Over the weekend, I stumbled onto the Style Identity series being presented on the blog Truth is Beauty. I recommend it to you. The quote I wish to illustrate here is:
The effect of clothing context on our apparent masculinity or femininity is analogous to the effect of color on our skin.
The apparent color of your skin changes, for better or worse, depending on what color is next to it. That’s because of simultaneous contrast.
And the apparent qualities of your face and figure, including the apparent masculinity or femininity, change depending on the context that surrounds it.
If almost everything in the frame reads as boyish, then the viewer mainly notices what’s not boyish – and so the Gamine’s feminine qualities actually stand out more.
The more boyish the context, the more beautiful Gamines look.
Do you see the brilliance in that? How beautiful it would be if mothers of tomboys could get comfortable with that and quit trying to force the pretty little dresses and such!
In my own life, it made me think of these two pictures I took the day I got my hair cut.
Since learning I don’t technically need my glasses all the time, I have gradually decreased wearing them. They are mostly reading glasses now. In the same time period, I have also changed how I wear my hair, and I’ve been getting alot of compliments.
I do like my hair. But I’m also wondering, could people be responding to seeing me without glasses? When I got these glasses, I really liked them. Now that I know how glasses are supposed to fit, I know they are a little bit wide for me. Two problems with that extra width:
- It makes my eyes look very closely spaced. Not quite cross -eyed, but you know what I mean.
- My eyes also look smaller; therefore, I appear more … shall we be PC and say yang rather than masculine?
Alot more could be said. Allow me to just close with this important point about fitting glasses:
glasses should line up with the sides of the face.
Oops!
Btw, I am affiliated with Warby Parker now. If you use my link (www.WarbyParker.com) they will pay me a little fee. Thank you!
Ahh – great insights, and I get it!
I ended up ordering in haste from Zenni yesterday, because I realized that if I wanted to do my major work conference of the year with unchipped glasses, my time to guarantee I’d get them beforehand was already over a week gone. So I ordered the ones that I found that I could identify the fewest flaws and was done with it. I’m nervous about them (but if they’re awful, I have one return allowed). I’m realizing that online pictures come no where near close to showing what a physical try-on can, and am thinking that my days of ‘cheaper’ glasses may be numbered.
And interesting comment about glasses making your eyes look closer and smaller (which they do). I’m convinced that my prescription (which is quite mild far-sightedness) actually make my eyes look bigger through them. At least, that’s true in the mirror. Which may in reality be a lie. Hmm…
I think it is the frame rather than the prescription. Mine is also mild farsightedness.