Someone mean and nasty destroyed my blog and now I am fighting to put it all back!

For the past 24 days, I have been unable to get into The Beauty Gypsy.

Neither have many of you, as your mails and messages tell me.

No, the blog is not shutting down. Not now, not ever… at least as long as I have eyes that read and hands that write. This is my world and I would be utterly lost without it.

The problem is that someone hacked into The Beauty Gypsy on July 16th and took down the whole site. Literally stripped it to shreds, in a way that restoring it has become absolutely impossible. The best that I’ve been able to do is have it taken to the wire and restore the old content. But it’s still not loading on many devices around the world, including my own. The only place I can currently see it is on my iPhone… possibly because I have cookies or some such technical mumbo-jumbo stored there, as my website developer tells me.

Why would someone do this? I’d like to believe it’s because the the blog is so cool and popular. But more probably it’s just because there are mean and nasty people in the cybersphere who just like wrecking things for kicks. You know the ones I am talking about – they are the ones who develop email viruses and malware that have trashed many a site and computer. There is no help for them except intense psychotherapy!

So after crying for over a whole week over spilt blog posts, I have now taken the jump to completely redesigning and relaunching The Beauty Gypsy. It’s not going to be an easy process. I don’t remember when I last slept for more than four hours a night – first in trying to restore the blog and now in relaunching it. And there is more caffeine and adrenaline flowing through my body than blood at the moment.

But I have a great designer on my side – hello Viva La Violet! – and in the end, all of us will have a shiny new iteration of the blog that will hopefully make up for all the lost, bleary eyed, sick to the stomach days.

Image: Studio Firma/Stocksy United

Will the blog change? No. Because I am not the one being redesigned. I will still continue inhabiting the world of my first loves: beauty recipes and cool products from around the world, with a non-commercial, non-paid-for-by-the-brands chill zone that you love.

But you will also see new columns (like the one on products not worth wasting your money over… my current favorite project), new vibes and a whole new aesthetic. I promise more information as soon as I can start typing it into something larger than this tiny iPhone screen. Seriously, you don’t realise how tiny our phones actually are until you try drafting a whole blog post onto one!

So, just please hang around for a bit more. Keep the messages coming and hop over to my Instagram (@thebeautygypsyblogger)… I really need the TLC at the moment because having a sick blog is like being sick yourself. Life is just grey and gloomy in absentia.

And tell me, what more would you like to see in The Beauty Gypsy?