for too long anyway, which for me is a plus point as I don’t really like my hair to smell really strongly as it kind of freaks me out a little bit (weird, I know).

The only down side I would say that there is to this product is the packaging. don’t get me wrong I really like how it looks, the little glass bottle that the oil comes in is lovely and looks very classy and expensive but it does make the application process slightly tricky. It's still very do-able but I personally think that a spray or dropper would have just made this an absolute must have for me.

All in all I would still give the Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse four and a half stars out of five purely for the effect it has on my hair. If you would be interested in trying it for yourself then you can buy it online for around the thirty pound mark here.

Life | Moving house is stress personified

As you know, if you have read my other posts, I'm from the Wirral (lets just say Liverpool). Then I moved down to the big city of London for university. The first time I moved my life down to our fair capital was stress free, a breeze if you will. This was mainly down to the fact that I was moving from my mums house into a student accommodation building and so it was all explained in a way I'm sure a two year old could of understood. I lived with Unite if anyones interested and yes, before you ask I would highly recommend them to anyone, even if the amount I was paying for rent was a penny over extortionate. I lived in the one in Tottenham Hale and had a jolly good time living there, the sunsets were particularly good as is demonstrated in my beautiful picture.

Anyway enough of that slightly related tangent. This is a tale of stress, not one of a fun, stress free year in the paradise that is Tottenham Hale (jokes). So, me and five of my friends decided that we wanted to rent a house together, to continue our aforementioned fun filled time living in London. This turns out to be way not as easy as it sounds.

Firstly, finding a six bedroom house in London, preferably reasonably central, is near enough impossible on a student budget. Secondly, our rich chinese friends, not racial profiling, factual, had found quite possibly the most beautiful apartment ever. Like, ever. It has a balcony that looks out over the millennium dome (I refuse to acknowledge that is now the o2 arena, it will always be the millennium dome to me no matter what everyone else says). I took that picture from their balcony would you believe. Long story short that apartment is the stuff that dreams are made of, if you dream of very nice apartments that is. It was then clear that anywhere we found to live would look like a pile of rubble in comparison to that place and so we tirelessly continued our search for property perfection.

Then as if by magic we stumbled on what can only be described as a miracle. Two three bed apartments in the same building. On the Thames. With views of the shard and the gherkin. I hope you are suitably impressed. And as if it were meant to be the two were in our budget range. It was a miracle, divine intervention if you will, it was meant to be. Or so it seemed. We paid our little deposit thing to have them taken off the market and then skipped back to Tottenham, well we got the tube back but you get the gist. It was then that things started to get expensive, complicated, stressful and did I mention expensive?

Everything started out well enough we put our references through and sent over copies of our bank statements and all that jazz and it all seemed not too shabby, apart from the three hundred pound referencing and admin fee that we all had to pay. Each. And from this point on more and more chaos ensued. My references failed for like no reason at all meaning that I had to pay an extra hundred pounds to have then done again, may I remind you that I am a poor London student and so a hundred pound is like a million to me right now!

Then before we knew it the estate agents were threatening to pull the deal and leave us basically homeless and about six hundred pound poorer... it took a hell of a lot of complaining and threatening to take this higher up for them to finally see that they should just let us move in to our beautiful new apartment! So all in all the moral of the story is, if your looking for a beautiful apartment on the Thames, don’t go with my estate agent which, for legal reasons I probably shouldn't name... so lets just call them carbon dioxide property management. (if you knew what they were actually called then you would see what I did there, but alas you do not.)

Life | The road to fitness

So I have decided that it is about time I tried to get a bit fitter. Now, when I say a bit I mean I think its about time I was at least as fit as a pensioner. (no joke, my nan is fitter than me.) For the past year my fitness routine has been walking from my flat on the ground floor to the tube station and then from the tube station to my chosen destination. And thats it. I have been blessed with a relatively speedy metabolism and the rather odd ability to just forget to be hungry because my days are jam packed with exciting things to do, I hope you sense the sarcasm here. Because of the killer combination of these two things I have luckily escaped what is commonly referred to as the 'freshman fifteen' (where you put on at least a stone in your first year of university for those not in the know).

I was never into sports, apart from the good old sack race (if you don’t know what that is then what was your childhood?). P.E in school was a rather painful experience for me to say the least, it wasn’t that I was unwilling to try or anything like that its just because I have the hand-eye coordination of a very uncoordinated moose and my dancing ability is shockingly bad! I have always been this way as reflected by the fact that while all the kids on my road would play out on their bikes and whatever during the evenings, I would much rather play in my sisters wardrobe. (We had a giant barbie doll house in there before you start thinking I had problems).

