What’s In My Bag – The Truth

It can be tough on your self esteem sometimes, blogging. Everyday you come across more and more examples of beautiful blogs with stunning photography and seemingly endless numbers of followers. And their lives just seem so darn interesting – always out having delicious looking brunches at stylish eateries, sipping fancy lattes at trendy cafes, and of course unwrapping package after package of gorgeous new clothes to blog about. Makes my weekly muddy dog walks and occasional Primark shopping sprees seem very dull and pedestrian in comparison!

Never is this more apparent then when one of these glossy, aspirational young things does a ‘What’s In My Handbag’ post, which normally turns out to be a beautifully curated collection of pictures of a stunning designer bag, filled with luxurious beauty products and must haves, all incredibly neat and well kept. I always find these posts fascinating, but at the same time they make me cringe every time I peer into my rubbish dump of a handbag! I’ve often chuckled to myself at how embarrassing my own ‘What’s In My Handbag’ post would be, but then I realised – that isn’t who I am. I am frequently talking about how I’m not one of those effortlessly put together people, so why would I expect my posts to reflect one? So just in the interests of being honest – here it is. A true look at what is in my handbag.

Promise not to judge…??

The Bag

Here is just about the only part of this that will be posh – I do have a posh handbag, go me. I actually have a few posh handbags (mostly second hand, which I guess is cheating, but shhhhh, no-one needs to know!) but the frequency with which I actually rotate and use them is very low. This is mostly due to laziness – I am not really a morning person, and during the working week when I have to leave the house by 6.20am, I like to have as much precious time in bed as I can, so I rarely take a moment to assess my outfit and choose a different handbag to use. This is the one that ends up being used the most thanks to it’s generous yet compact proportions (I carry a laptop bag also, and just couldn’t do with the fuss of another large bag to lug around most days) and it’s monochrome colourway, which at a push goes with most things. This is where any poshness ends unfortunately….

The Contents

A Carvela purse…

Oh wait, maybe the poshness doesn’t quite end there. I have a nice purse, by Carvela and picked up at TK Maxx one busy Saturday, when I managed to be that awful person who holds up the queue because I managed to find the only one in the store without tags on and made the mistake of asking how much it was, which took all available till staff to run off and find out, for some reason. I did try to call after them that it really didn’t matter, I was going to buy it anyway and was genuinely just curious, but they zipped off so quickly and with such determination they didn’t seem to hear! Oops! I really had to fight my inner urges when buying this too – a part of me is always going to want a different purse to match each handbag, but let’s face it, I don’t use most of them halfway near enough, so I had to ignore my inner voice and go with something neutral!

An Impulse body spray and Next perfume…

I am girly, I like dresses and heels and I rarely leave the house without at least a little make up and my hair done – that’s just me. So it goes without saying that I like to smell nice too! Thing is though, don’t know if you’ve noticed but branded perfumes cost a bomb these days, so while I’m addicted to my Chloe and my Tom Ford scents, I just can’t bear to use them every day and save them for the evenings or nice days out. Cheaper versions might not last as long, but it just seems like a waste to use up something which at today’s prices, let’s face it, is akin to liberally spritzing yourself with liquid gold, especially when I’m just trundling to and from the office! This Next ‘Just Pink’ perfume is a much more affordable option for the working week and smells eerily similar Ralph Lauren Romance! My other go to is Yardley’s English Rose EDT, which I can normally pick up for round a tenner. At that price though I can spray away to my heart’s content without worrying about hemorrhaging money…!

L’Occitane Violet hand cream and lip balm

Oooh, finally some luxury! Well, not really. They’re trial size freebies!! I like to carry a few beauty essentials in my handbag, but as I alluded to in this post last year, it’s not actually that often I buy beauty products outside my everyday items. It isn’t that I don’t like them – I do, and I completely see the value in some of the higher priced products, but I am simply lucky enough to have a Mum who is an absolute expert at collecting freebies, which my sisters and I get gifted in our stockings at Christmas! As a result I have a large stock at home on standby, and I am unashamed to say I haven’t bought a moisturiser in a few years now! Thanks Mum! These two were a recent addition this Christmas, and actually I’d be tempted to buy them full size. I love L’Occitane products anyway, but this one was a new fragrance for me and I love it (yes I am actually an 80 year old woman mentally…)!

At least three other lip products….

Let’s see….. currently I am carrying a red lipstick, two lip crayons (one nude and one pink) and a hot pink lip gloss! Some might say I like to be prepared for all possible situations, however I can confirm that this once again comes down to laziness. I grab them as I’m leaving the house, then don’t take them back out again at the end of the day. So a couple of weeks and various different looks later, I inevitably have a bit of a collection going on in there…! Also, you can see for yourselves that these aren’t the immaculate, pristine products you normally see in these ‘In My Bag’ posts. They are battered, scratched from rolling around in the depths of my bag for weeks on end, covered in smudgey fingerprints and I almost certainly will have had to pick the odd dog hair off them (how does it get EVERYWHERE??) Yep. Dems the truths.

A bright green nail polish….

I have no idea when I last wore this shade. I genuinely have no idea why this is in there!

Hand sanitizer and poo bags….

Because once a Doggy Mum always a Doggy Mum, apparently. Even when the dog is staying at your parents house for a bit. The hand sanitizer comes in handy at least. The poo bags, not so much! In fact they almost always unravel in my bag and tangle everything up, meaning I scatter the contents on the table everytime I walk into a meeting. Profesh AF, I think you’ll agree.

A rainforest worth of old train tickets and receipts…

Why do I do this? Why? I must pass a million litter bins on my way to work, and yet every time someone hands me a piece of paper I feel the need to hoard them in my handbag and purse until the end of time – or at least until I get fed up and have a mass clear out, painstakingly checking them all in case any are important (spoiler: none of them are ever important).

Things that should be in there but aren’t…

• Hair grips – why are there always about eleventy billion hair grips everywhere you look – in pockets, in drawers, in the washing machine, on the floor, etc – until you actually need ome while out of the house, then nothing?? It’s like they hide!
• A pen – a pen, my Kingdom for a pen. I steal pens every time I see them. I steal them from hotel lobbies, bookies (only when passing – I don’t spend all that much time in there…!) the Post Office, conferences…. I’ll steal them from you too if I get the chance – be warned. Because I always need one and I never have one. Sad but true.
• My keys – yeah, the older I get the more it seems I am likely to leave these on the coffee table, particularly on days when I’ve hired a van to drive all the way to Birmingham and clear out my storage unit. Sore point, let’s move on…..
• An emergency Gin & Tonic. I think maybe this is frowned upon, but I feel like it might need to be something I have in my life…

And that is largely what’s in my bag. Well, minus the fluff, dog hair and intermittent bits of loose change anyway, but we don’t need to be quite that honest, do we now…?

Love,

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