by Sam Faiers
It was the first big event I had to go to in my role on the TV show, and it was so exciting. I remember I had my hair all blow-dried and was wearing a cream dress from ASOS that was short at the front and long at the back. It took me ages to decide on my outfit, but I think I made the right call in the end. Back then I had to pay for my clothes, just like everyone else, and I still can’t quite believe how lucky I am to get some of my outfits for free these days.
Until then I’d always got the train to go into London, but this time they sent cars for us, which in itself made me feel amazing, and nearly like a celebrity. I remember I shared a car with Amy and Kirk and, oh my God, it’s hard to describe how weird it was for us. We were all so nervous, but also giddy with excitement – we had no idea where this TV show was going to take us, but we were up for giving it a go!
When we got to the club, I remember we were all doing our best to be on perfect behaviour. We were so worried what the journalists would write about us and the show – we really wanted them to put positive reviews in their newspapers and magazines.
So we had a meet and greet with them in an upstairs room, where they asked us lots of questions. It was weird for us, and it can’t have been easy for them either, as at that point they didn’t know anything about us, so the questions were very general, like what the best thing about Essex was and whether we were all single. I can remember Amy and Kirk being really flirty, and she kept joking that she was going to marry him. That is the kind of silly thing that she would never say now because while it seems funny at the time, it can look quite different in print. Nowadays we are all a lot more guarded about what we say to the media, but that day everyone just said whatever came into their heads.
Then everyone else went downstairs to see a screening of the first episode. And do you know what? We weren’t allowed down there! We had to sit upstairs and wait. And, oh my God, we were soooo nervous. We attempted to make conversation, but really we were just trying to listen out for any signs from downstairs. Luckily though, all we heard was laughter, and we kept telling each other that was at least a good sign.
The screening was an hour long, and it felt like a very long hour, I can tell you. But finally everyone came upstairs and were like, ‘Well done, we loved it, we can’t believe how funny it was. It will be amazing.’
It was such a relief to see their response, and quite motivating too. It was probably only at that point that everyone realised for the first time: ‘Hold on, this show we are getting involved in might actually work and be quite big.’ I had no idea what to expect from the next few months, I just knew I was so happy to be involved, and I loved the idea of the new things that it could bring.
Sarah was great. She really took the show on as her project, and looked after the cast really well. She would come round to the house just for a gossip and a cup of tea and would stay for like three hours. She would come to talk to me about coping with the media and the attention and to keep me up to date about what was going on – and also I reckon so she knew exactly what was happening in my life. That way she could decide which bits would be the most interesting to film. The idea is that the TOWIE producers always know exactly what is going on with you, so if I thought I fancied someone, or I was really mad at someone, I’d tell them.
Sadly Sarah only worked on TOWIE for series one – and then went off to be a producer on Made in Chelsea. Can you believe she dropped us for that show?! I guess she was offered more money though, and I don’t blame them for wanting her – she is really good at her job and we were sad to see her go. I do actually like Made in Chelsea too. It’s weird, because it is like a different world from Essex, but at the same time they go through a lot of the same things as us. I always say though, no matter how good it is, TOWIE is still the best!
The way filming works is that we are told how many weeks the show will be on for, and we have to keep those free, while still living our normal lives, if you get what I mean. So, for example, if I am told to keep ten weeks free from the start of September, I can’t go booking any holidays or making any big plans in that time.
While we get on with life as normal, we also have to allow for what they want to film. That takes priority over anything else for those ten weeks. So say I want to go and visit a friend in London, but it is not something the producers want to film and they decide they need footage of me in Minnies, I have to cancel my friend and go to Minnies. And the hardest thing is that we only get told the night before whether we are needed the next day and at what times. So life definitely revolves around TOWIE for those ten weeks. I’m not having a moan about it though – it is my job really and I love it! Luckily I’m still close to my old friends, and they are all really understanding when and if I have to cancel on them. I always try to rearrange our plans and make it up to them by passing on some of the freebies I get sent.
Of all three series we have done, the first one was my favourite to film. We just had so much fun. You know when you start at school and you are making new friends and learning new things and everything is fresh and exciting? Well it was like that at the beginning. And we weren’t known yet, so looking good in case the paps were around wasn’t an issue. Things like whether the bit we were filming might annoy people and we would get abuse for it on Twitter hadn’t occurred to us yet, so we were just totally enjoying ourselves and having a mad time. Sorry to be all sentimental – because, don’t get me wrong, I have loved filming every series since – but I guess I just look back on it as being a time of innocence or something, kind of like you look at your junior school days in a ‘wasn’t it nice’ sort of way.
Seriously, Amy, Harry and I had the best time filming together in the salon. We would get self-conscious when we suddenly remembered the cameras were there, or just make ourselves hysterical so that we’d cry with laughter. It took us a while to learn how to ignore the cameras and behave naturally, but now it’s pretty much second nature to us.
