A happy Christmas to all our lovely blog-readers

Beauty Bible is, like most people, taking a wee break till after Christmas (New Year's Eve, to be precise), when we'll be back with all that's new, noteworthy and buzzy in the world of hair, make-up, skincare and general gorgeousness.  Hope your travel plans go smoothly - and that you have a glorious time.

PS  We will be thinking on Christmas Day of the 250 young women at Centrepoint, waking up to the beauty bags that we packed last week.  A wonderful, warming thought.

Have a dekko at Occo in the City

Occo's one of our favourite new brands of 2010:  inspired by Dalmatia, on the Adriatic coast, and scented to conjure up the region - salt breezes, lush grapes and figs, aromatic wild flowers, etc.  The range is vast, but we've yet to find a product we didn't warm to.  (Special favourite:  Motovun No. 3 Deep Forest, all cypress, cedarwood and a hefty grind of black pepper.  Not a little Christmas-tree-esque, as it happens.)  Most products are around 98% natural - and for now, you can find the entire Occo line showcased in the City, at the store above - it's at 18 Royal Exchange, EC3V 3LL.  A little corner of London that is forever Dalmatia.  (Or rather, a little corner of London that is Dalmatia until the end of December, when this pop-up closes its doors.)

www.occo-online.com

Such a generous industry...

Our hands are wrecked.  Our manicures are history.  We're knackered as anything.  But having rolled up our sleeves and spent eight solid hours unpacking boxes and repacking (to the brim) some specially printed bags, Beauty Bible is delighted to say that on Christmas morning - thanks to the generosity of the beauty industry - 250 young homeless women at Centrepoint will wake up to a fabulous present that looks something like this.  For the past seven years, Jo - along with beauty industry trainer and lifecoach Sharron Lowe, and a fantastic committee that includes Kirsty Lewis (Brand PR), Michelle Boon (Beautyseen PR), Sarah Duguid (Sisley), a representative of Modus Dowal Walker (thank you guys, for the loan of the van driver!) - plus our own Sarah - has been pulling together these Christmas goodie bags, which for many Centrepoint residents will be the only Christmas gift they get.
      So we just wanted to use this blog to say thank you to a roll-call of brands and donors, including Richard Ward, John Frieda, ESPA, Jean-Paul Gaultier (courtesy of Kenneth Green Associates), Revlon, Estée Lauder, Rituals, L'Oréal Elvive, Mavala, Neal's Yard Remedies, Maybelline, Crabtree & Evelyn, Clinique, YSL, Giorgio Armani, Yes to Carrots, Dr. Organic, Biolage, Weleda - and oh, the list goes on so please forgive us if we've forgotten anyone.  Thanks too, to our own Beauty Bible Executive Assistant Amy Eason and all-round good egg Dave Edmunds, plus Centrepoint's John Raynham.  Couldn't have done it without you (and the Christmas carol CD.  Oh, and the biscuits...)
      Between you, you've made 250 women's Christmas Days.  Thanks from them.  And thanks from us:  it makes us proud to work in this industry.  Meanwhile, if you'd like to contribute to this fantastically worthwhile cause, simply click the link below.

www.centrepoint.org.uk

A free Green Beauty Bible...!

... when you spend £15 on Une make-up at www.boots.com!  We've sent out a bulletin about this fantastic offer to our subscribers, but basically it goes like this:  all you have to do to secure a copy of our bestselling book The Green Beauty Bible  is to spend £15 on-line, as above - stocking up on this new and noteworthy brand of natural-as-possible make-up (from the same 'stable' as Bourjois).  Fab shades, smooth-as-silk textures, high-performance - and really reasonable, too:  £15 goes quite a long way at Une.  But no, the becoming flush that you would be able to see on our cheeks right now (if you had a webcam) isn't a sweep of Une Breezy Cheeks blusher.  It's a little tinge of pride that they chose us for this promo, actually.

Something fishy at Margaret Dabbs

Margaret Dabbs is the go-to medi-pedicurist for us (and all our beauty editor friends).  Cleverly, she's also 'cloned' herself so that her white-coated podiatrist assistants are equally good at blitzing every last molecule of hard skin, to leave feet baby-soft and beyond pampered (so that we can comfortably march from A to B...)  Now Margaret has a whole tankful of new hard-skin-destroyers:  at the swanky new Margaret Dabbs Sole Spa at Liberty (which we have to admit is slightly more convenient for us than the other salon at 7 Cavendish Street), you can now enjoy a Garra Rufa fish pedicure in which the little fishies nibble your tootsies to smoothness.  (Tickly but worth it.)  The 'Aqua Therapy' pedicure features on a lengthy menu of treats that ranges from the famous Medical Pedicure £75) through to a Shape & Polish (just £25).  Click here to read it - and trust us:  whichever you go for, your feet definitely won't fail you now...

PS  Remember to book separately for varnishing - it's not necessarily included, depending on which pedi you book.

Margaret Dabbs Sole Spa at Liberty, Great Marlborough Street, London W1B 5AH
020-7494 4492

A tutu lovely spa offer

Blytheswood Square is a spiffy but not-at-all-over-priced new boutique hotel in Glasgow with a spa that we're hearing good things about from our beauty spies..  And as major ballet-lovers, we're trying to figure out how we can head north to enjoy one of their Cinderella Day Spa packages:  'the ultimate whirlwind transformation (pumpkin not included!)', as they put it.  Blytheswood Spa has put together the packages in tandem with the Scottish Ballet:  a Cinderella Deluxe Spa package (price £255) which includes a tailored Anne Sémonin Phyto-Aromatic facial, a seaweed foot experience (to get your feet glass-slipper-worthy), and a luxurious hand pampering session.  (Never know when a prince will swoop to kiss those, after all.)  Or, for Cinderellas who've got a fair bit of cleaning/sweeping/Christmas shopping to fit in before they can party, check out the Speedy Cinderella Package, £25:  a shape and polish and well-deserved glass of fizz.  Plus - oh, lovely! - they currently have tickets for the Scottish Ballet's performance of Cinderella to snap up, price from £10 (with limited availability, from 14th-31st December at Theatre Royal Glasgow).  Cinders, you shall go to the ball - and the ballet...!

