What an amazing Valentine Weekend I've had!
It all started last December while visiting my daughter in Hamburg. I switched on my phone to find that I had won a competition I'd entered on book blogger and reviewer Tay Pickering's website, Chicks that Read. It was to promote the lovely Karen Aldous' new romance, The Chateau, and the prize was a makeover with Karen's daughter celebrity makeup artist Gemma Aldous.
You can imagine my excitement. The first thing I did was to look at Gemma's website where I was overwhelmed by the number of the A-listers she had done the makeup for. It was certainly going to be a challenge for her to turn me into the star of the chateau - especially as my only sight of a red carpet had been when I'd spilt wine on it!
My only problem was going to be the whole 'Getting to London' thing.Those of you who are regular readers of my blog will know that I'm not a great traveller and this is where my lovely husband came to the rescue. In fact he proved to be very deceitful – but in a good way! He couldn’t think of anything to get me for Christmas so decided to combine my prize with a weekend away. He got in touch with Karen and asked if the makeover could be linked in with a Valentine Ball at Gray’s Inn he wanted to take me to so that I had somewhere to go to show off my make-up. Not only that, but he also booked for us to see War Horse the following day, so the weekend became a very special one indeed. I didn’t find out about all this until Christmas day!
To say my weekend was amazing would be an understatement. Karen, her husband Glyn and Gemma met us at The Royal Horseguards Hotel, where we were staying, for a lovely lunch and then the men left us so that we could start the highlight of my weekend - the celebrity makeover. The beautiful view of the Thames from the window (and a bottle of Prosecco) set the scene and soon Gemma was opening her very large suitcase of cosmetics. The first thing Gemma did was to ask me what type of make up I usually wore and what I liked. I said that I was happy for her to make all the decisions as long as she could find me some cheekbones!
Without a mirror, I could only guess what was happening, but I know it involved a lot of brushes! It was fabulous to feel so pampered but I was a teensy bit apprehensive to see the results as the last makeover I'd had had ended up in my looking ten years older and resembling a clown. How silly of me! I'd forgotten that Gemma had made up the likes of Pixie Lott, Emeli Sande and Sheridan Smith. After curling my hair she said, "You can look now." 
What I saw nearly made me fall off my chair. Kylie Minogue was staring back at me... how had she done it! My husband has always liked Kylie but there was no way that Gemma could have known that. I couldn't wait for him to come back to see the results! "Who do I look like?" I asked when he came in.
"Kylie!" he replied picking up his jaw which had dropped to the floor.
Not surprisingly, we had a great Valentine Ball and then the following day, which was Valentine's Day, we went to see War Horse which was quite stunning.
So I owe a huge thank you Karen, Tay and Gemma for such a wonderful prize and of course to my husband for making it the best Valentine's weekend ever. If you would like to find out more about my celebrity makeover, Karen has interviewed me on her website. You can read it here.
Click here to purchase The Chateau by Karen Aldous
