Playback: January 2012 Highlights

How quickly is this year passing? Already we are days into the 2nd month of the year and I’m only just publishing my January monthly highlights.

This month’s highlight/playback will give you an insight into my blogging life.

January was more about professional achievements for me. I was given more responsibilities at work which gave me a great sense of achievement but it also meant that I had less time to spend working on the blog and often saw me up into the wee hours some nights trying to finish my work or a blog post (so much for that new years’ resolution to get into better sleeping habits). Truth be told, for the most parts, blogging is far from glamourous or fun.

Most days, hours can pass just to find the right words to describe the texture or scent of yet another face cream or the shade of that muted berry-pink lipstick. Compound that with writer’s block sometimes, I assure you, it can be quite stressful.

Then there’s the time spent to find and research all the facts about a product, its pricing and ingredients and any scientific support behind the at times ostentatious claim. There's also the waiting for the opportune moment for good lighting to do product swatching and face-of-the-day (FOTD) shoots in good natural light where possible.

After all that, there is editing work in Photoshop to fix the lighting, crop it and apply watermarks to the photos. Sometimes I wonder how it doesn’t consume all my time and how I manage to have a life outside of work and blogging at all. But honestly,  I love blogging and I wouldn’t have it any other way (but don't ask me that question when I've only had 5 hours sleep that day!).

I find time (to the detriment of my beauty sleep) to write and still try to have a balanced lifestyle catching up with overseas friends who came to Melbourne to visit, take a mini-trip away with my best friends and let my hair down on Friday night drinks.

Onto other blogging news, January saw the launch of Kiehl’s highly anticipated midnight recovery eye complex to complement its popular Midnight Recovery concentrate (and I promise a great giveaway to go with it later this month!), falling in love with Face of Australia illuminators, finding my perfect red lip liner as well as finding a HG product in Alpha-H to give me amazing skin.

Kiehl's Midnight Recovery Eye cream launch

So 2012 has been a frantic and fabulous start with a great array of beauty product findings; I can only see it getting more exciting and fun-filled in the weeks and months ahead. Now I just need to make sure I can keep pace.

What has been your achievements for the last month? 
How do you get yourself motivated when you lose your Mojo?

A view from the top of  Mt. Hotham on a brilliant Summer's day during my long weekend away. 

December Highlights: Interviewing Natalie Bloom

With the festivities of Christmas and the holiday season last month, I was grateful for a relatively quiet month on the beauty front.

I did, however, have the pleasure of meeting and interviewing the amazing Natalie Bloom, entrepreneurial beauty addict and founder of Bloom Cosmetics.

At 40, Natalie is a mother of 4 (the youngest is just 4 months old!) and racing at 100 kilometres an hour daily to grow her hugely successful Bloom Cosmetic that is currently turning over sales of more than $20 million annually. 

Natalie Bloom - image courtesy Ben Swinnerton | Herald Sun

I chatted with Natalie before Christmas about her love for design and beauty and everything else in between.

How did you take that leap from your passion of arts and graphic design and turn it into a business?
I studied graphics design in my Arts degree and it started with designing cards while I was a freelance designer. It was the encouragement of my then boyfriend (now husband) that I took the plunge and started my own business printing cards. Nowadays at Bloom, I’m all about artistic and creative direction and collaborating with talented Australian artists like Beci Ophin and David Band to design our packaging.

How did Bloom Cosmetics start?
What launched bloom as a cosmetics brand is the lip balms which is the heart of Bloom with only natural based ingredients and they are still a core product in our range today. The DIY kits with candle and potpourri making kits were also popular and developed a big following.
The success spurred us to develop a lipgloss at a time when lip glosses weren’t as mainstream as they are today and the business just grew from there. From then we launched eye products, then the complexion products and the rest as they say, is history.

What can we look forward to next with Bloom in the new year?
Well Bloom Cosmetics will turn 19 in March, which is a fantastic milestone. We will be growing our organics range which will launch new body care products which I’m very excited about. I’m very much into the organics and healthy living at home with my 4 kids. I’m what is termed a dark-green consumer (using only environmentally-friendly products at home).

