In defense of paying a ton to get your nails done

When I was 11 - and I remember the age exactly, because of friend-group fluctuations and which friend this was - my best friend at the time got a gift certificate for mani-pedis, and brought me along. It was... fine? But the pedicure was plainly not for me - too ticklish. Also the whole thing seemed a bit too much like going to the dentist.

In grad school I got a grand total of 3 manicures, one with pedicure. The two manicure-onlies were pick-me-ups of some sort. The first was the French variety, and I remember it as looking great (which I knew even then to be a basic thing to think - a basic style to have requested to begin with) and being impossible to replicate at home. The mani-pedi was when I got married, and again, pedicure, not for me.

But this notion of The Manicure lingered as the ultimate frivolous indulgence. You can, after all, just paint your own nails! (Which I do!) Any bottle of nail polish, even a fancy one, is going to cost so much less than a manicure. I'd both congratulate myself for savvily avoiding this unnecessary expenditure, and feel a certain degree of envy of peers who clearly took themselves seriously enough (Because You're Worth It TM) to think their looks (and their careers?) were worth investing in, in this way.

Aaaand then there was the big exposé about nail salons - how exploitative and toxic most of these places are. At just the historical moment when scorn for sex work (and often, by extension, the people - the men - who patron sex workers) became problematic, the Woman Who Gets Her Nails Done became emblematic of consumerist insensitivity. It all seemed a little hmm. Like perhaps the motivating force here wasn't so much a goal of a safer and less exploitative norm in the nail salon industry, but rather a world where women feel that much more terrible about primping and not primping. (Because it always cuts in both directions.)

Then, back in Toronto, I started noticing a whole new nail-art world. Students at the university where I teach would have these elaborate nails, sometimes with rhinestones (?) embedded in them. It looked neat and fun and... especially impossible to replicate at home. And not all chipped off, like my own DIY polish attempts inevitably were. (I'm decent a painting my own nails, but less so with not absentmindedly fussing with the results during a meeting.) I decided that I would, as a sort of end-of-year reward, go get my nails done, probably at a fabulous-looking place I'd seen on Instagram, on Dundas West. It would be a whole outing, once it was warm out. I would get the famous gel nails, the ones where the polish doesn't chip. With some sort of nail art, because that was clearly what this place is known for.

Then I learned I was pregnant and it didn't fit with my panicked first-trimester mode, when I wasn't even having any coffee, to do this, plus I wasn't awake enough.

Then it was later in pregnancy and I was too tired in a different way, and concerned that there's something where during childbirth they need to measure your blood oxygen so I couldn't get polish that wouldn't come off easily, and if this was just going to be regular nail polish I should just do this on my own.

Then it was the first six weeks, when I was doing fine as it goes, which is to say, only mildly incapacitated, and also had to feed too often to commit to more than brief poodle-walks.

Then it was too cold.

And then somehow, it seemed... possible? But, expensive. Could I justify this? I felt confident the salon was a Good One but not that I, personally, had any business spending over $50 plus tax and tip on my nails.

I don't know what the ultimate catalyst was, but after many visits to, then away from, the booking site, which requires credit card info and everything, I took the plunge.

The outing itself was decadent if not all-out relaxing. (Subway to streetcar-replacement bus, yeah.) But the salon - Naked Beauty Bar - was spectacular. As were - and are, a week and a half later - the results. Actually getting my nails done in this manner - where a manicurist does all sorts of things to your nails and cuticles and all of that takes longer than the polish itself - shouldn't have appealed to me, because aw shucks I'm too low-maintenance for that but given my state of haggard frazzledness upon arrival (or given that I am not in fact too low-maintenance for that), it was just lovely.

Then I picked up tacos to bring home from Good Hombres, home of many a satisfied third-trimester craving, but apparently just as good after the taco fixation had subsided. The whole thing improved my mood tremendously. With tip it was, I believe, $78. Not including the tacos. Frivolous, yes. Shocking, as in, I'm re-startling myself as I type this. But worth it.

Post-postpartum

The verdict is given at the six-week appointment: Are you back to normal? Your normal, not Gisele's, but both may seem similarly implausible. Six weeks is when - at least if you're nursing - your uterus is supposed to have shrunk down to its original size. This is a giant unspoken euphemism for: if you still look pregnant at that point, it's the pregnancy-exacerbated addiction to salt-and-pepper potato chips, but not pregnancy itself. (Or just... pregnancy more generally, which involves more than an expanded uterus? But anyway.)

The personal: It has been 10 weeks and while I feel a bunch more with-it than I did, say, 5 weeks ago, I still look... not just bigger than pre-pregnancy, but somewhat pregnant. I had and hadn't expected this. All bodies are different, so there's no actual answer to how permanent this and all other bodily changes might be.

There's all sorts of empowering language about this online: You just created and birthed a whole new human being! Be easy on yourself! Which, sure. But then there's life in the clothes limbo where the maternity clothes are excessive (or just too dreary to keep wearing), but all pre-pregnancy clothes - pants at least - seem like they belong to a small doll of some kind, so little of your current body would they possibly contain. (Admittedly this was the case with those black Levis from the get-go. What was I thinking there?)

And then this is all paired with the not-vanity physical aspects of recovering from childbirth - as much as a line can even be drawn.

And if it's winter in Canada, and your preferred form of exercise is jogging, and the only gym nearby costs $180 a month and that's with a discount, getting back (?) in shape - at whatever size - is a challenge.

What I've found, maybe of use to others, maybe not:

-Move more, but don't diet. This is essential if nursing but probably the way to go regardless. So I'm forcing myself to jog, a bit, despite the terrible weather. (High school winter track, in an only slightly less-cold climate, was good preparation.) Also to do many dog-walks I might otherwise pass off to spouse or dog-walker. But apart from trying harder to remember that vegetables exist (even in winter, in Canada) and staying away from potato chips, I'm not changing how I eat.

There are practical aspects to this choice as well as values-ish ones. Practical being, having a newborn means scarfing down something, and quickly, when time permits. (I have not turned into a different person, so there are not casseroles or bean soups going into my freezer on Sunday nights. But now is not the moment for the David Tanis recipe where use of foraged asparagus is encouraged.) Values more like, I have a daughter, one who for better or worse will not be coming of age on the Upper East Side in the 1990s. Worse perhaps global-politics-wise but in terms of having the option of avoiding thinness-is-everything culture, better, I hope?

It can hard if you grew up in that culture to look at your newly-very-pudgy waistline and not think, this is a problem something must be done about. So I sort of allow myself to think this, but then remind myself that whatever the build is that results from eating normal food and getting some exercise is the one I'm best off having.

