Love from, Florence Grace

If there's one term I can't stand  it's ' beach body ready '.  It's toxic, it's destructive and it's just totally negative, implying that you have to look a certain way to be allowed on a beach.  Growing up, I went on more 'diets' than I can remember, always striving for that perfect 'beach body' and always thinking of myself as a failure because I could never quite get there. All I wanted, more than anything else, was to be skinny. It was the only ambition I had for a long time, and tt makes me sad when I look back on my teenage years and see how much time I wasted hating myself and depriving myself of food I loved to try and make myself look a certain way.  " Recently, I had a pretty nasty photo made of me  and circulated around the town I live in by people  I believed were my friends, making fun of my boobs" Of course now, quite a few years later, my stance on self love and body image is totally differen...

I have been running Love from, Florence Grace for four years at the end of July. Four whole years! In that time, my blog - and ultimately, my career - has really evolved. I'm no longer just a blogger with big dreams. I'm a content creator living   her dreams. Love from, Florence Grace is so much more than a blog now, with 'Love from...' becoming more of a brand. It encapsulates not only my blog, but my magazine ( Love from... magazine ) and also the name of my freelance content creation services. Everything I do comes under the title "Love from...". My starting point, my birth place.  The Rebrand Because I've been doing this for so long, my branding has kind of been... well. Non existent, and all over the place at best. I've never been able to slot myself into any kind of niche, like a fashion or beauty blogger, because I cover such random things. I like to class it as "real life", but it just doesn't seem to fit. I blog about...

I'm a big perfume fan. I own more perfumes, body mists and sprays, fragrances and eau de toilets than I can count (or even remember!) and I spritz myself from head to toe multiple times a day to make sure that I'm always smelling fabulous! Sadly for me, my taste is expensive - Chanel, Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors are three of my go to's, with Chanel Gabrielle  being a firm favourite of mine. Marc Jacobs perfume is always a winner in my eyes due to it's gorgeous bottle design, and more recently I decided that Honey  was going to be my scent of the summer. It's light, sweet but not too sickly and I fell in love from the very first spritz. I thought that I was dead set on that being my scent of the summer, the one that would take me through the muggy days to make me feel fresh, the rainy days to make me feel sunnier - and then I came across an amazing collection of summer perfumes  on Clive Christian.  Initially, I was looking for some aftershave for my dad, wh...

There's no denying that I'm a massive oversharer . Social media is my vice, I share everything online and have pretty much no boundaries when it comes to how much of my life I make available to the big wide world.  In the past, this is something I have been criticised for - in fact, I was bullied over it at one point. People didn't like that I put dates and locations under my photos on Facebook, they didn't like the 'cringe' posts I put up on Instagram, they didn't like some of the brutally honest content I shared on my blog. I say "in the past" but it doesn't stay in the past - sometimes, it still happens now.  Obviously when I was younger, I really let the criticism and the nastiness get to me. I wanted to alter my social media feeds to be exactly like everyone else's so that I could avoid the 'hate'. I became a clone , I didn't post everything I wanted to and I made sure my feeds were curated to perfection.  ...