'I am drunk/pregnant' and other things you should avoid saying in French

Hello reader,

So yesterday I had lunch with a friend of mine who is fluent in French and incidentally a couple of her French speaking friends. It started off as a nice meeting, I love meeting new people, especially if they're from a different culture than me. As the lunch went along everyone would use little French phrases which I would totally pretend to understand while in my head I'd be freaking out, not knowing what I had just nodded in agreement to. For all I know Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble (also known as Ben to his friends), could have been saying how he thought right-wing politics was the way forwards and animal testing was completely justified.

Now as a wannabe French speaker I naturally wanted to impress these people and show off the little French I remembered. The problem was I couldn't remember a single French phrase that would be appropriate so I thought to myself, "hey, you know how to conjugate verbs, you know how to say I am. Come on brain, whisk me up a phrase. How hard can it be to get three words wrong?"

Oh you are about to find out where it all went wrong.

Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble was going to order a dessert of some kind and asked us all, "does anyone else want anything?". Then the ego monster rose in my chest, oh so eager to impress Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble and show them that I too could speak a little French. So the words "non merci, je suis plein" escaped from my lips.

Let me go through that with those who do not understand what just happened. Naturally I wanted to say, "no thank you, I'm full" in French. I am, would translate to je suis, and the verb full would be conjugated to plein. Which I thought was correct at the time.

Then everyone kind of froze and looked at me suppressing smirks, understanding my intended sentence, and Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble just shared a small chuckle with his friend and smiled politely at me. Knowing I must have said something wrong I pulled my friend aside after and asked her why they were all laughing, and it was then she told me that "je suis plein" often meant "I am knocked up" in English.

Yes, "je suis plein" = slang for "I am knocked up".

I looked it up later and it can also mean "I am drunk".

Great. Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble will never look at me in the same way again. They all understood my mistake and what I actually meant to say but it was still a little embarrassing.

Naturally I looked up other phrases which don't mean quite what you intend them to mean in French. Here are a few if you, like me, are a self-embarrassing French speaker:

• Je suis chaud - I am hot (expected meaning) - I am horny/warming up for something (actual meaning) - J'ai chaud (what you should say instead)
• Je suis fini - I am finished (expected meaning) - I am dead (actual meaning) - J'ai fini (what you should say instead, I HAVE finished)

Here are a list of other words in which you should use the verb avoir, because as per usual, there are some exceptions to the "je suis". http://french.about.com/od/expressions/a/avoir.htm

I have some others too but I think I shall build them up and make a new post some other time when I have enough mistakes. Hopefully I won't find these mistakes the way I found out this one and embarrass myself in front of  Sexy-French-Ben-With-The-Stubble.

Salut

Garnier Pure Sauna Self-Heating Mask Review

Hello there,

Yes, it is in fact a Sunday, but let's go ahead with the Face Mask Friday thing. Because it's catchier than Face Mask Sunday right? And I'm all about the alliteration. I should make that a theme too, "All About Alliterations" and start posting up cool alliterations. Except no one will read it. Moving on, my apologies for making this two days late. I was preparing for an interview and dragged to Oxford Street with my mother only to spend three hours in Marks and Spencer wondering what my life had come to.

The mocking, sorry reviewing, of today's product is based around Ganier's Self-Heating mask. All jokes aside, I will refrain from mocking, and try to 'tell it as it is' - after all how many other ways are there of telling 'it'? Go on, give us a ball park figure politicians (like they'd be reading this blog, I mean look at their pores).

I picked up the face mask at Boots, mostly because it was £0.85 for two 6ml sachets which was the cheapest face mask I had brought yet. Considering this was produced from quite a known brand it seemed like excellent value for money. For all you animal lovers, unlike The Body Shop or Superdrug Tea Tree products it had no guarantee against animal testing. It also looked highly professional and because I could never in the next three years afford to go to the spa I very much liked the sauna aspect. Now to make my room steamy and get someone with a Russian accent doing my face mask. At least that's how I imagine spas work.

Before I spread this face mask onto my face the smell hit me. It smelt like a Garnier face wash I had tried out a couple of years ago. It isn't a bad smell, more of a raw but fresh cosmetics smell. However I am concerned that what if all the Garnier products have the same signature smell? Let me just give you a piece of advice if you're starting a cosmetics company: if you want your products to have the same notable smell, do not make it smell like Garnier's face mask. I want the products that I apply to my body smelling nice, hence why I spend a fortune at The Body Shop. Nevertheless I applied to concoction to my face, and surprisingly enough as I massaged it around my face I could actually feel it heating up my skin. I then removed it after five minutes (despite the packaging saying three minutes). It hadn't hardened or anything but was still in it's liquid form.

My skin felt drier after the ordeal and two days later and my skin no longer felt fresh like it did on the day of the face mask despite a promise for skin to feel purified "for up to 7 days". Luckily it also didn't feel as dry either. I guess you can't get it all huh?

It'll be a 1.5/5.

Marks deducted for the smell, how the effect wore off, the dryness, and how there wasn't as much of an effect as I thought there would be. It didn't make my face as clearer as some of the other products I've tried but good affordability and definitely for those with oily skin.

