31 July 2010

Almost Rosey

I'm honestly a bit self-conscious about this next thing, but I regard this blog as somewhere between confessional and exorcism, and so it must come out.  My embarrassment stems from how this hits a bunch of anti-feminist stereotypes of women: it was a frivolous expense, on a foolish superstition, for looking pretty.

Okay, so, here goes: I've had my colors done.  It was a birthday present, anyway!  I just agreed to sit through it!


If you're not familiar with this, it's when you pay someone to look at you and tell you what colors would look good on you, often with regard to your "undertones" or "season" (I'm an Academic Autumn).  The practice is rife with stories of people going to several different practitioners and getting entirely different sets of colors, so you'll excuse me if I don't consider it binding.


I feel that I understand colors pretty well, having often drawn circles on white paper with colored pencils and having observed the apparent change in the centres.  I'm aware of your analogous and complementary schemes, so I see pretty much what is happening here.  The first four swatches are meant to be I guess interpretations (for makeup-buying) of my skin color, blush tones, eye colors, and hair. 




This was back when I was not dyeing my hair, on purpose.  The color-picking woman exhorted me to come back if I ever changed my hair, since of course this would shift around the wheel in a way that only an expert could be reasonably expected to compensate for.
(An aside here: After talking for about five minutes over dinner last night about the physical structure of hair and how that affects the way it can be colored, one of my father's co-workers confronted me in a weirdly hostile, contemptuous way about whether "you even remember the actual color of your hair," as though dyeing would make you unfamiliar with that, and further as though not changing your hair would be more moral than having knowledge about the molecular composition and organization of keratinous structures.) 

 Here's my prescribed, non-embodied colors, separated  by hue.  As you can see I am meant to wear almost exclusively green.  I do wear green without remorse, but colors I generally wear happily not represented on this chart include blue, black, gray, brick, navy, gridelin, yellow, and taupe. Yes, even yellow, which if you mention to someone they'll go "Oh, yellow is a hard color to wear."  No it isn't.  You just put it on your body like all the other colors.   It doesn't try to escape or explode or nothing.

A selection of colors from the chart.  Body colors are situated at the confluence of a circle and a line.
The color-woman said I have the eye-whites to wear proper white, but that I should look into getting my teeth whitened.  Instead I have used them for chewing food, removing tags from clothing, and looking that little bit crazy.

29 July 2010

Proof of concept

The idea is moire-pattern legs. 






This idea has been kicking around in the back of my head for a month or so.  It turns out to be time-consuming to put on, but not terribly uncomfortable.  Recommended for cooler climes. 

For my boyfriend's sake, here's a version in black as well.





I think in future I wouldn't use fencenet, but a couple similarly-sized close-to-black shades (navy, brown, maroon) for a raven-y iridescence.  Or, for comfort's sake, just a normal patterned tight.

27 July 2010

Keratin

Every, oh, year or so, I get the compulsion to paint my nails.  More often if I watch Bound.  So last night, looking at the creepiest way you can paint your nails (your exact skin color, matte--"mannequin hands") I got the bug and painted my nails with Urban Decay in Burnout.

If this looks like a terrible manicure to you, that is a true impression based on facts.  Some blame must lie with the polish itself, which was the worst possible combination of sheer, viscous, and quick to reach a half-dry state where the top layer can be torn away with the brush.  This may be down to the fact that it is, I would estimate, ten years old.  Most of the blame, however, is mine, as I have the nail-painting skills of someone who paints nails around once a year.

Having doubly coated them and waited two and a half hours, I was super pleased to have successfully removed my jeans without destroying my good work.  Somehow I always seem to be wearing jeans on these occasions, with their heavy canvas, uncooperative buttons, and embedded zips.  So I got them off successfully and I was so proud, running around the room and pumping my fists in the air.  Anyway, that was when I had to put sheets on my bed, and, well, carnage.

This morning, I arduously peeled all that stuff off and repainted them with a color of my own devising, a combination of my Aromaleigh foundation (chosen to neutralize pink tones in my face), a scoop of brick-toned powder blush, some body glitter (I don't know what became of this) and some drugstore clear topcoat.  It's...pretty matte, all right, but too light and yellowy-beige.  I need to think of Zora Neale Hurston's description of white ladies' hands in Dust Tracks on the Road, pale but pink at the tips like orchids. 

UPDATE: IMPROVED RESULT

Mixed two scoops Meow Cosmetics Inquisitive Mau (ugh) with one scoop Medusa's Makeup Pompeii. Tone and finish are just right, but it's a little too pink.  Next time Pennywise instead, I think.

