A dog just wants a pillow.
How to find your style essence
A reader asked:
I saw your recent blog post on style essences. I am having a really hard time figuring out how my facial essence comes across. Do you have any tips?
The best way is to try out the different style essences—to see your face in the context of each style essence—take photos, and compare the results.
So basically, step one is to do your hair, makeup, jewelry, and outfit according to each essence. But how do you do that?
In this post, I’ll describe a sample look for each style essence.
Who looks good in pink tulle? A study in style essences
The answer is: People with the ethereal and/or ingenue style essence.
For example, Lana Condor looks fabulous in pink tulle.
Categories are like clouds
Categories are only useful for comparisons.[1]
We can’t evaluate categories by how well they describe their contents, because categories never provide absolutely accurate descriptions of the things they contain. If they did, each thing would be a category of its own.
Where to part your hair
The glass is already broken
A few months ago I knocked one of my favorite glass teacups off the shelf and broke it. I was having a bad week, and this made it worse.
Then I read this passage by Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist, about his encounter with “a renowned Thai forest master named Ajahn Chah:”
My favorite writing on the internet
Your Life in Weeks by Tim Urban
Wait But Why, May 7, 2014
Thanks to this post, I keep a life calendar in Google Sheets. It’s a satisfying memento mori, and helps me see the shape of my life as a whole.
(This website, reviewmylife, offers a free template, but I haven’t tested it: Weeks of your life calendar – free Excel download.)
The don’t-want list
“Next time you set out to build something, make a list of the things it won’t do before you list all the things it will do.”
—37signals[1]
You could call this a don’t-want list, or an anti-feature list.
A note on The Gift of Fear
In my first post on abuse, I said not to read the domestic violence chapter (chapter ten, “Intimate enemies”) in The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.[1]
I’ve changed my mind.
I’m going grey at 27
Anne Kreamer wrote a book about going grey and described the experience like this:
“I went to a dinner party full of impressive people—activists, scientists, playwrights. I felt embarrassed that all I was working on was a piece about my hair. But people responded to it. And I realized, going grey is a serious issue! It is emotionally charged. It’s worth talking about.”[1]
So that’s what I’m doing today: talking about it.