Ouch. It’s been a month of seemingly random shopping online and in person God these things have tickled the collective imagination of my Instagram followers. From a pressure-relieving seat pad to a face contouring stick that creates instant cheekbones, here are the pieces people are going crazy for.
I mean, we obviously have to go with the sexiest item: this “long-sit” Gel seat cushion has a special honeycomb design that helps spread the load and relieve pressure on the lower back, hips, sciatic nerve and – mainly – in the old fanjita. The substrate. Yes folks, I bought a seat pad specifically to keep the bits of the pen from going numb when I write at my desk for long periods of time.
I can hear you all now, screaming, “you shouldn’t be sitting so long anyway!”. “My Apple Watch makes me stand up and do jumping jacks every twenty minutes!!” “GET A CORRECTION OFFICE!!!”.
Calm down. If I want to sit at my desk and rant until I lose my cool, then I will. And the new gel seat cushion allows me to go even further than before. What an accolade to win!
Jokes aside, the pillow is actually great if you have lower back pain and find every office chair uncomfortable. It doesn’t make it feel soft and cuddly, like sinking into a couch, it’s just kind of… props. In a really forgiving way. It also allows air to circulate between your ass and the chair, which is helpful, and you can pick up the pillow by its special handle (just a regular handle, but I’m on QVC mode) and use it in the car or at The Globe Theatre. (If you know, you know.)
I bought mine from Amazon here* – was £24.99
*indicates an ad-affiliate link. This means that a small percentage is earned with each purchase through the link.
Look, I know this is subjective, but I’ve tried a lot earplugs – I can almost safely say most of them on the market – and these are still in my ear this morning.
Most others go out, sadly, around 3am. because they’re so big they’re going to burst through the wall of my ear canal, or they stick out too much and prevent me from sleeping on my side, or they’re too stiff and it burns my ear.
Before this particular type of earmuff, the best I had found was the Alpine Sleep Soft (YesI’ve tried the Loop and all the others that come up often as suggestions) because the soft silicone plugs were easy to pull in and out (no need to roll or twist), they were small enough for my elegant ear canals (pretty sure most ears The plugs are made to fit giants) and formed a brilliant noise seal that cut out snoring but allowed big noises to get through.
(Alarms, foxes mating, owls screeching.)
After trying just about every type of earmuff except the custom ones where you have to make a mold of your ear canal (I’m just not that dedicated), the Alpine Sleep Soft was the best. But then – then – along came Alpine SleepDeep!
These are oval and seem to fit a bit more comfortably inside (you give them a good extra push with your thumbnails and they suction into place like you’ve inserted some sort of outer space satellite vent) and they also come in two sizes. Which is key. I recommend the small unless you have a very large head. Or large ear canals.
As mentioned, these are the only earplugs I can put on at night and wake up still wearing them in the morning. I think they are quite apparent.
I bought mine here* – I bought the mixed pack with both sizes, but if you just want “small” then go for the (confusingly) “50 pack” version. This seems to be the small size in itself.
Sort of a cheat entry, because I covered this amazing vest last week, but still one of the most popular recommendations of the month. This is a soft, beautifully cut vest top that doesn’t require underwear underneath because it’s built in. I’m a convert.
You can read the full rave about this top hereor buy the Uniqlo Ribbed Bra Top, £19.90 here*
Some online contouring is an extreme sport, with people changing their entire bone structure and magically reshaping their noses through clever optical illusions. I can tell you that this looks impressive on film but completely unrelated when seen up close in real life, so don’t feel like you’re missing a trick if you haven’t already covered your entire face in dark brown streaks and trash and done it all in a dodgy finish.
What I can recommend if you want the aforementioned ‘supermodel chisel cheekbone’ is a quick sweep of the Beauty Wand in Contour (I use medium/tan) just under your actual cheekbones and then a quick dusting over with a fluffy brush to mix. The sponge applicator seems to apply the color in a more forgiving way than a stick – less waxy, easier to peel off – and the shades are well thought out, non-orange and stick around until you wash your face.
It’s a good way to dip your toe into the world of sculpting if you don’t want to invest in an expensive contour product, and I love that the plastic tube packaging is beautifully light – perfect for my makeup bag on the go.
I bought mine at Boots and they are also online here* – costs £9 and is just as good as the more expensive products it competes with.
I’ll bore you with a story: I have some really lovely Tiffany earrings. A gift, years ago. Ten years? In all that time I’ve tried and failed to wear these diamond studs for more than a few days at a time. The screw thread seems to tear the inside of my holes when I try to feed the posts and I end up with painful, swollen lobes every time that take days to go back down.
I made the executive decision to sell the earrings and buy myself some ‘new’ ones (really favourites, so new to me but not to the world) and this time I opted for the standard ‘push on’ backs. All good, and my ears appreciate it very much, the smooth posts just slide, but I must say that the lady at the jewelry store put the fear of God into me about losing the earrings. It was all about the screw post for safety.
I began some serious research, which took me about eight minutes on the train home from London, and found a possible solution: Locking Lox Earrings.
These clever backs allow the earring post to slide into it, but then lock in place so you can’t slide the back even if you apply Hulk Hogan levels of force. There is simply no hindrance. Wonderful! To undo, you just push the prongs together (a little crazy but nothing too frustrating) and they slide off.
So far, so good. I walk around with the backs, going up and down a few hundred times, still no sign of the LOX power running out.
They’re almost a tenner for two sets of locking backs, making them probably the most expensive gadgets on the market right now, if you ignore MI5-level hidden spy cameras and nanobots and the like, but by their very nature they should be hard to miss and so hopefully you only need to buy them once for each pair of fancy earrings…
I bought my LOX on Amazon here* – £9.99
I didn’t want to be self-promoting (or I did, but I thought I’d leave it until the end!) but my most purchased recommendation this month was actually my new book, How not to be a Supermodel. I can’t tell you how many messages I get every day from people who have finished the book and feel the need to immediately tell me how much they loved it. Or from people who just started it and can’t put it down. Or who can’t stop laughing out loud in public.
Dozens and dozens of brilliant, heartwarming messages and mini-reviews, often with whole passages referring to me. It’s so fun to hear how people gobble it up and then lose the book to their friends and family because they put so much into it!
If you haven’t read it yet (or haven’t listened to it – the audiobook is available on Audible and Spotify and all the usual places), then you can find it in your local bookshop or order it online here*. I can promise you that if you even remotely like what you read here on Substack, then you will love the book.
