by Tanya Burr
Contents
PROLOGUE
GROWING UP: PART ONE
GROWING UP: PART TWO
SKINCARE ESSENTIALS
MAKE-UP ESSENTIALS
HAIR AND NAIL ESSENTIALS
FASHION
LOVE
LIFE
BAKING & RECIPES
CONFIDENCE & HAPPINESS
YOUTUBE
LOOKING FORWARDS
ASK TANYA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOLLOW PENGUIN
COPYRIGHT PAGE
With thanks to the following stockists for the photoshoot outfits:
1) Long nude floral embellished dress – Yuvna Kim. 2) Black shorts – River Island; white T-shirt – French Connection; necklaces – Jennifer Zeuner and Kasun London; black bra – Freya. 3) Floral dress – French Connection. 4) Black bodysuit – Oh My Love; cowgirl jacket – Rokit; black hat – Topshop. 5) Long cream skirt – Nevena; grey T-shirt – River Island. 6) Gold dress – Prey of London; sequin jacket – Vintage; boots – Dune. 7) Sequin top – Zara. 8) Lips top – Oasis. 9) Fake feather jacket – Topshop; leather leggings – Richard Radcliffe; shoes – Sergio Rossi. 10) Pink jumper – Zara. 11) Black-and-white column dress – Roland Mouret; black tuxedo jacket – Reiss. 12) Vest – Aloe.
Quotation on p.152 from Modern Family, season three, episode nine (written by Steven Levitan, Christopher Lloyd and Ben Karlin).
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to correct any errors or omissions in future editions.
Author’s Note
Hello and welcome to the digital version of my book! This book is packed with my top tips on fashion, beauty, love and friendship, and there’s also room for you to list your own hopes and dreams alongside mine. Unfortunately it’s not possible for you to add your own list to this digital version of the book, so please grab a pen and notepad so you can jot down your thoughts as you read. I hope you enjoy the book as much as I’ve enjoyed creating it!
Prologue
As we drew up beside the pavement in front of the Sanderson Hotel, light bulbs started flashing before I had even opened the door of the car. I felt sick with nerves but at the same time, I was really excited and couldn’t wait to go inside.
Jim gave my hand a squeeze. ‘Ready?’ he asked.
I took a deep breath and stepped out onto the street. One of my biggest fears was that no one at all would turn up and I certainly hadn’t expected there to be photographers waiting for me. It all felt really surreal. It was 30th January 2014 and the launch night of Tanya Burr Cosmetics. I had been working on the range for more than eighteen months and really wanted everyone to love the products as much as I did. This party felt like the culmination of many, many hours of meetings, designing and hard work.
Entering the party, I just couldn’t believe how many friendly faces were there. My best friends from home like Maddie, Vanessa, Kate and Emma were there to support me, along with YouTube friends such as Zoe, Joe and Alfie and, of course, my amazingly supportive family – Mum, Dad, little sister Tasha and little brother Oscar, and my fiancée Jim. Everyone was enjoying the cocktails, and yummy canapés and looking around, I felt a buzz of happiness and excitement. All of the finished products were displayed and lit up on surfaces around the venue and looked amazing.
The evening went past in a blur and when it got to 10 p.m. and the launch was supposed to be winding up, it seemed busier than ever, but I figured by that point, it would be OK to sneak away. A lovely man at the hotel organised for me to get a private room with twenty of my closest friends and family so I could spend some quality time with them, as during the party I had been doing interview after interview with lots of different journalists. The man led us into this cute little room with a table inside, just big enough for us all to squeeze round and grab some food. As it was quite late, instead of a proper dinner we had all the Crème Egg brownies that my friend Scarlett had made me. Looking around, all the people I loved in one place, it just felt incredible. Everyone was so supportive and that meant the world to me.
This launch is just one of the many amazing things that has happened to me since I started making videos and uploading them to YouTube back in 2009. I feel like I need to pinch myself to see if it’s really real, and it makes me feel really choked up just thinking about it. I often have these moments, where I sit back and I think, ‘This is just insane.’ It just reminds me just how lucky I am and how far I have come in such a short time.
