Self-confessed.

There are many people who believe that if they acknowledge a fault, a flaw in their character, then it's all OK. I'm one of them. I have in the past confessed to my hypocrisies and even claimed that they are unavoidable...

1. One contradiction that I have recently noticed is in my beliefs about tanning. Having naturally very pale skin, and hating the sun, I have always been in the 'pale and interesting' camp. Self-tan? Tanning booth? Tights or leggings to protect people from the 'blinding whiteness of my legs'? No way! It's stupid, can lead to skin cancer and in my opinion a tan doesn't look that great anyway.

But it truly, truly bugs me when people comment on it: 'you're so white!' or 'you've just come back from holiday and you're just as pale as before!' or, even worse, that incessant fussing which teachers are so prone to, ensuring that I'm wearing sun-block to prevent burning. So when I realised how I had a very pronounced tan line from where I was wearing my watch, I felt disproportionately happy. I'd proved all those doubters wrong! I can tan without burning, I just choose not to!*

2. Perhaps less ridiculous are my confused ideas about animals; I know I'm not the only one who is neither a staunch PETA supporting vegan nor a Tory country girl who enjoys hunting and has rosy red cheeks. Recently I have become a vegetarian (pescetarian to be precise; another hypocrisy, I know...) but I still enjoy wearing the plenty of leather garments I own and continue to buy. And I've had a serious fixation on the perfect fur coat to last a lifetime, but somehow I feel wrong about real fur (see?? Contradiction!) so I'm hoping to find the perfect faux fur. How fantastic do these women look in their fur adornments? (from top: Greta Garbo, Anna Friel in Me Without You, Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums, Kate Moss and Bosworth at random sleb events)

And I don't particularly love animals either; some dogs and ginger cats are cute, but you'll never find me stroking a cow. So the only way I can justify myself is that I don't mind killing or wearing them, it's just eating dead things I have a problem with. Anyway, isn't it pretty?

*you don't know how tempted I was to put up a picture of my tan line, before realising just how ridiculous the idea was.

Bargain Hunter

I may not mind spending a little more for something I love, but never let it be said that I don't try to get something at the lowest price. Maybe it's the middle-eastern blood in me but I'm always bargaining when I buy something at a market. So I was absolutely delighted to find The Laden Showroom on Brick Lane, which I'd visited a long time ago but couldn't remember its location.
I wouldn't call them cheap; I managed to spend £45 on one beautiful yellow dress, but they're definitely bargainous. As a showroom, they sell lots of different concessions and (shopping obsessive that I am) I recognised loads of the clothes that Topshop sell in their Oxford Circus branch on the bottom floor. A trench-coat which will cost you £85 at Topshop was selling for just over £50. I recognised a whole bunch of Orion cardigans (like this one on ebay) which I once got in the Topshop sale for £20 but which now retail at £50 - at The Laden Showroom they're £30, not in sale.

The best bit? As soon as I bought my dress and went into the boutique opposite, there it was (in a different colourway) selling for £10 more!

Judging a book by its cover

A while ago, I was in a book shop and I saw a row of the most beautiful Agatha Christie novels. Now, I do dearly love Ms Christie, and her ingenious plots never fail to delight me. However in average her stories take me no more than a day to read, and with the surprise at the end being the key ingredient of a Christie novel, I rarely reread them. Even so, these book covers were so beautiful, and complemented each other so perfectly, that for one second, I was tempted to buy them anyway.

Such is the power of a good book cover. Whilst a bad cover will very rarely put me off a book I want to read (except when the cover is an image of a female body part; it's screamed to me 'unoriginal chiclit' ever since reading this article), a book with a beautiful cover is powerfully alluring, often irrestistable. A hardback book may seem like a waste of money, even cumbersome when you want to carry your book around but it adds a specialness to it, especially when it was a gift. For my birthday, I received this stunning anthology of poems; anthologies are the perfect candidates for special book covers because you're not likely to want to read a couple of poems on the tube.

In fact, browsing the page on the Penguin website for inspirational gifts, I want to immediately buy every single over-priced box set - NOW!

SCHEDULED

Note: if this scheduling business is going to work I'm going to have to improve, I accidentally made the post date and time for this 07/07/08, thus banishing it to blog history and then amended the date, only then it came up so I had to delete it and copy and paste the text onto a new post...

Although I don't look it, with my pale eyes, skin and red hair, practically the whole of my maternal family tree is from Turkey, which is where I'm headed off to today (there was a little clue about that in my anklet here - which subsequently broke). Anyway, I'll probably write plenty about Turkey when I get back; contrary to some Western notions about the Middle-East being a bunch of philistines there is a wealth of great art and fashion, which I often indulge in and return with practically a whole new wardrobe.