We didn’t plan what we would do or say – that was just us. I think you can see everyone’s true colours most clearly in series one. You see Lauren really out of control, you see Mark and his ‘she’s fit’ comments, and as for Amy . . . I know some people questioned whether she was acting or given lines, but, believe me, that was the real Amy! The funny, sweet, lovely, say-anything-that-pops-into-her-head girl who was my best friend from school. It’s definitely more the real her than the Amy we saw on her solo show It’s All About Amy, where I could see that everything she was saying and doing was too thought out for the cameras, whether she knew it or not. Maybe that’s why a second series wasn’t commissioned.
When you look at how everyone else became a part of the show – they all pretty much came about because of a link with me, Amy, Kirk or Mark. We are the original four, definitely. As far as people I brought in, obviously my sister Billie was through me. Then I introduced Lucy Mecklenburgh – Lucy Meck – to Mark in Marbella just before we filmed series one. So as soon as he was single and able to make a move, that was her lined up for TOWIE, as anyone Mark got involved with was going to become central to the show.
I mentioned to the bosses I knew Peri Sinclair, who had the shop around the corner. And then Joey got onto the show because of me – although he will never admit it! He got papped with me on a night out once and I told the photographers his name was Joey Essex, and they loved that cos you couldn’t make it up – but no one thought it was his real surname. I told the producers to put him on the show, and then I ended up getting with him. And because of the link to me he got lots of air time, which showcased how entertaining he can be. Like when he took me on a date and we ended up visiting a tip and then eating these squashed sandwiches in the middle of the woods. It was pure genius, and really established him as a central character. He will never ever thank me for it, but look at those facts!
In fact, thinking about it, I need to get some commission off all this lot! Of course, I wasn’t the only one from the original TOWIE lot who made suggestions to the producers, and I’m sure
that each and every one of us thinks that we were the one who brought the most to the table!
2
THE ORANGE COUNTY RULES
When I was young, I was a bit of a letdown as far as the Essex girl image goes because I don’t remember being that interested in beauty in my early years. I was a proper tomboy throughout primary school, and was never one of those little girls that worry about their looks and spend hours looking in the mirror and trying on their mums’ make-up. And I think that is partly a way of thinking that I got from my mum Sue.
Don’t get me wrong, Mum definitely knows how to look good – she is glam, stylish and totally gorgeous! She is also a really young mum – she had me when she was just 22 years old. But she doesn’t go in for fake tans, false nails, or anything like that. She was more bothered about being a mum – things like putting a good dinner on the table for us all every night when Billie and I were growing up – rather than looking like she had walked straight out of the salon.
So it was only really when I went to secondary school, and the other girls began to get into beauty routines and that, that I learned about it and started getting into it too. I wasn’t obsessively girly or anything, but I started to take a lot more interest in my appearance, and enjoyed experimenting with the latest crazes along with all my friends.
I went to Shenfield High School when I was 11. It is a pretty nice school in Shenfield, which is just outside of Brentwood. It is a mixed school, but the boys and girls are taught separately which, looking back, is a good idea – it meant we were less distracted in class! I guess it must work, as the school gets pretty good results. Billie is 11 months older than me, and was in the year above me at school. Mum would give us a lift in every day and I’d say I was pretty happy there. I wasn’t too bothered about the academic side of things, but I loved the socialising and the friends and the fun times. Mum was fine with the fact that I wasn’t very academic, as long as she knew that I wasn’t wasting my education and was making the best of things in my own way.
At school there was a group of seven of us who were all best friends. Lucy Meck was one of them, which shows just how long we have been friends, although I admit we aren’t as close now as we were then, as you might have noticed . . . The seven of us hung around together all the time, and I’m not going to lie – we were the popular girls in school. We called ourselves the Seven Sexy Cinders, after Cinderella. We came up with the name ourselves and were pretty pleased with it! So pleased we made a book about ourselves, which I’ve still got. It is full of photos of us all posing and having fun, and notes that we wrote each other about our nights out, and of course the boys we fancied, and our plans to always stay best friends. It’s definitely a book of great memories that I am going to keep forever – even if some of the things in it are a bit embarrassing to read now!
But although we were popular, we weren’t like something out of the Mean Girls movie or anything like that. We weren’t nasty, and I got on with everyone in my year. I remember one girl called Heather who I used to sit next to in German class. She hated the glam look and wasn’t interested in celebrities and that, but we always used to chat and have a laugh. I didn’t judge her for being different from me. That’s something I have always tried to stick to – everyone chooses their own way to act and look, and if it doesn’t hurt anyone, just because it is different from how I choose to portray myself, it doesn’t mean I will judge them because of it.
Billie was in the year above me at school, and she was in a group of friends that called themselves the Shenna Plasticz. I looked up to her and her friends a lot, and we started changing our appearance and using beauty products around the same time. As I’ve said, it wasn’t that I suddenly became obsessed about the way I looked, but it was really good fun to try out new products and beauty routines, and I think that’s pretty normal for a lot of girls our age. But our mum and grandparents used to get mad at us for our make-up, and especially the fake tan.
