The Luxe Hair Fragrance with a Touch of Shine

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luxe shine spray

My Colab Luxe Shine hair fragrance is out! Sorry for the delay, I think I was slightly premature with my excitement when I started doing a song and a dance about it a few weeks ago. But you can now find it at both Superdrug and Feelunique – it’s £4.99 for a 200ml can (£3.99 at Superdrug at the moment) and if you love dark and oudy fragrances then this will be right up your street. There are notes of Bergamot, Oud and Cashmere so it’s a really warm and sexy scent – grown-up rather than girly, woody rather than sweet.

There’s a light sheeny shine from this fragrance spray thanks to the precious oils in the formula – it’s perfect for adding just a touch of gloss to finished hairstyles. It’s very lightweight, so great for fine hair (like mine) that can easily be overwhelmed with heavy glossing products, but do still tread carefully – a little goes a long way, so start with a spritz and build up if you feel you need more. I like to use my fingertips to work the spray through the lengths and ends, it gives my hair a kind of piecey definition that looks very casual and undone. It’s also quite brilliant for spraying down the length of a ponytail to give it some gleam.

If you want to see the spray in action, check out my September Favourites video. It’ll be making another appearance very soon, I’m planning quite a glamorous video using the Dolce & Gabbana AW15 makeup collection and I want my hair to look supremely amazing.

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Weekly Window Shop: The Best Nude Court Shoes

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best high heels

Welcome to this week’s shopping obsession: nude court shoes. I need some to finish off my “key spring outfit”, which is my faux-leather Karen Millen skirt with wrap blouse/Hush cashmere/soft marl t-shirt. Nude – or beige – shoes also look incredibly chic with everything from stonewashed jeans to cocktail dresses – they are as much a wardrobe staple as the LBD.

Key criteria for my nude shoes? Not too high (my ankles seem to have completely lost the ability to hold me upright in high shoes since having the baby), slender heel, non-patent finish and preferably a pointed toe rather than round. Though you’ll see that I did go a bit off-piste, mainly because my friend Rach kept sending me tantalising links to other styles…

lk bennett best nude shoes

Let’s start with the favourites – Floret from L.K. Bennett in soft nappa leather, pictured above. These are just perfect, really; a great heel height that gives shape to the legs but is easy to walk in and leather in a sophisticated beige tone. Not “elastoplast nude” but a posh, smart neutral. I love these. They are £175 here. (There’s 25% off site-wide with the Grazia code GRX25 at the moment – not on this shoe style, unfortunately, but on most others.)

jimmy choo agnes suede pumps best nude shoes

Jimmy Choo’s Agnes suede pumps only just miss out on the top spot because I fear I would wreck them within the first day. I’ve had suede before and on the second wear I walked straight into a London Puddle. (As we all know, a London Puddle is no ordinary puddle – the surface has a thick layer of oil and essence of dead bird and the main body of liquid comprises of 50% alcohol-wee and 30% spilt mocha-choca-latte. The remaining 20% is probably a mixture of acid rain and commuters’ tears.) But – my God – these shoes are elegant, aren’t they? View them from all angles (you really want to) at Jimmy Choo here. The Agnes in nude suede, £395.

aldo suede pump in bone

ALDO, handily, have a more affordable suede pump for those who need to negotiate London Puddles – not quite so heart-achingly slender but pointy and stiletto-heeled and in a beautiful bone shade. You can find them online here – they’re £65.

dune claudette woven pumps best nude shoes

OK, let’s go off-target for a moment, because these woven open-toe beauties from Dune are – as my friend Rach says – very Chloe. The heel on the Claudette is slightly higher than my ankles can easily handle, but I’d sacrifice a bit of bodily wear-and-tear for these. Ha. Find them here – they also do them in a deeper shade.

best nude high heel shoes

Still off on a bit of a tangent; these Coach pumps take a classic pointy-toe court and add something of a hard edge. On a sidenote, I have to say that I am incredibly impressed with Coach’s customer service; they made a bit of an error with a Christmas present I bought and they could not have handled it better. (I shop online under my married name, so I didn’t get any special treatment!) You can find the beadchain pump in “beechwood” here – it’s £225.

office melanie shoes

And finally, the Melanie almond-toe court heels in suede. I realise that half of the shoes here have been suede and so are quite incompatible with the whole walking-around-London scenario, but they do look so soft and enticing, don’t they? I’d invest in a big can of suede protector if you’re going down this route… The Melanie heels are £50 online here.

Next week could be a round-up of the best Egyptian cotton sheets and duvet covers. I must have spent around thirty hours obsessing over the different thread counts and comparing prices but I’m worried that people are clicking away from my Weekly Window Shop in their droves! Ha.

The post Weekly Window Shop: The Best Nude Court Shoes appeared first on A Model Recommends.

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The Four Month Hair Colour

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ruth crilly model

It has suddenly occurred to me that I haven’t had my hair colour done in nearly four months. Four months! I have hardly any noticeable regrowth and the colour on the lengths of my hair still looks as nice and rich as it did on the day it was tinted. (Actually, I lie: I think it might look better than it did on the day it was tinted! It was a little too warm and too dark, first of all, which is often the way. The tint fades and you’re left with the proper shade.) This just confirms for me, in my head (and now out loud), that my colourist, the lovely John Spanton, is in fact something of a hair colouring genius.

It has made me think that perhaps this dark, honeyed blonde is a shade that I will stick with for many years. I can highly recommend it if you’re growing bored of the “classic” blonde and the frequent trips to the hair salon required for maintenance, but note; dark blonde is not by any means maintenance free. The colour I now have is an amalgamation of many, many different blonding sessions and not just a tarted-up version of my natural shade – it’s unfortunate that my natural shade as I’ve grown older is actually a weird, ashy brown-mouse-blonde and not anything particularly desirable. Though around 50% of my hair (nearly all of the underneath layer, in fact) has been kept natural – John purposefully left it untreated so that the condition of my hair wasn’t too affected over the years. Clever chap.

Anyway, this was just a bit of a “thinking aloud” post – I’m in full-on Bank Holiday mode and writing a proper feature was quite frankly beyond me. Especially after the large G&T at sundown! It was supposed to be a list of the pros and cons of sticking to your natural hair colour, but then I realised that it wasn’t really my natural hair colour and then I got into one of those mental confusions that make you want to bang your forehead repeatedly on the desk in front of you.

John Spanton is at Trevor Sorbie in Covent Garden – more info here.

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