Living Life the Essex Way

by Sam Faiers

  I reckon the person who does her make-up best out of the cast is Billie, because like me she has spent a lot of time working out what works best for her. But I also think Maria does a really good job. She spends a lot of time on her skin and foundation, and gets it pretty perfect – her skin looks so even sometimes, it is like she is a mannequin!

  I reckon I spend about £75 a month on make-up, and my favourite brand is MAC. I am quite a loyal customer, and go to their Bluewater store all the time to stock up. As a perk of being well known, I have a loyalty card that gets me 20 per cent off. I find that weird though – that the more famous you get, and the more money you have, the more perks you get. It’s like things are the wrong way around – not that I’m complaining! I get sent a lot of free make-up now too. Sometimes it comes in goody bags at events, sometimes it is given to me when I do signings, but a lot of the time it is sent to my management. I am really appreciative and thankful for it, but obviously I can’t use it all, and it is not all appropriate for me. I have quite sensitive eyes, so I need to be careful when it comes to eye make-up in particular. But of course I never throw any of it away, and a lot of it goes to friends and family. I also have a huge drawer full of products for when I want a change. It’s great fun digging through it.

  The one make-up item I can never have too much of is lip gloss. Never underestimate the power of the lip gloss! I am addicted to it, nearly as much as I am my lashes. When I put it on I instantly feel happier with myself, and sexier. I don’t know whether it’s the way it reflects light or what, but my lips look instantly bigger and better – and it’s the same for everyone. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t look better with a touch of lip gloss, whether it is tinted or clear.

  My favourite is MAC’s Dazzleglass Lip Gloss. Sometimes I just wear it on its own, but if I want to make more of an impact, I will wear lipstick as well. I like to experiment with colours – I wore dark-purple recently, and I have coral and nude shades too, but really I prefer them in matte-red and dark-red. And I will always use a lip pencil too – mostly MAC Spice Lip Liner. It makes quite an impact.

  I haven’t always worn these products though. At school everyone was obsessed with Nivea’s Pearly Shine, which came in a candy-pink colour and made your lips all shimmery It only cost a couple of quid, and everyone had it. I think they still sell it today. Now, however, it’s all about the gloss.

  No matter how much I love my make-up, I make sure I take it off at night. Or at least, I try to most of the time – sometimes, after a heavy night, I admit, it may have to wait until the next morning! But generally I will take it off before bed and put Nivea moisturiser on all over my face and body, so I can wake up fresh the next morning and put all the make-up on again!

  How to Get the Perfect Lashes

  • There are many different types of lashes, so make sure you find the one that’s right for you. I love the Eylure range, especially 107 and 140, but try different ones out, and decide whether you just want a few subtle extra lashes, natural-style, or a full-on look that lets the world know you are wearing them!

  • Cut them to size. There is nothing worse than a false eyelash strip hanging off the end of someone’s eyelid because they haven’t trimmed it down.

  • If you want to keep using the same pair of lashes over again, you will want to put mascara on your own lashes first. If you are not too fussed about keeping your falsies in perfect condition, you can put it on after they are attached. This creates a more natural look, but does mean that they are not as easy to reuse.

  • Put eyelash glue in a thin line along the lashes – I tend to use the one that comes with the Eylure sets – and wait 30 seconds for it to dry a bit. It is easier to stick it on when the glue is a bit tacky, rather than still runny. It also means you won’t get any of the glue showing.

  • Then stick them onto your eyelids, as close to your actual line of lashes as you can, lining them up from the outside of your eyes, and pressing firmly once they are in place.

  • When the glue has dried, put eyeliner over the top of the eyelash join to really blend the join into your eyelid. And you are all ready to go!

  • Get it done professionally the first time if you are unsure – MAC make-up counters do makeovers for a fee, and really show you how to do a good job of it.

  What Is Trichotillomania?

  Trichotillomania is a compulsive urge that makes a person pull out their own hair. It can be triggered by stress or depression, or it can happen subconsciously. I do it when I am asleep, or not thinking about it, but some people do it when they feel tense, and pulling the hair out relieves that. The most common place to pull hair from is your scalp, eyelashes (like me) or eyebrows, but people also pull hair from anywhere else on their body really. It can be treated with the help of therapy, or some people can just grow out of it.

  You can get more information and support at www.trichotillomania.co.uk

  6

  LIVING THE DREAM?

  Like everything in life, being famous has a good and a bad side.

  Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about the bad bits – there is nothing more annoying than a famous person, who’s living a great life and enjoying all the perks, having a good whinge about how tough things are for them, just because of a few less than amazing things they have to deal with. That really gets my back up, so I promise this chapter won’t be like that . . . And to be honest, I thought there would be a lot more negatives to being in the public eye than there have been. I was actually prepared for a lot more, but really the press and the public have been good to me and the rest of the TOWIE crew the majority of the time.

  For a lot of famous people, one of the big problems is who you can trust. When a family member or friend gets offered big money to sell photos or stories, it can often prove to be too tempting. But luckily I can happily say this has not happened to me so far.

