Getting Purse-onal: The Perfume Blogger’s Purse

Welcome to another addition of Getting Purse-onal, in which my Captain Kirk bobble head displays the perfumes, cosmetics, and reading materials that have been lurking around my purse this month. Please feel free to share the contents of your purse with us in the comments!

Perfumes

Here we have a Lolita Lempicka Si Lolita mini, which I pilfered from the Lolita Lempicka set that I bought for our upcoming perfume sale fundraiser. Si Lolita is a terribly peppery, energetic perfume, ideal for study sessions. Lavanila Vanilla Blackberry an unusual fruity fragrance with a relatively uncommon blackberry note. The wonderful Undina sent me this sample of bold rose Frederic Malle Portrait of a Lady (Some lady! Ah do declare!)

Cosmetics

The lad in my life has a gloriously manly lumberjack beard. I absolutely adore it, but my easily irritated facial skin does not. Cosmetic Lad has done a very impressive job at soothing skin more sensitive than Christian Bale. I can never really tell whether toners actually work, but Eau Roma Water smells fabulous and I could swear that I detect a slight glow upon application. The power of placebos!

The pictured lipstick is the new Viva Glam Nicki by my beloved rapper Nicki Minaj. I have never worn a pink lipstick in my life, but I bought it anyway because I’m such a fan of the Viva Glam cause (100% of the sale cost of Viva Glam products goes to the M.A.C. AIDS Fund). I confess that I have yet to work up the courage to actually wear Nicki out of the house. In the meantime, I’m working on channeling my inner Nicki Minaj by cultivating multiple personalities and dating Drake. (Drake, I am the Nice Jewish Girl of your mother’s dreams. Call me.)

Reading Materials

I have very strict rules regarding magazines. I do not buy them unless I feel that the cover model is a positive body image role model. That means that the last Vogue that I bought was in March and April of 2009 (the Michelle Obama and Beyoncé covers). I have no intention of paying $5 to be made to feel insecure. I don’t think anyone does in this economy, which is probably why Vogue is in absolute financial free fall. I honestly could not believe my eyes when I saw that a plus-size woman was on the cover of Vogue when it wasn’t even the condescending-ass annual Shape Issue. Moar plz, Anna Wintour.

That somewhat spooky-looking kitteh is from a National Geographic article on GFP kittehs. When you are trying to insert a gene into a host organism’s genome, one of the easiest ways to determine that your target gene was incorporated into the genome is to pair your target gene with the GFP gene, which causes fluorescence. If your host organism glows in the dark, your target gene has been successfully incorporated. Now I just need to figure out how to get Zelda genetically engineered. A glow-in-the-dark kitteh would make those nights when she waits in the dark to pounce on my face much less harrowing.

I’ve mentioned here before that I am agnostic. However, I spent eight years at a Jewish school that had daily morning prayer services, and I never really fell out of the habit of praying. I like the lull of the familiar words and melodies. This siddur (prayer book) is from my father’s Orthodox days in Brooklyn. It is chock-full of doodles of hands, which tells you about how closely he was paying attention.

I know that it’s kind of a dorky thing to say, but I really love poetry. A few years ago I picked up a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (I reasoned that it quite literally had my name on it), and it’s been nothing but Whitman and Rita Dove and Sandra Cisneros ever since. Feminine Gospels has an excellent poem about female celebrities called “Beautiful”, but I confess that I bought it based on the cover. How could I resist cage-hair?