Thanks for picking up my book! I’m so excited to be writing it, for loads of different reasons. I hope to give you more of an insight into my childhood and life growing up in Norfolk, tell you about why I started making videos and the journey I have been on since: full of fun, surprises, meeting some wonderful people, getting engaged to Jim, moving to London and launching my cosmetics line.
I also want to give you all some practical beauty, style and lifestyle tips and help you feel more confident. I always try to be happy and upbeat, but as any girl knows, growing up – and being a grown-up – isn’t always easy and I hope to show you some of the tricks and tips I use to help me feel self-assured.
As some of you might know, I have also suffered from anxiety and panic attacks and I will tell you more about how I have learned to deal with this in the hope it will help any of you affected by similar issues. I will talk about my friendships and relationships and all the everyday stuff that goes on behind my videos. I’ve also left space for you to add your own scrapbook-style lists, so you can jot down different ideas about what you want to achieve, ways you can feel happier, things you want to explore online or places you want to see. I really want you to get involved, so grab your pen and get writing!
Finally, I just wanted to say thank you. I love, love, love, what I do: writing my blog, filming my videos, working on Tanya Burr Cosmetics and always having exciting projects in the pipeline. But the best thing of all is speaking to my viewers every day. I wouldn’t be doing any of this without you guys and I am so grateful for your support. I love reading all your comments and tweets and feel so lucky that I get to chat to people I think of as friends all around the world. Let me know what you think of my book – I can’t wait to read your feedback. Happy reading!
Love, Tanya xx
My story started long before I was born, when Mum, whose name is Melanie, scribbled in her maths notebook, ‘Mel for Neil’, ‘I love Neil’ and their initials in love hearts one day in the classroom. She was just twelve at the time and Neil was a boy in the year above, who was one of the cool kids and was always making people laugh and being naughty. Mum was very studious and quite shy, so it wasn’t an obvious match. However, they became good friends and when Mum was eighteen and Dad was nineteen, they got together and that was it; they have been together ever since. When I was little, Mum showed me the scribbles in her maths book, which she retrieved from her jewellery box, and I love the fact that she has kept it.
Mum and Dad bought their first home in the village of Tasburgh in Norfolk a few years later and a year after that, when they were both twenty-five, they tied the knot in a small ceremony for just their closest family and friends. Both Mum and Dad were really keen to start a family and had planned to have a baby for ages. Mum marked down the dates in her work calendar (she was working in an office at the time) and was hoping for a late spring or early summer baby. I was born on 9th June 1989.
When I was little, we would go for long walks in the countryside and down the lane nearby to a farm where there were chickens and cows and we would buy eggs, milk and cooking apples. We also went to the park, blackberry picking and to see local friends in the village. It was a real countryside upbringing. Our house was in a cul-de-sac and it was really quiet. Sometimes my old cat Casper used t
o fall asleep in the middle of the road and if a car came along, they would stop and pick him up and put him on the grass verge before continuing.
Dad worked long hours driving lorries for an oil company. He had been doing the job since he left school when he was sixteen and some of my happiest memories are the times when he used to come home for his lunch if he was driving in our area. I would see his enormous lorry pull up outside the house from the big window in our living room. I would always be elated to see him and rush to the door to greet him. On other occasions he would bring heating oil to our house and I remember the big pipes, his heavy boots and the strong petrol smell of the chemicals.
Dad hated his job driving lorries but has always been really entrepreneurial and in his spare time, he used to do art classes. In our garage he had a massive lathe and he used to craft lots of wooden furniture and sell it on to make some more money. He also made loads of things in our house, like tables, chairs and lamp bases. When I was about two or three years old, apparently I used to go around saying, ‘Daddy made it, Daddy made it’ and point at almost every piece of furniture because I literally thought he made everything! When I was at school, he slipped a disc in his back and ended up having a year off work. In that time he studied web design and later he started his own business, which has become pretty successful. We were all really happy that he didn’t have to drive lorries any more.