What are your favourite products from your lines?
This is like asking me which on my kids are my favourite! I love them all but I’m fanatical about our lip gloss as that’s what launched the brand. I also love our newly launched candles and we have what I think is the best mascara with the full and flirty mascara which is made in Italy. Then there are the eyeshadows which are just beautiful.  

How do you maintain a work-life balance with 4 children , especially with such a young son who is only 4 months old?
It’s a constant juggle; sometimes one takes over another depending on what needs your urgent attention at that point in time and it’s constantly changing.
I’m very grateful for my supportive husband who has flexible working hours and can help with looking after the kids when at work. My 4 month old son comes to work with me on certain days as I’m still breast feeding and I have a nanny 3 days a week to help me out at home. Without these support, I definitely don’t think I will manage as well as I do.

Do you think there is a tension between the traditional bricks and mortar stores and online stores? Who do you think would come out on top?
In today’s climate, I think you need a presence in both and they really enhance the experience of each other. Since the relaunch of Bloom’s website we have seen our sales double but we also don’t see a decline in sales volume in our retail presence.
I think online is great for doing short and sharp promotions and can cater internationally (we are working on making our online store available to international customers but have to iron out some bumps first) but a retail presence adds the personal touch to the shopping experience and that is why retail will always have a place in the business. It’s about finding the right mix of online and offline and making that connection to get people from looking at the screen to walking into stores.

Natalie & I

So there you have it, the online and offline debate is going to fizzle out and the two will end up being complementary channels if Natalie is to have her way with it.

Thank you Natalie for taking the time out of your busy schedule to chat with me.

Beauty In Bloom Giveaway
Natalie is also kind enough to sponsor a giveaway of her book- Beauty in Bloom: A collection of beautiful inspirations.

Beauty in Bloom is an inspirational, eclectic and stylish compendium of all things beautiful from Natalie Bloom, founder of Bloom Cosmetics. From the love of makeup to inner beauty, nature to notebooks, from perfumes to Paris, Beauty in Bloom is about making us look beautiful, feel beautiful and above all be inspired by beauty. If you want to win this special book.

To win a signed copy of this book (yes, I've confirmed Natalie will be signing your book!), all you have to do is tell me what inspires you every day?

The most creative answer will be judged as the winner. Readers can enter mulitples times but each separate entry must be a unique answer.
This competition ends on midnight AEST 22nd January so don't forget to get your entries in!
This competition is open to all readers, international or in Australia.

November Highlights

I’ve decided to start a monthly series in which I showcase the highlights of the previous month. This could be events I’ve attended, products that deserve accolades with a sprinkle of any personal highlights I think worth mentioning.

For the inaugural post of this series, it's only fitting that we start with a beautiful and special event that is dear to me - MBBE 2011. 

MBBE 2011
The Melbourne Beauty Blogging community is a cosy one. We ladies we have met at last year’s MBBE are like family and quite a few of us catch up regularly for lunches, dinner and ‘on the job’ at various events. So when this year’s MBBE gathering came around, it was like another little sorority meeting where we caught up with each other’s lives, work and chatted about our latest beauty favourites (this time it was BB creams).

All this against the beautiful backdrop at Miss Fox – a chic and vintage inspired salon that provides impeccable manicures, luxurious spa experiences and every beauty services in between.

We were given the warmest hospitality by Victoria, the owner and hostess of the event, providing us with refreshing PIMMs cocktail and delectable cupcakes as well as pampering with mini hand massages, manicures with Zoya polishes and mini make overs.

The highlight of the afternoon was a keynote speech by Kate Morris, Founder of Adorebeauty online beauty store and winner of the 2011 Telstra Business Women’s Awards. It was inspiring to hear how her perseverance in dealing with numerous rejections from brands that Ms Morris contacted and wanted to represent online who just wasn’t interested which made her more determined than ever and now many of these big brands are embracing the online era and joining her legions of brands representations at Adorebeauty.

