While the aim of my skincare and makeup routines during my teenage years and early 20s was always clear—combat breakouts and minimise the appearance of spots—my 30s have been an entirely different ballgame so far. When I turned 30 in April 2019, I was in the very early stages of pregnancy and working full-time in central London. The grind of the daily commute and a busy social life and work calendar combined with first trimester nausea and, later, intense pregnancy exhaustion meant that—hormonal breakouts aside—my beauty aims quickly shifted to finding products that would make me look less tired pronto.
And my quest has pretty much remained the same since. Fast forward nearly three years and we’ve all been through a global pandemic (exhausting to say the least), I’ve discovered what it’s like to live with a tiny human who is still yet to discover the joys of a full, uninterrupted night of sleep, and I’m now pregnant again. The result? My lifelong acne-prone skin is still oily and susceptible to spots, yes, but it now looks eternally dull and is the first thing to give the game away when I’m sleep-deprived.
Luckily, though, I now have the tools in my beauty arsenal to disguise the true depths of my tiredness. And while I might start the day with the kind of sallow complexion that rivals an extra on The Walking Dead, I’ve curated a failsafe assortment of beauty products that will take even the dullest of skin from dreary to dewy in mere minutes. (Although I can’t help with the actual feeling of tiredness—for that, there’s only one solution: copious amounts of coffee.)
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