-'Invest' in jeans in the size you actually are. Just do it, don't overthink. I resisted doing so at first, both because I believed (correctly) that my build at 3 weeks postpartum or whatever would not continue, and because I figured (incorrectly!) I'd be fine alternating between sweats and leggings indefinitely. Turns out, it does wonders for a sense of normalcy, of resumption of life outside a postpartum haze, to put on some pants - yes, with stretch - that have a zipper.

But... get nice jeans. I don't necessarily mean $200 (a road I personally have yet to go down, now or otherwise), just ones that you genuinely like, and that don't feel temporary. Because who knows! They very well might not be temporary, and you don't want to be aiming for size goals rather than in-shape-ness ones all because you're sick of wearing crummy jeans in your 'just for now' size. I ordered two pairs from Everlane - one in black, inspired by Andréa in "Call My Agent!", and another in dark denim inspired by my need for a pair of regular jeans that can close around the waist - that are so nice that this will be the silver lining if I wind up having to get rid of all my previous pants.

-In-person clothes-shopping is not going to happen. Certainly not if you're carrying your baby in a carrier, or exclusively nursing (which in my experience means you never have more than 2 hours apart from baby, and get antsy after 30 minutes). Or if it does, don't expect to try anything on in the store. Normally I don't do online shopping. I have gotten over this.

-Accessories, always the obvious choice when clothes are for whatever reason complicated. But shoes are tricky because walking around with a baby (in winter, at least) is limiting style-wise even to those who don't normally wear anything all that impractical. (Got a pair of Blundstone boots in the third trimester and am trying to remember that I own other shoes, but the traction they provide on the perma-ice outside is making this difficult.) Bags, same - whatever it is will need to fit some baby-stuff, if not necessarily nearly as much as diaper bags suggest. But I ordered myself a bracelet (this, from Shlomit Ofir), which just arrived, and now feel massively more elegant. Have painted my nails red to go with. And the velvet scrunchies I bought in my last third-trimester outing-of-sorts (tacked onto a trip to the dentist) do liven up a sweatpants look.

Skincare overanalysis overanalyzed

A writer questioned the skincare craze, and Twitter - OK, a good % of the women writers I follow on Twitter, plus a couple of early, quick-take articles backlashing the backlash - let this writer know that she'd been way off. Easy for a young woman (the writer is, apparently, young) to write something like that! And it's sexist to dismiss pursuits just because women enjoy them! And dismissing skincare as evil toxic chemicals is anti-science! Can't anyone have fun?

There were problems with the original piece, most notably the choice to snark at the skin quality of skin-routine-havers. That said, the response - or, rather, the skewed version of it my 34-year-old self was getting - struck me as overshooting the mark. Or maybe not that exactly - more like, the flaws of that specific article segued a bit too easily into a defense of skincare itself. Which... maybe doesn't need defending? Or maybe does? Gah!

To write about skincare (which I've been doing, here and there, for... long enough that my age is showing), you sort of have to situate yourself. If I say I'm meh about skincare, but don't say who I am, I'm a clear-skinned 20-year-old with no stressful life events to speak of. So allow me to gaze in the mirror and offer you a glimpse of My Skin, as of January 30th, 2018:

Now that I'm ancient and live in the arctic, I use a facial moisturizer. It's this one. For soap, this one. I also own, but never remember to use, a foaming face wash from Japan via Markham. I do not - should, but I don't - wear sunscreen in winter, in Toronto, under my giant hat-and-hood combination. In summer, yes - it's a Vichy stick. Because I wear makeup - eyeliner, sometimes mascara, concealer, sometimes that Glossier eyebrow mascara because who am I to judge - I also use eye makeup remover. Which is... it, I think? Where this puts me on the maintenance-ness spectrum isn't so clear.

Why I don't have (much of) a skincare routine is less about having good skin (more on that in a moment) than about having complicated hair. There's only so much time and $$ I'm willing-and-able to throw at looking like the best-looking 34-year-old 5'2" woman I possibly can. I chose hair, or maybe hair chose me. Between a natural hair texture described in countless essays by my fellow Ashkenazi ladies (who rarely mention their ethnicity in these pieces, lest that lead down the sinkhole of discussing what "Jewish" hair can mean, when not all Jewish women have it, I know, I know) and an immature devotion to dyeing my hair all different ways, there's just sort of a lot going on, hair-product-and-equipment-wise, at any given time. That means various conditioners and hair products in rotation, plus a recent trip to a salon to (this is embarrassing) fix the ombré I thought I could do myself but as it turned out, no. (My hair, for the record, isn't orange-tipped anymore.) Plus a hair dryer, hair iron, plus a somewhat-coveted hair-iron brush thingy.

Point being: I'm in zero position to tell other women a) that I'm sure their skin looks just fine, what are they worrying about, or b) that skincare, because I don't personally get much out of it, couldn't possibly be fun. I don't like how I look with unstyled hair. I also enjoy doing my hair! Both! Self-hatred? Self-care? Self-something; I'm quite certain no one else is losing sleep over what my hair is up to.

So it's partly a hair thing, but also... I suppose I do think skincare is - for me - fairly pointless. Not pointless because I have no complaints in that area - other stuff too, but most saliently, I'm 34! and I look 34! and our society demands women look under 25! I do not lead a stress-free existence! - but because I'm not convinced any intervention I could afford, and feel OK with, would do anything other than cause breakouts. I don't doubt that there are interventions that would remove every enumerable feature that makes me look 10 years older than I did 10 years ago - how could I doubt this when half the storefronts in my part of Toronto sell just that service? It's that I'm cynical and am convinced the women whose public personas have them looking flawless from $10 serums may well use those serums but look the way they do for other, more expensive (injectable) reasons.

(If I find I'm looking a bit pale and are-you-feeling-ok, I'm so easy-breezy that I don't use glow-inflecting skincare products... but instead go with the obviously much nobler option of a Charlotte Gainsbourg for NARS Multiple stick. Obviously. And - need this be stated? - if in ten years my home resembles a Shoppers Drug Mart parapharmacie aisle, never mind any of what I just said...)

What gets to me about skincare, then, isn't skincare routines themselves (which, again, I get it, even if I don't get it), but the increasing conflation of this one thing with conventional femininity, and more specifically, with a sort of humility. There's this odd shame in not going in for this, in not treating your skin as an ever-perfectable part of yourself. It's as if, if you're not really into skincare these days, it's because you think you're all that, or, conversely, because you don't value yourself enough to establish once and for all, and on your own face, what exactly is a retinoid.

