Product

This fall has been the busiest season of my life. It made the months leading up to my qualifying exam (or, ahem, NJ road test) look like a breeze. I did whatever the professional equivalent is of that oft-heard social advice to say yes to everything. What shall come of all this remains to be seen, in so many different respects, but that's not the point of this post.

The point of it is that it's now December, and I haven't had a haircut since July. An every-other-day workout routine has dwindled to every other week. My pampering, so to speak, consists of hygiene and eyeliner. It's everything that falls somehow between the two that falls by the wayside.

And then there are the women profiled on Into The Gloss.* Their thing is pointing out - as if nearly every other site-participant hasn't already done so - that skincare is more important to them than makeup:

"I’m not a huge makeup aficionado [....] But I love skincare and, once I find something that works, I stick with it."

"For me, feeling beautiful is all about being natural—it's not about the colors of lipsticks, or foundations, or concealers, all those things. It goes beyond that."

"The [some product] line is really nice for young skin that’s prepping for anti-aging without being so full-on." [....] I like to switch up what masks I wear seasonally. [....] I’m not a makeup girl."

And these are just among the more recent ones. While each individual woman may well just be describing her own routine, in the aggregate, the message is clear: Caring about your skin is a noble enterprise, while wearing makeup is tacky and borderline deceitful.

The sensible part of me, the part that has read Naomi Wolf but had already more or less come up with this on my own, gets that skincare products are generally snake oil. A tax on being female and all that. While I have nothing against skincare when it's needed (when, say, you have a mark on your shoulder that Dr. Google tells you is not just melanoma but the deadliest kind of melanoma, it never hurts to have an offline dermatologist set you straight), I try to restrict my skincare routine-such-as-it-is to sunscreen and, in winter, moisturizer. (That said, I'm a tremendous hypocrite and currently own three different tsubaki oil conditioners. In my defense, Mitsuwa was having a sale.)

But skincare seems somehow like a really luxurious pursuit. The idea of spending money on something that couldn't possibly do anything, that isn't even claiming to address a skin problem, merely to improve the skin's appearance, is part of the luxury, but there's also the question of time. What sort of morning is this that would allow for not only the usual getting-ready but also a multistep application of mists and serums? And what if it all really does work? What if the reason my face at 31 looks different from my face at 21 isn't that it's a decade later, but that some mix of frugality and feminism has stopped me from going the skincare route? I can't tell if the fantasy is more about youth or relaxation, but it definitely pops up on days when I look in the mirror and think I look tired.

*A cynic might note that ITG is now selling skincare products of its own, but the motif predates the e-commerce, and may well explain why, once the in retrospect inevitable decision to start selling something came, they went that route.

Into The What?

When guilty pleasures collide. Emily Schuman (of "Cupcakes and Cashmere" fame) has come across better than possibly anyone else profiled on "Into The Gloss." Which is to say, there isn't the requisite posturing about being so very low-maintenance... followed by a list of dozens of serums and moisturizers used daily. It also isn't a great big list of Estee Lauder, her sponsor... unless all the brands she mentioned are owned by one conglomerate. (Where's my corporate sponsor? Ideally this would be Uniqlo, but I'd settle for Nars. Or Zabar's, Murray's Cheese, Strand...) She just frankly discusses what it is she has to work with ("a pretty athletic build"; "I lack any real facial definition"; "mousy-brown" hair that she bleaches), and the end result is relatable rather than self-deprecating. Relatable not because these happen to be my own personal concerns (which I have, fear not, just not those), but because the whole thing reads more as 'within-normal-limits woman making the best of what she's got' than the trials and travails of being naturally stunning in a world with too many parabens and not enough pulverized kale.

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Unrelated question relating to a different post on the same site: What does the following mean? "Last year, a friend gifted me with [fancy soap]." Why not the far more direct "a friend gave me"? While I know that "gift" can now be used as a verb (and that some contingent cringes every time it is), I'd thought it was more in the context of, say, a fashion blogger is comped whichever handbag from a designer, and then it can be that Coach or whatever "gifted" the bag. But do friends now "gift"? Is this used to indicate that something was given as a gift, as versus I don't even know, handed to someone? Like where "give" is just a synonym for "hand," like hand/give it to me? Or does it just add an air of luxe to whatever's being discussed? So your friend might gift you luxury soaps, but give you an extra roll of toilet paper.

