Small bust, big heart

Hands-up, this is shameless publicity for my new site: The Ten Best. I’m billing it as the essential guide to the best of everything.

It seeks out style, quality, efficiency, innovation, taste and value — and identifies the ultimate across a range of categories: Fashion, Living, Health & Beauty, Food & Drink, Entertainment, Technology, Travel, Money, Web, History.

To give you a taster, I’ve written a post on a subject that may be of interest: The Ten Best Bust Creams. I’d be chuffed if you’d swing by to check it out.

If you’re on Twitter, don’t forget you can find me in my SBBH guise at @AABigHeart. You can also follow The Ten Best at @TheTenBest.

Tags: bust cream, bust enhancing cream, bust firming cream

Laugh in the face of lines, like the fabulous Lauren Hutton

With an artillery of Botox, fillers and surgical procedures at their disposal, many women are buckling under the pressure to stay forever young — and their natural beauty suffers as their faces grow ever more puffy, frozen and stretched.

Rather than becoming a beauty-zombie, Caroline Cox suggests an altogether more dignified route in her excellent book Grown-up Glamour (Quadrille Publishing, £12.99).  Inspired by a host of graceful-agers – like Lauren Bacall, Cate Blanchett, Lauren Hutton and Helen Mirren — Cox provides an insightful guide for the woman who wants to age naturally… and in style.

For anyone over 30 that wants to turn heads, without resorting to the scalpel or pleasure-sapping diets, this book is indispensible. Cox is an authority on fashion history and modern hair and beauty trends and her past books include Lingerie, Stiletto and How to be Adored.

It’s not just her advice you can tap into — the book teaches you “How to age fabulously — by the women who got it right” and it’s peppered with wisdoms from lots of glorious older beauty icons, as well as the men that adore them:

I DON’T BELIEVE MAKE-UP AND THE RIGHT HAIRSTYLE ALONE CAN MAKE A WOMAN BEAUTIFUL. THE MOST RADIANT WOMAN IN THE ROOM IS FULL OF LIFE AND EXPERIENCE. (SHARON STONE)

I PREFER OLDER WOMEN – THEY HAVE SEEN MORE, HEARD MORE, AND KNOW MORE THAN A DEMURE YOUNG GIRL. I’LL TAKE AN OLDER WOMAN EVERY TIME. (CLARK GABLE)

Follow Cox’s beauty and make-up tricks to learn miraculous ways to look brighter, more youthful and impeccably groomed. You may well find yourself brimming with Cougar-esque confidence that has a transforming effect on your life.