I have already said that I have scheduled a handful of posts to pop up whilst I am away for a couple of weeks but it has been quite difficult to write posts which are not immediately relevant, and I have not had much time for lots and lots of writing (although in fact this post itself is scheduled!) so right now I don't have enough for one every day. Of course I am sure no readers would mind since there are so many wonderful websites to read every day but being the freak that I am, I hate disturbing the symmetry of the posting. Sadly this has already happened because of the posting irregularities; writing at all hours, 4 posts some days, none other days and my blog archive count certainly isn't even.

Oh well! I just thought I'd make a notification of my commenting absence and ask you to continue making contributions to my posts so that I can read them when I get back, or even if have a couple of bored minutes whilst I'm away. xxx

Beauty Transcends Language?

Ever since I was little, I've always been obsessed with language, reading everything from Roald Dahl to cereal boxes; I cannot resist reading food packaging.

And when I get a magazine, I spend the majority of my time reading the articles, the information about the clothes, the editor's introduction. Pictures are pretty, but language is far more engaging for me.

However one of my lovely friends got me a copy of this this month's Italian Vogue, 'ago'. Italian Vogue is said to be one of the best Vogues, more ground-breaking as its recent sell-out all-black issue shows, and more fiercely stylish.


So I shall do my best to enjoy this thoughtful gift and allow beauty to transcend language. Besides, I have noticed that foign magazines contain a lot of English headings in comparison to English foreign content...

PS apologies for recent spurt of short posting; I have been caught up in last minute holiday preparation frenzies and reasoned that short posts is better than none at all, especially since for the next couple of weeks posts will be less frequent (scheduled for every couple of days)

Movie Magic in 30 seconds

Sometimes I do wonder if I spend too much time watching films (and then try to rationalise it by saying that at least they're good films). Today I thought maybe I should write about two good films I have enjoyed recently, or maybe consider why I enjoy them so much.

Instead, I am going to introduce you to 30-second Bunnies Theatre, where you can guiltlessly watch all the old classics, in approximately 30 seconds each (some are a little longer).

www.angryalien.com


Try to stick to the films you've seen, otherwise they might just be ruined for you. And if you've seen them, I'd strongly recommend The Big Chill and Brokeback Mountain - bunny version (although the real versions are great too)

Makeover

I do love seeing before and afters. Clothes, before and after altering. Celebrities, before and after airbrushing. Regular people, before and after a whole lot of plastic surgery. I love those little makeover montages in films and Andy's makover totally makes The Devil Wears Prada for me. No, I don't have some weird obsession with altering my own physical appearance which manifests in before and afters, I simply love marvelling at how you can take the most mundane, even ugly, and bring out its 'beauty' (or, in some cases, completely ruin it! But that's part of the fun, the fact that makeovers are such a delicate process).

Anyway, when I started this webpage a couple of months ago I wanted a really neutral and simple design; the colour scheme is co-ordinated, the layout obsessively neat and there is a clinical lack of adornment which I so detest (glittery myspace page anyone?). I was trying to go for a sophisticated look, but also I lack any talent in graphic design and also suffer from chronic perfectionistism. So choosing a name was torture and now I've come to realise that prettyfaceshelpinraces is a little rubbish, but I knew I'd hate whichever name I choose and decided that it was vaguely relevant. But there was no way I could choose a suitable picture for the blog's header that would perfectly encapsulate its essence. So it's remained bare. And now I hand it to you.

I reckon any person who can turn on a computer and definitely everyone of my lovely readers could come up with a better blog design than I could. It would probably be easier for them if they had a blogger account so could see the colour schemes etc, but blogger isn't exactly rocket science. So I'm asking you for help! if y have any ideas for a more interesting yet unglittery colour scheme (although I'm not ruling out any glitz!), a nice font to tie in... hyperlink colour, a pretty header, so on and so forth... leave me a comment or e-mail me at aprettyface.blog@gmail.com and I'd be absolutely delighted! If I love your suggestion and decide to use it, after a month or so of tortuous indecisiveness I will totally implement it. Look, I've even made a pretty (?!?) little badge with my great graphics design skills for you which you can put up on your blog if you have one, as a sign of your fabulousness.

The Secret of Happiness

I spend a lot of my ‘thinking’ time pondering the nature of happiness. In my opinion, happiness is the single best thing any of us could wish for and it comes above anything else. However I think many people would agree with that statement and when I think about happiness, my questions go much further.

I think it’s nigh on impossible to define exactly how to acquire happiness, if only because it would be so difficult for each of us, at least on a material level. If I were to receive these beautiful Giuseppe Zanotti mirror embellished ankle boots:

from a kind benefactor, I would be very happy indeed, whilst I can think of at least one person who would be much happier with some sort of spangly music converter storage iMac thingamajig. As you can probably tell, I wouldn’t know what to do with the thing. But I believe that both of us would be equally delighted that there’s someone out there who is thinking about how they could make us happy.