25 July 2010

Nyx, Erebus, Uranus, Thanatos

For Comic-Con or whatever.
Sometimes it's just time to accept that it's cosplay time.

Top this

But enough about my body!  Let's talk about my clothes.  The agony and the ecstasy of my sartorial existence has, for a long time, been this skirt.

 Isn't it wonderful?  I love it.  But what to wear it with, bearing in mind that I hate provoking a look of alarm or dismay in the faces of passers-by?  I have made many imperfect attempts at solving this conundrum.  The colors here, as it transpires, are hard to match, especially the brown.  And it mustn't be too elaborate or busy, else I risk looking "costumed", according to various style books.  I don't think I can help looking a bit costumed.

My first real attempts at getting an outfit together were these two sweaters.  The first is just absolutely awful.  I should look into getting it felted and/or cutting it up into something usable maybe.  The second is okay, but largely transparent and if it's cold enough to wear a camisole and a sweater it is probably cold enough to want long sleeves. 

 A brown shirt I'll often wear because it's got a cream and orange fleur de lis and it says Renew Orleans.  Though for all the good that sentiment seems to be doing it might as well say "Grease the earth of New Orleans, that nothing may grow there, lo, unto the seventh generation, when man is ruled by a race of irascible giants."

 I don't know, maybe if I lived at fucking Burning Man.

 This I actually like well, but it is too small and the buttons are snaps, meaning that I will spill forth if I make the error of bending or moving.

Not a bad color match, but a little busy for my taste. 

At least this combination looks intentional, if a bit Autumn Homeless.

Not a close match but DOG.  Also you can see me under-pronating here. 

In the category of "things I also don't know what to wear with or when I would wear them, maybe if I combine them".

No, no.  None of this.

A choli and its matching skirt worn as a wrap top.  Again, the first is probably only suitable for burning a man. 

A recent charity shop purchase.

I can't figure out how to wear this next one, by which I mean I literally cannot determine how to assemble the garment into some wearable form. 
Also obviously it's a weird clay beige color found nowhere on the skirt.  Fuck it, I should just wear a plain green top with this, shouldn't I?  Green.

23 July 2010

On Hedonism

My favorite thing about Jennifer's Body--in which Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody attempt to remake Mean Girls as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and end up with an affected, irritating Ginger Snaps--is the opening scene in which Megan Fox scratches a scab and chews on her hair.  Fox is, in the film as in life, an exqusitely crafted product machine-tooled to the sexual specifications of an aggregated audience of women-fanciers, and despite my knowledge of this, I can't help but enjoy seeing her walk around and even occasionally talk in films where she has not been tinted orange in post-production.  There's something going on with Jennifer's sexual power and demonic energy and physical perfection all waxing and waning together month by month, but I'll be damned if I can tease it out of the web of pointless homoeroticism and immediately dated cultural references.  Anyway, some part of the film's point, whatever that may be, is about the physicality of bodies, and the relative frailty and impermanence of even the most perfect ones.  Moon, too. 

I think I love my body just about as much as is humanly possible for a young woman of this era who doesn't exercise (hence my project of extensively documenting it), but I still get Kafka-esque heebie jeebies from many of the realities of being a consciousness in a big gestalt of semi-autonomous cells, not all of whom share my genetic material.  Sometimes my teeth just hurt for no reason, and I'm always biting the inside of my mouth.  My toenails--are they getting ingrown?  Was there always this much hair?  Does my nose look bigger when I wake up than it did when I went to bed?  Is sitting causing my ass to atrophy?  Why is all this body fat distributed as cellulite instead of smooth curvilinear forms, anyway?  Must my breasts be asymmetrical?  What happened to all the coins and paper and hair and peach pits I ate?  And my skin!  What the fuck!  I'm not even going to go into what goes on in my perineal area, suffice to say that popcorn is a sometimes food.  And as if that wasn't enough to worry about, I'm freaking mortal as well!

Keeping this in mind, it is often difficult not to eat all the cheese I want.

21 July 2010

On Women in the Sciences

Years ago, I attended a panel on Women in Science for which the prompt was the shitstorm stirred up by Harvard president Lawrence Summers remarking that tenure appointments of female science and mathematics professors at Harvard had probably declined steadily throughout his tenure because of a) babbys, and b) innate differences in the sciencey parts of women's brains. The panel was made up of three female scientists and one male scientist; the audience was...well, I went to a panel later in the same conference titled A Woman's Right To Jimmy Choos and the demographic composition was roughly the same.

