It’s pretty much the middle of Summer now and the sun is scorching down on us, threatening to create spots and blemishes caused by suncream and sweat – it really is a magical time. The good news is that with the help of a carefully curated skincare regime you can reduce the chance of those pesky pimples popping up and instead keep your pores cleansed and happy. Before you jet off on holiday, make sure to grab a selection of skincare saviours boasting hydration and exfoliation.
To give you some guidance, check out my budget summer skincare heroes below. I sometimes worry about travelling with my expensive serums and moisturisers for fear that I might forget them or some other tragedy befall them, so I created this budget-friendly routine that worked like a gem. You don’t always need expensive products, you just need ones that work.
Make-Up Remover – Nivea Micellar Cleansing Wipes
Although I love Drunk Elephant’s Slaai Butter Cleanser and Garnier’s Micellar Water, my holiday make-up remover is less fussy and more travel-friendly with Nivea’s Micellar Cleansing Wipes. These space-saving wipes are a great choice for gently removing make- up and giving your skin a first cleanse before your scrubs and toners.
Price: around £3.
Face Scrub – L’Oreal Smooth Sugars Clear Scrub
I really love this face scrub and try and insert it into my skincare routine throughout the year. In a warm and humid country, this is a skincare staple as it carefully unclogs pores by removing dirt and debris with its coarse sugar texture. The smell is also divine (kiwi seed extract) and can even be used on your lips to remove dead or dry skin. Talk about a multitasker!
Price: £10.
Toner – Lacura Healthy Glow Glycolic Acid Tonic
If you’ve ever had a sneak peek at my Aldi Budget Beauty Gems post, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Aldi’s ‘fake’ skincare range, Lacura. Making cheap copies of top skincare brands, Lacura is a great place to find some budget beauty bargains like this fake Pixi Tonic. I decanted it into a small travel bottle (pictured) and found that the glycolic acid was great for giving my face a second exfoliation after spending the day wearing suncream in the heat.
Price: £3.99.
Serum – Superdrug’s Simply Pure Hydrating Serum (Day/Night)
Superdrug have recently seemed to up their game when it comes to their own brand range. With a fully fledged Vitamin E range, hydration range and more, they have created some great products that don’t break the bank! These day and night serums are compact and hydrating on the skin, providing an extra layer of moisture to prevent skin drying out. Serums are a must and these guys are a great place to start.
Price: £2.99 (day), £3.99 (night).
Eye Cream – Boots Aloe Vera Eye Cream
I am forever on the hunt for a great budget-friendly eye cream and this one wins the jackpot. With aloe vera to soothe burnt or inflamed skin, this eye cream is essential for taking with you on your travels. A little goes a long way and your eyes will thank you for taking such good care of them!
Price: £1.67.
Moisturiser – No7 HydraLuminous Water Surge Gel Cream (Day)
No7 is a great ‘middle brand’ that isn’t too high end but isn’t completely cheap either. I’ve always enjoyed using their face creams so I decided to try out their HydraLuminous Water Surge Gel Cream on my recent trip and it was great. Instantly hydrating and quickly absorbed, this was a great primer to suncream and an effective way to keep skin moisturised.
Price: £14.
Moisturiser – No7 HydraLuminous Overnight Recovery Cream (Night)
As my skin is prone to drying out, I picked No7’s HydraLuminous Overnight Recovery Cream to work on hydrating my skin overnight. Sleeping in air-conditioned rooms is great but the air can easily dry out your skin even further, so a decent night cream is a must. This one by No7 feels lovely and soothing on the skin and when I wake up my face is smooth and soft.
Price: £14.
Nymans is a fabulous National Trust property located in West Sussex. This gorgeous, largely ruined, house sits in acres of beautifully designed gardens and is a lovely place to visit for a relaxing excursion. Last evening however, I visited Nymans for an outdoor theatre production of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Opening an hour early for picnics, it was a wonderful event.
In short, Much Ado About Nothing focuses on gossip and the manifestation of what one overhears and believes. One couple, Claudio and Hero, are brought together through deception and disguise, with Don Pedro wooing Hero on behalf of his friend Claudio. Similarly, Benedick and Beatrice fall in love through both overhearing that the other feels affectionately for them. Alongside various other plot twists and gossip, the story is full of excitement and deception and all in all is thoroughly entertaining.
Alongside a great set, the cast were superb. My particular favourites were Jordan Bernarde, portraying Benedick, and Oliver Buckner who played Beatrice. Whilst both actors worked fabulously together in their witty and conflicting relationship, individually they were also excellent. Bernarde delivered hilarious lines with gusto and cheer, encouraging the audience to revel in his frivolity and delight in eagerly listening to his every line, whilst Buckner suited the role of a woman almost disconcertingly well and was equally talented. He expertly demonstrated the wit and sophistication of his character whilst retaining the perfect female charm and demeanour. It was authentic to see the female characters played by males, as was the case in the time of Shakespeare, so that was a nice feature. In addition to the outstanding talent of Bernarde and Buckner, Jon Tozzi did justice to the role of Hero and had fantastic hair for fashioning into feminine and masculine styles!