Two years and two days after I was born, my little sister Natasha, who we call Tash or Tasha, arrived. I loved looking after her and apparently one of my favourite things was getting her dressed and undressed — it was like she was my little dolly! I also loved helping Mum to change her nappy and do things like that. We did bicker growing up but we have always been very close. Dad would hate it if we ever argued and always made us hug and make up.
My first school was Henry Preston Primary School and it was opposite my house, so I would literally cross the road to get there and always spoke to Mum through the gate or over the hedge on my lunch break. The school was so small and friendly and I always felt happy there, even though I do remember being a bit scared of my headteacher.
My teacher in the last two years, Mrs Piggott, really left a lasting impression on me. There have been certain people in my life who have made me feel like I can do anything and she was one of them. She was a really strong woman and a bit of a hippy. She wore knitted crochet crop tops with her belly button showing, paired with floral maxi-skirts, and her hair up in a messy bun; it was a pretty cool look for a teacher, if you ask me! I took piano lessons and she taught me guitar and really encouraged my musical side. On Friday afternoons, we always sat on the floor and sung along, while she played the guitar.
I did an after-school activity every night of the week. I started ballet when I was two and then went on to do tap, jazz, disco, modern and gym. Mum and Dad wanted me to be confident and have different skills and while I don’t think I was particularly good at dancing, I loved it. Mum told me that when I had a routine development check at about four years old, before starting school, the nurse asked me what a lake was and I replied, ‘It’s something you dance on’, because I was so obsessed with the ballet, Swan Lake. The nurse said to Mum, ‘This child is different!’
When I was small, Mum started working as a child-minder, which was really cool because it meant she was at home with us and there were always other children in the house to play with. There was one little boy she looked after whose mother was an artist and sometimes we would go to her studio half a mile down the road and have art lessons, where we made things out of clay. We never watched much television. We did have a video player, though, and I’ve always loved Disney. I remember we were given Cinderella and Lady and the Tramp and we watched them over and over and, later, we had Beauty and the Beast, which is still a real favourite of mine. Mostly though, we played with toys or outside in the garden with the other children. Mum had left school at sixteen, but alongside her child-minding work and looking after us, she went to night school to study for her A-Levels and from there, she went on to study for a degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, then she did a part-time Masters and a PGCE about a decade later. She is now an English teacher and, looking back, I think she did brilliantly bringing us up and studying at the same time. Sometimes, when Mum was studying in the evenings and I was a bit older, Dad would let us watch programmes like EastEnders, which Mum would never normally allow. Sometimes she used to take me with her to lectures, where I learnt about literature and history from a very young age (when I managed to listen!). I would eat these enormous chocolate muffins afterwards from the university café. I asked her recently whether they were really as big as I remembered – and apparently they were!
As I got more independent, I spent most of my free time outside playing with the other children in the village. I met one of my best friends, Emma, at school. She is two years younger than me and was my sister’s friend first. Me, my sister, Emma and a couple of other girls in the village would all hang out. In the summer, we made dens in the woods or we went on bike rides. We also spent loads of our time making up and performing plays. Being the oldest in the group, I ended up being the leader. I would say the words and make Emma write them down – I was quite bossy! Emma reminded me recently that I would say to her, ‘You need to go home and have this typed up for our rehearsals tomorrow!’ Apparently she would always spend half the night typing the script up and putting everyone’s lines in different colours and the next day would bring us all printed copies. Amazing!
We spent a lot of time with my nanny and granddad, my mum’s parents, who live in Newton Flotman, which is a couple of miles up the road from Tasburgh. I grew up so close to them and spent a lot of time with them before I started going to school, and when I was at school, we went to their house every Sunday for lunch. Sometimes, I would also bike to see them with my little group of friends and Nanny would always be so happy to see us and give us cartons of apple juice and something to eat before we cycled back home.
