Well, here it is - my first blog post of 2014! I hope that you all had a fantastic New Year. Mine was pretty good; I went to Martin's and drank beer with a friend of ours. We ended up going to the pub and saw in the New Year by watching the fireworks across the fields near Martin's house, which was a bit random but quite fun nevertheless! I'm back with some blogging resolutions, with what I hope to achieve over this next year. So, without further ado, let's jump right in...


I'll elaborate on this a bit. With my job, I'm often working into the evenings and often late nights, which means that by the time I get home, I don't really have any time to get a blog post up. I often fail to get one in before midnight, by which time no one is reading them until the next day anyway! I'm sure that it's affecting my blog's success, so with that in mind I'm going to start scheduling posts to go up the next day. In theory, you won't see any change - it just means that I will have written the post the night before, as opposed to on that particular day. I will aim to schedule them for lunchtime (So between 12-2pm usually) and hopefully cause myself a little less stress in the evenings!


Again, this is down to my job. I work a full five days a week, and on weekends I like to spend time with Martin and/or my friends, not cooped up in my room blogging. I usually post on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays with my "Week in Instagram" posts on Sunday. I like to take Monday off unless there's a particularly pressing post (I use that night to catch up with TV and Youtube videos!), and on Fridays I'm usually at Martin's or Martin is at mine, so it isn't really practical. I will sometimes post on Saturdays, but it will probably be instead of posting on one of the days during the week - it depends what I'm up to that particular weekend! I think that four blog posts a week is completely reasonable and totally doable.


I love reading about what people have got up to with their spare time - trips, restaurants they've visited, anything like that and in general they're pretty well received by the beauty blogging community. With that in mind I aim to write more about what I get up to, along with any shopping experiences (Like the one I wrote recently about Primark in Trinity Leeds) and anything of that nature. I know I have my "Week in Instagram" posts, but I would like to start taking more pictures of my life - they're nice to look back on, after all and hopefully you guys would enjoy seeing them too. If you have any suggestions about any lifestyle posts you'd like to see then wing them my way!


This is one that has been on my mind for a few months now. Ever since I've started blogging, I've always used my windowsill to place products on to take pictures of, but over time it has developed it's problems. By far the biggest one is the size - it's nowhere near big enough for some of the products I want to talk about and I admit to having to sacrifice a blog post idea because of it. However that is going to change this year - I'm going to invest in some proper lighting, a semi-portable studio and some more interesting backdrops - the plain white is starting to grate on me!


This will be quite a difficult one to stick to, because of timing. I depend on natural light (for the time being!) for my images, and as you all know in winter it gets particularly difficult to find that window of opportunity to take images. If that doesn't come, then I have to leave it for another day. However, if I stick to my previous resolution then that problem will become obsolete, and I can take pictures whenever I need to. I don't have a large room to store my things in, in fact my room is very small so any unnecessary packaging like boxes really doesn't have a place in there. If I aim to get any pictures of new products taken within a couple of days, then I can put them away where they're meant to be nice and quickly.

I think that all of these resolutions are quite reasonable, and I'm looking forward to having a better organised blog in 2014. I had a great first, full year with my blog in 2013 and I want to keep it that way. Hopefully by making these little improvements here and there, I can maintain a good blog that you guys keep coming back to again and again.

In tomorrow's post, I'm going to look back at my 2013 resolutions and see how well I did - it'll be interesting, that's for sure! I've just looked back at them now and have mixed feelings... but then you'll hear all about that tomorrow.