Leandra Medine's Blog, page 754

Overthinking Underdressing

Is it better to be overdressed or underdressed? I ask because I have historically empathized with she who hails from the latter group and as such, recently determined that the very question above informs more about my style than I may have initially believed it to.

I think I’m becoming casual-to-a-fault. My aesthetic leans more toward Narciso than it does Nike, and recently a close friend named Claire has been making the same joke, without fail, every time I walk into room where a celebratory, slightly-but-not-quite formal is being held: “Oh! Ripped jeans! For a change!”

You’d think the punchline would wear off after being repeated so many times but it doesn’t. This is probably because the only thing worse than a recurring joke is a recurring, out-of-place outfit.

At my cousins wedding the summer before last, I was almost asked to leave on the account of my pant-not-so-suit. For visual reference the pants in question were eggshell-colored charmeuse crepe palazzos; they hit the floor as spectacularly as they buttoned at my waist, and with them I wore a white silk t-shirt, gold choker and layered a light blue double breasted linen blazer over my shoulders.

“It’s black tie!,” my aunt yelled at me in her foreign accent. My mother, father, great aunt and a red headed girl I don’t know looked on while she assessed the visual damage I would inevitably cause to the bridal party, of which, mind you, I was not even a member. And to this day, every time I see that aunt, she reminds me that I wore pants to her daughter’s wedding.

Did I find it disrespectful? Absolutely not. Could I see where she was coming from? Indeed: Squareville, USA.

But more interesting than the actual clothes and the responses they continue to elicit is perhaps why I dress the way I do; why, when I see a pair of ripped jeans, the internal amicability alarm sets off and I am almost immediately wooed. Furthermore, no matter how beautiful the gown, how perfect the fit, how elegant I feel, I am never as comfortable when torn away from the clothes that make me, me.

This seems counterintuitive when considering the “identities” I so often speak of assuming via clothing (The Lady, or The French Girl, for example), but I’m going to trace this handicap back to a primitive, savage time: The Era of Bat Mitzvahs.

When one classmate of mine was turning her Holy Twelve, her parents threw a party at a JCC in New Jersey. These particular parties called for dresses, but style maverick that I was, I forewent the dress for a pair of green ill-fit trousers, a black shirt with white Mongolian faux fur trim and a pair of knee-high wedge boots that were a little small on me but still the most magical possession I owned, what with their leather leaves embroidered on the shoes’ calves.

It took my mom and me over an hour to get those boots on my feet. At the end I thought it was totally worth it, but when I got to the party, all the other kids were in t-shirts and jeans. This was a jungle gym party that had no place for embroidered leather. Nor did it for my hairpins. Everyone looked so comfortable and cool in their easy outfits that allowed for child’s play and here I was in itchy trim. I felt like such a fool.

So you know what I did? I disappeared into a corner to take off the shoes that stole an hour of my life and tucked the fur trim into my blouse while I wished I was in jeans.

Twelve years later I still can’t shake that night off. Why didn’t I just own how I looked? Why did it make me so uncomfortable? Is it possible that at just 12 years old, I’d already culled an idea about the implications tethered to being over vs. underdressed? Did I really know that to be the former meant you’d tried too hard and therefore to be the latter effectively made you Kate Moss — effortlessly, at that?

I’m not quite sure. But it is possible that for everyone who’s tickled by getting overdressed or perhaps similarly, by looking like they don’t even know they’re dressed, a congruous story floats through their past. So maybe I’ll ask again — is it better to be overdressed or underdressed?

Sisterhood of The Traveling Handbags

A new bag is kind of like all the best parts of New Years Eve: purportedly exciting, inarguably fresh and pleasantly rejuvenating when considering the boundless places you’ll carry it (and oh the places you two will go!). It’s representative of the act of leaving tired baggage behind like an overripe year and replacing bygones with the promise of a new, unwritten and therefore highly lucrative beginning.