Afterwards, there was a quiz with prizes to be won from Garnier, Guinot, Illamasqua, Endota, Avon and GlossyBox for the smart cookies who manged to get the most answers correct. That quiz was probably as difficult as the most recent CAPM exam I sat for (being unprepared didn't help). 

There was even an award presentation for Jacie for her Online Beauty Writer of the year from Beauty Directory presented by Kimmi of The Plastic Diaries. We were proud as punch and it was as good as winning the award ourselves to have one of our MBBE receive such high accolades.

As always with such events, literally thousands of photos were taken. I thought instead of posting it all up, I'll create a slideshow with my favourite photos to share with you. The music can be switched off if you prefer.



Valerie from Ponikuta must be thanked and congratulated for bringing the new and old MBBE gang together and organising such an amazing event this year. She is the woman who made MBBE a reality and runs around tirelessly for months to plan and co-ordinate activities and sponsorships and made the day such a fabulous success!

P.S - for those of you interested, I didn't end up wearing those pretty red pumps, the beautiful warm day called for a pair of red-hot sandals instead.

The majority of the photos in the slideshow are credited to Brendan Cook, who was our official photographer of the day.

Oscar Oscar Salon

Mid November saw a breakfast champagne event on a bright and early Sunday morning at Oscar Oscar Chadstone hair salon, home of leading hair styling artists and the talented Jackie Chan who works magical kung-fu equivalent of hair styling wonders as seen first hand by yours truly on the day.

We were given some brand overview and product information on Aveda Hair products whose premise is to combine art and science to infuse plant extracts and flower essences into professional and high performing hair care and styling products.

We also learnt lots of tips and techniques watching Jackie re-create the low side ponytail and a sleek half-upstyle that was all the rage at the recent runways (the trick is to use a rubber band, but instead of tieing with it, you secure one end of it to your hair with a bobby pin, then wrap the rubber band tightly around the pony tail,take a strand of hair and wrap it over the rubber band to hide it and secure the other end with another bobby pin).

We even had a mini makeover afterwards provided by the entire talented Oscar Oscar team. I managed to have Jackie worked the Cloud Nine styler on me to give my hair soft waves and I had some backcombing action at the back of the crown to create the Barbrarella big hair look.

Fast fact: did you know Cloud Nine is develope by the original makers of GHD, who then sold off the technology off and went to further develop and innovate with the Cloud Nine?



I learnt so much at the session that day and truly appreciated having the advice of a great hairstylist who can give you a great cut to make your hair work with you rather than against. If only Chadstone wasn’t so far out of the way for me, I’d be paying Jackie very regular visits.



Clinique Event
The end of November saw Clinique host its first Melbourne blogger event and some of the MBBE gang again got to catch up during the mid-week soiree over hors d'oeuvres, champagne and drinks and hear from the beautiful Alexis and Miranda gving us the low down on the Clinique story and sneak peeks of some upcoming releases (look out for growing additions in the Even Better product family line and a mascara exchange program next February).


(Be sure to hover over the pictures whilst the slide show plays if you are interested in reading the title or commentary of the photos)

With the business side of the event out of the way, we had a make up demonstration by the talented Courtney with IT Girl 2011 Melanie being the model of the evening to showcase a simple yet sophisticated look using products from the upcoming Black Honey collection.

We also had a skin consultation with the wonderful Clinique ladies and then continued the socialising where conversation topics moved from dodgy hair stylists to more BB creams and plastic discussions. The talk was so riveting and the hospitality so warm, we didn’t even realised time had flown and it was 10pm when we wrapped up. I was definitely trying to hide my worse-than-usual dark-circles and bleary eyes the next morning at work!

And Finally...
Being such a whirlwind month, I was glad to finally close November off. It had been hectic at work and having family from overseas visiting for 3 weeks and then going interstate for a wedding threw me completely off my regular routines.

Bring on the party season of December and the quieter family time that the festive season brings as we head towards the close of yet another year.

I wrap today's post up with one of my favourite photos taken whilst taking the relatives around the Great Ocean Road on our way to the Twelve Apostles. I just love the broody ominous-looking sky.