Beauty or Beast?
If the thought of leaving the house without completing your beauty regime or styling your hair brings on a state of anxiety, spare a thought for people from the past, many of whom had to do some pretty strange things in order to maintain their personal appearance… Plucking painful High foreheads were considered beautiful in 15th century Northern Europe, where upper class ladies slowly and painfully plucked their hairlines and scraped back their hair. Wigging out A good example of the perils of extravagance was seen in the European courts in the 18th...

Kitchen Confidence
Reignite your love affair with home cooking this year… From cheery Anthony Worrall Thompson to sultry Nigella Lawson, celebrity cooks are helping create a renaissance in home cooking. Interestingly, neither Anthony  nor Nigella trained as chefs, creating  their careers from a simple passion for good food. Our relationship with food is changing. There has been a slow shift away from ready-meal mania: between 1998 and 2002 the demand for ready meals rose by 29 per cent across Europe and 44 per cent in the UK alone. We now consider the amount of packaging...