One of the silver linings of COVID has been the emergence of some clever small brands offering much-needed solutions. Have A Nice Day Goods aka H.A.N.D. makes slim, elegant glass spritzers of hand sanitiser with refills available. My fragrance of choice is the energising Mimosa & Lemon Myrtle. At this point, you might feel fairly over using sanitiser, but it seems to me that having one on our persons at all times is not a need going away any time soon, sadly, so it may as well be one that looks, feels, and smells lovely while still being affordable and eco-friendly. Also, I have found the act of spritzing rather than rubbing really refreshing, and it’s nice not to feel you’re covered in goop every time you sanitise.
Is the LARQ a very expensive water bottle? Yes, yes it is. Did my husband ask me why I was charging a water bottle with my laptop? Yes, yes he did. (“The future is now, honey!”) But let me count for you the number of ways I love it, and how it’s easier to justify the price when you realise the idea is you’d never need to buy another one. Ever. First up, it keeps water properly cold for up to 24 hours, and because of its insulation, the bottle itself never gets cold to touch or produces condensation, unlike normal bottles which are always irritatingly wetting other things in my bag. Second, it regularly purifies the water it contains, emitting bacteria-killing UV light every two hours, or you can do it as need be at the push of a button, so there’s never a need to manually clean the bottle. (Other bottles never seem properly clean anyway, no matter what I do. More to the point, even once they’re allegedly ‘clean’, I’d forever seem to have bottles on the bench drying. Funnily enough, hands are not water bottle-shaped, so you can never get in there properly to manually dry them, and air drying never seems to get them totally dry. Third, which for me is the biggest win of all, because the UV light kills bacteria-causing odour, there’s never any nasty ‘water bottle taste’ no matter how long you leave your water in there, which is what has always turned me off from using reusable bottles. Fourth, it’s easily rechargeable by USB and one charge lasts at least a month. Fifth, its design: it has a slim, neat shape, is available in a variety of colourways, feels comfortable to hold, and the lid screws on and off easily without ever getting too tight, or leaking. And finally, 1% of all profits are donated to an eco charity. So yes, it’s a very expensive water bottle, but if you can swing it, it’s an amazing sustainable upgrade to daily life.
Love a magazine? Don’t we all. But what about finding a newsagent (devastatingly, they barely seem to exist anymore), heaving it home and then after reading just… chucking all the glossy goodness in the bin? There is a better way, I assure you – meet Readly. Now, I have tried other magazine subscription apps in the past, but this is my choice by far. Not only does it take a Spotify-esque approach to the entire process, in that, for a set fee, you can access every magazine in the app, whenever you like, but there is a wonderful selection of Australian and international magazines to suit all interests, including hard-to-get-our-Aussie-hand-on US titles. In terms of accessibility, it also takes the cake. The interface is very easy to use on a computer, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a sexy device to read on, and if, like me, you are ‘eyesight-challenged’, rest assured that you can zoom in as close as you like on all that tiny text. The mags can also be downloaded to read during times you don’t have internet access. An absolute winner.