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Unrelated comment relating to yet a third. The so-very-now look for men's hair is apparently the one that's been so-very-now since forever among male physicists. (For obvious reasons.)

As one does

Best "Into The Gloss" ever. We've got:

-Photos of a woman with glowing skin, no cellulite (there's one shot from the classic "Daily Mail" angle that would reveal any in the usual places), and a lovely, spa-tiled bathroom.

-Pseudoscience: The magical power of "green juice" (which, as is disclaimered, the profilee is selling) to cancel out cigarettes and lack of sunscreen, not to mention the need for makeup. The insistence that coffee is something one should want to remove from one's life, because detox, or who knows. "Among other things, green juice alkalizes your body and gets your intestines working properly... You get great skin because your liver and your guts are working properly, and you stay slim because all of your bodily functions are in line, and your hormones are balanced—your skin is a direct reflection of what's happening in your guts."

-Humblebrag: "[...] I don’t wear makeup, and honestly, don’t really know how to do my own makeup. I have friends who are musicians, models, and actresses, and they always have to do their makeup for things. So when I have something to go to that requires me to wear it, I have a lot of people within a five-mile radius that I can reach out to who will just do it for me."

-The haute-hippie thoroughness of it all: "To moisturize my face, I found an Ayurvedic, organic face cream called [whatever]. This woman sources everything from India, makes products in super small batches in a traditional, Ayurvedic way, and even chants mantras into them." And: " I love being in my shower—the water is oxygenated, re-mineralized, pH-balanced water, and all of the tiles were made by [some tile company] to make it feel really grounded, like you’re in earth." And: "[I]f you flush out the mucus and get rid of dairy, the whites of your eyes will sparkle more." And: "I usually wash my body with a loofah, but I use a dry brush to exfoliate when I’m juice cleansing."

It's all just fahbulous, dahling. Totally not relatable to those of us who prefer our greens as non-pulverized solids, thanks, like maybe sauteed with garlic and olive oil. Or who would never think of abandoning coffee for bogus purity reasons. Or who are even the least bit cynical. And yet: shiny!

On my immediate surroundings, as I wait for the shuttle

Love:

-It's the only reliable, one-stop source for (almost) everything I buy. I want a big bag of bulk rolled oats, and a splurge on plumcots. They come through.

-It isn't more expensive. People want it to be, because it's so insufferable (see "Hate" below) that it seems it ought to be, and maybe it is in some parts of the country (Chicago?), but in most of my experience, it's not. It was cheaper than the nearby Gristedes in New York, and is about the same as Wegmans here. (An employee at WF here once remarked to me that Wegmans is so expensive, which was, I think, overkill.) One gets the impression that it's more expensive because the kind of items that tend to cost a lot (produce, meat, fish) look so much more appealing here, so you end up leaving with more. And I suppose the per-pound stuff is expensive for what it is, but it looks no more appealing than any other salad bar, which is to say it ranges from nauseating to that which could be prepared in two seconds for a tenth of the price, so I avoid it.

Hate:

-Every single thing that isn't food is pure, unadulterated rich-hippie obnoxiousness. Cosmetics, skin creams, paper goods, and placebo-or-worse supplements, all packaged in such a way as to make you think you've done your good deed for the day/week by making that selection. This takes up a huge amount of (in this case) the middle of the store, such that if you want ice cream or bread (and why wouldn't you?), you have to wade through a sea of it. Given the number of "Smile, You're On Camera" signs in that section, and the prominence of lotions that won't slowly kill your baby like what's sold at CVS, it would seem that the very purpose of it is to give bored SAHMs with a case of kleptomania something to do. I, at least, have yet to find a purpose of it, and the shuttle drops us off for two full hours, so believe me, I've tried. A bunch of extra-non-toxic nail polish in colors that are always just slightly off.

