To me, they are the ultimate fashion statement. Hats have really have become part of my signature style… for so many reasons. But quite aside from fashion, they’re a beauty essential for me – for when my hair’s beyond redemption.

Here’s why I love them…

As a classic cover up for ‘bad hair’

To keep my hair healthy, I don’t wash it everyday. (Hair’s natural oils are so important for keeping your hair strong, smooth and shiny.) So on days when my hair looks flat, unstyled and just plain blah!, nothing beats a hat.

For instant chic + versatile style

Plunk on a hat, tie on a headscarf and you have instant panache. A hat will change your look or suit your mood in a second: wear a classic suit jacket and jeans, and see how totally different the same outfit looks (and feels!) with a polished fedora, a funky baseball cap or a billowy chiffon headscarf. (It used to be all about baseball caps, of course, but I’m rather over them. Those really do look like you’re trying to cover up bad hair…)

For sun protection + shade

My fair Scottish skin needs an extra measure of cover-up, but everybody should think about wearing a hat with a face-shading brim when they’re outside, even on not-so-sunny days.

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I firmly believe we are what we eat. In some of my previous columns on Victoria Health, I’ve shared my Stay-Slim Secrets and other thoughts on Food, but this month I’m letting you have a sneak peek inside my kitchen, along with some of my all-time favourite recipes, which I believe are packed with nourishment and goodness. As a result, they feed every cell in your body – not just your complexion…

LULU’S GREEN SOUP

This green soup is good for using up vegetables that you’ve got in the fridge, so there’s no waste. My son Jordan is a cook (he has a fabulous restaurant in Islington called Trullo, where believe it or not it’s even hard for me to get a table!), and he makes up bags of chicken stock to use as a base for this. Marigold Bouillon powder is also a great standby (Delia Smith swears by it…!)

Basically, you add to the soup whatever is to hand: cabbage, cauliflower, spring onions, courgettes, peas, even lettuce – so long as it’s green. Add these to the stock, boil until the vegetables are soft, and season to taste (lots of black pepper is FABULOUS!) You can then whizz it through the blender. If you prefer bigger chunks of vegetables, chop them to your preferred size before you put them into the stock. And I always add a big handful of chopped herbs on top.

Invest in some small flasks for taking food-to-go with you. If you’ve got some hot, healthy soup in a flask, it helps you resist the endless fast-food options – which are almost invariably high in fat and loaded with sugar.

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Last month I shared with you some of my best make-up tips (read them here) – but that was just half the story! So this edition, I’m taking you through what I know about eyes, cheeks and how to ‘finish’ a face perfectly…

Learn the art of making eyes. I think that smokey eyes always look fabulous. End of story. The eyes really are the window to the soul, and eye make-up is the window-frame. Personally, I have a deep socket with lots of eyelid, so actually I can take a lot of shadow in the socket area, to add depth.

Honestly, I’ve got it down to a science… So here’s the step-by-step.

1. I start with a magnifying mirror. For anyone who needs glasses, this is a must: it’s brutal, but worth it not to look like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, when you’ve finished!
2. I use a light-reflecting concealer all over the lid, which works to even out the skintone (getting rid of any redness or shadows), as well as acting as a ‘base’ for the make-up to cling to.
3. I outline the eyes with a kohl pencil, close to the lash-line; then take a brush and blend the eyeliner, pencil to create a softer line.
4. I don’t like my brows to be too dark, nowadays. I’ve been through phases of having them dyed almost brunette, but I think it looks softer to have them a few shades lighter. If I want to emphasise them, I use a powder brow pencil (in a taupe-y shade) and extend the outer corner – where my natural brows just disappear!
5. At this stage, I move on to looking into the mirror from quite a distance away – because I find that to start with, when I’m applying shadow, I want to be able to see the impact rather than the finer detail. (The magnifying mirror comes in handy for making sure it’s all perfectly blended, when I’m done.)
6. I have a palette of neutral eyeshadows – coppery-gold, taupe, dark brown and a pale shimmering bone colour – and I swirl quite a fat blender eyeshadow brush in the four shades, to mix them. I then hold a mirror quite a way away from me, at this point, and using the brush I work the mixture of shadows into my eye socket, spending time blending, blending and blending again, so that there are no hard edges. I have green-y gold eyes, but I’ve seen these colours work beautifully on blue eyes and brown eyes, too, and palettes of those neutral browns are available for every budget. They’re the ‘Little Black Dress’ of eyeshadow palettes.
7. I also use the brush to sweep the eyeshadow out towards the outer corner of my eyebrow. When I’ve enhanced the socket, I might also add a touch of the bone shadow to the brow-bone, to emphasise the bone structure – and for that, I sometimes just dab it on with a finger.
8. When I’ve finished with the shadow, I reach for that kohl pencil again and outline my lines one more time.
9. I add lashings and lashings and lashings of mascara, till the lashes get smokier and smokier.