The male scientist was the first speaker, and looking distinctly uncomfortable, he explained that while he in no wise agreed with Summers' assessment, he felt it would be a disservice to the panel format to have only panelists who were in total agreement, and so he would advance what he felt was the best defense of the innate differences theory he could muster. Basically, that defense was: it was utterly ridiculous to dismiss discrimination and socialization as factors in women's low representation in science jobs in the manner Summers had been presented as doing, but to treat the idea of innate differences between men and women as an already-settled question was unscientific, and more research should always be conducted.

The female speakers all declined to touch directly on the subject of Summers' remarks, and I had the distinct impression of them scooting their chairs ever so slightly away from the first speaker.  Instead the female scientists focused on their personal narratives as girls and then women interested in science. All noted that they had been routinely mistaken for secretaries by male colleagues of all ages, and all bemoaned the difficulty of finding mentors who people would decline to spread rumors they were fucking. The second speaker, who seemed most interested in talking about female scientists in the aggregate and least interested in talking about her journey, mentioned the case of Ben A. Barres. Barres, an M.I.T.-educated neuroscientist, transitioned from female to male in his thirties, and recalled, for example, overhearing colleagues discussing his work commenting "He's such a better researcher than his sister Barbara!"

Then came the Q&A portion of the panel, where people could get up and query the panelists. To a woman, it consisted of people who wanted to unleash a blistering torrent of invective at Larry Summers and were not reluctant to use the unhappy male speaker as a surrogate, whatever his views. After three or four of these the moderator opted to restrict commenters to only caustic screeds which could be phrased in the form of a question, and it was around then that I decided it would be a better use of my time to wander off.

Gingembre


When I was eight or nine, my science teacher, whom I idolized, looked with fondness at my copper locks, saying "Habitual, never dye your hair."  This is a hell of a trip to put on a prepubescent girl.  She herself was rocking a salt-and-pepper ponytail that had never seen dye, so I can't say she wasn't practicing what she preached.  Nevertheless, when the onset of adult hormones darkened and dulled my hair a few years later, I started looking for something that would give me that feeling I had when my science teacher looked at me.


What grows out of my head today is a fairly deep greenish-brown with gold and copper highlights.  It's pretty fine in texture, with a smirk-worthy Veronica Lake wave.  Mostly I do nothing with it, not even putting it up unless I feel like it's going to stick to my face or get caught in a thresher or something.  Until quite recently, I was ruthless about burning it with peroxide and getting it all chopped off every month.  I believed it was my enemy. 


It's not difficult to have the wrong kind of hair; there are so many of them.  In my case, I had Nerd Hair.  This style is marked by a disinterest in whatever bullshit products people are currently using on their hair.  Nerd hair can be easily obtained by a scrupulous daily washing with an over-drying shampoo, inattention to dandruff, and a reluctance ever to cut the hair, leading to a gentle taper at the ends.  Mine was limp, yet frizzy, like an ironed cloud. 


The only thing that prevents me from having nerd hair now (debatable!) is henna.  Mashing a paste of this leaf and some acid into my scalp every six months or so gives me the hair I always imagined I had before I looked in the mirror.  I wouldn't be growing it out to this rather absurd length without henna.


My hair now is nice and shiny and silken to the touch, but I'll be damned if I can run my fingers through it.  The henna gives it "body", which as far as I can tell means "a high frictional coefficient". 


I have no pretensions about appearing "natural" (though I do on occasion like to have no roots).  I suppose I have some bias toward a plant-based rather than chemical dye, or a small plucky company over a big evil conglomerate, but what mainly keeps me on the henna is that it is permanent, more than any "permanent" dye or treatment I've heard of.  The color I have on the third day is the color I have on the 300th day. 


So that's why henna, but I feel the more important question is: why red?  When hair color is a choice, it's as good a psychological test as any other costly signal.  If I can simplify the rather complicated sexual politics of women's hair color for a moment here, I'll give you an answer.  Of course the follicles that grow out of your head have no intention, but moving from their color to another (or sticking at a time when everyone else is dyeing) can carry these meanings.


To go blonde is to create yourself as a sexual object: the way you look to a partner will be most important to you when you fuck.  To go brunette is to conceal your sexuality from the public eye, to make yourself a "serious" woman instead of a sexual one.  But to go red is to make yourself a sexual subject, and foreground your own desire.  Like blush, like lipstick, like anger, you're wearing that rush of blood outside for all to see. 


Often I find myself wishing there were subject/red versions of other female signifiers--say, a ginger size of tits.  Oh, also I wish applying henna to long hair by my lonesome wasn't such a bastard--I managed to rip out a whole bunch of hair this time. 


 The red brows, lips and dolly cheeks of this post were inspired by Johanna Öst.