-Because the presumed customer is a sanctimonious beeyotch fresh from a hard day lounging at the self-refurbishment spa, people who work here fall into two categories: obsequious/chipper in that way that so confounds people who aren't American and seething-class-warrior. Once again, today I got on line for the latter. In a brilliant move that saves the company labor costs while giving the customer the illusion of labor solidarity, they've effectively phased out baggers, so if you bring your own bags, you bag as the cashier rings you up. Because I'm not from a country where it's always been thus, I'm slow at this, and have trouble coordinating the bagging and the checking of prices on the little screen. So. Today, I made the grave mistake of mentioning that I'd used four bags, as I had not seen the "BYOB" discount ring up. Turns out the cashier had entered it already. I apologized, thanked her, apologized, thanked her, and so on. Then, when she handed me my receipt, she angrily insisted on pointing to where the bag discount was indicated. "I believe you," I assured her, but to no avail, further evidence that the bag refund at WF is more trouble than it's worth.

When in doubt, YPIS

-Frank Bruni has called out foodie types for their "elitism." This fact alone will probably have many nodding along to his column, but the content itself makes no sense:

When [for-the-masses celebrity chef Paula] Deen fries a chicken, many of us balk. When the Manhattan chefs David Chang or Andrew Carmellini do, we grovel for reservations and swoon over the homey exhilaration of it all. Her strips of bacon, skirting pancakes, represent heedless gluttony. Chang’s dominoes of pork belly, swaddled in an Asian bun, signify high art.

Is this snobbery? Or is it perhaps the fact that there is no obesity crisis among the customer base of expensive Manhattan restaurants. Whether this is because even wealthy New Yorkers are not dining out every night (and are in all likelihood eating all other meals at home, using Greenmarket ingredients), or because they're so rich that they think nothing of picking at their food and tossing the rest, sneering at the bourgeois convention that at an expensive restaurant one must finish one's plate, the fact of the matter is, they're a skinny bunch. Bruni might as well be saying that because many Americans are obese, the French, if they're going to point this out, need to cut back on Camembert, that to do otherwise would be hypocritical.

-From the beauty blog I love to hate, hate to love, for a change, a PhD student profile. One who uses no makeup whatsoever, and whose beauty routine consists of bathing. A female grad student, to be clear, and one not averse to wearing a pretty floral dress. Continuing the love-hate theme, this latest post makes the useful point that if many women gave up on complicated and expensive processes of de- and rehydrating their skin with products and just used soap, the same balance would be achieved, and probably with less exposure to chemicals than using glob after glob of products marketed as "natural." (OK, this woman doesn't use soap, but soap-free "gentle cleansing wash," because she is, after all, a woman.) It's brave, in a way, for someone whose blog is about finding the perfect products to spread onto one's skin to offer up the idea that glob-less works, too.

So that's the love. The non-love ("hate" seems a bit extreme) is that this version of "low-maintenance," while of course available to all, is something not so many women can get away with while still looking conventionally attractive. Most women have to choose. For women with any hair texture other than fine, straight, and summered-in-Martha's-Vineyard, using whatever shampoo's lying around means not caring how your hair looks. "Normal" hair is still defined by shampoo companies as what this woman happens to have, which is how she gets to have a no-fuss approach and still look nice. And because she's blond, too, she's able to avoid hair-salon primping altogether and still look 'done.' "I’m out in the sun a lot doing research on boats, so my hair just gets naturally lighter." She's also, conveniently enough, thin, pretty, and occupied with a kind of research that keeps her fit. (Kind of the opposite of reading 19th C newspapers in Paris on the way to and from croissants.)

Given how much "maintenance" women do is about looking how this one does naturally, it hardly seems a ringing endorsement of self-acceptance that this particular woman keeps things simple. But I wouldn't exactly say that anyone's privilege is showing - I get the sense that the PhD student in question found it amusing that a beauty blogger wanted to interview her on her "routine," and don't get the impression at all that she's judging those who do such things as schlep home giant and not-so-cheap containers of the only shampoo and conditioner that work for their hair, on account of they're about to move to a place that might not sell it, only to come home and look up something called "soap.com" where the product is not only available for delivery but also cheaper. Ahem.

Punishment, reward

"La Libre Parole." On microfilm. Not 'fiche, 'film. Then Le Boulanger des Invalides Jocteur. With, for the first time since I've been going, at least, millefeuilles. Predictably the Platonic ideal of a millefeuille. Best and worst of Frahnce, all in one afternoon.

