The queen of mineral make-up

You’d have to have been living on planet Zog for the past year to miss the fact that mineral make-up is the hottest make-up story in a l-o-n-g time. But it was Susan Posnick - who we breakfasted with recently at The Charlotte Street Hotel - who started the whole mineral hoo-ha, with her ColorFlo product. It’s awfully clever: the powder’s in the brush (which overcomes the downside of mineral make-up: it gets everywhere, as the mineral make-up counter in Selfridges proves. It gets like Pompeii down there). You simply click to prime the brush with powder (Susan claims that after the first time, you don’t even need to do that), and swirl into skin, building up flawless coverage. After breakfast with Ms. Posnick, Jo is a belated convert (Sarah meanwhile resisting the urge to say ‘I told you so…’) - she simply needed to find her perfect shade, which turns out to be M4 Light Beige. It’s even helped Jo get over her grief at the discontinuation of Giorgio Armani’s Hydra-Glow foundation.

Beauty gives back

Jo recently judged the Clarins/YOU Dynamisante Woman of the Year competition, for the seventh time. It’s open to women who’ve started a charity for children and this year’s winner - pictured here with Clarins’s charming head honcho Olivier Courtin (the son of the founder) - is Julie Perry, who has managed to build a school-and-a-half in a village on the Kenyan coast, through her charity The Indi Project (visit www.indinurseryproject.co.uk to check it out or even better, to sponsor a child). Nice to see that beauty can ‘give back’ (Julie gets a cheque for £30,000 for her charity), but also nice for us to be reminded what a fabulous summer classic Eau Dynamisante really is, with its awaken-the-senses, upliftingly citrussy notes. (We rather long for a bottle the size of the one Julie’s clutching…)

Sorry. Been in the 'Beauty Dungeon'. Back now.

The No. 1 rule of blogs is to update them on a really regular basis. Sorry, we failed. For the past two months we have been hurtling towards a deadline for Beauty Bible Beauty Steals, our review of literally thousands of the affordable high street and supermarket brands, which will appear for Christmas 2009. And we've also been writing up all the new entries for the paperback of The Green Beauty Bible, launching in September. We have emerged, blinking, into the light. Our skins are beginning to turn from pastry-pale to sun-kissed golden. We have a life again. And a blog.