Well, okay, it's Thursday, with a projected high of 66F, and here's how the purple skinnies have played out for Day 4 of the 1x5 challenge:
Thrifted pink tank top from several years back, thrifted Loft cardigan I got with three other sweaters in a 4-for-a-buck deal from the charity shop down the street. Fake Birks were an impulse Walmart purchase right before lockdown started last spring. I felt dumb for buying them, but I wore them daily all last spring, summer, and fall, so I have gotten my $15 worth, at least. Again, not a purchase I'd necessarily make again, and the kind of purchase I'm actively trying to avoid. But as I've discovered that the heel of one of my new-to-me Dansko shoes is crumbling (and that this apparently has been a common occurrence for Dansko shoes in the last ten years or so, which I wish I'd known before) . . . well, anyway, I'm going to try to fix it so that it will hold together, because I do like my Dansko shoes. But I am reminded afresh that there are valid reasons to buy new shoes rather than secondhand ones. On the other hand, now that I know what I know, I'm not about to plunk down $120 for new Dansko shoes, no matter how cute they are. Meanwhile, I like having a pair of tan sandals for the pop of contrast they provide for just about everything in my wardrobe. As I said in my previous post, that's my goal: not for everything to match, or be matchy-matchy, but for everything potentially to work with everything else.
Here, for example, I did use my color guide to work out my combination for today, as least as a kind of template. I do find that the colors of my actual clothes don't always line up exactly with the colors in this book, but I figure that if I can get an idea of the theory of what works with what, then I can put together actual clothes that I have. Here I'm assuming that these jeans are probably closer to eggplant purple than anything else. Eggplant does go with a spectrum of pinks – blush pink, soft pink, pastel pink, and so on. I'm not entirely sure exactly which one this top matches, but it's in that spectrum, and to my eye, it works. Ditto this cardigan. I'm not sure which green in that color chart this would technically be. I've always thought of it as spring green or grass green or apple green – not a super blue green, but not a super yellow green, either. Not at all a gray green like sage (which is probably the best green for me, since my eyes are a grayed shade of blue-green, and my skin's undertone is a cooler pink). But on the color wheel, green does complement purple, generally speaking. As these are the clothes I have, and as I'm not going out shopping today for the perfect green . . . anyway, I think the color blocking works all right. I like how the lighter, brighter colors make the purple function basically as a dark neutral. My best dark neutral is navy, but for my purposes right now, purple works fine. And the brighter tan sandals do provide contrast at the bottom. I like the way the lines work here – the lace detail at my real waistline adds some nice subtle pattern, while the longer line of the cardigan offers verticality. I could wear dressier shoes with this outfit to take it up a notch, if I were going out to dinner or a party (in my fantasy life). The cardigan as a layer is light enough that I could wear this even into the North Carolina summer and be okay, but it's not too summery for a mid-60s day in March. I could also wear sneakers if my feet get cold.
Here's a close-up of my earring choice today, also a gift from my husband. I think he picked these out without recourse to an in-house personal shopper. As I said, he's good at this.
I'm not sure anything plays quite as well with my coloring as blue, but this is not bad. My husband loves this cardigan. Though I'm not convinced that it's a great green for me, it plays well enough with colors that do look good on me that I can wear it and feel all right.
UPDATE: Reader, my feet got cold.
Also, my hair dried. This is Day 3 hair – I washed it Tuesday – misted to medium dampness this morning with water mixed in a spray bottle with a tiny bit of Not Your Mother's Curl Talk Defining Cream, which I also use as a last step/leave-in when I wash. I do not, in fact, have juicy sleek defined curls, but I do have plumped up waves, with shine and softness, and that, my friends, is more than good enough for me. I do want it to look nice, but there's a limit to how much time and effort I'm willing to expend.
ALSO: I wound up getting a mole shaved off the front of my thigh yesterday. Had there not been more Band-Aids in the cabinet at home, that would have been the end of the 1x5 challenge for me, because I would not have wanted to bleed on my purple jeans. The dermatologist thought it might have been a wart, but could have been a squamous-cell cancer, so off it came and away to the pathology lab.
These jeans do have some spandex in them, and as of today, the knees are starting to be just a little stretched out. Really not bad for what was a cheap brand to begin with, for which I paid maybe $4 secondhand at Goodwill, worn day after day like this. By tomorrow they'll be ready for the wash, but honestly, they've stood up a lot better to this level of wear than I expected them to.
If I ever go traveling again, I've got to remember them as a staple to pack. They're really quite comfortable, obviously go with a lot of things, and do hold up reasonably to continuous wear. I could see building a travel capsule around them and being quite happy to keep putting them on.
FRIDAY
Last day of the 1x5 challenge! Honestly, I don't know that my outfits have featured all that much interesting variety, but it's been interesting to me to see how much I can do with one pair of purple skinny jeans. Funny how any color can become something of a neutral, when you make it a backdrop for other things. Today, to round out the week, I decided to go with that idea of purple as a foundational neutral, and to try using it in the way that people often use black, to create a "column" of a single color as the core of an outfit.
Like pretty much every other 50something woman in the Western world, I used to wear a lot of black. I bought into the idea that it was artsy, that it went with everything, that it was universally flattering. Now . . . all of these things, as it turns out, are untrue. At least, items 2 and 3 are objectively untrue, and as for item 1: something is artsy if you say it's artsy. It's artsy if you, an artsy person, wear it. That there might be some kind of artsy uniform, by which artsy people may be identified, strikes me as, itself, a profoundly un-artsy thought, in the same league as joining the Nonconformists' Club because at last you've found likeminded people.
