I am a bit late to the party that is the Beauty Bible organisation that Josephine Fairley and Sarah Stacey have run for the last 15 years (that’s how long they’ve been working together). When we received a copy of The Anti-Ageing Beauty Bible, I was not aware of the excellent books and website the two ladies work hard to maintain, and the phenomenal lengths they go to ensuring all the products they review get strictly assessed by their army of testers (over 8,000 of them in total, ‘They are incredibly dedicated’ Sarah told us).
If you don’t believe the waffle from the beauty marketing campaigns, then this new book is for you. Jo and Sarah recruited 2400 women of over 35 to trial a whole range of anti ageing products and the book is full of the ones that the testers reckoned really did work. It’s your beauty shopping list sorted really, from face creams to fillers, foundations to facial oils, lipsticks to the best whitening toothpaste…It’s very convincingly done and is entirely centred on the concerns of the 35plus market.
The book embraces age rather than showing you ways of beating it back, which works with what we are thinking at TWR on the whole subject of getting older. We don’t yearn to be young, we just want to look fabulous and pretending we are 25 when we are not is just deluded. We want to look the very best we can at what ever age we are -forget the numbers- and the book does support this wholeheartedly, including some lovely quotes from the odd celeb, a few of our favs include;
‘I’ve been living in this excellent body for over 60 years, I love it so much. As long as it doesn’t get too fat, or too thin, doesn’t break-I just think, “Thank Goodness!”‘ Joanna Lumley
‘Attitude is everything’ Diane Von Furstenberg
‘Wrinkles don’t scare me; they are a part of life and I will and do embrace them. But I look at surgery and that scares me’ Christy Turlington
‘When you are younger, you want to be perfect, but later you learn that perfect isn’t really that interesting’ Susan Sarandon.
‘The only real elegance comes from the mind; if you’ve got that the rest really comes from it’ Diane Vreeland
The only small criticism we have is the title. We’re a bit fed up with the over-used term Anti Ageing, it sounds so negative and we did ask Sarah why the book is called The Anti Ageing Beauty Bible when it, rightly, embraces the idea of ageing and shows you how to do it well. She said they’d talked about it long and hard but felt that the book supplied the reader with whatever they might need to feel good about themselves, what ever their attitude to ageing. Hmm, may be we’re just a bit ahead of ourselves on the terminology front.
With lovely illustrations by David Downton, this might make a good present to drop hints about for Mother’s Day….or visit the Beauty Bible website which has regular beauty tips and product reviews for all ages. The ladies keep a good blog too.
The Anti Ageing Beauty Bible, Josephine Fairley and Sarah Stacey. £19.99 (available for £12.99 on this link)
so, apart from drinking more water and using products I can't think this is going to tell me anything I don't already know?
Well, it does list the top ten, tested products in useful categories such as moisturisers, hand creams, serums (we are loving serums at the mo) and foundations. even if you don't wear make up most people will use a moisturiser so it is interesting to see which products tested the best. I think that's useful info.
I know Lizzie you might think, as I did, that Jo and Sarah get 'supported' by brands who perhaps persuade them to say positive things about their products, but Sarah was adamant that this doesn't happen and I believed her, she described what her testers have to do for each product and it's a thorough research project involving proper cataloguing of results. Fluffy it ain't and there's no where for a poor performing product to hide.
But perhaps one of the reasons to consider buying is to keep a fresh eye on new stuff that's out there, and as Sarah said to me, to keep yourself from fading away, which is easy to do if you stick to the same look/routine with little motivation to change. But check out the website too, as it's free and you might find answers -or not- there. Ax