Behind the Scenes of a Beauty Blog

Being a beauty blogger - no matter how popular your blog is or how regularly you post - isn't easy. The time and effort that it takes to make a post is actually a considerable amount more than people tend to realise. In addition to that are the comments, emails (if you are lucky enough to be approached by PR), social media sites, coming up with potential post ideas, and trialling products. It's incredibly enjoyable, but it's not easy.

This is what my Saturdays tend to look like.

As I have been at school all week, Saturday is when I can bust out with the nail polish and the makeup I have been unable to wear all week. I'll be sitting there in my trackies and slippers, my hair in a messy bun but with a perfectly applied, full face of makeup. Well when else do you think I get the opportunity to trial products for reviews?!

I tend to write about 3-6 posts on the weekend to be spread out over the week, because it is the only time I get to do so. I sit in my little room at my little desk drinking hot chocolate and stalking other people's blogs, commenting, emailing bloggers for my Behind the Blog series and thinking up creative post ideas.

And then, you are sitting there typing away at about 6 blog posts at any given time, and you are temporarily blinded by a ray of sunshine powering through your window. And then the mad dash begins.

You leap up from your chair and proceed to accidentally clear your desk of about ten nail polishes, one half opened that catapults across the room and splashes all over the floor. You don't have time for this! You fling open your wardrobe and madly propell shoes behind you, most of which land on the bed, until you find a suitable pair to keep you dry as you traipse across the overgrown, soaking wet lawn that hasn't been tended to for approximately six months.

Next step is to load your arms with beauty products, as many as you can carry and as many as you can remember you are supposed to photograph. You balance your loot as you rifle for your simcard which is plugged into your computer, expertly shoving it in without even mucking up your still-wet nail polish.

You race out the back door and into the garden, only to find that the sun has moved behind a cloud, it is drizzling and the conditions are much too poor to photograph products.

So you wait.

You allow your products to fall to the table with a crash, and you sit there huddled under the verandah freezing to death in the dark with a soaking wet dog that is adamant on licking you to death. You wait, and you wait, and you wait, and then finally...the sun comes out again.

And so it begins again, the mad dash to collect all your products and race out to take photographs amongst the greenery of your Dad's vegetable patch. Everything is soaking wet and you take extra caution to avoid filling your lipsticks with dirt and your blushes with small insects intent on getting in the way.

You take 1000 photos at varying angles, all of which are causing problems due to light reflection, the light being too dark, the product being too white and contrasting or the product being a ridiculous shape. Your camera decides it won't focus and struggles to take close ups. And then the inevitable happens. Your camera battery dies.

After an explosion of words unsuitable for this blog, you madly run into the house flailing around for charged batteries. Naturally there are none, and a midst your chaos your family questions your hurrying. "The sun is going soon!" you yell, as if that explains everything.

Two charged batteries later and a clock and remote control that no longer works, you find yourself out in the garden just as the last rays of light move behind a cloud and the rain starts to bucket down.

Cold, wet and angry you gather your beloved products and make your way inside to the computer, shove your SD card in and start the tedious process of filtering through the millions of unsuitable photos, cropping, rotating and uploading them to the corresponding blog posts.

The worst bit is, you haven't even started any of the writing yet.

I hope you enjoyed this post, I had a lot of fun writing it and I promise you it is 100% true to life (at least for a winter's day, in the summer it is not at all a problem).

I would love to know the 'behind-the-scenes' of your blog and the difficulties you encounter. I think it is easier to appreciate blog posts once you know all the trouble and effort that has gone in to making them!