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Thank GOD for make-up! And thank HEAVENS for the make-up we can buy now – because it sure is a serious improvement on what I used to use, once upon a time…

Today, textures are sheer and gorgeous and make skin look luminous. When I started out, textures looked – well, like a mask. I wore PanCake and PanStick, which were created by Hollywood make-up artists in the golden age of movies to cover absolutely everything – so that you could barely see the skin! I figured if it was good enough for the movie stars, it was good enough for me, so I plastered the stuff on like it was going out of fashion. (Which happily it did, in the end…) Before that, I’d just copy my Mum: she had a bottle of foundation, and she’d do these two stripes of lipstick on her cheeks like a Native American Indian, and blend them in as blusher. For my mother, lipstick was more like a stain, so that’s what I did, too. Then I’d add lots and lots of mascara from a little compact that I used to have to spit in to wet the brush!   Happily I’ve progressed a bit since then…! (And so has mascara technology…)

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No matter how well you know your skin, your face and your features, I think it pays dividends occasionally to turn to professionals for advice.

Maybe you’ve never even had your make-up professionally done.  Well, it’s about time – because it needn’t cost a penny.  I’m very privileged:  I’ve worked with some amazing make-up professionals, but there are talented make-up artists working in beauty halls up and down the country – particularly on the counters of big-name brands like M.A.C., Bobbi Brown and Chanel.  It’s a really good idea to book in, once or twice a year (or more often if you feel like it) for a free makeover.  (Some of the counters make a small charge for makeovers – though most don’t – but it’s always redeemable if you buy something.)  You will definitely pick up a few tricks, especially if you ask the make-up artist to let you have a go, too.

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I l-o-v-e clothes.  Love them!  Dresses, jackets, leggings, skirts, tops, cardies, shoes.  (Oooooh, s-h-o-e-s…)  And I break a lot of rules because in my mum’s day, you got to forty and wore neat little coats and cardies, and abandoned fashion to the younger generation.  Well, not any more!

Having said that, I think every woman of a certain age has to have what’s called a ‘mutton-o-meter’, built into their consciousness.  That means not wearing clothes that really should be left to the younger generation (like my nieces), but picking out certain elements that do show that you haven’t lost the fashion plot, and still have that finger on the pulse, and can bring you right up to date and make you look fresh.

But I believe there are ways that every woman can look better in her clothes – and feel better in her skin.

Work on your posture…

The fastest way to lose five pounds and take off five years, for instance, is to stand up straight. I can remember going shopping with my mum and I’d sort of schlump when I was trying clothes on – and she’d narrow her eyes at me and give me such a look!  With boobs (which I’m ‘blessed’ with), the temptation is to hunch to make them disappear, but I’ve studied the Alexander Technique in the past, which really helps with posture (and so does Yoga).

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A couple of months ago, I shared with VH readers some of the tips I’ve gleaned over the years for not piling on the pounds:  what I eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks.  (Click here to read it).  But I’ve also picked up many other tips for resisting temptation and ensuring I eat healthily, even when I’m touring or away on business.  I hope – as the bikini season approaches rather scarily fast, and we all start to think about our bodies! – that you might find these useful, too…

•  I always keep plenty of bottled (or filtered) water in bottles, at room temperature – not cold because I don’t like it chilled.  I have trained myself to drink water;  it’s not the most delicious thing in the world, but I know it’s good for me, so I make myself drink it.  It helps keep me filled up between meals, but I don’t drink it with food.

