Dressing Table

I’ve always said that I wanted to show you my dressing table and two years later, I still haven’t. I was sorting out and throwing out old makeup last night and I thought, why not?

This is my dressing table. I’ve got a big thing about dressing tables, when I was little my mum had one, full of bottles and smeary things that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on and wasn’t allowed to. It’s another thing I equate with "being a grown up". Of course, my dressing table of dreams was always a delicate Victorian vintage piece with soft lines and a rounded mirror, probably painted white with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. Vintage perfume bottles sitting on it, everything pretty and girlish and unique. Of course, these things do not usually present themselves to you for free or cheap. Instead I have my dressing table of another vintage – a 1950’s beast of all angular lines, it’s chunky and it’s a funny shape. I got it from Freecycle, it was originally a Vicar’s wife’s dresser – it was purchased for her as a wedding gift by her parents and it has lived in the vicarage in a small leafy village about 5 miles from my house, used and loved until she got too old to worry about fripperies and making herself up. Then the mirror was taken off it and it was moved to the hallway of the Vicarage to become a sideboard. Now the vicars wife has passed on, her son is renovating the property and the dressing table is now mine. It wouldn’t have been my ideal choice of dresser, it is large and bulky, solid and practical rather than whimsical but as time has gone on, I feel a lot of affection for it. For a piece of furniture, it has a bit of soul, even if it is an ugly colour (all donated furniture is this colour for some reason?) and it is very nicely carved and is solid wood, not chipboard. I might get round to painting it one day…

On top of my little drawers is my bedtime reading – the second Great British Bakeoff book. It doesn’t have it’s dust cover anymore because I actually use my cookbooks and am a little careless in the kitchen so the dust jacket got covered in butter smears and flour and a little torn at the sides with moisture so I took it off. Remember in 2011 I vowed to bake everything in the first GBO book? (Well within reason, I’m not making that silly Stargazy pie or in fact anything incorporating fish) Well I’m about 3/4’s of the way through, so I was looking ahead at the next book and planning what I’m making next. I do use it because I prefer their Victoria Sponge tutorial and I’ve made some of the kid friendly recipes from there with Cassie. I’m really looking forward to making the mocktail macaroons from the second book. 

On top of the book is my bookmark, which was kindly sent to me in a package along with some mix cd’s by TheBlueTree’s on OD a couple of years ago, it was one of the favours from her wedding which she kindly sent me and I still use it. 

In this photo you can see the little terracotta pot I picked up from a charity shop for 25p for Cassie to play with when she was small, but it ended up on my dresser looking after all of Cassie’s and my hair bobbles. Next to that is my contact lenses pot, I use a 2 week contact lense but I’ll need to change back to dailies soon because my eyes are drying out. 

Next to that is my Chinese sweets tin, it originally contained gummy sweets and I bought it in Chinatown in London on one of my numerous birthday trips pre-Dan. I really like the picture on it so I’ve kept it and it used to be quite tongue in cheek because it used to be the tin I kept my drugs in when I’d bought a bag full in advance. So it makes me smile a little bit, reminds me of really good times with  friends. Don’t worry the insides have been thoroughly washed and it now stores grips for my hair. 

My nail polish collection. Very small, not very workable colours. The Max Factor one is a sample they gave me for free from a department store counter, I probably use it the most often. Elf sent me the next two as freebies in a goodie bag when I spent £10 on makeup online, they look nice but they aren’t very workable colours on because I’m very pale anyway and they just make my nails look dead. The orange one was a sample from the front of a magazine, I mainly use it to paint Cassie’s toenails (which she asks for every week, she doesn’t take after me in the tomboy stakes). I did have a couple of other more workable nail varnishes, all samples but they’ve gone gloopy and peel easily off my nails so I’ve had to chuck them out. I really need to go buy some nail varnish I guess. Next to the nail varnish is my stuff to stop me trying to bite my nails, it’s horrible. 

My sad and lonely earring box. Seriously, this is all the earrings I own, bar a feathered pair that’s in my handbag. I love earrings as well and I’m not fussy about costume earrings but the combination of no money plus the fact I live nowhere near a fashion shop equals no earrings for Christie. I’m a bit annoyed I can’t find my other bow earring as well, I really like them. The one pair I do have however, are real pearls and I kind of only wear them for things like Sunday lunch out or proper meals with my matching pearl necklace. Look I even took the photo in an emo black and white (not really, for some reason all the colour ones came out over exposed). 