I remember my Nana Liz, Mum’s mum, who still lives near us in Brentwood, saying, ‘Your skin is so lovely, why are you girls putting that tan on it?’ But we didn’t want to know – we were sure we looked good! In the year above me were a group of girls we called the Orange Crew. And, oh my God, they had proper bleached-white hair, orange skin and false eyelashes. When we first started at the school we thought they looked silly, but a year later things changed and we were starting to look the same! I don’t think we did it to such an extreme – a lot of us still had dark hair rather than white-blonde – but we definitely had the orange faces and the lip gloss. I love lip gloss; I became obsessed with it then and am obsessed with it now. It is definitely one of my must-have beauty items.
Not everyone in our year went through the same transformation obviously. Some girls took it too far, and some didn’t care and wouldn’t do anything about their looks at all, but we went for glam and pretty, and I like to think we got it about right. But you can be the judge of that – have a look at the photo on page 2 in the picture section.
It’s weird when you look back. One day you are looking all sweet and innocent and childlike, then the next you discover all this beauty stuff and your whole appearance really changes. But it is all part of growing up, and I definitely think people need to try things out when they are teenagers – you just need to accept that you will get some of it wrong and will not always be happy to look back at the photos!
So anyway, an Essex girl will try to make sure she looks good all the time, but especially on nights out. We like a glamorous, big, full-on look that catches people’s attention, and we are not afraid to look like we have made a lot of effort – why should you hide the fact that you want to look the best you can? That’s a good thing!
But that takes time. Before a night out I will take on average two hours to get ready – and that is assuming all the other stuff like my nails and tan are already done. I like to get ready with my mates, at my house, with a glass of wine and some music in the background to get us in the mood. If I absolutely had to though, like if I had no warning I was going out, I could get ready in an hour, but that really would be the quickest. I would rather not go out at all if I had less time than that.
As everyone knows, the tan is probably the most important thing for an Essex girl. There is a reason Essex is nicknamed the Orange County! But we are proud of it, and looking tanned means you also look healthier and slimmer. Not that I always got it right from the start . . .
The first time I tried fake tan was when I was about 14. I can’t remember exactly who out of the Seven Sexy Cinders started it first, but suddenly it was something we were all doing. Last year, Lucy tweeted a picture of me and her at the age of 13, lying on the grass looking really tanned, and the press picked it up and ran a story implying we used fake tan even back then. But actually we had just been on a camping trip and were both naturally brown – it was a year later that we hit the fake tan for the first time.
But yeah, when we started getting into it, we got 100 per cent into it, and keeping up our tans became a really important thing. The downside of that, of course, was that when we got it wrong, we got it 100 per cent wrong, but we didn’t care – it was all about the tan! We were using these tanning wipes you could get from Superdrug for 99p, and we used them all the time after that, even though we didn’t really know what we were doing. We would end up looking orange, like really orange – especially our hands. We used to get these dark-orange marks between our fingers, which was a total giveaway, so that everyone knew what we had been doing.
It didn’t go down well with the teachers. They noticed what we were doing and used to tell us off. But we never took any notice really. I mean, seriously, what kid takes style tips from their teacher? In fact, our rule was that the more they hated our look, the more we loved it.
I have pretty much been tanned ever since, though obviously I have moved on from the tanning wipes. Now I do my own tan at home with a can of Fake Bake. It costs about £30, and I put two layers on all over me each
time, so each can lasts for around four uses. But while I’m pretty expert at doing it now, if it is a special occasion I’ll go down to the salon to have it done, as there is still always the chance of screwing it up. They are professionals, so it is always going to be that bit better. I like Fake Bake as a brand, as I don’t think it is as sticky as some of the others – that sticky feeling you get after you have put the stuff on but before you can wash it off is horrible with some of the products. And while all tanning products smell a bit, the smell of Fake Bake isn’t as bad as most of them.
Being tanned is like a religion in Essex. Pretty much everyone does it, and I don’t just mean the girls, but the boys too. Personally I think pale skin can be nice, if it’s like porcelain with freckles – whatever makes you happy really, but I do think tanned is the best. Luckily my skin is quite naturally olive coloured, which helps when you fake tan a lot and, to be honest, it just makes me feel more confident in my appearance.
So yeah, while being tanned is still pretty much a must for an Essex girl, we are realising the risks and choosing to go for the fake. Girls will get a spray tan done every week – it’s set in the diary like a weekly appointment, like church used to be in the old days, but now it’s less God and more Goddess!
Even though not many girls are using sunbeds these days, for obvious reasons, boys still make the most of them. In fact you will find more boys on the sunbeds these days than girls in Essex. All the boys on TOWIE are doing it. I think they want to be tanned, but they reckon getting a spray tan or using cream is too girly, so they go on the beds. Somehow they think doing it that way is manlier. Except Harry Derbidge of course – he loves a good spray tan! I can’t remember the last time I had a sunbed – I think about my skin too much to risk that.