Healthy buys we love this month

Staff writer, Roisin Dervish-O’Kane (not pictured, sadly)

My recent trip to Mauritius was unforgettable. For anyone who hasn’t endured my tales of palms, yoga and eating the Indian Ocean out of prawns – check out this month’s healthy. For water sports and white-knuckle sea-karting (basically a jet-ski with a rubber ring), I needed swimwear that held its own.

This bikini delivered. It was a pleasure to spend a holiday on the beach in swimwear that combined laid-back surfer-chick style with the practical athletic creds that meant I could run, paddle, and career my way through the ocean without fear of indecent exposure. The top was padded without being OTT, the bottoms substantial without being frumpy and the cross back, super-flattering.
Swell Flame Bikini, £35, animal.co.uk

Senior sub-editor, Chantelle Pattemore 

My previous experience with fitness trackers have been very, well, meh. They either felt cumbersome and kept getting caught on my pillow when I was trying to sleep, and entering everything in (especially food when products were tailored to the US market) proved tiresome. So the fact I have been wearing my Jawbone Up2 for two weeks straight and even rush to put it back on as soon as I get out the shower, is surely testament to how fantastic it really is.

The Up2 is slim, discreet, has an interesting strap design so can (almost) pass for a piece of jewellery, and is incredibly user-friendly. It tracks three main things: food, fitness and sleep, and gives suggestions for how you can improve on each of these, as well as congratulating you when you hit a particular target.

It also syncs to a ton of other food and fitness apps, such as My Fitness Pal, so if you’re already attached to another programme, you don’t have to desert it. This also helps when tracking food, as although the Jawbone app itself does include some British items, a fair amount is still American-based. Logging it on a daily basis means I am definitely a lot more mindful of how much and what I eat, and the same applies to how much I am moving too, whether it’s actual workouts or a simple daily step count. I’mm definitely not going to be ditching this tracker any time soon.
Jawbone Up2, £89.99, jawbone.com

Deputy editor, Claire Lavelle
Concerning things have happened to my skin now I’m (just) post-40 – where there used to be springiness there’s a hint of sag, and the sprinkle of pigmentation just underneath my hairline pops out the minute the sun hits my face. But it’s the skin around my eyes that upsets me the most – I look tired, even when I’m not (although with a young child and an old dog in the house, an unbroken nights’ sleep is a thing of the past).

I’ve tried a lot of eye creams and find most of them make zero difference. However, there are two exceptions to this rule, and one of them is HealGel Eye (the other brand worth investing in is Environ). It’s one of four products in the HealGel range which has been developed by a team of aesthetic and plastic surgeons, and contains skin-saving ingredients such as haloxyl, a tetra peptide that helps reduce dark circles and puffiness. It’s soothing to apply, skin feels ‘lifted’ straight away and you only need a tiny bit. Quite simply, it works.
Healgel, £32, healgel.co.uk