To which one might say, skincare fans aren't asking others to care if they don't! Which, argh, it's tricky. Yes, it's annoying when non-hobbyists, in any area, make a bit thing about their indifference. But it's also the case that baseline expectations on what normal self-presentation requires can ramp up, and that there's this whole industry demanding that women, well, ramp up. And if the only thing that can be said about skincare routines is that it's rude to insult those who have them - which it is - where does that ramping-up stop?

"The lady at home who watches it"

This is a makeup post. An intentionally subjective one, which maybe more makeup posts should be. It's about two products: one which works for me, one which works, but not for me. In that order.

-Charlotte Gainsbourg Nars Multiple in Jeanette

I will get the embarrassing bit out of the way first: I bought a nearly $40 makeup product named after Jane Birkin. Not as expensive as her namesake handbag, but this still makes me a victim of the Gamine Suggestibility Industrial Complex.

Now, the excuses-excuses part: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin's daughter, as well as the celebrity behind this makeup collection, just happens to look more like me, coloring- and features-wise, at least on paper, as it were, than maybe anyone else whose face has ever been used to promote cosmetics. She also has a personal style in that enviable effortless-Frenchwoman realm, evoking those Parisian and now global boutiques (Sandro, etc.) where ordinary (but chic!) clothing costs ten times what you imagined it possibly could.

And on a more practical note: I'd been looking for a non-sparkly blush, and intrigued by the idea of lip tint, despite never quite figuring out which tint-marketed product would do what "tint" suggests. (I also had bought a different Nars Multiple that turned out to be basically glitter, and thankfully done so within Sephora's zone for returns.) This product is, on my coloring, absolutely correct in both of those functions. If your issue, beauty-wise, is looking washed-out and sickly even when feeling absolutely fine, this is your product.

-Glossier Boy Brow, Brown

I had, as readers know, been apprehensive about entering the Glossier store. It seemed too cool for the likes of me. I've read Into the Gloss basically since it started, and probably visit the site daily, which made visiting its shop this thing. But you know what? It's a store that sells beauty products. It's not showing up at a media office uninvited. (Something I did do in that very neighborhood, actually, en route to a different media office where I was expected, but the elevator didn't go to the floor I needed. Point being, this is a not entirely irrational fear on my part.) Yes, visiting Glossier involves taking an elevator to "penthouse" in a building that seems as if it would have a secret bar, and not a secret millennial-oriented version of a Clinique counter.

I say "secret" but the day I went, at least, there was a woman out front in a pink jumpsuit (think astronaut, not romper) waiting out front, directing in potential customers. The store, or "showroom," was also staffed by young women in that uniform. The space was too busy to be intimidating, and filled - as on some level I realized it would be - with readers of Into the Gloss, as versus the site's cool-girl staff (a couple of whom I did recognize on the street nearby) or the tastemakers who (I think?) get sent these products for free.

I'm reminded of that great line from "30 Rock," where Jenna's saying who would be which character from "Sex and the City." She says she'd be a Samantha, Liz Lemon "the lady at home who watches it."

Anyway, the other ladies at home who watch it (that is, envy-read ITG) were very cool, yes, as well as very... younger than millennial. Which I should not have found surprising, this being a brand that recently came out with a new lip gloss.

The product I was curious about, due both to the zeitgeist and their persuasive marketing campaign, was Boy Brow. The showroom is all-tester (if you like a product, a salesperson gets it for you at the register), and includes disposable tester wands and such, which is very wise, I think, where hygiene is concerned. I'm familiar enough with eyebrow makeup as a concept to know I would need ("need") the brown one, as the thing is to go a shade lighter than your hair, so as to avoid the Uncle Leo look. I put it on and... hmm.

Technically, kudos to the product. It worked, as in, it did what it's supposed to do to eyebrows. It made mine look naturally prominent, and even allowed for some shaping in ways that looked sort of high-fashion editorial. The thing is... I can now say, with confidence, that I look worse with more prominent eyebrows. It also just felt weird. (As would eyeliner or mascara, I'm sure, if you didn't get used to those at a young age.) The moment I was back home, I was swiping those waxy eyebrows with eye makeup remover, returning my eyebrows to their yes weirdly light for my coloring natural state.

I have a theory: I think the dark-bushy-brows thing took off as worn (are brows "worn"?) by women who are otherwise fine-featured (and, often, fair-haired), on whom this one stronger, perhaps sliiiiightly less gender-normative feature (thus, I suppose, "Boy Brow") adds an edge. That is, women who already met society's beauty standards to a T can add (or, in rare cases where this is what nature provides, choose not to remove) A Brow and thus have one of those imperfections that brings about perfection.

As a woman who resembles neither Cara Delevigne nor Natalia Vodianova, but is more (to bring things full circle) Tina Fey- or Charlotte Gainsbourg-like in appearance, thicker eyebrows added nothing. They made me look like a grown-up version of a girl who wants desperately to be allowed to tweeze her eyebrows but isn't permitted to do so by her, I don't know, eyebrow-fundamentalist parents. Yeah, I image-searched Gainsbourg and Fey just now and their brow game is, like mine, non-existent. Which, on them, works just perfectly.

Single-process I think not

-Finally get the haircut that removes the last attempt at hair color experimentation. (Comparable scenario: finally grow out bangs.) Restlessness ensues.

-Think, hmm, your hair doesn't look/feel that much healthier, plus hair "health" isn't even a thing, and your hair is looking sort of meh. Time to shake things up!

-Briefly contemplate a platinum pixie before remembering that you are not in fact Agyness Deyn circa several years ago, while remaining blissfully self-delusional about your non-resemblance to that other same-age hair icon, Alexa Chung, when settling on the more doable alternative inspiration. 

-Locate your long-forgotten Pinterest login information. Pin photos you've just found, only to realize they're repeats of ones you'd put there ages ago. If music tastes are stuck at what you liked at 14, hairstyle ones hover at give-or-take 26. 

-Edit - no, curate - the relevant board, taking care to remove photos where the appeal was probably not a realizable hairstyle, but rather... a very pretty model you'd subconsciously (or consciously!) wouldn't mind looking like, or shampoo-commercial shiny hair of a texture that you don't have now and certainly won't after bleach is involved. 

-Gaze, pleased with your 'accomplishment', at the assembled photos, most of which are (apparently; what else is new) of a Californian lifestyle blogger, who happens to have the hair of your dreams. Vow to suspend disbelief when it comes to your own non-resemblance to said blogger (as would make sense; your lifestyle could not have its own blog), including but not limited to: natural hair color; natural hair texture; tendency of hair, when bleached, to turn orange.

