Here at I’m Absolutely Fine we have gathered the finest beauty minds for a Beauty 101. Nadine Baggott brought us her Skincare SOS kit: she decodes the ingredients to look out for and keeps budget front of mind. Sali Hughes, who has launched her wildly successful skincare range with Revolution (Emilie is a devotee of her Daily Exfoliant), opened up her make-up bag, uncovering treasure, and Annabel rifled through her bathroom to share her summer sensations…NOTE: These are highlights not new record...
Aug 09, 2023•44 min
Summer is here. Maybe you are leaping into August with the enthusiasm of a newborn deer or maybe you feel as if you are about to be culled and mounted on the living room wall. We are veering wildly from wanting to scamper and scurry the streets, eating snacks and generally channelling rat girl energy; and spending so long in the bath that we turn ourselves into broths. Either way we will not be replying to emails in a hurry: Sorry for the delayed response but….I’m Absolutely Fine podcast is taki...
Jul 26, 2023•28 min
Happy Friday! Just slipping into your feed to let you know that the week is nearly over, and there’s only one more week to go before you have to get through the next week. Oh God. So this week we asked you the question: You’re a burglar…but you can only steal things that MILDLY INCONVENIENCE your victims. What are you taking? 700 of you responded with mildly inconveniencing horrors…Long story short, we are not the bigger person... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 20, 2023•13 min
Our guest this week is Anna Richardson - host of Channel 4’s Naked Attraction and the recently-launched podcast It Can’t Just Be Me: a sex and relationships podcast where she answers all kinds of problems about anything from ‘Can you be friend with an ex?’ to ‘how do I cope partner’s depression?’. Anna has seen more naked people than anyone else we know, so we ask her about the dynamics of attraction and what she’s learned about bodies from looking at so many of them. She’s also making a documen...
Jul 19, 2023•37 min
Just slipping into your feed to let you know that the week is nearly over, and there’s only one more week to go before you have to get through the next week. Oh God. This week we talk about JULY WEIRDNESS. July is the waiting room of summer, and waiting rooms are weird: you don’t know your life is about to change for the good or for the bad. As a result we find ourselves thinking the same thing over and over… ‘Disappointed, but not surprised’. And we have also discovered a good catch-all for whe...
Jul 13, 2023•9 min
Welcome to a Podcast From The Edge - I’m Absolutely Fine but…mini! Five-ish minutes, broadcast live from The Edge…The Brink… The Overwhelm…The Vortex - that slips into your feed every Friday. Not ‘That Friday Feeling' but, rather, all the fucking feelings. Just to let you know that the week is nearly over, and there’s only one more week to go before you have to get through the next week. Oh God. Here we go: This week we’ve chewed over some of the DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES FOR MIDULTS. Like... looking...
Jul 06, 2023•10 min
Our guest this week is novelist and all-round treasure Daisy Buchanan - who is no stranger to this podcast because now and again we ask her to come on and tell us what we need to be reading. She hosts the literary You’re Booked podcast and has just written another great novel - Limelight - which is about women and bodies and bodies and shame and sex and bodies and how we take up space in the world. We talk about how we are trained to look at ourselves and why things like sex and photographs are ...
Jul 05, 2023•39 min
Welcome to a Podcast From The Edge - I’m Absolutely Fine but…mini! Five-ish minutes, broadcast live from The Edge…The Brink… The Overwhelm…The Vortex - that slips into your feed every Friday. Not ‘That Friday Feeling' but, rather, all the fucking feelings. Just to let you know that the week is nearly over, and there’s only one more week to go before you have to get through the next week. Oh God. Here we go: All the ways we’ve been undignified this week - revolving door panic, dribble (both ways)...
Jun 29, 2023•9 min
We used to get on planes as though they were buses but, these days, that feels a bit more complicated, expensive and wrong. So what do you do if you long for adventure? Pine for discovery? But you feel grounded - and not in the good way? Well, we have our friend Melinda Stevens on the podcast this week – she’s about as expert as travel experts get. She edited Conde Nast Traveller UK and US for years and she’s just launched Loupe - a new initiative entirely designed to give us a new way to look a...
Jun 21, 2023•47 min
Envy, Gluttony, Anger, Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust… Elise Loehnen has written On Our Best Behaviour: What Happens When We Stop Trying To Be Good? It’s about the way women have been caged by the patriarchy, by fake morality, by the seven deadly sins and by our feeling that if we are obedient enough, we will be protected. It is a fascinating, overwhelming read and she’s our sensational guest this week. Is it an uncomfortable truth that the more we try to be to the world, the less we can be there for...
