I know I said in my previous article I am up for trying anything once, but Vajazzle – ing??? For those not already in the know, vajazzling is the new craze to hit the UK. It’s basically an arrangement of different crystals on your nether regions in the form of hearts and different shapes, using Swarovski crystals. Thanks to a new “Hit” TV series, the craze has been brought to the attention of millions. Reportedly this craze already has a celebrity following, so if it’s good enough for the celebs, it’s good enough for me! This can be done at the beauty salon, or behind closed doors in your own home, where kits can be bought from beauty outlets for around £5.00.
So here I go. Looking through the designs, I decide on a heart shaped crystal one. Ideally this follows your monthly wax so skin is soft and fuzz free. I purchased my kit from an online retailer and used the alcohol wipe provided to wipe the area for vajazzling clear of any moisturizer or residue and the crystals are stuck on in the arranged design. The whole treatment is totally pain free, thank goodness! And cheap and cheerful, especially as some treatments cost in excess of £50.00. So after 20 minutes of negotiating crystals in to the shape of a heart, this is seriously not easy from my angle, and using a mirror really doesn’t help, I finally have something that vaguely resembles a heart. It is strange looking down and seeing the glimmer of diamonds, but I am sure my fiance would enjoy it, or at least give him a laugh! The pack’s instructions do state the crystals can be used on any part of the body, phew!
So personally I reckon the body art would look great on tanned shoulders or backs, especially as I found my underwear was sticking as I walked about. I would recommend going to the salon or enlisting a trusted friend to help with the application, and perhaps keep it for occasions when going commando is an option. It definitely brings out your naughty side! Reading the instructions on the pack, it says it lasts between 2 and 5 days. So as the sun comes out and we don the lovely trends of the season, we can adorn our bodies with glitz and glamour. After all, “Diamonds are a girls best friend”!
Ladies, if you thought you’d seen it all with the extremities of the proverbial ‘landing strip’ or permanently pink dye poodles…feast your eyes on the beauty craze which swept over from America and crept under the bedsheets a few years back. Behold the provocatively named ‘Vajazzle’! This type of body art takes the form of rhinestone placement around the nether regions of the body; most popular on female pubic areas, but can also be modified for male adornment or other areas on both sexes.
Originally designed within the confines of a San Francisco beauty parlour around three years ago, Vajazzling hadn’t been seen on European or British territory until the last year or so – most noticeably on “The Only Way Is Essex” series on UK television last year.
So what exactly does this craze for body sparkle involve? It appears to be very easy indeed. Simply a case of prewaxing the desired area of your body, making sure it’s towelled dry, then placing the Swarovski crystals in a pattern or design of your choice in strategic formation with the use of tweezers. Each crystal is then pressed down firmly for a few seconds for the adhesive to ‘take’, then the person waits a little while before dressing. And that’s it! Vajazzled!
Various websites enthuse on such matters, claiming their clients have already carried out home experiments with regards to worries on ‘after care problems’….Namely, if the vajazzling is placed on the female pubic area, does it hurt or chafe the male during intercourse??? The answer was a resounding “NO, not a problem as the crystals are smooth”!
Your vajazzle should last a few days, and obviously it’s a good idea to wear loose fitting clothes. The crystals can be re-used, with a skin-safe adhesive; and keep them stored carefully to minimise scratching. You could also try them in different areas – like above the waist or on your back; just have fun with it. Or , alternatively head off to Essex for a contemporary adornment complete with entertainment!
I urge the people of Essex to stay indoors. a dangerous animal is on the loose: classism. in the past 48 hours, Britain has erupted in a paroxysm of sneering snobbishness. With the news that a lion might have been roaming the outermost fields of Clacton, a much wilder beast showed its face: the acceptable hatred of the (apparently) moneyed working class.
And so, Twitter has seen "lion" and "Essexlion" become its most discussed topics, as the incident is used to deride the people of this county. Essexism, it seems, is the last unchallenged prejudice.
First, countless supposedly hilarious pictures of the lion emerged: big cats with Photoshop-ed bouffant hairdos, because, of course, everyone in Essex has ridiculous hair. they have ridiculous hair, so the notion goes, because the men and women of Essex have no taste. they simply have money. And for the middle and upper classes, that will never be enough. Only "old" money ushers you into the upper echelons. however much a working-class person has "made good" – and that’s a phrase that exposes the belief that the higher the strata, the greater the virtue – they will never be accepted.
And then there ensued a torrent of feline-themed Essex jokes. one of the more followed journalists on Twitter, who calls herself FleetStreetFox, and who has a column in the Daily Mirror Online – which, of course, has a substantial working-class readership – wrote: "#Essexlion will be several shades darker than most lions, French manicured claws and a taste for WKD." thus, she niftily encapsulates three stereotypes in one: fake tan, fake nails and the "wrong" kind of dipsomania – one that is fuelled by cheap booze. The 18th-century outrage over proles binging on gin is alive and well.
Even The Observer columnist and broadcaster Lauren Laverne, who is from Sunderland, itself an oft-derided area for similar reasons, poked the escaped animal with a snob stick: "Hope they manage to find the Essex lion before somebody persuades it to get mane extensions and a vajazzle." here she is making reference to The Only Way Is Essex, the television reality show which serves as a cornerstone for Essexism, by cherry-picking the most extreme embodiments of the county’s female stereotypes.
How accurate are these representations? Does Helen Mirren fit the stereotype? Does Simon Amstell? Did Dudley Moore? Or, for that matter, my mother, who was born in Ilford yet somehow managed to become a lecturer and local councillor without ever having a manicure or spray tan? (Not that there’s anything wrong with these things.)
