Handbag Trauma

During my gap year in Paris, I treated myself to a mustard-yellow Marc by Marc Jacobs handbag. I still remember the whole experience with fondness - paying the very helpful and rather flirty sales guy my hard-earned and totally deserved money, who then chased after me with the box for the bag which he’d forgotten, and the satisfaction of leaving the shop with a bigger-sized bag that the one I’d gone in for. 

Three years later, and the bag was going grey and looked… well to be honest it was a complete embarrassment to have it hanging off my arm. So I did what any straight-thinking, money saving woman would do, and purchased a small pot of mustard-yellow shoe cream online, with the intention of ‘buffing’ it back to beautiful. I still don’t fully understand why it was such a bad idea… I was using common sense, wasn’t I?

Apparently not, and after days of returning to it to see if another 5 minutes of scrubbing cream into the leather would revive it, I gave up. Still grey, and now with a sticky coating all over, I put it into a Tesco bag and left it on top of my wardrobe for the next 7 months. The shame!

So come Christmas time I finally decided to do something about it. No, pay someone to do something about it. It didn’t take long to find a host of ‘handbag clinics’ online, and after  phonecalls and several quotations, I settled on handbagmakeover.co.uk, the cheapest and friendliest by far. 

They sounded really great, despite admitting after I explained my revival attempt: “Thank god this isn’t a video call or you’d have seen me totally cringe at the thought!”

So I shipped off my sorry-looking mouldy-mustard coloured bag and hoped for the best (and also hoped that it wasn’t a scam where people willingly send off their designer bags to an unknown address). Within a week, I received an email displaying photos of a brand new-looking bag. Shiny clean, back to it’s bright mustard yellow, and polished to the nines. My DIY attempt cost me an additional £10-20 for a ‘de-grease’, but the bag surgery was worth it. 

These websites have before-and-after galleries to show off their handiwork which is always fun to browse through - although HOW someone could put oily items or loose bottles of make up into a Mulberry Bayswater is quite beyond me. One lady had lost her Chanel bag to a house fire, resulting in one surviving panel. It did make me question, however, if it was still technically a Chanel bag if the four new panels had been made by someone other than Karl Lagerfeld, but then again I’d be pretty distraught if I’d lost a £2000+ bag to flames.

I paid £104 to have my bag revamped and revived - and some websites offer a total re-colour of your choice on your bag. It’s definitely cheaper than a new one, but do look after your bag in the first place, and definitely do not attempt a DIY involving shoe cream of any sorts!