-Put your full trust in the Japanese salon in the Kensington market, the one where you considered getting ombré on a whim, when first visiting Toronto a couple years ago, before you knew that this was a place where you need to book in advance. Wait, with eager anticipation, for your appointment.

T-shirts to blouses: In praise of the micro-makeover UPDATED

When I think of high school, specifically my time in high school, I think of gray t-shirts. V-neck, I believe. This wasn't like Mark Zuckerberg, with a gray-shirt uniform signaling a preoccupation with that which is more important. The gray t-shirt was, for me, a way of projecting invisibility. I wasn't making a thing of wearing gray t-shirts, and didn't only wear that color. It just seemed like the way to be clothed without endorsing a brand or asserting allegiance to a subculture (remember, these were the days when the worst thing ever was to be a poser). The gray t-shirt doesn't impose. It's so unimposing that it can go into the laundry with the whites or the colors. And you have to really try to find one that's expensive, which is another way of saying: they're cheap.

In more recent years - which is to say, I'm talking about items currently in my closet - I found myself intentionally embracing the same gray jersey-material garment. It seemed very Gwyneth Paltrow, or Parisian, or I don't even know, but it seemed not bland but classic, which is always dangerous to think when you're taking your aesthetic inspiration from GOOP, but there you have it. I would pair an Everlane scoopneck one (note the aspirational past tense) with some pale beige or pink nail polish, dark jeans, and ballet flats. A grown-up, sophisticated approach... that allowed me to wear the same boring shirts, but this time with narrow-cut jeans, rather than bootcut, because 2010s vs 2000s. Revolutionary.

(Crucial side note: While I've always owned a button-down or two for interviews and the like, I've never worked anywhere that wasn't gray-t-shirt-compatible, and between grad school and freelancing, have done a lot of work from home. And... maybe you shouldn't teach in gray t-shirts, in the abstract, but you can do things like pair them with black slacks and a fake-pearl necklace from the Kensington Market, or so I've heard.)

And then at some point over the last few months, it occurred to me: shirts. Blouses. I'm worth it! ("Worth" being key, as non-t-shirt shirts involve spending $30-plus rather than capping things at $20 but mainly staying at $10, as well as using the delicates cycle and line-dry approach; haven't quite made it to dry-clean-only.) While the same might not be true of Gwyneth Paltrow, who'd look good in an organic sweet-potato sack, I, at least, look a lot better in something dressier than a drab undershirt. It's the same level of improvement as lipstick or eyeliner. It's... effort. Which - and you wouldn't know it from the headlines - looks better than effortlessness.

I'm still experimenting with exactly which shirt-shirts this will be. In rotation - that is, on the days when I'm walking the walk - are the following:

-A blue long-sleeved Muji button-down with a white Peter Pan collar. Too warm for it now though.
-A white off-the-shoulder 3/4-sleeve from Zara.
-A pale-blue striped and slightly cropped (slightly) off-the-shoulder from Bershka at the mall in Rehovot.
-A sleeveless, also blue-and-white, part-peplum one that (bonus points!) buttons in the back, from Durumi, a Korean-brands boutique here in Toronto.
UPDATE: Forgot one! There's also a sleeveless white linen button-down, from Uniqlo.

As the limited nature of this collection would suggest, I have yet to truly take this plunge. But it's a start.

The "Even though I didn’t do it for weight loss, I dropped about 10 pounds since the start of the diet" era

When it comes to feminism, I'm admittedly a bit all over the place. I can't get myself to care about wedding symbolism, let alone the question of which female celebrities identify as feminist robots as versus as humanist robots. But I'm deeply, deeply opposed to the thing where, if you're a woman (and this impacts men, too, but so much less), you could always be eating better, and you must forever be reminded of this. This is most awful when applied to women who are heavy (because it's always presented as, that the world will end if a woman is fat, which, no). But you maybe see the phenomenon's full evil the most clearly when it gets applied to women who would in no way - not socially, not medically - even plausibly stand to benefit from losing weight, who might actually be worse off skinnier, but who must nevertheless, because Woman, strive to be more toned or balanced or who even knows.

If this were simply about fatphobia, we could condemn it but call it by that relatively limited definition. Instead, it's fatphobia and woman-phobia. It's not just about getting/staying thin, it's about it never being OK for any woman to not think about what she eats. (And by "think about what she eats," I don't mean, Thai or Vietnamese?)

What somehow gets to me the most is the new Empowered genre, which goes beyond This Is Not A Diet diets, and is only deep, deep between the lines about... how it's not OK to just eat whatever. Because... what? Unclear. It's just not. Because Health, presumably, but what if you're feeling fine to begin with? What if there's no reason whatsoever to believe that introducing tremendous food concern into your life wouldn't make you less healthy? How is this possibility inevitably skipped over?

So yes, I'm thinking partly of Cupcakes and Cashmere featuring a nutritionist who's advocating (seriously) a #KonMari approach to diet, where you get rid of all your good socks and then are like, where are my socks?, and then lose 10 pounds. This nutritionist begins with a whole disclaimer about how she's not about smoothies and bowls (which are now a thing in Toronto, despite the snow and general non-SoCal-ness, which is just odd), but about - and aren't they always? - finding ways to get people (women) to be more thoughtful about (to think more about) what they eat. To be more aware. Which is about weight loss, but not necessarily, so it's not supposed to count.

But mainly I'm thinking about Refinery29 featuring a quack dermatologist's diet plan. "'You'll gain incredible radiance, greater contours, decreased puffiness, and higher cheekbones,'" Dr. Quack tells the author, a slim young woman with no perceivable skin concerns. And note that, apart from "radiance," the alleged skin concerns here are all weight concerns. You eat differently, and your face will look different, because you'll lose weight. And what do you think happens? "I glowed, my cheekbones stood at attention, and my clothes fit me a little bit better. For the first time since I started working out, I saw the beginnings of abs definition — something that had eluded me before." Also, "the contours of my face were more defined," notes the author, but surely this isn't any of it about weight, right? "Even though I didn’t do it for weight loss, I dropped about 10 pounds since the start of the diet." Was this woman ten pounds overweight before? Irrelevant - in this arena, the between-the-lines thinner is better still reigns. And we're somehow supposed to not read all the stuff about contours and cheekbones as being about weight. It's about skin tone, about decreasing euphemistic puffiness.