I truly have nothing but praise for this performance. The occasional songs were bright and merry (also very catchy- I’ve been singing ‘toss the pot, toss the pot, let us be merry’ on repeat in my head ever since!) and created an uplifting and light atmosphere alongside the twists and turns of the plot. The whole performance was delightfully entertaining, hilariously witty and fantastically directed from start to finish. If rain at an outdoor theatre event can’t ruin your evening, you know the actors were truly on form.
for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s honeymoon and the permanent residence of Margaret Greville, a famous 19th-20th-century hostess, the house is certainly grand. Located in Surrey, it is a wonderful National Trust property to visit for a day out or, like me, an afternoon escape.
The house itself, as previously touched upon, is magnificent. The bright yellow exterior adds a friendly feel upon arrival and the rooms are grand yet cosy. I enjoyed the entrance hallway; beautiful wooden balconies glance down at you from the higher levels as a chandelier sparkles around the room and tells you that you’re entering a luxurious home. The dark red carpet and draped curtains were a particular favourite of mine. They’re so seductive and give you a glimpse into the exclusive and elite culture that danced through these rooms merely one hundred years ago. There’s certainly something magical about it.
Glorious paintings adorn the walls, lacing every hallway and room with an air of sophistication, whilst individual and unique features in each section of the house lends to a whole and exciting viewpoint of the estate over the years. The use of it in the world wars, for example, as a convalescent home is particularly interesting, certainly to me as a historian but also to anyone, at highlighting the shift in these luxury estates from private houses to important places of rest and recuperation in the war effort. It’s fascinating how these elite members of society switched from having their private quarters and sophisticated lifestyle to providing aid and comfort to unfortunate soldiers. It’s glorious!
Libraries are my favourite room in any old house or castle. The library and study at Polesden Lacey don’t compare to that at Arundel Castle, which is spread across two rooms and features upper balconies, but it is very pleasant. Light and airy, I can imagine comfortable sitting at the desk and glancing out the window over the extensive landscape to gain inspiration. In fact, I went to Polesden Lacey to sit in the grounds and do some writing so I can confirm that it’s very relaxing and inspirational to look over the beautiful countryside! The Gold Room is also exquisite and, as the name suggests, lined completely with gold. It’s spectacular and worth seeing.
I decided to save the largest inhabited island of the Scilly Isles, St Mary’s, until last in the Scilly Fisles series. St Mary’s is home to Hugh Town, the unofficial capital of the archipelago, and really does feel like the busiest of the islands. Home of the airport, the hospital and the main quay, it’s understandable why this island is often the most popular among tourists for accommodation.
St Mary’s was busier than the other islands we came across but I still wouldn’t go as far as saying it was busy. The only day it felt uncomfortably crowded was the day when a few cruise ships docked by St Mary’s and everyone flooded onto the islands. We were meant to do our souvenir shopping that day but hastily retreated to our cottage like vampires fleeing from the sun.
Hands down the best thing we did from St Mary’s was the island sea safari. We booked onto this in advance (I recommend you do) and at £33 per person for a two-hour tour, it was well worth the money. It went all around the islands and included a running commentary about their history and special features. For me, the highlight was the wildlife we saw as the ‘seals, shipwrecks and seabird’ tour we picked included (as the name suggests) searching out the wildlife.
Seals. Seals. Seals. My favourite animal I think! I was so excited to see them in the wild I could hardly contain myself. And I wasn’t disappointed. We were shown to a whole herd of seals in various locations, they were everywhere! Much like dogs, many saw our boat and slipped into the water and swum around us, keen to play around and inquire over these new visitors. They were a few younger ones, no babies unfortunately as breeding season starts in September, but plenty to be seen. I couldn’t get enough.
The island of St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly is a walkers paradise. Scenic and beautiful, it’s easy to wander around this island for a couple of hours and relax.
Anyway, we continued walking around the island until we reached Troytown maze. This was marked on the map as an attraction so we thought it might be a large maze. What we stumbled across however was unexpected. Instead of the large hedged maze I had pictured, Troytown maze was actually made from rocks and laid out in a spiral shape. We giggled a little, feeling completely mislead. After I did a bit of research afterwards though I was informed that Troy Town mazes are the name given to turf mazes, named after the city of Troy in Ancient Greece, due to the complicated construction of the city supposedly meaning if the enemy entered they would be unable to find their way out.
home to the delicious Troytown Farm ice cream, available all over the islands, which we fell in love with. The farm shop had a delicious selection of ice cream and we went for ‘the works’: 2 scoops of ice cream with a dollop of clotted cream and a stick of fudge.
St Agnes is attached to its neighbouring island, Gugh, by a sandbar which is revealed at low tide. We crossed this sandbar before we got on the boat home to say we’d walked on Gugh but unfortunately didn’t have enough time to properly look around.
Tresco island felt like the most exotic and even tropical of all of the Scillonian islands. Covered with brightly coloured flowers and amazing looking succulent plants, the whole island felt like it had been splattered with a touch of the Mediterranean.
The walks around Tresco really are the main reason I would urge you to visit. We hiked for hours around the coastline and I was so exhausted when we got the boat back to St Mary’s that I fell asleep on the 20-minute crossing!
The Girl In The Window 