Jun 07, 2023•48 min
Do you feel a bit 'off' about work? A bit 'off’ about yourself? Perhaps - on paper - you seem successful enough, but you don’t feel successful? Are you chasing goals but, when you get there, you do not feel any better? Well, if this is you - and we think it’s a lot of us - then this week’s guest is just the tonic. Writer Emma Gannon became the poster girl for hustle culture when she released her bestselling business book The Multi-Hyphen Method. But things were not all they seemed: she was headi...
May 24, 2023•35 min
Our guest this week is a campaigner, a warrior, an author, a one-woman dancing dynamo. Her mission? To free us from the shame that surrounds us: Body shame, sexual shame, you name, it we’ve been ashamed of it. You know her on Instagram as the sensational Style Me Sunday, and we talk to Natalie about all the big changes she made when she was at a emotional dead end, the heartbreak of friendship ruptures and the evil of WhatsApp. PS: This podcast was bravely brought to you by Symprove. Get your ha...
May 18, 2023•33 min
We often talk about triggers, don’t we? The tiny stabs that strike at the heart of a regret or a fear or a grief or a resentment. Sometimes we can pivot from merry to murderous in a nano-second and we are left angry and or sad but unable to identify the trigger that sent us there. It is, we think, why so many of us feel so irritable so much of the time. We stumbled, the other day, on the concept of glimmers. And even the idea of glimmers is gently soul-warming. Glimmers are the exact opposite of...
May 04, 2023•47 min
Why are we all obsessed with dresses? SEPARATES scream the fashion pages. SUITS they howl. But the thing about dresses is - there’s only one thing to decide on in the morning. And once that decision is made then boots and belts and shoes and earrings are just fun and games. Considering we lean so hard on dresses, we are thrilled to have the dress queen on the podcast today: the authority, the grand fromage of frocks. Isabel Spearman styled fashion luminaries and worked for big, beautiful brands ...
Apr 26, 2023•37 min
Are you feeling a bit lost? A bit broken? A bit bored? Do you feel stuck? Trapped? Disconnected from any sense of joy? Do you yearn for change but feel terrified of it at the same time? Could you possibly be experiencing a midlife crisis? The midlife crisis gets a bad rap. It’s become a much-maligned term but that doesn’t make it any less real or any less painful. But maybe this identity storm is not a disaster…maybe it’s an opportunity? This is what psychologist Dr Julie Hannan, author of The M...
Apr 19, 2023•41 min
We recently received an email from someone who apologised for her delayed reply: she had ‘disappeared into the things’. HARD RELATE. We are constantly in danger of disappearing into the things: the sadness, the panic, the phone. So in this episode we talk about the strange things that are happening with our sense of self at the moment… plus all the mini identity shifts that send us from Diary Of An Edwardian Lady Lady (‘Gosh, is that a Golden Crested Bum Puncher?) to Bleeding Heart to Hard Man i...
Apr 05, 2023•34 min
Who doesn’t love a solution story: the tale of a grown-up woman who had a problem and thought ‘You know what? I am not going to wait for some fucker to fix this – I am just going to do it myself’. This is true of today's guest. Joanna Jensen suffered from eczema as a child and, when her own children were born with the same condition, she decided ‘enough is enough’. In 2010 she created Child’s Farm from her kitchen table and, by the end of the decade, it was the UK’s number one baby and child bra...
Mar 23, 2023•47 min
Last night we slept so badly that Annabel put hairspray under her arms and Emilie put her contact lenses in twice. This week the podcast is dedicated to the recognition that so many of us are so exhausted. How many times - today - have you thought ‘I am so tired’? Did you wake up thinking, ‘I am so tired’? Did you spend ten minutes sitting on the side of the bed, wrapped in a towel, staring at the wall, thinking, ‘How am I going to manage?’ Did you think, just as you woke up, ‘I can’t wait to go...
Mar 16, 2023•28 min
Are you being rude? Do you even know any more? Do you even care? This week on the podcast we discuss when it’s acceptable to ignore people (airports, for a start); what to do when you forget someone’s name for the millionth time; the question you should never ask and whether diary invitations are helpful or just annoying. And, now that it’s March and the sun’s a little bit out, our wardrobes feel very unfresh. So we wonder about all the dangerous clothes we‘re hankering after… We used to be draw...
Mar 02, 2023•41 min
Regular listeners will know that we often slip ’the patriarchy’ into the conversation around what holds us back. From diet culture keeping us hungry while feeding our self-loathing; to medical misogyny. So it’s a privilege really to have entrepreneur Sahar Hashemi on the podcast this week. Sahar has smashed through many a ceiling and is still busy opening lots of doors for women: she founded Coffee Republic - three years before Starbucks landed on our shores; for the past couple of years, she’s ...
