Following my post You couldn’t make it up, I came across the perfect sale section while I was out shopping. So my daughter is now the proud owner of her very own “make up”

The Tinkerbell compact contains a pop up hairbrush, and a mirror. The star is a vanilla lip balm, and the “blend & go” has a blending sponge (no powder!) and mirror.

My daughter is delighted! She has it all in her handbag, and keeps coming back to it. Whenever we arrive home, she “does her make up”, and she’s also taken it all out with her and it’s kept her busy in restaurants and whilst visiting family. I’m calling this a win!

It also allowed me to sneak a little bit of science into her life. Initially she was very keen to share, and do other people’s make up too. But after about five minutes, her sponge was looking a little grubby (she’s a forest school kid after all!), and her finger had been in and out of the lip balm more times than I’d care to mention. So we had a chat about how make up is just for one person, and isn’t something we really share, as we don’t want to spread our germs around (she’s familiar with the concept of germs, having talked previously about why we wash our hands). Something clicked, as she was playing with her toys a little later and one of them “asked to have some make up” and I heard my daughter explain that “we don’t share make up and this toy would have to find her own”!

She will occasionally come over and ask me if she looks beautiful, having done her make up. I tell her she looks beautiful now, and she looked beautiful before. It hasn’t actually made her focus on her appearance like I worried it would. More the fact that she can do something “grown up” for herself, and have autonomy over it.

A little bonus for me is that now she’s “brushing” her own hair, she’s started to realise that me brushing her hair isn’t quite the torture she makes it out to be. Now if I can just do something similar with hair washing…