In some ways, it may be easier to define what makes us unhappy. Sometimes, thinking about how for many people the answer would be that love is what fulfils their happiness, I start to feel down; woe is me, nobody loves me and all those thoughts which I logically know to be completely untrue, but still manage to occasionally plague me. Secrets and lies too (no, not the film which absolutely makes me very happy) are things which I have grown to detest over the unfortunate events when I have had to deal with them. To me, one of the secrets of happiness is to have no secrets; they are unhealthy and thinking over them never fails to bring me down. But of course, I too have private details which I do not share, and I understand that it can sometimes be the truth which creates the most unhappiness. I don’t fail to recognise the hypocrisy.

It’s not just happiness in which I can find so many contradictions in what I believe; in one of my ‘rants’ which I wrote on my birthday (I seem to be writing quite a few of these and I do find it immensely therapeutic) I wrote about how I struggle to accept the concept of the laws of beauty yet still I abide by them. The central struggle I have with happiness, and unhappiness is understanding the point of them all. They are such simple emotions; other emotions can be so difficult to define as positive or negative, but happiness is simply positive and so unhappiness negative. Therefore happiness is good, it is the ‘single best thing any of us could wish for’ so why not just never be unhappy? When feeling a little blue, why not just realise that it's not going to help being in a sulk, put on a smile, because smiling releases endorphins, dontcha know, and… be happy? Well, I like to think that I am in such great control of my emotions, but part of me knows that I can’t be. So I can argue with myself that there is no point in unhappiness, that any reason I have to be unhappy is perfectly invalid and that really I have every reason to be happy. But I’m still aware that there is pain, there is shit, there is unhappiness. Maybe the best we can do is look for those small things which help us to be a little happier (for me it’s shopping, tea, films, writing it all down – for others it’s spangly music converter storage iMac thingamajigs) and enjoy them.

I definitely need a new notebook.

When trying to think of something to write, I remembered the post where I shared a poem from a 'collection of musings' I'd started; started being the operative word. When I got the idea, the bits of material I'd already written were all written down in different places, some on the computer, a couple on the back pages of an old notebook etc. So I got an old 'rough book' (books we were given in school to do rough work, which are created so cheaply that the paper is so thin that you can't write with any ink thicker than a biro), bashed out an introduction and began to copy down some of the stuff I'd written.

I soon gave up; there's nothing more monotonous than copying out what you've already spent time writing. This was almost a month ago and the rough book hasn't been touched. So maybe a Smythson notebook would be a good investment? Although on a lower budget, I've always fancied a simple Moleskine, 'the legendary notebook used for the past two centuries by great artists and thinkers, including Van Gogh, Picasso, Hemingway and Chatwin'. Sounds like me...

Anyway, I highly doubt that my 'collection of musings' is going to get very much further, at least for now (plus I've already started my next 'project'; God, it's scary that this blog has actually lasted a good couple of months) so I suppose I could share another one, which is sort of related in that it muses on mirrors, those essential pieces of equipment which we use to decide on our own levels of beauty. Like the other one, it's completely unpolished but it's so much easier to write a half -completed poem on mirrors than spend a good half hour constructing an 'essay' on mirrors. And there are plenty of question marks, so that we can talk about it for a nice long time.

Accessories with Humour

When I started adding tags to this blog, I didn't think to add a jewelry/jewellery tag because I don't think about my jewelry very much; it takes too much effort (which I have now added). But recently I've noticed that sometimes I do love an accessory and that's when it has that one quality that every woman wants in a man: a GSOH. I like my jewelry to have a good sense of humour.

My most recent accessories acquisition was a little bit of costume jewelry, which I got with some birthday gift vouchers.

It's plastic, it's bright and in-your-face and look! it's even laughing!

However some people might say that funny jewelry should only be costume jewelry, and it should only ever be inexpensive because after a while, the joke gets old. I disagree; take for example Wendy Brandes' (writer of blog with GSOH) Onyx Skull Ring. Normally I take Holly Golightly's advice that 'it would be tacky to wear diamonds before I’m 40'. But the morbid humour of a luxurious skull ring means I love, love, love it and with the subtle detail I don't think I'd throw it away.

Plus, the one accessory I wear almost day in, day out (other than my lovely oversized watch) is my joker necklace. An eagle-eyed reader may have noticed it featuring in one or two of my posts, so you can't deny it's not versatile. The features of his face are so delicate that my rubbish camera couldn't pick them up; the impish grin, flower in the cocked hat and sticky out ears, which may be why he works with absolutely any outfit. But my joker's a lot less dull than the anchor or heart I could have chosen and he's got a great sense of humour.