Anyway that is all the juice I can give you on face masks this week. Next week I'll try out the Honey and Oat Scrub Mask from The Body Shop. I've been wanting to try this out for a long time but the £10 price tag attached to it scared the poor student inside me. I happened be in a luck and met a lovely lovely lady from a store in London who gave me free samples of two face masks so I could figure out whether I liked them or not.

I'll mix it up a little next week and try to post about something that is not about face masks, as well as continuing with Face Mask Fridays (yes, really, it will be on a Friday this time, Sunday shall be used as God intended it to, for rest, video games and eating fatty food without regrets).

À bientôt.  

Body Shop's Seaweed Ionic Clay Mask Review

Salut,

Well look at that, Face Mask Fridays is so a thing. I mean if you've done something twice it's a thing isn't it? At least that's how it works in my world. Which is probably why I consider myself an expert at yoga from having been to ten lessons or so in the space of a year.

Moving on from my lack of yoga skills, I was browsing in my local branch of The Body Shop this week (they're having a sale so it's only understandable why I was won over). Then I saw the sachet version of Body Shop's Seaweed Ionic Clay Mask on the counter. The original pot packaging looks something like this:

The pot is £12 for 100ml and my sachet was £1.50 for 6ml. I know, The Body Shop wins again for its brilliant affordability factor. Okay yes go on all you Body Shop fanatics, throw a rant at me about how this is because The Body Shop goes out of its way to avoid animal testing but may I just point out that my Tea Tree face peel from Superdrugs (refer to last weeks post) was more than a third cheaper and for more product too, as well as the fact that it stated at the back that it did not test this product on animals. 

The question is, was this face mask worth it? I applied the clay like mixture onto my face, so well done Body Shop for really sticking to the title there. The face mask smelt lovely, really fresh and clean which made it bearable to sit around improving my yoga until I realized my face was so stiff I could only mumble. It was time to see the results. I washed off the stiff bits of mask and in that aspect Superdrug's Tea Tree mask was more fun because I could easily peel it off. Well life is not fair, so I continued in my struggle to remove the concoction from my face.

Now the result was pretty non-existent. In all fairness this face pack is for oily skin which I do not have but it seemed like a bit of a fluff product to me. Body Shop describes it to "draw out impurities" be "clarifying" and "refreshing". Refreshing it was. I really enjoyed how fresh my face felt but it still left my blackheads as they were and my skin looked a little clearer. But that could have just been a bit of the clay mixture left over. 

I'll give it a 2/5. Lovely smell, felt fresh after but made no difference to me really, could have achieved the same by washing my face in cool water and I would have saved myself a good bit of money too. 

That's all on Face Mask Fridays.

À bientôt.  

Tea Tree Peppermint Peel Off Face Mask Review

Hello my lovely lovely blog viewers,

So today I thought, hey, it's Friday, let's get crazy. The sun is shining, it's nice and warm. It's time to bring out the face mask I brought upon impulse yesterday in Superdrug.

So let me say, this is the first time in my nineteen years of existent that I have used a face mask. I know, I hear all you well-groomed gals yelling "how could that be?!". As it turns out I'm not so well-groomed. I tend to get by on the odd splash of water on my face.

So anyway, I thought it'd be a lovely pampering thing to do for a jobless university student. I even thought about making it a thing you know? Like Face Mask Fridays! We'll see how far my budget stretches (yes I am that broke, all money is welcome).

Tea Tree Peppermint Peel Off Mask costs £0.89 at Superdrug which I thought was quite good, and it's enough for two masks (if you've got a small enough face like myself). The minute I put the jell like goop on my fingers the smell of peppermint hit me. Quite nice if you like that kind of thing. I'm more of a grapefruit girl myself.

The first thing I noticed after I spread a thin layer of it on my face was the cool burn of it. Before you go on about the paradox I just created for you let me try to explain. It numbed my face but I could also feel a kind of sting to it. I just went along with it, what do I know about face masks after all? I'm guessing this was the peppermint playing its part. The description did say "Peppermint oil is renowned for its therapeutic effect on skin disorders and for its cooling sensation". The slightly uncomfortable sensation continued for the next five minutes or so until the mask had stiffened on my face.

Now to see the results. I peeled the mask off my face and for a moment my skin looked a little brighter but then I went to wash the remainder of the mask off my face with water and my skin just kind of went back to before.

See, my skin's quite normal. The occasional spot and a bit of dry skin but nothing face cream can't solve. The tiny spot on my chin was still there after the mask, and maybe, if it wasn't the light of my bathroom messing with me, it had gone down a little and lo behold the blackheads on my nose were fading too. My skin hadn't brightened, it wasn't softer and my complexion was pretty much still the same. 

All in all, nice treat, face felt refreshed and my skin was a bit cleaner. Good for a girls night in, but soap does the exact same function if you're broke like me. 3/5 at a push.

I guess sometimes face masks are all about the psychological effects they bring. Maybe my spot hasn't really gone down and blackheads are still there. Who knows, but I think I'll try another face mask next week (a brand called Amie or Superdrug's finest depending on money - side note Superdrug did not pay me to do this aha). 

Face Mask Fridays  is rapidly becoming a thing.

À la prochaine fois!