For our sports day at school we would have to run a 1500 meter race in which the sporty girls would always win and I would always come somewhere in the bottom ten, an achievement I'm rather proud of by the way. This was until I finally twigged in year eight that if I walked the entire thing they would let me stop after about the first third and would still give me the point for my team. Result. This then cemented my unsportiness, if thats even a word.

But no more! I have decided to combat this fear I have of exercise, well not so much fear at all, just a massive amount of laziness and I have joined a gym! Shock! Horror! Its been about three weeks and I'm jolly proud of myself to tell you the truth, me and my friend go five days a week for an hour in an effort to just get fit already. I really just use it for an excuse to go and buy new clothes though really, after all you can't go to the gym in non gym like clothing now can you?

Life | Lessons learnt at university

Let me give you a bit of background on myself to put this little tale into context... I am originally from the Wirral which, because no one ever knows where it is except if your from the Wirral, is basically just outside of Liverpool so practically everyone whose from the Wirral tries to blag and say they're from Liverpool when they're blatantly not because their wheelie bin is green and not the snazzy purple that Liverpool get to have. Anyway, so I'm from the Wirral and desperately wanted to go to London for university, it literally felt like my lives goal to get to go to university in London. I was absolutely desperate so much so that when every decent university said a very polite 'no thank you' to me and then promptly closed their doors I decided that I was so desperate to get down there that I would go to any London university that would take me no matter how bad it was. And do that I did.

I ended up accepting a place at London Metropolitan. Now I don't want to sound all big headed here, I can assure you that my head can fit through doors and all that jazz, but I felt from the minute I arrived at  that god forsaken place that it just wasn't for me. I almost felt like I could do better (I realise that this isn’t doing all that much good for my promising I don’t think I'm the best thing since toast but I promise I really don’t have a ginormous head.) Anyway, I decided to stick with it and just get my head down and do a bit of studying because after all is that not what university is all about? Just realised I haven’t even told you what my degree was meant to be! I was studying 'Fashion Marketing and Retail Management' and I don't know about you but I felt like that sounded kinda fancy! It was only when you put the “at London Met” after it that strangers you met in clubs would say “oh” in a rather pitying tone. It should have been then that I realised that London Metropolitan was most definitely not the place for me. Lesson number one; don’t settle for a blatantly rubbish university just because its in a good city and you couldn't get in anywhere else because you wrote the most boring personal statement known to man.

So, I don’t know about you and maybe it was just me being a very naïve, young child at the ripe old age of eighteen but when I decided to study fashion I naturally assumed that I would indeed be studying fashion and the business behind it. Instead I found myself in lectures that could have been from a maths degree with spreadsheets galore and whole afternoons dedicated to learning how to use Microsoft excel. Another module I suffered through was known as operations management in which we learnt the seven types of waste, don’t ask me to recite them now I'm pretty sure by that point I was heavily into a game of tiny tower on my phone or some other equally as important pursuit. The only decent modules I did on that course were the fashion system and retail environment. Note they both have the name of the degree in the name of the module, no where do I remember agreeing to do a quantitative analysis and operations management degree. Lesson number two; research your degree and its modules extensively before signing on the dotted line, trust me that extra half an hour reading the module outline will save you a year of wondering why you ever took a course that wants you to know the seven types of waste.

Also, I just want to dispel a myth here, an urban legend if you will, like the loch ness monster or big foot. Before you go to university everyone will be trying to reassure you about the whole making friends thing saying that everyone is in the same boat and people will come up to you and just start talking. Lies. Absolute lies. It seems that at least on my course, at my university, everyone was told that exact same lie and so precisely no one went over to people to start a conversation. In fact before our first lecture we all just stood there awkwardly like a bunch of very awkward lemons in absolute dead silence. No joke, you could of heard a pin drop in that dingy little corridor that we had to wait in while the class before us finished. Awful. Absolutely awful. It wasn’t until we were put into partner work that the cloud of silence was lifted and awkward get to know you icebreaker like conversation ensued, incidentally I don’t remember a single one of the fun facts I was told about the people in my class but at least it broke the silence. Lesson number three; just be a man and talk to someone, it can't be as painful as having to wait for a half an hour for your lecture in dead silence because the class ahead of you are late leaving, trust me.

On the subject of choosing universities I would definitely advise to go for one that isn’t, I kid you not, last on the league tables. Now I'm not a university snob by any means, I'm a firm believer in that if you work hard then you can achieve your full potential anywhere. Well, that was until I experienced London Met. Just put it this way, no university that people are actually proud to go to has to advertise the fact that they’re 'proud to be London Met' on every available wall space. You would not walk into Cambridge and see 'proud to be Cambridge' plastered all over the walls now would you? In case you didn’t know the answer is no because everyone and their pet hamster knows that if you go to Cambridge then your proud to be there! Lesson number four; don’t choose a university that has to try and kid you into a false sense of morale and proudness, if your proud your proud, if your London Metropolitan, you're not.