Toilettage

I don't care how many times I come across this expression in my research, but reading about a woman "à sa toilette" will always summon the wrong image.

Speaking of, French vs. American approaches to beauty, on the voyeuristically-spectacular Into The Gloss, the blog that tells you what glamorous women keep in their medicine cabinets. Count me as Team America on this one - it's a bit frightening what an unlimited budget and access to the Parisian parapharmacie amounts to. I mean, the French actress whose stuff it is looks lovely, as she no doubt would with or without ten thousand clear solutions that only allude to purported benefits - you will look "fresher," more "luminous." AKA, you will have spent 15-20 euros on water that smells vaguely like soap. (Confession: after a summer-plus-semester of temptation, I gave in, and if I indeed wore eyeliner to dissertate, walk Bisou, dissertate, socialize with scientists, I'd have some fine La Roche-Posay to remove it with.)

But Katie Gallagher - a fashion designer I once saw on the street in New York - looks amazing (the ITG photo doesn't do her justice), and has the right idea - choose a strange-yet-beautiful hair color, make sure eyeliner is visible but not raccoon-like, keep any kind of makeup that's about painting skin to look like skin to a minimum, and the world does not end if you fall asleep with your makeup on.

Meanwhile, my own toilette is somewhat lacking, because of course the day there's a Dinner is also the day the hot water went off at 9am. While I was plenty awake well before that, I'd been so busy with Bisou's toilette-in-the-modern-sense that I'd forgotten about the water until it was trop tard. If it doesn't go back on soon, I must follow Gallagher's lead re: hair-washing, despite myself. I am officially not brilliant enough to bathe.