  Billie and I share our friends, and our friendship group is the same now as it was before TOWIE. It is the same bunch of girls we have sleepovers with, go out partying with, and share our secrets with. That is how I like it, and I want it to stay that way. Our friends think it is funny when we go out and we get people coming over wanting a photograph or a chat, but they are fine with it, and just roll their eyes and laugh. They know we haven’t changed, so they treat us exactly the same as they always have, and I know I can trust them. Occasionally the odd person who I haven’t spoken to for years will get in touch, but I don’t really fall for that – I’m just polite, and then get on with my life.

  Touch wood, I also trust my ex-boyfriends not to sell stories as, while things might not have worked out for us, I think they are all decent blokes really. Anyway, even if they did, I don’t think there is anything for me to be embarrassed about. I can be quite a prude, so nobody has naked pictures of me on their phones to sell to the papers or anything like that!

  As for the people in Brentwood, local businesses are loving the show. Business is booming because of the attention TOWIE has brought to the town, and a lot of them have had renovations and other work done. If anything, the only bad thing is that sometimes there are so many tourists around now, especially at night, that the locals occasionally say they can feel a bit pushed out – like when their local pubs become crowded. But I guess there are always two sides to these changes.

  Most people in Essex are really friendly to me. All the young girls and their parents that I bump into around the place on a day-to-day basis love the show, and will stop to give me advice on what I should be doing next, or who I should be dating. Sometimes older women in their thirties and forties, who didn’t get the chance to do what we are doing when they were younger, will make comments about our dresses, or look at us like we are dirt in a club. But I take no notice of that.

  I also do a lot of PAs – public appearances – where businesses such as shops and nightclubs pay me to come and spend time at their venue. I usually have to pose for photos, or sign autographs for fans, or be interviewed on stage – w
hatever they think is of interest to their customers. This can be well paid – I can earn several thousand pounds just for an hour or two of work. Pretty nice!

  PAs can be quite exhausting because they are all over the country, and when I do nightclub appearances I don’t arrive at the venue until midnight or later. I try to take some friends and make a night of it, staying on for a few drinks and a dance, but sometimes – if it is last-minute, or late on a work night, or really far away from Essex – and I can’t rope any of my friends in, I end up going on my own.

  Although generally people are positive, it can be quite daunting sometimes, and you never know how people will react to you, especially when you go to student nights and people have had quite a lot to drink. This is the main reason why I have a tour manager who comes along with me. He is called Ian and he works for a company called Peace of Mind Services, which is pretty much what he gives me! He is partly my driver, to get me to the venue on time and give me a chance to sleep on the way back, but he also does my security for me. He is a big, muscly guy, so not many people give me hassle when he is around, and it is reassuring to have him there.

  I remember once being at a PA with Harry in a bar in Bristol. It was a vile place – the floor was sticky, I was scared to even set my bag on the sofa and it was full of hillbillies – you know the kind of place! Harry was on stage doing a Q and A, and this group of lads was yelling over the top of him. Poor Harry was trying to talk, but all you could hear was them going ‘Who are ya?’ over and over again. I got really annoyed, so I stormed on, grabbed the mic and said, ‘Don’t be jel, be reem!’ and everyone else started cheering. I always think people who react like that are just jealous people who want a bit of our lives. And true enough, afterwards when we were doing photos, the boys queued up to get their pictures taken with us.

  People are generally positive though, and we only get this kind of negativity at about one in ten PAs. You just deal with it. Often it is just people who have had a lot to drink and get rowdy or over-friendly, trying to hug me all the time. But that is what Ian is there for. Ian doesn’t come along when I have a normal night out with friends though, and sometimes I wish he did.

  We had a horrible night during series three, when a gang of people attacked me and Billie, leaving me in hospital. It was covered a lot in the papers at the time, and really shocked both of us. It made us so conscious of the downsides of being well known.

  We were at a club called Jet Black in London and a group of girls started on Billie. There was an argument, then one girl hit me, and I instinctively lashed back at her. Luckily the bouncers saw the incident and threw them out.

  In all the pushing though, Billie got dragged out with them, and the argument continued. Billie was punched in the face and ended up with a split lip. It was so shocking. We found out later that this bit of the attack was filmed on someone’s phone, and it went on YouTube the next day. Poor Billie watched it back a couple of times, and got upset all over again. But in a way it was good it was filmed, as it was proof of what they had done, and showed just how shocking their behaviour was.

  Later that night, I was attacked by the same group of people. My friend Charlotte called an ambulance and I was rushed to hospital. My eyes apparently rolled back in my head, and my brain had swollen because of the beating. I needed a brain scan, and was covered in bruises and scratches. I had two black eyes and had lost a lot of hair.

  I was in agony for a week or two after, and was so upset. I just sat at home and cried, and tried to work out why it had happened. I think these girls were motivated by jealousy of our fame and how successful we were because of the show. I don’t think they would have behaved like that if we had just been ordinary girls on a night out. In a way it was good that Billie and I went through it together, as we could talk about it and relate to each other.

