Well here’s your Christmas shopping completely sorted; beauty journalist Sal Hughes’ new book, Pretty Honest, is available to pre-order. Get one of these for each and every girlfriend, for your Mum, for your sister and your boyfriend’s sister, for Auntie Jeanette and Mrs Hamblewick the pre-school teacher, for Kirsty up in Scotland and Babs who moved to LA… Order a whole stack of them and then sit back, put your feet up and have a nice glass of wine. Because I can’t imagine anyone not finding this book useful; whether you’re a seasoned cosmetics addict or a total beauty disaster-zone you’ll be hooked from the very first sentence. Sali has the kind of writing voice that manages to be warm and friendly at the same time as being completely and utterly no-nonsense. Her advice is frank and truthful but it never feels too blunt, she’s not afraid to call out the worst of the beauty mistakes but then always comes up with the goods in terms of fixes and remedies. Red lipstick, flat roots, fringes that won’t sweep to the side as they should – there’s an answer for pretty much everything.

Complete novices to the world of beauty will find this book to be indispensable; it starts at the very basics (how to cleanse, how to choose a moisturiser) and moves on to nail painting, makeup application and the de-mystification of such things as winged eyeliner and contouring. Advanced beauty aficionados will absolutely devour every word of it because even the basics seem new and exciting when you’re given them in such an engaging way. Whatever your interest in beauty, whether it’s all-consuming or a simply a necessity so that you can look and feel presentable, there will be something useful or titillating or eyeopening in every chapter.

I blanked out half of my Saturday so that I could just curl up with Pretty Honest and read straight through, but I couldn’t resist a little peek when I was eating breakfast and then, an hour and a half later, I realised that I was still in my dressing gown and late for a shoot! So I most thoroughly recommend. I think that the chapters on Beauty and Motherhood and Beauty in Illness are particularly useful and will be poignant for many people; again, Sali gives her advice in that wonderful, frank-yet-compassionate way. Always professional, always to-the-point, but with just the right amount of personal experience and anecdotal material to make you want to race to the end of the book, take a deep breath and start it all over again.

Pretty Honest: The Straight-Talking Beauty Companion is available for pre-order now; it comes out on Thursday so I think it would be delivered on Friday next week. And I would go for the hardback, too – this is definitely a book that you’ll want to dip in and out of for years to come. You can find it on Amazon HERE.

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