Granted, some people look good in black. But it is NOT universally flattering. I look like the undead in it. I also don't look slimmer. What happens when I wear black is what black does generally: it sucks all surrounding light into itself, light and also color. If your natural coloring and facial structure aren't strong enough, or high-contrast enough, to withstand the black hole of the black dress you're wearing, then your dress will suck the features right off your face. I am walking evidence of the truth of this assertion. And while you can wear makeup to counteract this feature-sucking effect – why? Why would I buy and wear clothes for which I would need, effectively, to wear a mask, just to look presentable in them? Why not buy and wear clothes that actually play up what I've got, instead of sabotaging it? Seems like a lot less work.
My youngest daughter can wear black and look great: she has very dark brown eyes and striking bone strucure: heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, beautifully shaped strong mouth, strong chin. Me, with my subtler coloring and less prominent, less symmetrical, less striking features, not so much. Mind you, I'm not running myself down here. It's not that I think I'm unbeautiful. But my particular kind of beauty is very different from this daughter's – or from that of my equally gorgeous blue-eyed, curly-red-haired daughter. I'm quieter, subtler, less dramatic than either of them. I'm the misty day to their storm and sun. I'm the fluidity to their clarity. And that's all right. In fact, it's just fine. But I might as well acknowledge it. If I know myself, I can dress myself.
In short, black does nothing for me. Too, as my weight has fluctuated throughout my 40s and 50s, it has at times been depressing to contemplate that all the "fashion" presented for my age group and body makeup consists of a black "core" with some neon-hued jacket or cardigan over it, or else leopard print. Some women do honestly look good in outfits like that, but try as I might, I couldn't see myself as one of those women. I'd have to have a different face, different hair, a different personality. If I wanted to look remotely presentable as an older woman, I thought, especially an older woman who isn't elegantly long and lean, I'd have to be a different person. I couldn't possibly be the person I am, and look good. The thought filled me with a species of despair.
Anyway, all that to say: today I decided to try that basic idea of a neutral "core," in a color other than black, with some layering of tones, to conclude my 1x5 challenge. To go with the purple skinnies, I pulled out, again, that purple Coldwater Creek top I wore with shorts on Sunday. The purples aren't an exact match, but from a distance I think the effect is more or less a single color, especially when I add a long cardigan. It's significantly colder today than it has been for the last couple of days, so I chose my big furry rose-pink/light purple-gray cardigan, plus a linen scarf I bought on clearance at the sadly defunct Hi-Lites ladies' factory-seconds store on our town's Main Street, some years back. If I'd had a cardigan and scarf in a tone to match the shirt and trousers, I might have gone for that for a more closely color-layered look, but I didn't, so here we are. I also thought about wearing my gray-green Doc Martens, but it was easier just to pull on Converse, and they do provide more contrast. My kids gave me the multicolored earrings for my last birthday.
If there's any real takeaway from the Curly Girl Method for me, it's the goal of healthy natural hair that I don't have to do much to. I'm not going to spend hours trying to style it in curls or highly defined waves. I'm just not. And I don't follow all the rules. I do comb my hair with a wide-tooth comb. I don't avoid shampoo – though I do use a shampoo without sulfates, watered down so that "water" truly is the dominant ingredient (also, I'm cheap, and watering it down makes it last a lot longer). I diffuse my hair to dry it, sometimes using heat. I do use a conditioner with no silicones, but a lot of moisturizers. I do not buy very expensive products, just things I can readily find at the drugstore, though I have gone up a few notches in price point from 85-cent VO5.
I do use a curl cream as a finish, to give my hair extra moisture and protein and to help it clump into more defined waves. Sometimes I use a mousse as well. I wash my hair, condition it, comb and use a wet brush while the conditioner is in to detangle and encourage it to form clumps, then rinse and wet-brush my curl curl cream through. I use a t-shirt to scrunch the extra water out of my hair. If I'm going to use mousse, I apply a couple of big palmfuls of it as if I were frosting a cake, smoothing it on and scrunching it through. Then I let my hair air-dry, unless I'm going out somewhere, in which case I'll diffuse it. Usually in colder weather I do some combination of air-drying and diffusing to help it dry faster, because clammy hair is no fun.
But that's it. It looks how it looks. It is a lot softer, a good bit more defined, a lot more manageable, than before I began my version of this method in earnest some years ago. With layers cut into it, it falls into a nice tapered shape. But I don't have big hair goals. I don't have Big Hair goals. I just want to take care of what I have.
SATURDAY
No. I've tried it several times, several ways. But no. Not flattering.
It's too reliably unflattering to be worth keeping, so into the outbox it went. Let it flatter somebody else. On with the reliably more flattering sage-green skirt which has featured here before, keeping everything else the same:
As you can see, I washed my hair today. Also, I haven't worn this thrifted denim jacket that much, because it's either been too hot or too cold. I like it, and I want to get some real wear out of it, so with today's high of 55F, I thought I might try it instead of the cardigan I would more naturally reach for. The skirt is thrifted, as are the purple top, the belt, and the infinity scarf, which I'm also trying to get more wear out of, because I do like it.