Feb 16, 2023•46 min
All those years trying to fit in. The energy wasted wondering if we were loveable enough. The box ticking: professional, ambitious, presentable. And yet here we find ourselves, at the sharp end of 2023, weirder than ever before. So, we did some…research, and it turns out you lot are up to all sorts of micro-weirdnesses. Maybe it’s time to unleash your inner weirdo on the world. She is bursting to be set free. We talk about the support groups we need: one for those who’ve been asked to ‘say a few...
Feb 02, 2023•39 min
So…January. Only 2000 years of it left. Just a joy of a month isn’t? Everyone is feeling fantastic, right? Well if, like us, you are wading through quicksand, then this is the episode for you. This week’s guest is a happiness teacher. At UCLA. To MBAs. Professor Cassie Holmes is an award-winning academic and social psychologist, who, nearly defeated by the grind, decided to learn how to have a more fulfilling existence. And - spoiler alert - it’s mostly about how we manage our time. Happily, she...
Jan 19, 2023•49 min
Not to be dramatic but it’s nearly fucking Christmas...Anyone else feeling exhausted/deranged/burnt-out? We thought we’d share some of the best advice (and weirdest) we’ve received from you guys, from ‘Nothing good comes from a drink you have set on fire’ to ’Never trust a man called Tim’. We talk about all the modes we might slip into during the perineum of the year, from Goblin Mode to Donkey Mode. And how we would decorate the perfect Midult Christmas tree: a tiny vortex to scream into and - ...
Dec 22, 2022•37 min
So buckle up for the best kind of Christmas chaos…with our friends and yours, The Scummy Mummies. Helen talks about navigating the single life while Ellie owns up to a Christmas loo brush (is it acceptable to clean it in the dishwasher?) and a hefty midlife crisis purchase. And here’s the burning Midult question this Christmas: Bublé or Tucci? Only a few more breakdowns ‘til Christmas guys... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 15, 2022•46 min
Do you feel as though you are about to explode with ALL THE THINGS? Ageing parents, health, money, a social life, trying to stay hydrated, sober and sane, and sleep for more than 45 minutes? Well someone else who understands the ferocity of the rush hour of life is novelist Fran Littlewood – she’s here with us today to talk about her brilliant book Amazing Grace Adams; the story of a perimenopausal woman going on a rampage. It’s a raging read, out in January and it’s already been optioned by the...
Dec 08, 2022•40 min
Everything in the world is making us want to retreat to our beds with a book right now. But what to read? Enter our guest this week, Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is a writer of naughty books and heartwarming books and books that can help us to look at ourselves with more generosity – from her hot novel Insatiable to the most recent Careering. She also has a mini-book out with The Pound Project called Burn Before Reading which is full of books to hold on to when you are in the emotional quicksand. We ta...
Dec 01, 2022•50 min
Bay Garnett is the woman who turned second hand into vintage. She is the person to talk to right now, when money is tight, fashion feels oppressive and we want to stop contributing to the fast fashion phenomenon that just feeds our greed for new…more…now. In this episode, the Queen Of Thrift talks to us about how to plug into the thrift circuit, how shopping can also be activism and why secondhand clothes can help us tell our own style stories. Rather than the ones that are just…sold to us. Lear...
Nov 24, 2022•41 min
We all kind of agree that (despite the amazing skin elasticity and ability to metabolise alcohol) our 20s were the fucking trenches. So here we are in our 30s, 40s, 50s trying to decide which bits of our personalities to hold on to and which bits to let go of. Who to be, basically. Well maybe we could start with who we’d like to be in a very micro way. This week we start a campaign to be the people who…. organise 6:30pm dinners and no longer compliment people on losing weight. Tiny steps to worl...
Nov 17, 2022•28 min
If you are anything like us, you will have been driven half mad tracking the chaos - the sheer wildness - of the last few months in politics. So have we got a treat for you. This week our guest is the sensational Hugo Rifkind, Times star columnist and radio presenter - his Saturday morning show on Times Radio is a must-listen. He unpacks his red box of weirdness for us as we talk about the maddest things that have happened in this Autumn term of politics. Given we are in fast moving times, Gavin...
Nov 10, 2022•43 min
Here we all are, wrestling with the shifting sands of our identity. Who are we? What are we doing? Is this what we wanted? And alongside these panickings, there are times when our physical selves change and challenge us in ways that can make us feel desperate. Today’s guest opened the floodgates for people to take about their experience of hair loss when she started documenting her own situation. And the solutions she sought. Because Jo Jones is a woman of action – she co-founded Beauty Banks, a...
Nov 03, 2022•44 min
