Manolo for the Big Girl Fashion, Lifestyle, and Humor for the Plus Sized Woman.

Okay y’all, we need to sit down and take it to the reals.

It’s tough out there, gang. There is bad taste EVERYWHERE. People are still getting pink and white square tips and wearing oversize sunglasses, I STILL am the only person at my local grocery store who can be reliably be counted on to wear a proper-fitting boulder holder and people buy and apparently consume something called Arbor Mist, which makes my soul hurt.

But all is not lost.

For every no there is a yes, for every low there is a high, and for every Woman Too Damn Old For A Vera Bradley Wristlet And Really Should Know Better Anyway is a teenage daughter who won’t let her buy one.

Ladies and gentlemen who act like ladies,  let us doff our collective chapeaux to Clare M.

Clare M is one of our younger readers and at a fresh-faced sixteen years old, stopped her otherwise entertaining and right-thinking mother Julia (who shared the story with me yesterday) from purchasing a Vera Bradley wristlet.

WARNING: Our more delicate readers might want to avert their eyes.

Friends. I am a writer, a Southerner AND an Episcopalian so believe me when I say have seen many MANY pink elephants in my time, but I’ve never, ever (perhaps because I’ve never been forced to drink hairspray) seen pink elephants like THAT.

Now to be fair, this might not be THE wristlet Julia wanted, but it cannot possibly be far off.  Now, we will ignore for the time being that a Grown Woman wants a wristlet –which I think of as strictly the domain of the Miley crowd–  and let’s focus on the low-rent-Lilly Pulitizer tragiculousness of Vera Bradley on someone who remembers what MTV was like when there was music on it.

Our heroine Clare, spying her mother cruising the internet for Questionable Trade (and in this instance I mean a VB wristlet) throws herself into the line of fire like:

“Mommy, no. No Vera Bradley.”

Julia protests. She asks “Who will even know?!”

And Clare, bringing a tear to my eye and making me love her as if she were my own child (by which I mean my own Birkin) responds:

“God will know.”

I salute you Clare. Well-played. Well-played indeed.

Guys, I accidentally bought Diet Cheese.

I mean I only HALF accidentally bought it because it was on sale and the idea of “Light Brie” intrigued me. I mean, how is it possible? For me light brie is only double creme and not triple.

Diet cheese can [redacted] right off.

I don’t have a lot of experience buying diet foods –my family, despite being well-off, bought the grossest, cheapest most processed food imaginable and as God as my witness I will never eat Imperial-brand margerine again– so I don’t have vast experience in food betrayal, but I bet a lot of folks do.

Today Miss Plumcake wants to know:

What is the vilest “diet” food you ever bought?

I’m really interested in what’s going on in the comments section of yesterday’s beauty post –although I haven’t had time to comment– but I did want to make a few clarifications.

When I talk about beauty, I’m not talking about the industry, although I find it really interesting you can fake being pretty, because you can and the biggest signal of that to me is  the current crop of models on the runway.

I’m almost always on the side of sympathy for the model. It’s not easy to be a good model, but back in the day models used to have to be pretty.

(Plus they looked so bitchy! Here Lisa Fonssagrives wears a cockfight on her head and STILL puts the Haughty into Haute Couture)

Not anymore, at least not for editorial work.

Now generally speaking you can be as mudfaced as freshly baked sin as long as you are very very thin and very very tall you have a decent shot at at least getting the call.  As commenter Harri P noted, you can bleach your hair and diet yourself away to nothing and by “industry standards” be considered pretty or beautiful.

I must admit, I’m guilty of some of it too. I haven’t had any aftermarket work done in the medical sense (yet! I’m still holding out for a third eyeball in the middle to balance out the other two) but I’ve got a laser hair removal appointment this afternoon and let’s not forget about my eyelash extensions.

And you know, it’s a lot easier to fake beauty if you’re wealthy. Is there a class element to it? Does that affect how you feel about the whole shebang?  What do you think?