elemental

Most adults I know don't like to wear yellow gold. It's quite a polarising colour. Is it an elegance thing? Is yellow too loud, colourful and trashy? Is silver more tasteful? I personally am attracted to anything shiny and sparkly, and gold tends to sparkle more.

I also don't have an issue with mixing metals, which I know a lot of people do. Life's too short to care that the silver buckles on your shoes clash with your gold earrings and the brass zip on your bag.

But to me, the important thing is balance. It's difficult to articulate because it's quite a visual and often instinctive thing, but sometimes the colours just feel wrong. Those last five words took about ten minutes to type, no joke. I was typing then backspacing then typing then backspacing, trying to think of specific examples, then trying to come up with a general rule, which just serves to prove that I would never make a very good fashion writer. Anyway. It's just nice to have options. A gold watch you can swap the silver one out for if it 'feels wrong'. Multiple bags and shoes with different buckles. I'm all good on that front. My wardrobe is plentiful. Like I said, I don't discriminate.

On the jewellery front, I had a gap. A long silver necklace shaped hole in my life. This christmas I finally caved after lusting after a gold necklace with my initial on it since I first saw it approximately three years ago. I was (and still am) in love. My mum couldn't understand why I was so desperate for a new necklace when I had just bought this one. But accessories aren't boyfriends. I also just bought a pair of heels after obsessing over the heel issue for even longer, and I'm already feeling a flat-shaped hole in my life too.

In a moment of shopping serendipity a beautiful but overpriced necklace was reduced by 75% and I grabbed it. My friend loved it too. I felt bad that I was taking away something so beautiful from her life. So I proposed we get friendship necklaces. Only, she likes her jewellery as loud as possible. She got the gold version.

It feels ironic that in a post where I struggled more than ever to say what I wanted to, and ended up rambling on for quite a while to manage it, I could have just said everything I wanted to with some photos. So for those of you who don't like reading (in which case I've just realised you'll never get to read this), the above post in pictures:

My cork noticeboard is meant to be for important pieces of paper, but it seems to have been invaded by necklaces and a huge map of Snowdonia.

problem?

Today, while adding my newest purchase to the nail polish box, I decided it would be fun examine its contents and to count all my polishes.

My first reaction was wondering if maybe I had a problem. I decided that I did. But the definition of this problem evolved from

I have far too many nail polishes

to

They're all the same colour! I have two true reds, two dark reds, two pastel purples, two greys and two hot pinks. Why?

to

Most of them are probably/maybe dried out anyway

to

I don't have any deep pinks, or light blues, or dark greens, or polish with a crackle effect. I need to buy more nail polish.

Yeah, I think we need to go back to problem number one.

EDIT: so after I posted this photo, I realised there were two more polishes that weren't in the nail polish box but the make-up box. THERE MAY BE MORE.

EDIT EDIT: weird that it happens to be a blog post about nail polish that has inspired so much thought, anyway, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and came across this post from 2008. Back in the day when I thought I had an impressive collection. Oh, the innocence.

painful gain?

A couple of months ago, after a particularly rough night out, I woke up on Sunday morning and decided to stop drinking. That following Friday, however, I was invited to a pretty fancy party. I had nothing to wear and I was trying to resist the temptations of liquor. But then I found a nice shimmery gold dress in a local boutique and so I did my hair, put on my make-up and decided to go. Then it was time to choose the shoes. This part was not difficult. I only had one pair of heels, and this outfit and venue demanded heels.

So I wore my gold dress with sparkly blue heels. No-one looks at your feet anyway, right?

Maybe so, but my feet were the only thing on my mind that night as I danced away, alcohol-free, and the pain in my feet steadily grew worse and worse. Here's a few things I learnt that evening:

1) Dancing in heels hurts when your nerve endings are not numbed by alcohol.
2) Drunk people do not have the courtesy to avoid stepping on your toes.
3) Drunk people are not funny when you are sober.
4) The ground is actually really cold if you try to walk home shoeless in October, sober.

After that night, two things happened:

1) I stopped wearing heels.
2) I started drinking again.

So for the past few months I have been stomping around in boots and brogues, happily dancing away while still painfully conscious that this outfit would look a lot better with heels. I have spent hours scouring internet websites and sale racks for a suitable pair, but with feet that hate heels as much as mine, yet a mind with a taste for spindly stilettos, this search has been fruitless.

Finally, I found the perfect pair. They were approximately double my budget, and they were in the sale. But they were also beautiful and I bought them. The shoe gods must have been getting fed up of my unladylike footwear, because they blessed me with a sales lady who is not very good at mathematics, and further reduced the shoes' price.

I love them. And they are called 'Carbonara'. Be still, my beating heart.



There's just a slight problem. A problem entitled 'the bunion and extra half size of my left foot'. A problem which squishes and cramps my abnormally long left toes. But, I've done my research, and the luxuriously soft leather of these shoes seems perfectly suited to a shoe-stretching spray. I could also use the spray on the slightly too small toebox of my other beautiful left shoe. If that doesn't work, I will fill myself up with some vodka and brave the pain.

pretentiosity

Being pretentious is a bit of a catch-22 sometimes, isn't it?

The word itself implies an act, a false face, pretending to be something you are not. So can you even be pretentious if you hold your hands up and admit it? Because I am self-aware enough to recognise I bear a worrying number of symptoms of the typical pretentious student. I have the tortoiseshell frame glasses, am off to do an English degree next year, but not before a holiday around Europe on trains through cities with cultural landmarks but more importantly lots of bars. For god's sake, I even bought a tweed elbow-patched blazer the other week, and THAT wasn't enough. I had to replace the existing buttons with gold buttons too (top left).


But I think the final straw came last week when I went to pick up the developed photos from my disposable camera last weekend. Yes, an old school Kodak disposable. The first half of the photos are from my recent holiday to Istanbul. I could always plead the excuse that I forgot my digital camera, but I won't deny that I took secret joy in trying to get arty angles of the authentic side of the city - no cheesy posing in front of buildings for me!


I want the protests, the noise, the unposed passersby (except for when they get in the way of my carefully composed portraits). I want the multi-layered landscape.


That's until I got bored half-way through the film and forgot about the camera, until New Years Eve. The next half of the film is a sequence of drunkards pulling more and more stupid faces while dancing to hideous noise. But it's all OK, because our New Year's Resolution is to read Ulysses.

shameless

I have lots of exciting new acquisitions which I want to share with you all, but that will have to wait as today I am going to be a bit shameless.

In order to make room for my new stuff, I have decided to not only clear out as I do periodically anyway, but also try to sell my old stuff for the first time. Who knows how it will go as I am totally inexperienced in this field. Anyway, I currently have a dress up for sale which I love love love and posted about on one occasion on this blog, but have never worn. I am probably going to add a couple of bags and bits and bobs over the next few days so I'll let you know if I do. But please have a look at my current listing because I have this fear that it is just going to lay there buried under all the other shiny and professional listings by hardcore ebayers.

CLICK HERE



Update:

click HERE too! And here and here and here.