Here are some handmade owls. They are not very well stitched, but still better than something I can do. I bought them off a 12 year old girl who makes them all by hand by herself, I’ve had them about a year. She had a younger sister with a terminal illness, who was spending her last days at our local residential hospice down in Newcastle. The hospice didn’t have everything this girl would have liked for her younger sister, so she was making an owl for every day her sister spends in the hospice and selling them to raise money to buy things for the younger patients in the hospice. She was just a little slip of a thing, looked younger than her 12 years at her stall with her mum, long blonde plait and toothy wistful smile, so I bought two. And I can’t bring myself to move them or throw them out, her sister’s probably l

ong gone but she inadvertently has made her sister live on in the memories of strangers. 

Flanking them are two candles I got for Christmas from my mum, I don’t think I’ve ever lit them, they aren’t particularly pretty, they just sit there. 

A picture of the other side of my dresser. On the left is all my skincare products. I use Soap and Glory’s Hand Food for my hands (birthday present), The Body Shop Cocoa Lip Butter for my lips (I think Harriet (3,2,1) sent me it as a present through the post), I alternate between The Body Shop’s Cocoa Butter and Ted Bakers Body Souffle (Christmas present 2 years ago) for my body depending on my mood and whether I want to smell edible or like flowers. The small sample size is superdrug’s BB cream, they gave me the sample in the shop on launch week and I tend to take it when I’m travelling overnight, I have such clear skin I don’t feel I need very much. I’ve started using Superdrugs B Ready Day Cream on my face, which is formulated for late teens to early twenties, the next one up was too thick for my face. I don’t really need to moisturise my face but my mum always swore that face cream was what kept her looking young for ages and I don’t want wrinkles. I think the cream I have is pretty good, it was £9.99 which makes it more expensive than the plain nivea I was using before, but when you get into the world of day creams, £9.99 seems to be nothing! Anyway, it was something I treated myself with when I first got my bursary in. 

Underneath that you can see my Lush Fair Trade Foot Lotion. I don’t even see this as a luxury, it’s the one thing on my dressing table that I feel is a necessity. I have wide, oddly shaped feet and basically, they don’t make shoes to accomodate my wide boat like heels and my narrow tapered toes and I over-pronate in my shoes, so I very quickly get sore, blistered, cracked feet. On placement, my feet are aching by the end of the day and the only thing I can think about is getting home and slathering this peppermint goodness on. I also use my Ped-Egg about twice a week. 

My perfumes are a Lush sample size of Karma, Vera Wang’s Princess (which is almost empty) and the long thin one is La Senza’s undiscovered, which came in a giftset from my dad and Siobhan last Christmas, it generally goes in my handbag in case I need to freshen up. 

My Butterfly tin has a Van Gogh painting printed on it and it’s actually a tin lunchbox from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. It’s from when Dan and I went together in February 2008. I love it, once again evokes good memories and it stores all my makeup at the moment. 

The thing that looks like a little cupboard is from Homesense at a retail park just outside of Leeds. It stores bracelets, not that I have many of them. On top of it is a mans Ben Sherman watch that I got Dan for Christmas 2008, he asked for a leather watch but he never wears it so I’ve retrieved it from the back of his underwear drawer and I occasionally wear it, though even at it’s tightest it’s still a little big because I have narrow wrists. 

There’s the inside of my Van Gogh tin with all my makeup in. There’s a lot of samples in there once again, I seem to pick them up all the time and I like putting them in my handbag, which I’ve just sorted. The Bourjois eye makeup is really nice, I accidentally stole it from my mums flat (it somehow ended up in my makeup bag on the way home) but I’ve been using it in the meantime, so I’m going to have to replace it when I next see her. I have a lot of kohl eyeliners because I lose them and then they turn up again. I only have one blusher, that’s the Rimmel Santa Rose on the top right, as you can see it’s going to need replaced soon. I use every last drop of my makeup. Generally my everyday makeup is a bit of MaxFactor Facefinity compact foundation (or a cheaper alternative depending on budget), some Santa Rose across my cheeks, a neutral coloured eyeshadow and a little bit of black liquid eyeliner. I tend to use Rimmel’s Glam Eyes, I like how easy it is to apply but it runs a bit too easily, anyone got any good alternatives? I then follow that with mascara, at the moment I use Max Factor’s False Lash Effect but it doesn’t really give me false looking lashes because I have very short straight eyelashes. 