There is no moral difference between laughing at people simply because of where they were born and mocking people because of the amount of melanin in their skin, their chromosomal makeup or their inability to walk.
The Oxford English Dictionary rarely makes news, but it’s added slew of new words and phrases is just too ridic to not write about here.
As we perused the list of chosen words, we noticed that some of the additions were tech-based, while others were nothing more than slang gone way too far.
But at the very least, adding these words to the dictionary can help us youngsters explain to our elders what we mean when we use words like “mmk,” “tweep,” “totes,” and “vajazzle.”
So here they are — the latest crop of words. How many of them make you say WTF?
Maybe some of these words shouldn’t have made the jump from Urban Dictionary to the Oxford English Dictionary, because let’s face it, how many of them can you read with a British accent (how the OED is read) without losing the effect?
I was the worst kind of stereotype when it comes to trying to get my partner to propose.
In fairness, I use to imbibe large quantities of alcohol and it can get a little sticky modulating your feelings through a haze of test tube shots. Pro alcoholic tip: If you want to be the most popular person at the party, bring a case of “Tooters.” Drunk feelings are sort of like period feelings in that they feel extremely, righteously appropriate in the moment, and no they obviously cannot wait until morning!
So there was wailing. and screaming of questions through great hiccupping sobs, like “Wh-wh-why haven’t you ask-ed m-m-me to marry you yet?” Cue stumbling, possible puking.
Ah, the ancient art of seduction.
Here’s how my father proposed to my mother: One day he said, petulantly: “Well, I want to get married, but you won’t even talk about it.”
So you can see where I got my romance gene.
I was being terrible and I knew I was being terrible, but I couldn’t stop. I was on a runaway train of terrible like when you go batshit crazy after a breakup and can’t stop calling/guilt-tripping/checking that email account you still have the password to even as you feel your dignity evacuating your body.
I stopped verbally vomiting my personal insecurities in that dramatic fashion once I quit el binge drinking, but inside I was still a bubbling cauldron of fear and insecurity ever time the subject was broached. Intellectually I knew it wasn’t true, but my dumb-ass emotions just kept on feeling like there was something wrong with me, that he didn’t love me enough if he didn’t pop the question.
All this pressure built up inside my head, until I did something I never imagined I would be the kind of girl to do: I ultimated him.
Around 7 years of dating, I decided that 8 was about all I had in me. I didn’t see it as telling him what to do so much as informing him of my limits so he could make his decision accordingly. but yeah, I basically told him to propose or I was out. I also told him that it’s not classy to wait until midnight on the last day.
I justified all this by saying that marriage was just very important to me: that despite our total commitment to one another, evidenced by our living together and at that time going through the process to foster children together, I needed the public and permanent commitment of a legal marriage.
So we got engaged, and two weeks later a baby came to live with us, which I would not recommend to those of you looking to revel in engagement attention. My own mother barely looked at the ring.
But that’s still more than you’re likely to get once you’re boring old married. which based on my complete disinterest in actually scheduling my nuptials, maybe isn’t as important to me as I insisted. because in all those fantasies about our future, I never got this far. The camera panned out on the tears glistening in my eyes as he rose from one knee.
Which makes it painfully clear to me that I wasn’t obsessing over getting married. I was obsessing over getting engaged.
I felt that being proposed to would bestow some sort of legitimacy on our relationship, or, let’s be honest, me. to a former ugly girl, a social pariah who has spent my life flabbergasted every time someone is attracted to me, a proposal would be undeniable proof that I am desirable, and lovable. I wanted to be the kind of girl that someone proposes to; that is, I wanted a man to make me OK, which I know is not very feminist and more importantly didn’t work because I’ve got this fucking ring on now and I’m not fixed or anything.
Don’t get me wrong; I still want to get married. I just don’t care as much about it as I thought I did. What I cared about was the show of great commitment inherent in actually purchasing the ring and getting down on one knee. Now that that’s done, I’m straight chilling. The marriage was less important to me than what the proposal represented.
And I definitely could not care less about the details of my wedding day, beyond wanting to look really really hot and eat lots of donuts. My mom keeps emailing me to let me know she wants to be involved in the wedding plans, of which there are none. Hi Mom! I’m not cutting you out, I’m just lazy and apathetic! (Also, stop reading these articles; I write about some really messed-up stuff I don’t want you to know about.)
And of course, being engaged didn’t deliver what I thought it would. It’s dope, but not much has really changed. which as a smart savvy feminist I probably should have already known, but I refuse to be ashamed for having soaked up some of the messages women are bombarded with from birth. I feel fat sometime and I thought there was something amazing on the other side of the proposal, OK? sorry. I’m fucking susceptible.
So when I got to the top of Marriage Mountain and saw it was just the same old trees and shit on the other side, I had the same feeling I had after having S-E-X for the first time — the familiar “Is that all there is?” of being a woman.
I’m engaged, but I’m still insecure as shit, kind of fat, a bad housekeeper, and covered in mystery bruises half the time. I still forget to shave my ankles. I still lazily wipe up spills with my dress. I worry about being a good-enough fiance like I worried about being a good-enough girlfriend and surely will worry about being a good-enough wife.
I still do something up a few times a week that makes me think, “Really? somebody wants to marry me?” Not because marriage is a prize for women, but because it’s a real accomplishment for anybody for whom it took a years-long collaboration between therapy and recovery to become someone you’d want to spend your life with. and maybe that’s the real reason I got so hung up on the symbolism of getting engaged; I do see it, along with other milestones, as a marker of how much progress I’ve made.
Anyway, I’ve learned my lesson. Marriage probably won’t make me any better or happier than getting engaged did. but I’m glad I get to find out. Sometime. When I feel like thinking about it.