Blytheswood Square, 11 Blytheswood Square, Glasgow, G2 4AD/0141-248 8888
www.blytheswoodsquare.com

Be Breizh! (That's not a spelling error...)

Yes, you read it right.  And you say it:  'Breeshe.'  And it's the Breton word for Brittany, which - as spa-goers know - is a prime destination for thallassotherapy, which involves all manner of seawater and marine treatments.  So we haven't just put this outdoorsy shot of a girl in her Breton t-shirt to torture you:  this is what you could now be looking forward to - with a lot less hassle than before - on a Brittany spa trip.  One of the fiendish things about booking a French spa visit has been - well, the Frenchness of the whole thing.  So (not before time) there's a brand new English website which offers an A-Z guide to top-to-toe pampering in  breezy, breizh-y Brittany.  On this well-designed, easy-to-navigate site, there's a full run-down of the treatments, the spas, the locations (find that bit under WHERE TO GO - and look for ALL RELAXATION PLACES), and which are best for what (cellulite/legs/post-natal/stress/joints etc.)  We defy you not to start looking longingly at next summer's diary...

www.wellness.brittanytourism.com

Enter Cleopatra's Boudoir

We've always had a 'thing' for vintage perfumes and perfume bottles (though not quite in the league of our friend Roja Dove and his world-class flacon collection).  So on our peregrinations through cyberspace we were pleased to stumble across a US website - Cleopatra's Boudoir - which focusses on old bottles, the websites where you can find them, discontinued scents (how we long to have smelled Bonne Belle's Gadabouts, Lundborg's Stolen Secret or Atkinson's A Nosegay, for instance...) - and also features a blog about the author's fragrant vintage 'finds'.  (Recent postings include Cobra by Weil, Fabergé's Straw Hat, or - oh, an old chypre favourite of Jo's, this - Sikkim, which was briefly revived by Lancôme about five years ago, but then disappeared once again into the ether.)  We say:  this Temple to Ancient Perfumes is a must-have addition to the blog-roll for any fragrance fiend.  

www.cleopatrasboudoir.com

The most expensive bathtub ever...?

Just had to share this with you.  (We were alerted to it on the Beauty Editor Post blog - a US blog that mostly looks at salon treatments and spas - by Victoria Health's Gill Sinclair, who is probably redesigning her bathroom to accommodate it as we speak...)  The 'shoe' bath is created from a mosaic tiny glass tiles, less than a tenth-of-an-inch each in size, by a firm called Massimilliano Della Monaca. Gimmicky?  Sure.  Over-the-top?  Absolutely.  But it also looks pretty comfortable - and if any footballer's wives are out there (oh, and Gill), it'll set you back somewhere between $17,000 to $27,000, depending on the materials chosen.  View, alas, not included.

We love... Style Notes by Maggie Alderson

Let's declare an interest here.  Novelist Maggie Alderson is Jo's best friend.  But cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die, we'd follow her new Style Notes blog even if we didn't know her from a bar of Floris Rose Geranium Soap.  Style Notes is a column that's appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald for years, and is now exclusively available to on-line readers.  (She has some following, and Herald readers are deserting in their droves now they can no longer find her in the Good Weekend mag.  Fact.)  It's about real clothes for real people, mostly - but with the cred of someone who used to edit Elle and The Evening Standard's ES and who for years trailed between Paris, Milan, London and New York for the seasonal collections.  Always witty, sometimes poignant, and eternally readable.  What's not to love?  (Even if she's not your best friend.)

www.maggiealdersonstylenotes.wordpress.com

Hell on heels...?

We love a high heel as much as the next woman.  But we have to admit that when we saw these shoes by sportswear sandal brand Teva (for L.A. fashion house Grey Ant), we thought they were a practical joke. Turns out not.  Now, we are not about to go climbing Kilimanjaro in heels.  But despite the rugged outdoorsy styling seen here, we have a hunch that the Teva heels - which are currently only available in the US (doh!) - would probably be seriously comfortable when spending hours on your feet clutching a cocktail glass at a Christmas party.  Or pounding the pavements of the concrete jungle looking for a black cab, afterwards.

Just one style tip, from Beauty Bible:  maybe kill the woolly socks, OK? (Although then again, on second thoughts, in this weather, maybe not...)

Big ideas for the smallest room

One of the things we love blogs for is interiors inspiration.  Yes, we read beauty blogs and fragrance blogs - but that's definitely mixing business with pleasure! So the interiors and foodie blogs are the ones which get Beauty Bible excited.  A particular favourite is The Decorista's blog:  very visual, very colourful, filled with gorgeous interiors that tend to mix vintage with modern, in a so-liveable-with and basically pretty achievable way, if you've got a bit of an eye for flea markets and fabrics.  (OK.  The Decorista is American.  But there are no borders in cyberspace, in case you hadn't noticed.)  We're sharing the photo above with you, though, to alert you to a rather lovely and sort of beauty-esque posting about - yes, loos, and how to make them prettier.  We say: out with the old school photos, the Toilet Duck and the Giles annuals, ladies!  And in with some of The Decorista's ideas, for lovelier lavatories.  Just click here to read them...

www.thedecorista.com