The most worthwhile of new bags, however, are typically those that are actually old — the ones that once belonged to someone else, that lived through a life of possible anguish and, depending on the state of the bag, hopefully far more glee. They’re the ones that are only new subjectively, because for the first time, one of its kind is yours. But that’s not to discredit who loved them prior: those who cared for them, carried them, and declared them a treasure.

It may seem hyperbolic to view a purse as something more than its intended employment. Surely one could argue that a bag — three letters, one purpose: to hold your crap — possesses no more meaning within its leather or fabric or sequined margins than that of a tissue box, or a thimble. But that is exactly where we beg to differ. A bag contains just as many memories as a journal.

Finding this bag isn’t easy. As was the case with Goldilocks and her failed attempts at finding the perfect meal and bed, when looking for a handbag you’re left to sift through a full lot. Sometimes the bag is too big or too small. Sometimes the handle is too short, the color might be wrong, the fabric isn’t exactly what you hoped it would be and while you’re ready to commit, really, you don’t want to settle.

So you wait. You wait until that special moment finds you. That moment when your heart flutters, nothing else matters and you just know you’ve found each other.

Such was the case, at least for us, last week when we went to LXR & Co’s Pop Up shop in SoHo. On a marginal, not quite urgent search for the bag, fate hit us over the head in primary colors that told a tale of the most recent leg of Louis Vuitton’s renaissance. 

The crayon box of Vuitton bags sat royally in all their colored glory. They were the doctor’s bags of Marc Jacobs’ imagination, saturated tree bark-embossed leather and structured to make plausible the understanding that these bags, under several different reigns of ownership, would holster more lives — and stories — than cats do.

We, of course, just couldn’t help wonder: where had these bags been before?

Maybe in Paris. Individually under the ownership of four different, impossibly chic French women with messy bangs and an endless supply of perfect black jeans. Maybe the green one had belonged to a woman whose husband left her for another man. Could it have been that the red one was once what held together the life of a burlesque dancer from Deauville? And then what if the yellow one lived far across the Seine, in a felt bag, having never been used until the moment she was first picked up in this very Pop Up?

Or maybe the red and blue were being timeshared: split between two friends on different continents (or, you know, boroughs) who shared stories of their lives using the purses to display their victories, dalliances, battle wounds, and most importantly, unwavering amicability for one another.

Or maybe they just were. And now, finally, they could start their lives as brand new individuals, commanding the right attention, emblematizing all that which was and would be chic again — successfully moonlighting as the spectacularly ironic lead roles in the hands of two New Yorkers.

Part of a collaboration with LXR & Co. The LXR & Co. Pop Up store is open November through December at 112 Wooster Street in New York City’s SoHo.

-Written by Leandra Medine and Amelia Diamond

For the Love of Shoes

When Dorothy clicked her red-glittered heels together while repeating, “There’s no place like home,” it’s quite possible that she was talking about your home, circa right now, because ten bucks says you’re snuggled up in bed or positioned on the couch with no plans whatsoever to move for the rest of the day. That certainly must beat Oz.

It may have also been her strange way of getting the lion to compliment her shoes or trick the scarecrow into asking who makes them.

I love Dorothy, but she’s sort of trying too hard to get street-styled, no? Those puffy sleeves, the ankle socks, the blatant photographer bait using her adorable dog Toto — we all know it’s physically impossible to not take a picture of a terrier in a wicker basket. But those glittery shoes are good, man.

And so is your bed — so stay there, tell Dorothy to move over in case she has magically clicked her way next to you, and sift through the slideshow above featuring delightful shoes that will take you exactly where you want to go.

And now for some atmosphere music. Do you and Dorothy want the fast-paced version? (Perfect for needing a pick-me-up, a little energy, like coffee for your ears…)

Or, do you need the more mellow version, like an Advil for your pounding brain? Choose your own adventure!

What’s the Secret?

How apropos that just five days after a minor dissertation on she who wears lingerie, the annual Victoria’s Secret fashion show would take place at New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory — a venue I have, until Wednesday night, always associated with the antithetical-when-considering-that-which-is-hyperliterally-sexy Marc Jacobs’ bi-annual ready-to-wear collection show.

There were certainly similarities binding together the former spectacle with the latter: Lynn Yaeger in a prominent seat for one, a wrecked ship as decor loosely reminiscent of the most recent spring show and a glittery runway for another. The differences, though, were far louder and more entertaining to note. Watching the familiar not-just-models-but-for-the-purpose-of-Wednesday-night, peacocks, that owned the runway as they do, perform not as the women we want to be but the ones men want to bang, put into perspective precisely what makes an icon, an icon.

My personal conclusion is that we aspire to be things, not people. Often what will happen is that we will assign the character traits tethered to these things to specific people, but when the Kate Moss reincarnate of your dreams is no longer a Kate Moss reincarnate — now she’s just a genetically blessed woman in lingerie, who is she in conjunction with you?

Per the show’s atmosphere, I could get past the expansive disconnect that was fashion’s zenith: Mr. Valentino sitting not on, but very close to the runway, sandwiched between Harley Viera-Newton and one Olivia Palermo vs. humanity’s creep-alert: the overpriced-ticket holding young men — ring fingers discernibly occupied — shuffling through aisles of seats like kids anticipating a trip somewhere they’d only seen through the lens of their wildest imaginations. I expected that.

I could even walk away without wondering whether Taylor Swift’s performance of “I Knew You Were Trouble” was a nod to those in the audience who hailed from the latter camp, or one to the angels dressed in a quartet of crystals, as ethereal fairies, in sports-inspired uniforms (holler at your soccer ball, Cara Delevingne), and Ashish-looking overalls stamped with smiley faces.

Because mostly, I was enraptured by my own reaction to the show. Where I thought I’d leave thinking the stereotypically inevitable: abs, what do I do about my abs? I actually left thinking the incredibly mundane: did I do my laundry yet?

My having experienced that reaction does one of two things. It either re-establishes my stance as a blaring narcissist or serves as a social note on the nature of being one of Victoria’s Secret’s angels. Why? Because in the context of that fashion show, they don’t seem human.

I don’t want to compare myself to them. I don’t care to. I don’t want to imagine what it’s like to be one of them. I’m happy with my clothed figure, thank-you-very-much. I’d rather just applaud their purported senses of self confidence and acknowledge how astutely these women, “the angels,” understand their craft as performers who have mastered the art of an interactive exhibition.

Joan Smalls in Givenchy, for example, is a very different experience to observe when held up against Joan Smalls in angel wings. And when those girls, all of them, blow kisses at the camera, you’d really think, in spite of their having absolutely no clue what kind of riffraff is on the other end of that lens, that they mean it.

But never mind them for a moment, I should also commend Victoria’s Secret, who has actually made underwear the most exciting thing on earth, more exciting than Isabel Marant for H&M, for two full days a year — once when the show takes place in New York and another when it airs nationally in December. That they have successfully marketed these women as the sexiest of their kind and turned that into a public testimony for us to revel/languish in takes a certain skill set.

See, one thing still remains, though. When it’s done, I just want to get up, go home and deal with my dirty socks.

A Love Letter to Mascara

Mascara has had a rough week. A recent New York Times article reported that the National Advertising Division is cracking down on mascara ads for falsely advertising their product via…falsies. (Or “lash inserts,” per the fine print at the bottom of such ads.)

Essentially, the thinking is that using fake lashes in mascara ads leads women on to thinking that their results will be exactly like Freja Beha Erichsen’s. I understand this concern. One time I saw an advertisement for those sneakers that make your butt look better and I just knew that if bought those sneakers, I’d be the next butt model in their campaign. Also, sometimes I see pictures of Freja like, anywhere — the street, the runway, in magazines — then I sort of assume I look like her by osmosis.

“If you’re going to sell me a product based on a photograph, then that photograph needs to be truthful,” executive director of Truth in Advertising Bonnie Patten told the New York Times. “You can’t assume that I have a degree in how many lashes a normal person has in her eyes.”

I don’t have a degree in this either. I wish I did, but I don’t.

It’s unethical to persuade people to buy something that can’t deliver what it promises, and advertorial lies inevitably lead to a discussion on propaganda. But there’s just something so innocent about mascara, so quiet and loving, like it never wanted anything other than to make you look more awake, that just makes me want to give it a little hug by way of typed words on this here computer. I want to tell mascara that it’s not its fault that it was sort of poorly misrepresented by way of faux spidery stems. “You work just fine without them, I swear,” I want to coo to it as I coat my own lashes with the magical paint.

The truth is that I don’t know where I’d be today without mascara. In Tuesday’s post while waxing endlessly on the cost of looking natural, I wrote, “I’m perfectly fine running around sans ‘face’ no matter how much of an earwig I resemble without mascara on — I really don’t care.” This is true, I don’t care…but I also kind of do, you know?

When I apply mascara it shows those around me that I care about them. It says, “Hey you. Hey world. I’m going to put this shit on my lashes out of respect for the fact that you get to look at me all day long, and in the same way that I’m wearing my favorite shoes and my coolest jacket, I’m also making my eyelashes look like I stuck my finger in an electrical outlet of awesome.”

When I put mascara on, I feel prettier. I do not feel pretty when I put on a crap brand and the formula clumps and suddenly I look like I mixed sand with black ink and called it a day, but when I use my favorite brand or one of its lovely sisters-that-are-also-competitors (like Venus and Serena!) I become a changed woman. My confidence grows. My smizing ability goes up ten fold and I feel like I own the world with the bat of my lash. This is all because of you, mascara. You, who on my absolute strangest day where my hair is being evil and staticky and my skin is arguing and my eyes are crossing, are always ready and willing to jump in and light my face up like the reflection of July 4th fireworks on open, glorious water. (In this case you are the fireworks, mascara, and I, the water.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is…I love you.

Don’t let the haters get you down. They probably just haven’t found their brand yet.

What’s your favorite brand? And what do you love about it? And please, for the love of everything good in this world, please post a picture of your lashes all done up. (And if you do wear “falsies” let me know because I am utterly intrigued and kind of want to try.)

Hitting Social Rock Bottom

Hitting rock bottom blows chunks. It infers that you’ve lost everything — your job, your family, your liquor license. But even in spite of being forced to involuntarily find yourself swimming in the depths of an all-time low, it can be argued that one thing shall and will, by the power vested in your poise, remain intact. And that is your dignity. In the event you have not sold it for drugs or a Spice Girl barbie, sometimes all you will need is a secure sense of personal decorum to get back on that saddle and giddy the fuck up.

When you hit social rock bottom though, you’re sailing (sinking?) on a different wrecked ship. Your finances may still be in tact, namely because you haven’t lost your job (sometimes, in fact, a social rock bottom could come in the wake of a promotion) and your family is definitely still loitering around your cosmos, made clear by the constant, badgering phone calls from your mother, that serve as a reminder to call your father, who is permanently offended that you’ve forgotten his birthday which, by the way, you did not. It was seven months ago and you bought him cufflinks, dammit.

But which one is worse?

You don’t have to answer that.

You do, however, have to acknowledge that contrariwise to Drake’s fervently popular lyric — the one that cantillates in tandem with a bunch of crazy-ass white pigeons exploding out of a stretched limo about starting at the bottom but then getting “here” (where is here, you know what I mean?) — the details of our own basements will always keep us grounded, and therefore at the very bottom that the Canadian rapper has escaped.

Take my social rock bottoms for example. They occur every Saturday night when I, a 24-year-old New Yorker, get home from dinner, take off my clothes, brush my teeth, wash my face and get into bed, grade of excitement almost offensive, to catch the night’s new episode of Saturday Night Live. When I turn on my TV, though — and this happens every single week — it’s only 10PM, which means I’ve got another hour-and-change to burn oil that certainly does not belong to midnight. Did I mention I am 24 and therefore fantastic at masking hangovers? What does the future hold for a woman who has forfeited her right to dive bars at the apex of her tender twenties? And furthermore, when will I learn that I don’t have to rush home for SNL at SUNSET O’CLOCK ON A WEEKEND?

Here’s another one that comes from a far more adventurous plane as imagined by a close friend, of another close friend, who has become the sexy selfie cognoscente. I’ve never seen anyone pool together so many dates with the mere camera click of an iPhone. Not even on Tinder. So picture this: she’s laying in bed, sending rapid fire text messages to a man she’s been coquetting. They are both typing, “baby, oh baby” at that pace that makes older people quip the same exact joke every single time: “Your fingers are gonna fall off typin’ that fast!”

Make no mistake about the context of their communication, though. Their exchange is chock full of additional defamations I will omit.

“Send a picture,” he finally begs.

“Fine,” she concedes, and so she gets up from her bed to pose in front of a skinny floor mirror leaning on the wall facing a window, in her bedroom.

“Hahaha,” he says back once she has finally sent it. And she is livid. Why in the name of Victoria’s Secret’s recently departed fashion show would he laugh at her suggestive pose and the coy sideboob she managed to relay without selling the whole cow?

“What’s with the underwear?” he writes again. And then she sees it: a besmirched, yellow-stained underpinning in the corner of the selfie.

Social rock bottom, folks.

But it keeps us grounded! So in the spirit of oversharing, please tell me all about yours.

Illustration by Charlotte Fassler

And Then I Was French

Do you think if I keep waxing desperation on the topic of my provenance, this self-fulfilling prophecy I have been expounding upon since the very early days of Man Repeller will hit me over the head and that the next time I venture to travel internationally, I am called an invalid while trying to use an American passport for one Leandra Medine when in a reality still unbeknownst to me, I am actually now a French citizen going by Léandrrrrrrra Médine?

Me too!

Today is a phenomenally big day not because it is the 318th of its kind according to the Gregorian Calendar or because in 1533, the conquistadors of Spain arrived in Cajamarca. Neither is it because Czechoslovakia became a republic on this day in 1918. It’s not even because Michael J. Fitzgerald was born today. No. It is because Isabel Marant‘s collection for H&M is officially available for mass consumption and that means the cultural zeitgeist as measured by fashion is now for everyone — and for the first time available to purchase online – hooray.

In doing my part to celebrate the dissemination, here is a look Charlotte and myself shot on Bond Street sometime last week utilizing the black blazer that comes with a skinny tie belt, a linen slub, short sleeve t-shirt that fits better than most underwear and white leather — real leather — lace-up pants as complimented by a pair of electric pink Jimmy Choo heels, which in scanning the introduction of this story, really make me wonder whether I’ll ever actually get to be Léandrrrrrrra.

A girl can try, can’t she?

And here’s where I ask reticently: WELL, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR, PEOPLE? GO! SHOP! DO IT! …Unless you already have, in which case, what the hell did you buy? Tell me everything – stories of victory, struggle, frustration, unlikely success. These things can be hard — vent. Leave not one single detail out.

A Cut Above The Norm

Oh, sure. We’re pretty fond of each other, but the truth is you all are our favorite contributors to The Man Repeller. Really! We’ve formalized that fact with “Let’s Talk About It.” This weekly column is a forum for conversation, communication, and complete distraction from the jobs you’re supposed to be doing right now. So get involved. We promise we won’t tell your bosses.

Earlier this week, America’s sweetheart Jennifer Lawrence got a haircut. In its aftermath, the Internet stopped just short of spontaneous combustion.

Last Wednesday, she took to Facebook to debut newly shorn locks. In a characteristically candid photo, the Hunger Games actress revealed what Us Weekly has dissected as a “kind of punk pixie cut that has a few longer pieces on one side but is shorter everywhere else” and I would prefer to summarize as “Michelle Williams, circa yesterday.” But no matter its inspiration or origin or etymology, this much is certain: she looks gorgeous.

Days after the socially mediated reveal, Lawrence expounded on the surprising crop in an interview with Yahoo. “I don’t know, I cut it earlier,” she said. “And it grew to that awkward gross length . . . so I just cut it off.” Apparently, the fact that her previous cut “couldn’t get any uglier” further strengthened her resolve.

Less compelling than the 23-year-old star’s account of her formerly fried strands, however, is the fact that she immediately followed it with a lengthy rant about body image in Hollywood. Commenting on the industry’s badly distorted ideal, she said:

[S]hows like the Fashion Police . . . put values in all the things that are wrong and [say] that it’s okay to point at people and call them ugly and call them fat and they call it “fun” and “welcome to the real world.” And it’s like, that shouldn’t be the real world. That’s going to keep being the real world if you keep it that way. It’s not until we stop treating each other like that and just stop calling each other fat . . . with these unrealistic expectations for women. It’s disappointing that the media keeps it alive and fuels that fire.

Given the forcefulness of her frustration, it’s easy to read Lawrence’s dramatic hairdo as a kind of rebellion against conventional standards of beauty. At least, I certainly did. After all, Emma Watson and Miley Cyrus and too many fictional females to name have all consciously wielded scissors as instruments of passionate, personal protest.

And yet an article published in the Atlantic this summer makes a compelling case against such logic. Citing The Newsroom, Girls, and Mad Men among other examples, writer Casey Quinlan claims that linking trauma to radical transformation “seems to confirm that a woman’s value lies in how she looks, and that only psychological instability would cause her to make a drastic change in her physical appearance.” Aside from a few notable exceptions, says Quinlan, primetime gives us “the impression that happy women don’t get pixie cuts,” and if my assumption of Lawrence’s motives is any indication, I’m guilty of the same bias.

I have always believed that the clothing we choose says something real about the people we are or perhaps the ones we want to be. Considering that our hair is the only outfit we wear every day, it seems only right to give it the same attention. But is it fair to assume that Lawrence is trying to make some grand statement with hers? While we’re on the subject, have you ever attempted to express one with your own? Finally, why is that we so often insist that major haircuts “stand for” something at all?

I blame Samson, but I’d rather hear what you have to say.

Let’s talk about it.

(Re)Imagining the Thakoon Tail

One of the happiest blunders during my tenure as a devout sample sale shopper came three Novembers ago when accidentally-but-elatedly, I stumbled into the private preview of one Thakoon Panichgul’s, yes, sample sale. It was unlike anything I’d seen before under the circumstances of a shopping event that promised nearly 80% off almost all fall/winter merchandise: a room devoid of almost any humans, filled with racks of clothes.

And oh, the racks! The clothes! Was it really possible that these were the very garments I had just weeks earlier seen flirting with consumers, coyly exposing full price tags on the floors of department stores city-wide?

Here, they hung elegantly on their hangers. No one pulled or stomped. Sizes ran a generous gamut, but in spite of the striped cashmere sweaters and wool red pants and the blue peplum cape coats, my eyes were focused on one article of clothing and one only: the salmon colored hyper-mullet that frankly made no sense under any circumstances but exuded an urgent sense of if-you-don’t-take-me-you’ll-regret-it-forever.

And guess what? She was right on manifold accounts. I would regret not having bought her and though I did, she still made no sense.