Which just, ugh. If you want to spend up on skincare products, enjoy. They probably won't do anything other than decrease your shoe-shopping budget (we all have priorities), but they won't involve giving up pasta/cheese/coffee/wine/joy for the sake of imperceptible physical changes. It's the diet thing, with its 24/7 attentiveness requirement, that needs to stop.

Classic elegance via glitter nail polish

Taste is meant to evolve. Personal style, I mean. You're supposed to be able to chart, ala Emily from "Cupcakes and Cashmere," how you arrived (by, say, the magical age of 30) at your look - trend-indifferent, of course, but also mature, without being euphemistically mature, which is to say, old.

I'm not sure where I'd fall on all this. I haven't so much evolved towards greater sophistication as wavered closer and further from that end of the spectrum, depending principally on how much of my workday is spent out in the world and how much could be done from, let us say, a couch. And a lot of what I've realized works for me has wound up consisting of old favorites of one sort or another. Which is to say, I end up returning, again and again, to various looks that I liked at ages when I was far too young to have anything like a personal style.

This is especially true when it comes to nail polish. Inspired by put-together women in New York (and elsewhere, obviously; that's just where I was living at the time), I had a grad-school phase of sheer pinks, beiges, etc. And those are fine. (The best of these: Uslu Airlines in YAP, and yes, I see the irony.) But as far as I'm concerned - and whether or not this does anything for my overall look - the ideal shade is navy with subtle glitter. Inspired both by Chanel's discontinued version (Ciel de nuit) and, less glamorously, by Sparkle Crest toothpaste, a childhood favorite that maybe ruins your teeth, but that looked just gorgeous. This seems to be a common-enough obsession, given the number of blog posts dedicated to comparing every navy-with-sparkles polish around (or, in the case of the discontinued ones, no longer around). Which, fair enough - it is the best shade. Why shouldn't others agree?

The admittedly on-and-off quest ended, in New York, when I happened upon some still-available JINsoon Azurite at ABC Home. It's a bit less glittery than I remember the Chanel one being, and seemingly darker and less sparkly than the Essie (which is now, it seems, fully available once more, at least in the States). These are points in its favor - it's basically a classic (as much as blue nail polish ever is) navy with a hint of shimmer, so that you know you've got glitter nail polish on, even if not everyone else does. And the best part? $10. Usually $18, and I'd braced myself for that, but no! Same price as drugstore polish. The DIY results below:

A photo posted by @casa_della_bisou on Dec 29, 2015 at 7:09pm PST

Planting

There's a branch of feminist journalism that involves protesting insecurities that a great many women didn't know they were even supposed to have, thereby introducing new ones into the general population. Exhibit A: "thigh gap," an anxiety I first learned about through articles and blog posts about why women shouldn't be worrying about this. (And yes, how meta, this post is probably adding to the problem.)

Exhibit B: "resting bitch face." This one I had heard of, and that had registered enough that I'd thought, heh, that's me! It seemed like - as Dan Savage might say - a superpower. Yes, it means getting told to smile for years on end, but it probably deflects a whole bunch of irritating interactions. But thanks to the Styles treatment, the idea has now been planted in my insufficiently-grinning head (and who knows how many others'!) that women who don't smile at strangers on the bus for the heck of it are perceived of as older/uglier/masculine, as versus simply... bitchy, which could also be interpreted as snooty or haughty, which, while not ideal, aren't synonyms of unattractive.

To be clear, I don't get the sense at all that the piece's author, Jessica Bennett, is advocating that women go out and get Botox (the cure, apparently). But again, it's this whole planting thing. While squeamishness/cheapness alone would keep me personally from going that route, this is so now going to be a thing, in a way that it probably wasn't and probably didn't need to be.

Thoughts on femininity from news cycles past

Going away for two, but what ended up being more like three, weeks set me behind in the various controversies. Catching up, kind of, but also trying to write-and-move, so it's not the very first priority. In case anyone was wondering where I stand on the issue of the day: Yes, it's brave of Caitlyn Jenner to come out. Yes, she looks great. Yes, it's unfortunate that this is demanded of her. True, few trans women (or, indeed, cis women) have access to her resources in the beautification department. No, she should't be blamed for using said resources. Yes, she's a both a trailblazer and a self-promoting celebrity. No, there are no new angles on this.

Except... all of this does kind of connect to something I'd wanted to write about earlier, regarding Sarah Maslin Nir's two-part series on the horrible conditions behind the scenes at NY nail salons. Atrocious, illegal wages, combined with dangerous working conditions, with some racism in the mix. Amazing reporting (and the translations - brilliant!), but plenty upsetting to read. The series is, happily, making an impact beyond simply causing the well-manicured to experience a twinge of guilt for a week or so, until their polish chips and they've by that point moved on to some other issue.

When a similar (if less persuasive) piece about nail salons appeared in the British press, I'd responded here, wondering, among other things, why these stories must always lead people to conclude that the problem is beautification, or conventional femininity, and not specific health concerns or labor violations.

This came up again in Leonard Lopate's interview with Monona Rossol, who came on to explain that all personal-care products are toxic. Nail polish especially. If you're buying the ones free of specific toxic chemicals, you're actually exposing yourself to even more dangerous untested chemicals. How dangerous, if you're using it at home, near an open window, every week or so? More dangerous than it would be to not use it, which is a non-zero amount, and is nail polish really necessary? Dan Savage has this line about how, when it comes to sex, people often view zero risk as the only acceptable amount, whereas these same people are just fine with skiing, driving, etc. Well, so too with beauty. Conventional femininity is simply unacceptable, and is therefore an inconceivable reason to go to any kind of risk - any kind of trouble, even. Even if salon workers in no way enter into it.

Anyway, where this relates to Caitlyn Jenner is that I'd long thought that progressives kind of got it when transwomen (or gender-non-conforming boys/men) embraced conventional femininity, but were squicked out when cis* girls/women did so, because what possible reason could there be for this apart from submission to the patriarchy/the beauty industry. Not so! It's apparently a problem (see: the entire internet) that Jenner's preferred version of womanhood for a magazine cover is different from how an avant-garde poet might look while grocery shopping at Zabars. What amount of conventional femininity would have been acceptable? Eyeliner? But a woman not in eyeliner is still a woman, so why expose yourself to toxic eyeliner chemicals and fund the rapacious eyeliner companies, when you could have just left your eyes unlined and still be every bit as female? Would it have been better if Jenner had presented looking just as she had prior to her transition, but come out with a bold statement about how what matters is that she identifies as a woman, and there's no set requirement for what a woman must look like?

But back to Lopate. Rossol included this digression about her own nails, which (the radio listener will have to trust) go unpainted. She then remarked, "You've got time to write books if you don't fix your nails!" And... if you do paint your nails, you don't?

