We are, honest to God, sitting across the street from a cornfield. Oh, we love New Jersey so much. We are also feeling very isolation-y having watched Red Dawn again this morning, and feeling v. Wolverines. Does this make sense to anyone who was not alive for Ronald Reagan’s presidency? All we are saying, Donald Rumsfeld, is that there are some very fucking relevant metaphor problems re: Red Dawn \\ current-day and you would be wise to mind them. ARGH. Gore ’08!

Holy shit, what a digression. These are not our favorite French Soles, they may not even be our second-favorite French soles. However, they are on sale. This should not matter, and yet it does. We are breaking all of Suze Orman’s rules. That woman owns us. Tss.

French Sole flats, $66

So this is the first in our reader-generated favorite-beauty-products-ever posts. Anything that gets us less to work to do is fine with us. Because, as that sentence proves, we struggle with grammar. In any case, possibly the most fun part of this for us, excepting the part where we have less work to do, has been the heretofore unlikely questions re: our methods and practices here, which we of course love, because we are basically the tickle.com demographic. Horrifying. So first the question, and then the recommendation.

How many of you are there? And if there’s only one of you, why are you always saying “we”?

We use the royal we because (a) we would so desperately like to be royal and also (b) because, trust us, we talk about ourselves enough. I, I, I. It just gives us a headache. And: we are legion!

Are you one of those secretly commercial blogs? Like, the Gap is paying for all this or something?

We can safely say that unlike in high school, we are earning nothing from the Gap. We’ve seen those “blogs” where like every third post is like, By the way, you should totally buy Toasties Slippers or something very horrible, and obviously, this is not that. Those things are always so obvious. We have one lovely, wonderful advertiser—Bizrate! We love Bizrate so excessively much!—and then those little ads on the left. It may seem incredible, but it is really helpful to us if people click on them. They almost never do, though, which is okay, as we have, in our lives, never done it either.

Why don’t you have one of those About Me sections with your favorite TV shows?

We are really too lazy to maintain them. For example, there is exactly one store in our 25 Best Stores in London section. That, obviously, is pathetic. However, we have many favorite TV shows, and they include Battlestar Galactica, Serenity, South Park, The Sopranos, Green Wing, The Office, and Extras. We are, and several friends have confirmed this, basically Maggie in Extras, particularly in the last episode, when she is shamed into cleaning her apartment. We love Maggie.

We hope that wasn’t totally boring. And now the recommendation!

Hi! I have lots of favorite beauty crap but I think I can narrow it down to two. One would just be impossible.

1. Lorac Gloss Stick in Sheer Berry ($15). I love it because it is more balm than gloss, but it’s pigmented enough to make me look pretty and it sticks around. It smells sort of like a chocolate orange which might not be everyone’s thing but it’s certainly mine. Also, it comes in a very low-key Chapstick-esque package that I adore AND I can put it on in the car without the aid of a mirror and not look like I’ve broken into my mommy’s makeup cabinet. I could not love it more if I married it.

2. Bumble & bumble SumoTech ($23). I have short-short hair and this stuff is what gives me that perfect piecey look, without making my hair look lank and greasy. My salon stopped carrying it so now I have to drive clear across town to stock up but I don’t care. It’s worth it and nobody else makes anything quite like it. It’s a paste! It’s a pomade!

Woo, picture attached.

Thanks!
Adrien
Amblus Professional Smartass
http://amblus.diaryland.com

Yay! That was so great, as we basically keep to the same exact three products and never would have considered either one of them. Plus A+ extra credit for the photo, particularly as it helpfully illustrates piece-ing quality of product B! So hurrah, and there will be more of these this week.

Now, if you:

A) Have a question for our stylist, who is currently on vacation but will return shortly;
B) Have a favorite beauty product to mention, and if we post yours we will totally send you a treat, but NB it will be quite a cheap treat (see above re: lack of advertising); or
C) Have a random question for us,

E-mail us here! It is all too exciting for us to resist the exclamation point.

We loved this so much we totally skipped the Viking center, which we’d previously been all excited about since other than the pillaging etc we’re so into the whole Viking aesthetic. This picture doesn’t do it justice but this gallery is a decommisioned church, and hanging through the … whatever church-y area that is are 10,000 … er, again, whatevers, made of rosin-covered horsehairs from violins and hairnets. And it is so pretty. We would suggest to anyone not enamoured of Vikings to see it. York! Very lovely, all around. It is by Susie MacMurray and it’s at York St. Mary’s.

Because we are still wonderfully, terribly jet-lagged, we woke up today at 7:43 a.m., which allowed us to do something we rarely do, and that is watch the Today show. We realized we could only watch it muted—it was better that way—until today’s band came on. And we said to ourselves, “That’s got to be like Jimmy Buffett’s band or something,” some other band of septagenarians. And then we realized it was Chicago. Hmm. Maybe they were in their 50s when they made all those songs we remember. Probably not. Tss. We are much older than we thought we were.