When I was eleven, I moved to the local secondary school, Long Stratton High School, which is in a different village. In primary school, there had only been twelve children in my class, so moving to a big secondary school felt scary. I don’t think I have ever been so nervous. There were too many children in Tasburgh going to the school, so the main bus, which all my friends got on, was full and I was sent onto a different bus. I remember everything about that moment, like what I was wearing and how nervous I felt. I didn’t know anyone and all the older kids were talking about things I didn’t understand and people I didn’t know. I also used to get the worst travel sickness – I still do now – and this bus went all around the windy country roads to pick up all the kids from the little villages nearby. I used to feel so sick by the time I got to school. In the end, Mum managed to get me onto the main bus and I felt much happier. And eventually, of course, I settled into high school and made some good friends, Kate, who moved to Tasburgh around that time, and Maddie. I also had some really special friendships with a few other girls. Two years later, Emma and my sister joined too – so I had my little close circle of friends around me.
When I was twelve, my parents had my little brother Oscar. He was born on 3rd May 2001 and I was so thrilled. He was so adorable and the best thing ever! I used to change his nappy, dress him and play with him while Mum cooked the dinner or was busy. He was just so cute and always liked to go to sleep on someone’s shoulder, so Tasha and I always cuddled him. Bathing babies is quite hard because they are so small and slippery, so if one of us was having a bath, Mum would pop him in with us. He almost felt like my baby and we all loved him so much. Mum said it was as though he had three mothers!
I got my first bout of anxiety when I was thirteen. I think I was always a slightly anxious child but this was the first time it really affected me and it seemed like it came on almost overnight. I felt so horrible and didn’t even know what anxiety meant or what panic attacks were. I didn’t tell any
one at first because I was scared they would think I was crazy. I had my first panic attack watching The Terminator and even now, if The Terminator comes up in conversations or on repeat on the television, I just hate it. It’s not the film itself; it just reminds me of the way I felt at that time. I was sitting with my family watching the television and had a horrid feeling of dread for no particular reason. Then, all at once, my legs turned to jelly, my heart started racing and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The TV was suddenly too loud and the room felt like it was getting smaller. I remember going to the kitchen where I stayed for ages in floods of tears trying to deal with it on my own.
My friends and family knew that something serious was up because I wasn’t eating. I felt too sick with the anxiety and was losing a lot of weight. I saw a lady about it, but I don’t remember much because I think I have blocked it out. It is just a blur of anxiety and unhappiness to me. I don’t remember the day I started to feel better. I guess I just started to be able to cope with it more. I still have anxiety but on a much more manageable level. As I’ve become older, I’ve discovered so many people suffer from anxiety on so many different levels and everyone’s experience is unique but that there are many ways to deal with it. I will talk more about my experience and how I have learned to cope with these feelings later in the book.
The next chapter of my life was a really happy one. In my last year of high school, I had loads of friends and was studying hard for my GCSEs. My favourite subjects were English and Drama. I wasn’t that confident, so performing in plays was great because I could get into another character.
On weekends, I had a job at a shop called Paddock Farm Shop in a nearby village. I know it doesn’t sound very exciting, but the owners were so relaxed and I got to open and close the shop by myself and I felt very responsible. Mum would drive me there because it was in the middle of nowhere at about 8.30 a.m. in the morning, to open for 9 a.m. They had a massive, scary fridge at the back about the size of a room, which had a huge metal door. All the fruit and vegetables would be stacked up in baskets and I had to take them out to stock the shelves. Then I served customers all day. I was there on my own and often it was quite quiet. We had a wind-up radio and I regularly sat for a couple of hours without anyone else coming in. Sometimes I did my homework or read books, but I always remember texting boys and freaking out because the phone signal was so bad. When there was no one around, I would leg it to the main road and back again, in case I could get a tiny bit of signal to see if they had texted back. At 6 p.m., it was my job to put all the empty baskets back in the fridge, but I was terrified of falling in and the door shutting behind me. It was like something out of a horror film, where they keep severed heads! All in all, it was a fun Saturday job and I liked saving up to buy myself treats. On the weekend evenings, I always had my friends over for sleepovers and my parents say there was always an extra body at the end of my bed in the mornings.