Which, in turn, brings me to Lauren Maas's excellent Into The Gloss post about female artists and makeup. It's very much in keeping with the Susan Sontag shopped at Sephora news from a while back. It seems that it's possible to produce Great Work and not to present as masculine. Who knew?

Now, I'll provide the necessary caveat about how, if women didn't have to primp, we'd have more time for other things. That's not so far off. But this seems more relevant when it comes to things like dieting (which requires an every-waking-moment weight-think) than things like painting your nails.

*Necessary update!

Frizz in the land of the frisør

More substantive posts to come, but in the mean time, here's what you're getting:

I know one shouldn't care about things like this. And normally, in my older-end-of-Millenial adulthood, I do not. But my hair looked awful the entire time I was in Norway. Which is, again, a stupid complaint - I was in Norway! In Scandinavia for the first time ever! It was gorgeous! There were fjords and mountain goats! But somehow appreciating the rest didn't stop me from caring about this.

And in fairness, my hair did look unusually terrible. What happened was, not checking bags plus packing light more generally meant that rather than the usual set-up (the right shampoo, conditioner, hair oil, and then, if feeling decadent, hair iron), I was using a "normal"-hair-oriented 2-in-1 that the CVS in town happened to have in travel-size; a very old container of Frizz-Ease, a product that for whatever reason stopped working for me a few years ago; and the occasional hotel blowdryer. Then, on top of that, there was the weather - the daily rain that would stop every so often, but there was always just enough mist that whatever smoothed-out or vaguely ringlet-ish situation I'd achieved (mid-century starlet waves, for the occasional fleeting moment) turned into frizz. And by frizz I don't mean curliness, kinkiness, or any other hair texture one might Embrace. I mean the classically middle-school result of using the wrong hair products for one's hair texture. The last time my hair had looked this terrible was probably when I was 12.

What didn't help matters was that the women of Norway didn't appear to have this problem. Around me, as my hair grew frizzier and frizzier, packs of Norwegians would pass by with long, glossy, hair-commercial hair. Because our society so often defines beauty as Scandinavian-looking-ness, I suppose, the percent of women who resembled supermodels beyond just hair was substantial. Or maybe just felt substantial, because I was so keenly aware that my own hair wasn't having its finest hour, and was selectively not noticing the women who weren't Uma Thurman to my Janeane Garofalo. That said, in Bergen there was this amazing poster I should have taken a picture of, in front of a hair salon, with a photo of the same young blonde model, a Before and an After. The Before showed her with long, straight Marcia Brady hair, and the After with a light-haired version of what my hair was looking like on the slightly-less-misty moments of the trip.

Surf, turf

Hadley Freeman brings our attention to a lip gloss named "Underage." Should we protest? Perhaps, but in the U.S. (where, it sounds like, this product is mainly being sold), underage can refer to a 20-year-old, too young to go to a bar legally but otherwise an adult. It's not necessarily Roman Polanski territory, but it's also not necessarily not that.

I'm thinking the name, though, is less about helping grown women (if, indeed, that's who buys lip gloss) resemble the 15-year-olds that pop-evo-psych-type men claim are the only "women" worth looking at (search WWPD for "Derbyshire" to see what I mean), and more about tapping into a less directly sexual fantasy: that one will be carded. And the threshold for that is probably more like 25 or 30 - anyone who could plausibly be under 21. As such, "Underage" is evil only insofar as the entire beauty industry is guilty of tapping into/inventing the desire to be a young-but-adult woman forever.

While denouncing lip-gloss labeling is one strategy, a more effective approach to dealing with the obsession with female youth-and-beauty might be to acknowledge that youth is associated with beauty in men as well. Or, at least, not to perpetuate the myth - as Stella Grey does - that women are somehow nobly immune to appreciating the beauty of beautiful younger men:

There seems to be a gender imbalance, vis-a-vis the packaging thing. All the women I know are tolerant of middle age showing itself in a chap. We quite like a late flowering, in fact: the silvering, the smile lines, the coming of bodily sturdiness. We read these as signs that life has been lived and enjoyed. We read them as indicators of substance, of being substantial. In general, men don’t seem to grant us the same courtesy, at least not the men I meet online. They are highly focused on the packaging. It’s disheartening.

Later in the piece, Grey (a pseudonym) specifically refutes the idea that she'd check out 25-year-old men. (25, not underage, even by car-rental standards.) These men, she recalls telling someone, "'have mothers of my age, so it’d be like randily pursuing the children of your friends.'" And, I mean, I'll take her word for this - I'm sure there exist, in the world, heterosexual women who could see a pack of surfer guys walk by in the outfit they wear here, consisting of a half-unzipped wetsuit, tight pants on the bottom, chiseled shirtless torso on top, and not notice.

In all seriousness, I think it's more a case of, women are socialized to deny noticing the surfers (or the London-or-wherever equivalent), while men are socialized not only to admit to noticing, but to pursue equivalent women, regardless of their own age (or surfing ability).

A better situation might be to accept the noticing for the gender-neutral near-universal that it is, while urging friends of both sexes to be realistic about who will date them, and whom they'll have anything in common with. And the way to get there would be to stop with the (pardon my jargon) patriarchy-affirming insistence that women are actually more inclined to ogle a man the less he resembles an underwear model.

"Nuts, how many in one serving?"

Elle addresses a topic new to women's magazines: what is it, exactly, that's "making us all fat"? Who exactly is meant by this first-person-plural isn't clear - the accompanying photos (of models, of the author) show slender women. Are we really all fat? In womensmagazineland (and Elle is usually the best of the bunch!), yes, we really are all fat. All of us are works in progress, in need of some kind of cleanse or lifestyle change or euphemistic improvement. Or so it was - the pendulum seems to have swung, and we're no longer in euphemism territory. We're back where we started, with already-slim women shaming one another for having not chucked entire food groups. Women's mags, too, have joined the backlash against PC, and are now back to triggering disordered eating through a more direct approach.

Two things jumped out at me about the piece. The first was the title (or maybe just the Twitter title, Twitter being where I found it), which had something to do with "green juice," which is apparently making all of us fat. Even those of us who still haven't gotten around to trying it. The strip mall with the Japanese supermarket and Trader Joe's won out as today's excursion. But I shouldn't get complacent; sushi is also making us fat. And bagels, although that's not going to surprise anyone who's ever come across an article of this genre before.

