a discovery

Yesterday, while beginning my inventory, I inadvertently discovered the secret to restrained shopping. I KNOW. You get up in the morning thinking it's going to be an ordinary day and then WHAM! you stumble across something life-changing. I imagine this is just how Alexander Fleming felt.

Friends, it is thus. You look as terrible as you can, or however you look without trying at all. (If you're someone who wakes up looking like you did before you went to sleep, this may not work so well for you, although maybe your standards will be higher, so maybe it will.) If you're going to put on any make-up, pick one thing, and make it a bit weird. For whatever reason, yesterday I decided to use eyebrow pencil and nothing else, and while in my mind I looked like this:

I actually looked more like this:

I put the mirror in grey light so I looked even more washed out than Dunedin has made my complexion, left on my knitted children's slippers, and asked my dog (who was in a decidedly indifferent mood) what he thought of everything so every time my question was met with a visual I hate you, mother. And things looked bad. Plain, at best. So when the odd thing looked good, there was no question of whether or not I should keep it. It was clearly a wearable miracle.

This may not sound like much to some of you, but for me, this is almost on par with penicillin. I am the person who buys it in her size, or a size down, or two sizes up - whatever they have, and belt it, or don't breathe in it, or put in in the small mountain beside my sewing machine of things some people I know might alter. I buy things that make me look bad because I like them, and I buy things in colours that make me look like I have a rare illness because I don't have anything else in that colour, so I must need it. No more! As long as I can employ these tricks in public without finding people with straitjackets waiting when I come out of the changing room, I am set, and you can be, too!

I realised while writing that last paragraph that, again, I'm writing something that may potentially discourage you from buying things from me, which verges on counter-productive. However, I have decided that I have so much faith in what I'm going to stock that there will be things for you that pass these insane tests, and if there aren't, I'm going to make it my mission to have something perfect for you the next time you come in. This shop is going to be unusual in many ways, one of which is how personal it will be; even if it's a business failure, it's going to be memorable, and fun, and together we will make the world look a little bit better.

Mission stated. Slogan to come.

Back to inventory.