No Mirrors For A Week!

Constantly exhausted and with a reflection to prove it, mum-of-three Clare O’Reilly stopped looking at herself. But was it a welcome break?

- Clare O'reilly

Master a foreign language, learn to scuba dive, run a marathon… There are many things I’ve always wanted to do. But with three kids and a full-time job as a writer, I’m what you might call ‘time poor’. So imagine my delight when I learned a few changes in my lifestyle could free up more than a year and a half in the next four decades of my life.

That’s right, 558 whole days with nothing at all to do; 13,383 luxurious hours of me time. What do I have to do in order to find that year and a half? Just stop looking in the mirror. That’s all… Simple, right?

It turns out women spend 55 minutes a day staring at our own reflections. With the average female lifespan in the UK being around 81 years old, let’s say we don’t start our almost hour-long obsession until we’re 20, that means we spend more than two years of our lives staring at ourselves and watching ourselves age – what a waste of time.

Of course I’m not about to hide from every mirror in my house until I die but, as an experiment, I’m going to spend a week without a mirror to see how it feels. I’ll save myself a staggering six hours and 25 minutes by the end of my seven days – at least enough time for a long bath and a chapter or so of the book I’ve been snatch reading page by page for months.

I’m excited, undaunted and feeling rather bullish at the prospect, too. I don’t wear much make-up, having plucked my eyebrows for three decades there’s only an occasional brave one that dares to grow where it shouldn’t. I waxed my top lip last week so am in the clear for that and other than a date with my husband on Friday and a couple of important work meetings I should sail through the week.