Nadine Baggott has put out the call for makeup artists, hairdressers, and complimentary therapists to get involved with an incredibly worthwhile cause in one of my favorite towns in southern England. Looks like a lot of fun, too.

Original post by Jackie Danicki

  stars get in my eyes 
  Originally uploaded by cecily.

Cecily, whose online writing I’ve been reading for about a decade now, writes:

Being able to show a smile to the world is something that many people take for granted. Because of my crooked teeth, I’ve rarely been photographed with a full-on smile. I’m always posing with some half-assed Mona Lisa mug, hoping that my eyes, or the tilt of my head, or some other facial expression will make me seem happier, friendlier, or more approachable. There are a few photos of me where I almost pull it off, but even so, I’ve always felt guarded and reserved because I was so ashamed of my teeth.

In our society, smiles are currency. They are generally given freely and exchanged once people have reached a certain similarity of feeling. When you’re walking down the street and someone attractive catches your eye, you first make eye contact and, in the very next instant, smile at the person to let them know that you see just how good they look. When all you can do is make eye contact, you’re only giving half of yourself. In that instant where you decide to conceal your smile, you’ve managed to deconstruct the bridge between you and that other person. Speaking from experience, it’s difficult to cross that gap once the connection has been broken.

Click here to see what we’ve been missing.

Photo copyright Cecily Walker

Original post by Jackie Danicki

Tilda Swinton was like a Richard Neutra house plopped down in a tract of Hollywood McMansions on Sunday. Her bleak marble face, that curtain-wall column of a dress–next to that, even the normally quite modernist Hillary Swank looked like a fussy boudoir throw cushion, with all that lace.

Swinton’s beauty is challenging, requiring the onlooker to strain and reach, to really experience the act of seeing. At first, for instance, you want desperately to give her eyebrows, but this would be wrong, very wrong, like putting a cornice on the Lever House.

If you attempt to comprehend Swinton’s appearance in terms of the ruddy carpet, or even in terms of of movie star, she is impossible to compute, but think of her in terms of an architectural statement, and it’s possible that she’s finally doing for beauty what Mies and Eliel did for architecture in the middle of the last century, ie, changing it forever, from the DNA up. Although it’s possible that she will remain a splendid anomaly, like Kate Hepburn, who wasn’t a skyscraper at all despite her height, but a yar sailing ship.

My boyfriend sent me a link to a story about her interesting love life–apparently the 50ish Ms Swinton lives with her 70ish artist husband and their children, and they are sometimes all joined in happy cohabitation by her 30ish artist lover. I think it’s grand that this odd, elegant creature lives such a passionate life of her own devising (even if she was a communist in her 20s–why she couldn’t just smoke crack like Amy Winehouse is beyond me. At minimum she has the decency to be a wealthy communist.).

I just got samples for MAC’s new line of austere neutral shades, and I will be experimenting with them with new respect, now that Swinton has set the bar for stark elegance so very high. I may have to attempt going without eyebrows, or taking a young artist lover–and fair being fair, if my boyfriend wanted to bring Tilda home and paint her in the nude at our rambling counattempt manor, I’d have to let him. We’d just have to steer clear from politics at the dinner table.

Original post by Hillary Johnson

I learned too late (as in less than a year ago) how aging it is to wear your hear curly and big when it’s this length. But I didn’t have the benefit of a team of expensive stylists. So it pains me to see Katherine Heigl wearing this look. As my boy Michael K put it, "Joanna Kerns wants her hair back."

It is nice to see a picture of her without a cigarette for a change, though.

Original post by Jackie Danicki