Actually, Justine Harman's framing of this piece - which is an interview with a lecturer in This Is Why You're Fat Studies - is brilliant. The gist of it is that all of the "Cleaneatalian" foods are - paradoxically - the ones that are making us fat. Skim lattes, green juice, and almonds - almonds! - are the problem. (Typing this reminded me of some almonds a few feet away; they're now at hand. Said almonds are at this very moment in the process of making me fat.) Of course, what sort of "problem" are we talking about? The article's aimed at the kind of woman who is not, in fact, fat. Or it's aimed at flattering the reader into thinking she's already slim but could be thinner still. It's not (just), in other words, a service-journalism piece alerting readers that the proverbial lowfat Snackwells are actually more fattening than fruit, especially if you respond to the reassuring packaging by eating the entire package. It's more along the lines of, you think you're doing everything? You're not - there's more.

Which brings us to the other thing that jumped out: Harman describes the diet-peddler she's interviewing as "the kind of glowing brunette you might see shopping at Whole Foods in lightweight cashmere while you're wearing your linty Lulus and snacking on Snapea Crisps." This is some of the most impeccable lifestyle writing I've ever seen. Harman managed to make wearing Lululemon to Whole Foods sound shabby.

French Jews, French tips UPDATED

-Have questions about French Jewry? I have thoughts. A short version, and a long one; a mid-length one is in the works. Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, an obscure research topic proves to have broader significance once in however-many news cycles.

-And back to your regularly-scheduled deep thoughts: Philip Galanes seems awfully confident "that hair dye and eighth grade do not mix." He OKs dress-up that involves a wig, but tells a letter-writer to turn his or her 13-year-old daughter's interest in going blonde into a discussion "about depictions of women in society."

I know it's very much the thing to be outraged whenever girls' parents allow them to express traditional femininity, and all self-expression-through-appearance apparently counts as such. We're supposed to lament the era when gender roles and the desire to primp and all that sort of thing managed to hold off until 16 (or 30?). When young boys and girls alike played in the dirt, explored in the woods, built those proverbial forts that so epitomize the ideal childhood. Why can't kids just be kids?

(I see that I repeat myself, but I really do think part of this is the concept of "virgin hair" - as if something sexual and adult happens when hair color is changed. Which... no. It's just hair, and however you dye it, it grows back your natural color.)

While I do see the skepticism surrounding a world in which young children feel entitled to expensive beauty treatments (and professional hair dye, at least, is a splurge, she writes, having just splurged on some), eighth grade seems exactly the right time to be experimenting with at-home Manic Panic, weird nail polish, etc. If not then, when? There's this brief blip of time when you're old enough to want to do such things, but too young to need to look office-appropriate.

Maybe, then, the issue is helicopter parenting. It seems inconceivable today - but didn't in my day - that kids might be bleaching or dyeing their hair unsupervised. These days it would almost have to be at a salon. And salon means the resulting look will be a tasteful, pretty look rather than the kind a 13-year-old could very well have in mind.

UPDATE

Re: helicopter parenting, there's quite the thread here, of commenters recalling their own "free range" childhoods. (So. Many. Forts.) What's frustrating about the comments is that they're each one presented as scrappiness oneupmanship, rather than as examples of how life just was, quite recently. ('My mother let me blow-torch the creme brulee as a toddler!' 'Oh yeah! Mine let me ride a motorcycle without a helmet while in utero!' I paraphrase but slightly.)

There's a huge divide, but it's not about seatbelts or curfews. It's not about today's parents being more fearful than earlier ones. It's about smartphones. It used to be impossible for parents to know what their kids were up to much of the time - even the kids whose parents tried to construct a panopticon out of guilt. Today, everything's documented, and everyone can be in touch at all times. It's become irresponsible not to use one of these devices. A constantly-monitored childhood was always the fantasy of some parents (we all had those classmates...), but is now the default.

"Seriously Spoiled on Long Island"

-Clickbait, outrage-bait, I should not be reading this, let alone the comments, where I of course began...

-Congratulations, parents who think hiking and volunteering are better activities for children. You have cultural capital that the spa families do not. This is not some sort of glimpse at the One Percent, nor even necessarily the richer 50%. You're not scrappier than these people, you just have better (that is, more upscale) taste. (See this exchange.)

-If a French woman explains that she learned as a young girl how to apply eye cream, or if a Korean woman speaks of having learned a 12-step skincare routine while still a child, it's this beautiful thing, and we the American women who used only Dial soap until college are to gasp in awe. But if this is 'merican girls getting facials, clearly the apocalypse has come. I'm with the commenter who says that this spa thing is at least better than parties for kids to go shoot guns.

-Referenced in the article: "Seriously Spoiled on Long Island." OK, technically the place is on Long Island, and called Seriously Spoiled. But still. If there were a "Seriously Spoiled in New Jersey," I might have to investigate.

-Maybe if all of these parents pooled the money that goes to spa treatments for children too young to know what they are (note: I'm 31 and not exactly sure what happens at a spa), those funds could go towards something noble, like trips to the hair salon for adult women who'd look a bit... refreshed if they actually went to the hair salon? Because that's much of what's at the root of the outrage, right? It's frustrating when young children go to a spa, or wear designer clothes, etc., and we may say that the kids are being spoiled, when actual spoiling is more about giving kids the things they ask for (which can, according to the article, be a spa day, so perhaps...). The issue is more that these are things adult women need to budget for, and it feels wasted on children too young to appreciate it.

-If the NYT Style section ever finds out how much Bisou's grooming costs, I'm screwed.

Reading materials

-I'm halfway-ish through Women in Clothes. I figured I'd better read it after I was lent it by one person and then given it by another. It is, in principle, a book I should love. And I do very much like it. The idea behind it is to examine how women feel about their self-presentation - to treat clothing as a serious undertaking. It's a window into class, body image, gender, self-esteem, everything. It's all the guilty-pleasure voyeuristic enjoyment of Into The Gloss, but you're reading a book. Also ITG-esque: there was this one essay that I kept alternating between thinking was the most pretentious, too-cool-for-school thing I'd ever read, and finding endlessly compelling and inspirational.

The drawback to the book's approach is that it almost by necessity excludes the frivolous or generic. There's a lot about nostalgic relationships to mothers' wardrobes and gender as performance, but nothing (thus far) that gets into the head of the girls I saw in Penn Station yesterday in a North Face fleece and Lululemon headband uniform. There's a section - very cool visually - with photos of women's hands, to show their rings (or lack thereof), and oddly enough, no one's fiancé went to Jared. Poverty is acknowledged (Cambodian garment workers; broke writers) but ordinary tastes are (thus far) absent.