Jezebel, source of endless mid-paperwork entertainment

-I thought it was supposed to be a good thing that people - even those who aren't poor or hipsters - buy used clothes. What with landfills, "fast fashion," etc. I'm confused.

-Am I the only one who interprets "eaten one sugar plum too many" as being... gastrointestinal? Apparently it's a way for a ballet critic to insinuate that a dancer's put on a few pounds. I'd have thought it was something about how the dancer managed to propel herself that high in the air.

-Ah yes, the jilted-by-a-JILF anti-Semite, always a classic. On a Savage Lovecast recently, Dan was trying to explain, re: a non-Mexican woman hot for Mexican men, the difference between fetishizing a race and having a preference that goes in a particular racial direction. I offer: it's fetishization if, when rejected by a partner of the preferred group, the dude's first thought is to bash them. Racist, annoying, whatever you want to call it, it tells you how front-and-central that quality was to him all along. Anyway, like some of the commenters, I'm surprised to learn there's someone out there whose stereotype about Jewish women is that we are insufficiently curvy.

And populist rage ensued

Living in Battery Park City and not working in finance makes one particularly aware of the fact that one does not work in finance. So I've long since gotten used to stocking up on pasta at the same Whole Foods where bankers shop for a presumably more varied set of wares (or, I suppose, to-go boxes, what with the hardcoreness of their work), and of dragging the tote bags back home past a whir of blue button-down shirts enjoying a seemingly eternal hour of happiness outside the Financial Center. But it's overall worth it - affordable, same-as-outer-borough rent (if you get a good deal and share a studio); the waterfront; and, when not closed by whim or Board of Health or whatever, a short-ish walk to Tribeca's Bouley, home of the city's best pain au chocolat. What I wasn't prepared for was the following: in a running shop, I overheard a guy at the register being informed that, on account of he works at "Goldman," he gets a 10% discount.

A new piece to the puzzle

Apparently when a book is marked as "arrivé," this doesn't mean it's actually arrived, per se, but that it's reached a certain point in the transportation process and been marked prematurely as ready-to-consult.

The rest of this stack of books had better be amazing

Say you're at the library and you decide you want to leave for lunch. This happened to me today, strangest of things. I tried to leave but Non! Not allowed. Had some invisible French scanners deemed my girth already sufficient? Non. I still had documents that needed to be returned, the message explained. I had, however, returned all my documents. Several arguments later, and after I had to go make a show of checking that I hadn't left them at my spot, lo and behold one of the documents had not been scanned back in. Finally, I was able to take a sortie temporaire and get a bowl of pho.

One soup later and I was back at the library. Was I allowed back in? No such luck. My reservation had expired and I'd lost not only my spot but all the books I'd reserved. Given that the books were waiting for me, I had idiotically not recorded what those books were, and there's no way to check this retroactively. When I'd left, I'd verified that I was making the temporary exit, and I'd put my card in the sortie temporaire tray and everything. More arguing. Eventually, I finagled my way into getting a new spot and the books that had apparently not been reshelved. So far so good, kind of. Considering this is a library where you have to swipe your card when returning from the bathroom, like some kind of hall pass for adults, none of this was terribly surprising.

The book I'd been most eager to see contained, according to the bibliography of an Italian book on a topic related to mine, an article in French on what sounded like exactly my topic. The Italian had, it seemed, misattributed the article to an adjacent author in that issue's table of contents, and immediately upon figuring out the real author, I knew that this was nothing other than the article version of a book I'd already read and not much needed about postwar American Jewish novelists.

Staying home and using digitized sources never looked so good.

By "hate" you mean "love"

Obviously the fact that wedding websites can tend towards the ridiculous is their appeal.

Whatever Fails Miserably

Woody Allen's "Whatever Works" is, no doubt, the worst movie ever made - a terrible movie regardless, but reaching 'worst' status because of the viewer's prior assumption of competence, if not excellence. Just... no.

This brings up the question of whether it's a good thing when movies represent places and situations we more or less know. This movie had everything 'going for it' in terms of my identifying with it - Uniqlo, physicists, particular streets I know oh so well, cynical New York Jews - and... no. My sense is familiarity makes good movies seem slightly better and bad ones seem endlessly worse.