Advent Calendars For Grown Up Girls

advent nail polish calendar
Sod the children, advent calendars are a great way for grown up girls to get through the painful, never ending-ly social month of December.

Forget chocolate-filled windows excitingly  opened daily by tiny fingers (or as happened in our house, the whole of December opened and eaten by the third day….middle son just could not resist), advent calendars are now excitingly filled with all sorts of appealing tiny products.

Selfridges started the trend a year or so ago with its stupidly popular Lancome beauty version, which despite being bought in bigger-than-ever quantities each year, still seems to have sold out already, although you could keep checking back. But there are many new version this year, I picked up this truly fabulous collection, above, of 24 tiny nail polishes- a new shade for every day before Christmas! -by Cïaté at Sephora in New York last week.

Why, oh Why, do we not have Sephora here in the UK? If you are reading this Sephora, I know things didn’t go well between us when you tried the UK before, but honestly, I think things would be SO MUCH BETTER if you tried again. You’ve gotten AWESOME (the Meatpacking store is my favourite, I could have stayed all day) and we’re all buying much more beauty stuff now. Please, have another go.

Luckily, it’s also available in the UK here at £42

And then dear reader, we have the GINvent calendar…oh yes.

ginvent calendar
Cleverly put together by Drinks by the Dram, the Ginvent Calendar has a tiny serving of 24 specialist gins in a wee 3cl taster bottle to swig, in a spiritually restorative manner, on a daily basis throughout the pre Christmas build up. For 2013 there is a new artisan craft version of the calendar too, if you prefer a locally made and crafted gin. This is not a cheap at £99 for the Ginvent and £109 for the Craft Gin calendar, but what a lovely present for someone. Best keep this out of the way of the little ones though…

For a better value calendar, can we recommend the excellent Boots Beauty one at £30

boots advent calendar

As it says, this is 24 days of tiny beauty treats, including brands such as Nails Inc, Juicy Couture and um, Paco Rabanne. I don’t think the daily doses of beauty are huge in size, but what a great way to cheer up your day!

you beauty advent calendar

A more fancy looking beauty calendar can be found at You Beauty, which has an advent box which claims to be worth over £240 but it’s yours for £49.95. Now obviously this is Beauty Maths, which don’t QUITE relate to real life maths, but never the less, I do like the look of the products involved, which include more upmarket brands such as ESPA, Caudalie, Dermalogica and Stila.

But where, dear retailers, are the perfume advent calendars?

Did no one think what fun it would be to have a new perfume to try every day? No?

Apparently no one seems to have thought that was a good idea, so I’m going to suggest you make your own. Firstly, invest in one of these ‘fill your own’ advent calendar trees, below, from NotOnTheHighStreet. at £25. (Note, other prettier build-your-own calendars are available, but the drawers are too small for what’s coming next…)

advent

Then, either nip over to eBay and buy this selection of samples. Or, over the next week or two, head to your favourite perfume counters across your town and collect yourself 24 samples and simply pop them in the boxes to surprise yourself or a friend throughout December (note, perfume samples tend to be at least 6 cms long) Nice idea for a present eh? I think I should patent it.

Christmas is coming people.

1 Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *