You’re like Voodoo, honey. Your kisses are cold. Feel your poison running through me. Let me never grow old.

 Dress: Warehouse. Cardi: thrifted. Shoes: Clarks via eBay. Necklace: Next.

I am not a friend to hair dye. I’ve never had highlights, lowlights or semi-permanent colour or… well, anything else. Not even one of those wash-in-wash-out colours that were all the rage when I was a teen. The closest I have ever come was a full can of silver glitter spray one night, which resulted in glitter being found everywhere in my student house (And, if the discovery of it down my flatmate’s boots is anything to go by, that of anyone I was anywhere near. While headbanging in a rock club. Um. Sorry, clubbers of Sheffield in around 1997!) for weeks.

For my second Dress Your Best post, I’ve donned chocolate and caramel shades in celebration of the wall of brunette that is my hair.

My sister’s hair is a richer, deeper shade and of an enviable thickness. My brother got the wavy hair that grew, when he let it, to his waist. I, by contrast, got rather fine hair that’s pretty much poker straight naturally. But, I have always loved its colour. It’s rich and varied and… well, it’s the perfect colour for me.

As a child and a teen, my hair was there with my legs, my eyes and my lips on the Things I Wouldn’t Change list, when more or less every other bit of me was on the considerably longer Things I Wish Were Different list. I know it’s not a waist-length profusion of glossy, chocolatey ringlets, but… it’s me.

I know other women love to play with the colour of their hair, but I’ve never been interested in that. I’ve never wanted to see myself as a blonde or a redhead (Apart from anything else, have you seen my eyebrows? Going too far different from my natural shade would be way too much upkeep for a low-maintenance kinda gal that favours a naturalish look!), nor even as a slightly-darker brunette. I like the rich base colour, and I like goldish tones that mother nature put there to get picked up by the sun and don’t want to cover them up.

I even rather like the odd white hairs that have been making an appearance for the past few years. I can’t say that I’ll necessarily hold that thought when they start to overtake the browns of which I’ve always been so fond, but for now the thought of covering them up seems frankly laughable.

I’ve come to be fond of the straightness and the fineness, too. And hey, if I fancy a change or it’s hot I can always do this:

…to keep it off my neck (It really was hot when I snapped that pic. Hence the fetching slathered-in-sunscreen shininess.), and end up with a bit of extra body, like this:

Will you still be sending me a Valentine?

 Dress: Warehouse. Shrug: handknitted  by me. Shoes: Accessorize via eBay. Necklace: made by me

I’m just going to paste in a comment that I made in a discussion about what worries women as they age. We were riffing off an assumption that women would be concerned about losing their looks when actually what most women we know are genuinely worried about when it comes to getting older are the same sort of financial security, what happens when I can’t take care of myself any longer worries that men have. Unsurprisingly.

Attractiveness isn’t really all about physical beauty and physical beauty isn’t really all about one particular version of it that’s frozen at the age of 19. I find extreme cosmetic surgery, this idea that we were at our best before we’d even really begun as adults, to be such a weird and destructive thing.

But, I am someone who was The Clever One to my friend’s The Pretty One. It’s easier, I think, for me to deal with the effects of ageing (insofar as we have ‘em – we’re early 30s) than for her because however hard she tries to fight against it her instinctive reaction, borne of years of being reinforced for her beauty, is that she’s losing The Thing That Made Her Special.

Whereas, I’m told that I’m more attractive at 33 than I was at 23, and I think what people are seeing is precisely that increased confidence, the personality. Those extra few lbs and the slightly less elastic skin and the odd white hair all mean something and I carry ‘em better than I carried the nervousness and insecurity I felt a decade ago, for all the glossy hair and softer skin I had.

And that last paragraph was really bloody hard to type without adding disclaimers. Sigh.

But yes. What worries me about ageing is most definitely the security side of things – both financially and in terms of ‘what happens when I can’t take care of myself any longer?’. All we can really do is plan as best we can, I suppose. :/

Golly jeepers – where’d ya get those peepers

 Top: Oasis via eBay. Trousers: Oasis. Shoes: Accessorize. Necklace: a gift

This wasn’t actually the best photo from this morning’s bunch, but something in my expression, somewhere around the half-smile, reminded me of my sister and that was unusual enough for me to go with it.

My sister and I look nothing alike, really. We’re the same height, our family having in an orderly fashion resulted in women of around 5’4″ and men of 5’11″, and we both have dark hair (her’s is darker naturally – but currently redder), but that’s about it.

I have a paler, less ruddy version of our mother’s skintone and the body shape she had as a young, pre-children, woman but our father’s facial structure. I didn’t realise how alike dad and I were until I saw a photo from my graduation in which we’re smiling the same smile. She’s the opposite – the more pear-shaped and athletic body shape & the skintone of the women on dad’s side of the family but mum’s facial structure.

She has my dad’s artistic talent and the dark greeny greyish eyes of the women on his side of the family. I have my mum’s crafting inclinations and… well… we’re not quite sure where my greeny hazelish eyes come from but mum thinks she remembers her grandmother – of whom we don’t have colour photos – having them and I certainly got the shortsighted-at-18 aspect of ‘em!

More physical differences than similarities, and yet between our height and our mannerisms you’d probably have no trouble figuring out that we were sisters. Good old non-verbal communication tells you so much, no?

Oh, and our brother? He’s a mum-coloured duplicate of Dad. I guess at least he knows what he’ll look like in his seventies…

Now this is chocolate lime…

Dress: vintage, a gift. Cardigan: thrifted. Shoes: Accessorize via eBay. Necklace: made by me

I had the most glorious bank holiday weekend of doing nothing in particular in the wonderful sunshine. Well, I say nothing in particular – I rediscovered my reading mojo and devoured The Eyre Affair, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and most of 1984. Again.

While soaking up the sunshine in the garden.

Bliss.

Finance, feminism and the fashion blogger

Cardi: Next. Dress: Dorothy Perkins via eBay. Belt: from another dress. Shoes: Accessorize via eBay. Necklace: a gift – handmade by www.katcrossjewellery.co.uk

Yes, I felt so much like I’d dressed as a bar of Dairy Milk the last time I wore this dress I thought I may as well go the whole hog and accessorise with chocolatey brown this time around. Well, why not?

This week on the Feminist Fashion Bloggers network, we’re considering the theme of finance, feminism and fashion blogging.

It’s an interesting topic, and one that I know has done the rounds a bit with regard to those sections of the blogosphere that are perhaps more focused on the latest trends and magazine-style photoshoots than my ponderings here are every likely to be. There’s a picture-perfect, fabulous new and expensive clothes at every turn, feel to some places – and that’s totally fine for those bloggers if they’re happy and able to support the lifestyle and the blog, but it’s not for me.

Traditional women’s magazines (Of which I end up with a pile every time I visit my mother. I use the recipes and very little else.) speak the language of the snake oil merchants. They encourage consumption to keep up with trends, even when they’re acknowledging we don’t all have thousands to splurge on clothes, shoes and handbags (you too can have a slightly-less-hideously_expensive version of this designer thing you don’t need and that won’t go with the rest of your wardrobe! Look, here are three versions of it in various pricebands so it’s a bargain really!). They encourage you to love yourself in one breath while preaching diet messages and telling you how to dress to cover various bits you’re assumed to wish to cover due to their unacceptable nature in the next.

This. Is. Not. Me. It’s not feminism-friendly, it’s not supportive of my personal goals, it’s not practical or interesting or stimulating or encouraging of my emotional or intellectual wellbeing, never mind my physical or my financial wellbeing. I turned away from it all years ago, feeling unrepresented.

And I found the style blogging world.

Take a look through the blogs on my sidebar, and you’ll see that almost all of them have a tendency to embrace the delights of second hand and vintage shopping, as do I. Several of them make their own clothes and accessories a fair amount, as do I. These are women whose wardrobes and shopping styles illustrate their love for vintage styles, the thrill of bargain seeking, a need in some cases to seek a cheaper option combined with a wish to remain stylish, the skills to craft perfectly fitting items themselves, and a desire to take a more ethical and environmentally-friendly approach to fashion than is encouraged by the veneration of Primarni.

Without exception, these women are an inspiration to me in a way that is completely lacking in women’s magazines, and perhaps some of the high-fashion style blogs.

I enjoy their creativity in putting together stylish and individual looks without assembling them from a clothes store’s emailed suggestions. I love their ability to bargain hunt. I enjoy their skill in spending a little money and time on rustling up a garment more perfectly fitting than they’ll ever achieve in the high street. I love their words and their supportive-of-themselves-and-their-fellow-women philosophies as much as I love their looks. These are women whose consumption is thoughtful and constructive.

As for my own finances. Well, when it comes to clothes I rarely buy full price items these days – where you see something in my credits which doesn’t have ‘via eBay’ or ‘thrifted’ after it there’s a pretty good chance that it’s either a sale item or something that’s been in my wardrobe for years (step forward this Next cardi, which I vaguely remember buying at least two jobs ago).  I spend within my means and I spend nothing like the proportion of my income on clothes that, say, my other half spends on football-related things. And I spend wisely – I buy what pleases me and what works for my wardrobe.

The style blogging world has, then, for me at least, not derided consumption in the way that I feel the consumption of clothes and make-up can be derided as frivolous, but neither has it encouraged consumption for the sake of it. Rather, those corners of it that I inhabit see spend on clothes as akin to spend on dvds or football or any other hobby in its harmless-and-fun-as-long-as-you-can-afford-it sense. And they encourage a thoughtfulness of consumption, whether with regard to ethical clothes manufacture or with regard to buying and dressing to focus on the good rather than focusing on the ‘bad’ by swathing it in items from the Suits XBodyshape box.

Chin up?

Dress: Vintage, a gift. Cardigan: thrifted. Shoes: Accessorize via eBay. Necklace: made by me

There’s a girl I quite often see when I’m on my way to work. She goes to one of the local schools, I think, and is somewhere in her mid-teens, at a guess.

Whenever I see her, she’s wearing a particular distinctive sweatshirt over her school uniform. She’s always on her own. And whenever she walks past other people from her school, her head is down, her hands are in her pockets and she scurries past in that slight hunch-of-taking-up-as-little-space-as possible.

I remember that scurry. School days are the best days of your life are they? Hah.

There’s nothing I can say or do, of course, but whoever you are, Sweatshirt Girl, I hope life brings you peace and confidence.

On Being The Clever One

Jumper: Oasis via eBay. Shirt: Bravissimo. Trousers: Oasis. Shoes: Accessorize via eBay. Necklace: made by me

Once upon a time, there were two women.

One grew up as The Clever One. Not that her family didn’t think she was pretty, but just that they emphasised intelligence because that was what was important to them. At school, her first friends were all big green eyes & blonde pigtails and she was a pudgy brunette with an unflattering haircut, so she heard a lot of things like ‘…but at least you have brains!’ and ‘you’re the clever one!’.

She sailed through school easily and with a general assumption from the world around her that she would do well with ease. She was in the top stream for everything, always turned in good grades, and toddled off to University in due course, as expected. She generally spent her formative years Being The Clever Sort.

The other grew up as The Pretty One. She was indeed pretty, with big green long-lashed eyes. She was cute and girly and flirtatious, got her own way through the fluttering of her eyelashes a fair amount. Did perfectly well at school, as it happens, but it was generally assumed she wouldn’t take that any further and would start a family in due course.

Both women believed the role that others spent years reinforcing for them.

You couldn’t shake the first woman’s confidence in her intellectual ability if you tried – it’s an intrinsic part of her perception of self. But it is only recently she has started to realise she’s actually quite decent looking, too. She didn’t discover her waist until her 20s. She cried at unflattering photos taken just a year ago. It’s not that she isn’t confident, it’s that her confidence has always been rooted in other things and it’s easier to hurt her through her looks. That’s a large part of the reason she began this blog – to explore those feelings, and to encourage the increased confidence in all of herself that she was beginning, finally, in her 30s, to feel.

The second one knows she is hot. But she needed to be encouraged and prodded and frequently reinforced to be brought to believe that her brains and her work were actually worth something, that she brought something useful to the table.

She was upset and full of self-doubt and ‘I’m just not cut out for this’ when her boss blithely assumed she wouldn’t be able to do a particular task particularly well (yeah, lovely boss) because while you can’t tell her she isn’t hot, her confidence in her brain and abilities is a newer and more fragile thing.

Why did a thousand external influences funnel each woman down a different route when they were children? Why weren’t they allowed to be pretty *and* clever?

Why on earth do we do that to people?

Robin

Cardigan: Jane Norman via eBay. Dress: Vintage, a present. Belt: eBay. Shoes: Accessorize via eBay

Well, if brown and red work on our aggressive little feathered garden visitors, I don’t see why they shouldn’t work for me