It’s the day of my big birthday bash, so of course I’ve woken up with a crater on my face so big Neil Armstrong could’ve landed on it. In a panic, I run to Boots and buy everything in sight that professes to rid my skin of this horrible disease that is acne: cleansers, scrubs,…
Health & Beauty
In defence of veganism – give me a processed carrot over antibiotic meat any day
One thing I’ve learnt over the course of my relationship and subsequent marriage to a chemist is that ‘chemicals’ in themselves are not a bad thing. You and I are made of chemicals, so is literally everything else on the planet, whether we consume it or not. In her recent post for Mouthy Money, Joanna…
Is influencer marketing immoral? Confessions of an insider
It’s a dreary Tuesday evening and I’m sat on the sofa eating a ready-meal mac ’n’ cheese, watching ‘The One with Ross’s Sandwich’ for the tenth time. I flick through Instagram and watch my favourite influencer ‘unboxing’ the three free parcels she’s been sent today. One by one, she shows off her new jade face…
How I got hooked on matched betting and why I will never do it again
There was a time when my blog Mrs Mummypenny was not generating enough cash. Way back in my first year of running it as a full-time job I made very little money. A good thing perhaps to not focus heavily on monetising the blog, it was more about creating lots of brilliant content – but…
My pointless NHS taxi – a waste of public funds
Through the stained glass, I could see what looked to be a grey-haired man in his sixties, eyes squinted, peering in. I opened it, to which he enquired, looking very confused: “Are you Madeleine Sutherland?” I confirmed I was. I had, fifteen minutes earlier, called up NHS 111 service to ask for advice about a…
Introducing our writers
They are students, mothers, artists, job-seekers, office workers, political activists – everyday people facing everyday money challenges. Meet Mouthy Money’s new writers – they tell stories about their financial lives, dreams, successes and failures. And their words won’t just twang your heartstrings or make you clutch your sides with laughter – though they’ll certainly do…
Your diet is making you fat (and nine alternatives that actually work)
In 1999, my sister and I embarked on ‘The Cabbage Soup Diet’. It is as ludicrous as it sounds but the fact that someone somewhere had written it’s what the health professionals recommended obese patients, we thought we’d give it a go. Neither of us was obese nor under doctor’s orders but back then, when…
Saving the planet is bankrupting me
I’m sat in my Mickey Mouse pyjamas in a grump because for the fourth night in a row, I’m dragging a reusable cotton breast pad across my face. It’s been two months since I embarked on finding an alternative to disposable cotton make-up removing pads, and I’m on my fourth ‘reusable’ product in the hope…
How vegan evangelists are propping up the ultra-processed food industry
Ultra-processing hands food manufacturers a licence to print money. Take potatoes. There’s only so much you could charge for them in their natural form, even if you were to market them as exclusive heirloom varieties, hand polished in mineral water by virgins. But transform them into crisps, or microwaveable chips, and the sky’s the limit.…
What I talk about when I talk about jogging slowly
I wasn’t a popular child. This was never more obvious than during PE, where the combination of my reputation as a boffin and the fact that I was comprehensively terrible at sports meant every lesson I was unable to skip due to “tonsillitis” became an interminable exercise in doing the bare minimum, and having no-one…