The first time I wore her, it was to shoot a personal style post. Back then, I paired it with a grey sweatshirt, frilly nylon jacket and black booties. It was great but you know that these days I am all about putting jeans under just about everything so it should come as no surprise that in order to make this, uh, old skirt seem, you know, new again, there was only one way to do that.

Pants.

And with the help of a trusty pair of black lace pumps featuring a patent leather toe, a plain white t-shirt that you can probably procure from anywhere and a silver bomber jacket (spoiler alert: it is definitely worth waiting on line to get your claws on at least the pictured from the Isabel Marant/H&M collaboration), I did what I’d done before and turned the seemingly formal skirt into the shit Saturday nights are made of.

During Fashion Week.

When you’re in a foreign country.

And therefore too far away to make conceivable the universal truth that you are sweeping dog shit off of sidewalks free of charge, at the expense of your beloved Thakoon Tail.

The Cost of Looking Natural: Beauty Edition

People always ask me if my hair color is natural. It’s a bit of a loaded question to which I inevitably provide a loaded answer but in all fairness, who’s really to say?

My hair colorist, if sworn to oath before the court, will tell you that she mixes one part F42 with two parts FTZ* to give me this reddish hue. She may divulge the fact that once a year she paints bleach onto the ends of my hair in a technique called “Balayage,” which essentially makes it look like I spend so much time surfing that the bottoms of my hair are lighter from the sun and — wouldn’t you know it —  so too are the pieces framing my face.

See…my hair grows in much darker but it lightens and reddens on its own. I prefer the lighter color, so I’ve started making it my year-round thing. Usually I evade the question by pointing to my grays and saying that I “just have them covered them up.” Other times I glare at the person who asked me until they walk away. Maybe the color is not technically natural, but it’s kind of natural and it looks natural. It also costs about 200 very natural dollars, so sue me.

In considering that which is — sorry to say it again — natural, Leandra pointed out earlier today that perhaps what I’m really looking for is to appear effortless. So how about these effortless eyebrows of mine that appear in a thick, curated arch? It costs me $50 once a year to essentially wax my entire forehead, because I don’t know if you know this about me but I’m related to Groucho Marx. For the rest of the year I do the plucking myself, but time is money so I’d estimate I spend upward of $200 of my own life’s hours staring into a magnifying mirror and ripping errant hairs from my brow.

We’re at $450 if you’re keeping count.

Next let’s talk makeup. There’s tinted moisturizer to pretend my skin is better than its naked reality, primer to fake radiance despite winter doldrums, mascara which I won’t shut up about, and now that I’m on my new “invisible eyeliner” kick that adds another twenty something to the mix. That’s approximately $115 for “natural looking” makeup alone. Crap. I forgot cheek and lip stain which makes it look like I just happen to be perfectly flushed and pouty. Another $30.

(Sometimes I get my eyelashes dyed so that I look like I’m wearing mascara even when I’m not, but we’re up to $595 so let’s leave that fun fact out.)

The final expense and most frequently purchased in all of my routine beauty circuit are nails. Nails are the silent killer. It costs me $35 for a gel manicure, which is cheap in Manhattan but beyond ridiculous when considering I get my fingernails painted the color of…fingernails.

So $630 total to look natural. Don’t check my math.

Admittedly, no one is putting a fork to my head and saying I won’t be pretty without the makeup and whatnot. I’m perfectly fine running around sans “face” no matter how much of an earwig I resemble without mascara on — I really don’t care. But getting my nails done, hair colored, eyelashes dyed — these are my “treat yoself” moments.

Where the dichotomy lies is in the response of others; nothing makes me angrier when I come out of a hair appointment feeling like a damn Pantene Pro V commercial model and no one seems to notice that anything is different about me. But isn’t that the point? That you’re just supposed to assume I’m born with it?

Fine. I am.

And yes, by the way — to answer your question, this is my natural hair color.

*No clue what the actual formulas she puts in my hair are, by the way, but it sounds like science!