Today’s post is about Generra dresses, because we are sure they are the only ones that will survive the heat. Hate. The heat. Plus, we will kill the next person who steps on the back of our flip flops. Also in random violence, we forgot to mention that as we made our way to Heathrow this week, after our taxi fucked us over, we were climbing up the stairs at Paddington with our four ridiculous bags, when some woman, completely ignoring the “Keep Left” signs, barrelled down the stairs with her own luggage, and hit us so hard we almost toppled over. We recovered our balance, shouted “Lady!” to her back, and then, we swear, reached out her hand and were thisclose to pushing her down the stairs. It was like a Diagnosis Murder moment. We swear. Really. That is sort of fucked up.

The only good thing about it is that when we finally made it to the top, the guy behind us looks at us all pityingly and is like, “Some people just don’t watch we’re they’re going.”

Anyway, Generra. Honestly, we love this dress. Nice big belt and you’re set. Kristen dress, $125.80

When did Generra become cool again? We remember it from middle school, like Chicago. It seems to have aged a little bit better, however. Halter dress, $66.30. Also in cantaloupe.

We like this one, too. It’s cotton but doesn’t it look sort of silk from the picture? Rope dress, $140. Also in black

Don’t these all look quite cool, in the temperature sense? We don’t mind saying that we spent the last two weeks in London intermittently wearing these very short denim shorts, and we just wish we had one of these dresses so we could, you know, not done that. Halter dress, $230. Hmmm, maybe that is the same as this one, just more expensive: Please examine.

Usually we are very happy with the online buying experience (obviously), but we need to buy one of these dresses immediately, because we are too fucking hot and although we would like to go to the dentist in our American Apparel shorts, it is just not appropriate. Slash dress, $66.30

This message just showed up in our inbox, and we thought it was funny enough to share.

If everyone stopped shouting, we’d probably all be a little bit happier.

Dear Bunnyshop,

And here are the rules:

1. Indoor voice: You have one. Use it. All the time.
2. There are many good times to stop and look for the gum in your pocket. Immediately after walking through the gates exiting the Tube is not a good one.
3. If, whilst on an escalator, you notice that everyone on the right is standing, and everyone on the left is walking, you should maybe try to do the same.
4. The fact that much of Europe is not air-conditioned does not indicate our cultural superiority.
5. Any complaint that ends with “If it weren’t for us, you’d all be speaking German” will be answered with immediate deportion.

Tss.

Hello there. We are looking for a few good guest editors to talk about their very favorite things: This is because we realized today, while talking to a friend, that every person in the world has one—just one!—favorite thing. For instance, our favorite thing is our dog.

For the purposes of this guest-editing position, or maybe guest contributor is more the thing, we will restrict our favorite things to: beauty things. We also are going to try to never use the word “thing” in a sentence again. Er, whatever. Anyone who has a favorite beauty thing (argh) other people can purchase, we would love to know about it, and then we will have a week of these recommendations.

Our favorite beauty product at the moment is Lush Big shampoo, which we are shocked at, because we actually complained about how much it sucked in this very space. But it somehow seems to have acclimated to our hair, and now our hair is quite lovely and soft and wavy. However, we were in such a wave of Lush love that we went and bought their charcoal face soap, and that, we have to say, smells exactly like that smell that makes you say, “Is there a chemical plant nearby?” Er, maybe that’s just a New Jersey thing.

So please: tell us about your favorite beauty product. It can be super brief and everyone who contributes will get a little treat in the mail. The treat will be super good.

Now we want to say that for some things we get quite a few replies, and for some barely any. We really want to do this, mostly because we are sick of our own voice[s], and we really want to know about other people’s favorite thing[s]. So really: send them in! We will love you for it.

PS If you have a little picture of yourself, from your MySpace page or whatever, that would be extra good. Also if you have any funny stories about the project that is extra good too.

Ooh, we forgot the whole part about how our keys were missing, too, so we got to hang out outside our apartment for a couple hours while we waited for someone with a spare set to get home from work. That was totally awesome too.

Honestly we’re getting totally sale-fatigued.

It seems weird to us that Ivanka Trump was judging PR last night. Does she have a pocket dog? Confused. Cannot. Wait. For the big Tim-takedown. Who can it be?

Sunner camisole, now $62

Today we:

- got stood up by the ass cab driver who was supposed to take us to the airport

- lost, or was robbed of us, our wallet, including all of our money and credit cards, except for two pound coins, which we

- used to buy two Krispy Kreme doughnuts

- threw a hissy fit

- ate three dinners

- got a haircut

- and sat next to some horrible woman on the plane who kept yelling at her husband in the next row. Tsss.

Today, however, is our further reductions, end-of-the-month sale continuing spectacular. We cling to the sales because if the sales are on, so’s summer. Ugh, we hate the fall, even more because of the pun.

We are going to try to show as many sale items as possible today. We’ll see how far we get. We will also have a new contest, but that will have to wait for a time when we are not quite so debilitated by jetlag .

These shoes are awesome. Summer: It lives! Gold wedges, now $34.99.

This is really just too Clockwork Orange, raping-the-nice-woman-who-lives-in-the-country for us, MAC Cosmetics.

Okay, it’s not an exact match, but bowl hat, big eyelashes and the ultra-violence = we’re going to Sephora.