•  I like a curry as much as the next person – no, maybe more!  But I’ve eaten a lot of Indian food in India, when I’ve been on meditation retreats, and I’ve learned that it’s very different to what you’ll find in most Indian restaurants in the UK – which is very high in fat (usually hydrogenated), and often straight from the freezer and microwaved.  I have an Indian friend in London and she has helped me to seek out the kind of Indian restaurant where they use fresh ingredients, fresh spices, and cook from scratch.  There is a world of difference:  ‘fresh’ Indian food is very clean, not a glutinous sloppy mess.  When I eat curry, though, I tend to go for chapatis, naan and popadums.  I used to be terribly brown-rice-and-Woodstock in the 60s, but I’m not big on rice now.

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From talking to friends – and all sorts of women, actually – I know that it’s the lines around the eyes that bother them the most. We should be thanking our lucky stars to be living right now, when skincare technology’s so advanced, because those magical light-reflecting ingredients in an eye cream can do a lot to ‘blur’ the appearance of those lines, creating a sort of ‘halo’ effect that refracts the light so it bounces off the skin in a super-flattering way. So use the same trick when you’re trying out an eye cream as with a day cream: let it sink in. Then see if there’s any residual gleam on the skin afterwards – in which case that cream’s going to be good news for magicking away the appearance of those lines and wrinkles.

As the day wears on, though, that subtle sheen can disappear, with the result that the eye zone can look dry, and lines become more visible. That’s ageing. So what I do is carry my eye cream around with me and use a dab or two during the day, even over make-up. I’m keeping the anti-ageing ingredients topped up, at optimum levels – but I’m also adding back that vital radiance, literally turning the clock back in the second or two it takes to pat my cream in.

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As a child I was always hungry – and it’s not like my parents didn’t feed me!  My dad was a butcher and would bring home amazing cuts of meat, and he’d do a swap with the fishmongers so he’d get terrific fish, too.  But I used to be able to eat what was on my plate, and half of what was left on everyone else’s, and still I’d feel hungry.  Maybe there was an emotional factor:  my mum sometimes worked, so often I’d come home to an empty house and make myself a bowl of Bird’s custard.  Total comfort food.  My mum would get home and say, ‘where’s that pint of milk I bought?’ – and I’d have to tell her I’d made it into custard…!  Glasgow, of course, is famously the homeland of the deep-fried Mars Bar.  Now, I’ve never had one of those – we were a Blue Riband house, actually – but I am a sugar addict, with a fairly typical Scottish hunger for sweets.  So let me tell you how I’ve worked to conquer that, over the years.

The food I eat now is quite different to what I was raised on, you see.  But I’ve learned, over the years, what works best for me and my metabolism.  I was never overweight when I was young (despite all that custard!), because I was so naturally active (some would say hyperactive!) and physical.  Then I got into the music business and started spending my life in the back of a van, belting from venue to venue and eating mostly at motorway caffs and roadside diners.  I could have written a guide to the service stations of the M1, or got a degree in Little Chefs!  There I was, surrounded by six men – all Glaswegians – except the roadie – stopping off for stir-fries and curries and eggs and bacon after the show, with steak and kidney pie for breakfast and chocolate virtually round-the-clock, just to keep us going.  I even took up smoking because I thought it would help me lose weight – but it didn’t!

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One reason why skin starts to look generally older is that it starts to look drier and dustier and just doesn’t have that youthful radiance any more.  The reason, I’ve learned, is simple:  cells turn over more slowly, and when they sit on the surface, they just don’t bounce light back in the same way as dewy, fresh young skin.

Which is why every woman of forty-plus needs to – yes! – become a wee bit of a scrubber.  In other words, exfoliate, exfoliate, exfoliate.  I’m not talking about cosmetic peels or the kind of dermabrasion that you go to a cosmetic dermatologist’s surgery for:  those can be harsh and require quite considerable recovery time.  I’m talking about daily skin-buffing, to slough away those dead (and dead-looking cells), revealing the fresh and more glow-y skin beneath.  Trust me:  this daily microdermabrasion can be your fastest-track to great skin.

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