This travel agent is in a tiny mall next to an Asian supermarket in, arguably, the most awesome street in Auckland. I suppose if the vintage shopping starts to feel a little pedestrian, it’s nice to have the opportunity for a more direct sortie to the past–or, indeed, the future.
This afternoon, Betty and the husband person trundled across the Domain and had a quick wander through the Auckland Museum.
First they visited some of their favourites: this little cow, who looks like he might have come, like the husband person, from the late seventies…
And this guy.
But then they explored an exhibit they’d never seen before: a reconstruction of various Auckland shops from the nineteenth century. Do read on…
From Brown Button, via the lovely 74 Lime Lane blog.
For her 27th birthday, Betty received a package from her sister in London.
Aren’t we all. And, presumably in case the whole Pilates thing doesn’t work out, these reflexology socks:
Danke, Minnie.
I came across this on one of my late-night walks home from work. It was sitting on its own on a large expanse of grass, just chillin’. It’s a bottle of Gees Linctus.
The joys of city life. One can find anything. I haven’t gotten around to transplanting my eyelashes this season, but when I do…
Pencilled on the wall of the foundry where a friend’s very large sculpture was being cast in bronze.
History records a list of things–whether they be tragic novels, children’s movies, chocolate bars or strengthening exercises–that have achieved what is pleasingly referred to as cult status. You know the ones–Wuthering Heights, Babe, the Reese’s Piece, the burpee, this type of thing. Their virtue is respected regardless of personal preference; they transcend their decade of production; they unite consumers, and reveal oddities like Vegemite-haters and PB&J non-combiners and people who don’t like the Dixie Chicks.
Some cult beauty products, however, have achieved this status inexplicably. I do not refer to those products, like 8 Hour Cream, which are regrettably Wrong but Wromantic (apricot-scented petroleum jelly, sadly, cannot really be deserving, despite its loveliness), but of those that have all the actual charm of the Emperor’s clothes. Following, therefore, is a short list of beauty products that deserve to go the way of the Branch Davidians. Read on.
St Ives Apricot Scrub. This so-called cult product is essentially cheap sunscreen mixed with ground-up swimming-pool bottom. The smell alone is sickening, but the texture is the fascinating part: St Ive may as well have stuck with orthodoxy and pointed his disciples to a Brillo pad.
Clarins Beauty Flash Balm. It is, similarly, the smell that gives this one away; it’s reminiscent of an early stage in the manufacture of rubber cement, and feels a little like the goop that is customarily tinted blue and poured onto contestants on children’s television shows. Like all of these things, it should have been disposed of safely and respectfully in the 1980s.
Blotting papers of all kinds. The favoured ones when I was a gurl were from The Body Shop, but there are umpteen variations — lilliputian rectangles of rice paper, dusted on one side with powder and designed to absorb tiny droplets of sweat or oil from one’s mid-afternoon nose. People will buy anything, srsly. For interest’s sake, the correct product to use in this situation is a Starbucks napkin.
Pleasing, no? It’s in one of the throoms at the Baptist Tabernacle.
