Oooph. It has been a month of seemingly quite random online and in-person purchases but by God have these things tickled the collective fancy of my Instagram followers. From a pressure-relieving seat-pad to a face contour wand that creates instant cheekbones, here are the bits and pieces that people have gone wild for.
I mean we should obviously go in with the sexiest item: this Gel Seat Cushion “for long sitting” has a special honeycomb design that helps to spread load and relieve pressure on the lower back, hips, sciatic nerve and – crucially – on the old fanjita. The undercarriage. Yes, friends, I bought a seat pad specifically to stop my thrupenny bits from going numb when writing at my desk for long periods of time.
I can hear you all now, screaming away, “you shouldn’t be sitting for that long at a time anyway!”. “My Apple Watch makes me get up and do jumping jacks every twenty minutes!!”. “GET A STANDING DESK!!!”.
Calm yourselves. If I wish to sit at my desk churning out words until my entire fanny loses all feeling then I will. And the new gel seat cushion allows me to go even longer than before. What an accolade to earn!
Jesting aside, the cushion is actually brilliant if you have lower back pain and find every single office chair uncomfortable. It doesn’t make it feel all soft and squidgy, as though you’re sinking into a sofa, it just sort of…supports. In a really forgiving way. It also allows air circulation between arse and chair, which is helpful, and you can pick up the cushion by its special handle (just a normal handle, but I’m in QVC mode) and take it to use in the car or at The Globe theatre. (If you know, you know.)
I bought mine from Amazon here* – it was £24.99
*denotes an ad-affiliate link. This means that a small percentage is earned with every purchase through the link.
Look, I know this is subjective, but I have tried a lot of earplugs – I can almost safely say most of them on the market – and these are the ones that are still inside my ear come morning.
Most others are plucked out, blearily, at around 3am because they are so big that they are about to burst through the wall of my ear canal, or they are protruding too much and stopping me from sleeping on my side, or they are too rigid and giving me ear-burn.
Before this particular type of ear plug, the best I’d found were the Alpine Sleep Soft (yes, I have tried Loop and all the other ones that frequently pop up as suggestions) because the soft silicone plugs were easy to pull in and out (no rolling or twisting necessary), were small enough for my dainty ear canals (pretty sure most ear plugs are made to fit giants) and formed a brilliant noise-seal that cut out snoring but still allowed high pitched noises to penetrate.
(Alarms, foxes mating, owls screeching.)
After trying nearly every type of ear plug apart from the bespoke ones where you have to have a mould made of your ear canal (I’m just not that committed) the Alpine Sleep Soft were the very best. But then – then – along came the Alpine SleepDeep!
These are oval and seem to just fit that bit more snugly inside (you give them a good extra push with your thumbnails and they suction into place as though you’ve entered some sort of outer space satellite airlock) and they also come in two sizes. Which is key. I recommend the small, unless you have a very large head. Or large ear canals.
As mentioned, these are the only ear plugs I can put in at night and wake up still wearing in the morning. I think that they are quite phenomenal.
I bought mine here* – I bought the mixed pack with both sizes, but if you just want “small” then opt for the version labelled (confusingly) “50 pack”. That seems to be the small size on its own.
Something of a cheat entry, because I covered this amazing vest top last week, but nonetheless one of the most popular recommendations of the month. This is a soft, beautifully-cut vest top that requires no underwear beneath it because it has it built in. I am a convert.
