Tag: vanity

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on a rose kick

I recently realized that all of the lip balms out on my dressing table are rose scented.

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What?! I like options! (Oh, I got this acrylic organizer at TJ Maxx, which liking.)

Completely unintentional!

I have a thing for rose, definitely (well, yes, and lip balm). I knew that already, but I seem to be on a real kick at the moment.

Here we have Rosebud Salve, a classic (I like the minted rose one, too), Jurlique’s Rose Love Balm, a deluxe sample of By Terry Baume de Rose (ridiculously expensive but also really, really nice. Wonderfully emollient, thick, feels productive to put it on), and an organic rose petal balm by a family friend. Which balm I reach for depends on the state of the lips and how I’m planning to follow up. I really do use all of them.

What you don’t know is that the Dior Creme de Rose balm (still love) and rose-scented Vaseline (which I don’t like as much as Rosebud Salve, not by a longshot, and won’t repurchase) are on my bedside table…

[Along with the unsexy Blistex Lip Medex, the mentholated tingle of which I enjoy.]

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the dressing table

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I like the routines of grooming and preparation surrounding the dressing table, a key player in the (not the literal but certainly the ceremonial) beginning and ending of each day. This for me is almost always some elaborate series of attentions paid to the skin but the full setup* is stocked with all manner of tools and medicaments, cosmetics and paraphernalia. A great deal can be accomplished in this space, particularly in the realm of transformation, and it’s often a meditative process. It strikes me as a private space, too, where I am with myself (with the reflection of myself, too, causing that multiplication/division of identity a mirror always does for me).

*No coincidence that I show you only a fragment, though this is partly a matter of obscuring what the mirror would betray, which is a true, true—as I define it—mess (this, too, is private).

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This, I realize, sort of in conjunction with my bathroom and all its tools and potions and particulars, is the main reason I don’t like to be away from home. My current favorite products within familiar reach. This general arrangement, at once stylized and utilitarian, and the set of routines it facilitates, is one I don’t like mucked with.

Showing you a bit of it as I enjoy seeing how people store things; how their lives, their daily environments, really look. In this no detail is too small to interest me (sometimes it is only the small details that will interest me). I keep this space quite organized (there are cardboard dividers in the mugs to sort pencils and brushes into subcategories, I’d just used the lipstick when I took this), though I change it around often, too, rotating products in and out according to my rapidly shifting whims and preferences.

IMG_0247You’ll spot a number of favorites I’ve mentioned, and more.

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