There’s all the bracelets I own in the world. Plus a ring, which we’d bought as an extra for Karen’s birthday but her fingers were too big, so returned it to us. I don’t throw anything out so it’s sitting there at the moment. The red bracelet is something some random little chinese kid gave me "because I would need luck and it was lucky" when I visited London in July 2009. The browny flowery bracelet was an accessorize bracelet I wore throughout Uni. Then there’s my real pearl bracelet and my Pandora bracelet on the bottom. You wouldn’t think that I absolutely adore jewellery from how little I own, would you? I guess Jewellery is just one of those things that when you don’t have much money, it just doesn’t happen and I can’t impulse buy costume jewellery in shops either. And I’ve not been lucky enough to have any jewellery handed down to me. 

In my drawers on the other side. My costume necklaces. I’ve got about 4 or 5, nothing special and a string of real pearls. I really should buy a proper jewellery box one day. In my bottom drawer is my contact lense packet, the bottle of contact lense solution I’m currently using, condoms and passion fruit lube. The condoms are tacky orange and cola flavour because I picked up a whole load free at the Student Union (I have no shame) and for some reason they think students want their cock to taste like fizzy pop. The passion Fruit lube was on offer in the supermarket, it actually smells quite nice, better than the cherry stuff which smelt rank when it warmed up. 

My hair drawer. I have two barrel brushes, I don’t have a clue what makes them different to the paddle brushes apart from that they are a faff to brush hair with. All my hair brushes are hairdressers quality because Dan bought them as a pack wholesale for my birthday in 2008, they are nice brushes. My favourite brush is the middle one that is actually bristly and made of real hair, it’s gentle on my hair and makes it feel really

soft. The big paddle brush at the end I use when trying to flatten my hair down while straightening. The little purple brush is Cassie’s, as is the Rapunzel detangler. 

The Twisted Sista stuff is what Dan bought me when I asked him to get me some curl booster mousse from the shop, he did not ascertain that what he’d bought me was for Afro-Carribean hair from the picture of the black woman on the front, but waste not want not, I’ll find a use for it. Next to it is my trusty frizz-ease serum and my frizz-ease hairspray, which I use when I’m putting my hair up. I generally don’t use a lot of product on my hair, mostly because I don’t know what to buy and half the time I can’t afford it. At the back of the drawer is my makeup bag I got as a freebie and at the far right of the drawer is my makeup brushes in their bag. 

Here are my makeup brushes. I do not know what half of them are for and I don’t really know how you clean them. I generally use the two on the far left. 

My useful things drawer – hairbands, a bow in a bun thing, mirrors, a thing to do a french roll (that I can’t figure out), eyelash curlers (ha!), scissors, nail polisher remover pads, a sharpener, emery boards, a nail file, a rape alarm and some verucca cream. 

My other side drawer. Two pretty much empty foundation compacts which I’m going to tip out and try and use the dregs of tonight, two eyeshadow pallets, as you can see I tend to use all the light shades and none of the darker ones because I don’t know how to blend. At the back of the drawer is a pack of baby wipes for Cassie related disasters, all my stockpiled bottles of contact lense solution and my Thompson’s holiday confirmation for EuroDisney. 

My giant bottom drawer done in two halves. Here is my overflow toiletries, leftover from Christmas and samples from magazines etc which will be used when I’ve used the stuff on the top of the dressing table. Plus 3 Lush pots which are empty, I’m collecting them for a free Facemask. Cotton wool pads for removing makeup and simple body lotion which I use for the job. The big butterfly case is actually chock full of talc, baby lotion and baby oil – when Cassie came along that was all people seemed to buy me and it’s actually harmful to use talc on small babies and I never used Baby Lotion or baby oil on her. Nowadays we use talc to de-stink ballet pumps and trainers and also Dan uses it to prevent chafage when running. I use the Baby Lotion and Baby oil to remove makeup with. I still have about 4 bottles of each left and Cassie is 3 years old. Seriously. But waste not want not. 

My hair products. My one luxury is my purple GHD’s. Seriously – best buy ever. Then there’s my Tresamme Hair Dryer which Dan bought me in 2008, still going strong (can you tell 2008-2009 were our glory years?) with the diffuser. Then there’s some curlers, my mum got two for Christmas so gave me one, I’ve never used it because I don’t know how,but I will some day. I think it’s Remington but it looks really cheap. There’s a water spray bottle in there. And the Nicky Clarke thing is hair clippers, Dan gets me to do his hair at home. 

Well that’s it, that turned out to be a bit of an essay. I hope you enjoyed my thorough tour of my dressing table and if you have time, I’d like to see yours. Is there anything else you’d like to see photographed?