  It still makes me angry thinking about it now, that a group of girls could do that to another person. They were like a pack of animals, and that is scary. For a while we debated taking security around with us all the time, but that just seems so extreme. I want to be able to live a normal life, without worrying that bad things could happen anywhere I go. So in the end we decided to just learn from it, and avoid any clubs where we might not feel safe, but other than that, we would use our security just for events we were hired to attend.

  Billie and I reported the gang to the police, and they took our statements and photographed our injuries. The case is still open pending enquiries as I write this at the beginning of 2012.

  It was such a horrible experience, and was reported in newspapers and magazines, even making the cover of a lot of them. The upside of what happened was the response we got. It was amazing how many people cared – from our true friends, to fans who put notes of support through our doors, to people we had worked with in the past who sent huge bunches of flowers. There was also huge online support too – the number of my Twitter followers went up by 45,000 in the few days following the attack. How crazy is that? I am sure some of them were just being morbidly curious, but I think most people were genuinely concerned, and I got so many amazing tweets.

  I have had to develop a thick skin when it comes to Twitter, I have to say. Don’t get me wrong – like PAs, the majority of it is positive. I’d say that for every negative tweet, I get 50 positive ones, and generally people message me about my outfits, or to ask for advice, or to give me support, but sometimes people can be really nasty and small-minded.

  I took a lot of abuse for dumping Joey. You’d think I’d committed mass murder or something, judging by some of the comments! At first it really upset me and I started to doubt whether I’d done the right thing, but then I realised that I have put myself out there to be judged because of the show, and I need to see the bigger picture. Most people have dumped someone, so it’s really not that they thought what I had done was so terrible. They just wanted to get a rise out of me. Things like that don’t bother me so much now – I just block the people who make nasty comments! One thing fame has taught me is to become more thick-skinned.

  Despite all this though, the worst thing for me by a mile that has come about because of my fame has not been the physical or verbal attacks, but the coverage about my family. On that front, two stories appeared in the press that I wish more than anything had not.

  One was about Dave Chatwood, who has looked after me and Billie since I was two, and in every way other than biologically is my true dad. I can’t go into detail about things here, but the fact is that Dave has been the most amazing dad. He has always treated us exactly as if we were his biological kids, and his priority has always been to look after Mum and Billie and me, always trying to give us the best.

  The other difficult story involving my family that I have had to deal with was about my biological father, Lee, and claimed that he had attacked his girlfriend, Fay Simmons, in June 2011 and had been convicted of assault. For me, what Lee did was really bad. Beating up a woman is just horrible and you can never justify it.

  Mum grew up in Hornchurch in Essex, and married Lee when she was 20 and he was a few years older. From what she has told me, he was very handsome, in a kind of tanned, almost gypsy-like way. He was full of energy and fun, into activities like water skiing, and he lived on a farm where he rode horses. He was wild and loved living life on the edge, which I guess Mum was really attracted to. I like bad boys as well, so I can see where she was coming from!

  I’m not sure what caused things to go wrong, but from what Mum has said, it sounds like Lee was really jealous. Apparently he would just go mad, like he would go off on one at her about her friends, as though his jealousy had taken over. When Billie was around one and I was a baby, and Mum took us to the shop . . . well, you aren’t going to get around Tesco quickly are you? But after an hour and a half, she would get home and Lee would be going mad. He would hit and kick Mum, once so badly he broke her coccyx bone – the one at the bottom of your back. She had to go to hospital and pretend she’d had a water-skiing accident.
Other times he would half strangle or suffocate her, and the police would be called by worried neighbours. He would never go for me and Billie on purpose, but one time Mum was holding me and he threw a spanner at her. Apparently it missed my head by about a centimetre. He was just clearly a violent nasty piece of work.

  Mum is a very strong woman, and she was worried about him being a danger to us, but part of her still loved him, and she kept thinking he would get help. My granddad, Chris, Mum’s dad, who lives in Brentwood, worked out what was happening, and he stepped in and convinced her to leave. It was a big family drama, but everyone was there to support Mum and she knew she needed to get us all away from him. I know she asks herself now why she didn’t leave sooner – she has always told me and Billie, ‘If a man hits you even once, you leave. No second chances.’

  Mum got divorced from Lee, and while she had no contact with him herself, she didn’t try to stop us from seeing him, so his mum, Nanny Wendy, would take us for visits. Nanny Wendy is amazing. She really tried to make sure we kept up a relationship with our dad, and to be honest, a lot of the time we would go and see him just for her. She called me and Billie her ‘Miss Worlds’ and has always treated us so well. Her relationship with us is really strong – she has also remained close to Mum – and she flew in from Spain for my 21st birthday party last year. We love Nanny Wendy!

  Billie and I haven’t really had contact with Lee for years now though. As far as I am concerned, he was violent to our mum, so I don’t want to know him, and I will never forgive him for what he did. It is a shame things didn’t work out for him in a family sense, but ultimately I am not interested. That is probably horrible for him to hear, but really he chose to do what he did.