The closest (again, thus far) I've seen to a blunt, not-at-all-earnest-or-signaling entry was the one that just documents a woman's e-commerce browsing, site by site, item by item. It feels real, but also demonstrates the challenges of turning the real into the readable.

The book somehow evokes - for me at least - a certain kind of Cobble Hill woman, chic but intellectual, New Brooklyn but more polished than hipster, 30-something rather than 20-something. Maybe it's all the references to clogs and literary readings? Of course, perhaps the second half of the book ventures into mall-ier territory...

-Yesterday I came across a newsstand full of free issues of the latest Chopsticks NY. "Home cooking issue," reads the cover, "with 12 comfort food recipes." Oh! "Let's Cook At Home with Japanese Ingredients," suggests page 9, and they had me at hello. Yes, the magazine is ads, but it's ads for basically everything Japanese in the New York area, and is full of incredibly useful information. I now know about several more Japanese supermarkets in New York and New Jersey, and a Japanese kitchenware store in Long Island City that - unlike it's Manhattan equivalent - has some weekend hours.

-Take a moment to process this, from Marisa Meltzer's Styles article about shampoo alternatives:

The once-odd idea of using cleansing conditioners (they clean but don’t foam) as a substitute for shampoo became increasingly in vogue in the last year. 

“It comes out of the new insight that shampooing every day is not for all consumers, especially those with curly, kinky, wavy hair or color-treated or processed hair that might be more susceptible to damage,” said Ron Robinson, an independent cosmetic chemist and founder of beautystat­.com.

Yes - the standard for haircare has for far too long been based on what works for one hair type. Perhaps the time has finally come to question whether the women who achieve shiny hair by washing their hair daily (but can air-dry) are actually lower-maintenance than those who only need shampoo once a week (if that) but do require heat-styling or products of some sort to reach the same goal.

But I'm not convinced that the answer is daily hair-washing with some other product that isn't, but probably costs more than, shampoo. If "forgoing shampoo in this sweaty SoulCycle era is simply not an option," perhaps the more stylish (and frugal) alternative is taking advantage of the cold weather and running outside, something that's safe and easy to do in the kinds of locales where SoulCycles tend to have branches.

King for a day

When I checked out ITG yesterday, I noticed that the "Top Shelf" profile recipient was wearing the very same t-shirt that I was. The similarity, alas, ended there.

Did that stop me from briefly wondering if perhaps I should style my t-shirt with, if not ripped black jeans (I don't have any ripped pants - as far as I know - and have no plans to rip any), then maybe my regular black jeans, before the part of my brain that remembers models are people paid to make outfits look good kicked back in. There's a rational part of me that understands full well that the difference between me and model-turned-actress Jaime King is not, in fact, that I'd paired my white pocket tee with intact navy corduroys. But there was still that glimmer of a moment when I honestly considered basing my styling choices off hers (or those of whoever styled her for this).

I guess the hope with these Top Shelf profiles, if they are in fact selling something (if I understood the exact mechanism, I'd be a more marketably-skilled individual than I am), is that you see that King's "approach to skincare is to always wash your face before bed, even if you don’t want to," and figure (with the non-skeptical part of your brain) that the difference between your face and King's is that she's better about nighttime face-washing. The idea is to be so swept up in the narrative that when you get to the part where she endorses a $300 "‘Skin Caviar’ Luxe Sleep Mask," or a $70 concealer, you'll think, aha, that's why she looks like so, and if you follow suit, some of that perfection will transfer to you.

But it's not even about wanting to look like a different person. It's not even coming from a place of low self-esteem, exactly - it's more that you mistake 'that woman looks nice' with 'that purchasable thing looks good on that woman.' The more unattractive the thing being sold, perhaps the more beautiful the woman needed to sell the thing. Thus all those ads with Olivia Wilde in brightly-colored eye makeup that even she can't quite pull off.

Highlights

As something of a writing experiment, I decided to write quickly and succinctly about something I'd only ever tried to write about at length. I can already feel that I'm going to have missed some key point, perhaps a really key one that will mean that I've come across as saying the very opposite of what I meant. I feel that so deeply that I read the first-thus-far Twitter mention of this, my latest Dish guest-post, and assumed I was being called WRONG, when upon an extra second's reflection, it seems more likely this was someone agreeing with me.

In other news, I had a dream recently that I'd gotten highlights. Not something I'd done or seriously considered doing since I was, I think, 13, but in my dream they looked fabulous.

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.

Too beautiful to model?

That underwear chain in no need of further promotion, and thus that shall not be named, is not a seductive store. Not in the way that a posh underwear shop can be, where you summon the courage, go in, and think, damn, that's a gorgeous $150 bra, and leave empty-handed (or, worse, with a $90 bra that will have seemed reasonable by comparison). My memory of the chain from high school or thereabouts is that they had good deals on utilitarian cotton underwear if you bought in bulk.

Despite giving this brand no thought whatsoever in ages, despite not visiting its website, I've somehow not managed to avoid multiple news items about how the store is having its annual fashion show, complete with image upon image of the women marketers want us to think are the most beautiful alive. Alas, the marketers may be onto something. I may need to rethink some of my Twitter follows, but there it is.

The overt sexiness of their marketing strategy - famously... appreciated by Borat in the beginning of that movie - has always seemed odd to me. Why cater to the male gaze when selling underwear to women? I mean, why cater so directly to it? Yes, many women past the five-for-$20 life stage want to look good, in their underwear, for men. But why scour the world to find the handful of women who'd manage to inspire both male lust and female insecurity? The women whose looks hit that magic point between porn star and high-fashion model? The women about whom no one, of any gender or sexual orientation, is going to fail to categorize as ridiculously good-looking? Who are so flawless as to be beyond aspirational? Do men really buy enough women's underwear (for whatever purpose) to make that worthwhile? (The company's Wikipedia page says no, but apparently the idea had been to sell women's underwear directly to men.)

Because there's a threshold, right? An attractive model makes you think you'll look more attractive in whichever item. Thus... models. Thus all the unflattering clothes womankind has purchased because they looked good on a personal-style blogger or it-girl. But past a certain point, if you're noticing the model and not the underwear, how can that sell anything?

Or maybe this is more a shopping question than a self-esteem one, at least for those of us who've largely aged out of such concerns. It's easy to suspect that having models that attractive is about distracting from the crappiness of the clothes. That, and it would seem that what you're paying for when purchasing a $50 bra of $20-bra quality is for the company to hire models whose pay grade is far above that of the nicely-built girl-next-door. It's not that other brands don't find other ways to rip off customers. This just happens to be one of the more obvious ones.