Women and Sparkles: A Love Affair
What is it about sparkle that captures the female attention so much? I fully admit to pink-shiny-sparkle-fascination syndrome. I'm like a crow with a predilection for pink. While Google searches turned up zilch in my quest for an answer, I thought about the nature vs. nurture argument--namely, that girls are raised with dolls placed before them instead of toy trucks, mermaids instead of scuba steves, and glitter instead of grime.
On the other hand, I am the first-born of my siblings, and my mother is notoriously tomboyish. She doesn't care much for shopping, or new things, material possessions for herself. My dad, well, he's a dude. So the girlish, sparklefest-inducing stimulus is quite lacking, actually. How did I become so girly? Was it Disney movies? Cartoons? I actually have a balanced androgeneity to my interests: I like cars and baking, web design and shoes, the color grey but also pink, monster home theater setups and white fluffy cloud bed linens.
I found one conversation on Yelp covering sort of the same topic (though it was posed by a frustrated limo driver after a quinceañera), and one woman piped in:
"I want my cleavage to look like a disco ball."
Mmmmkay. Thanks for sharing. But overall, the impression I got (combined with my own theory) is that glitter and sparkle bring attention to something by attracting the eye. It's sparkly, it's designed to get your brain's attention, at least for a second. So girls put on makeup with glitter in it, and wear huge baubles full of rhinestones and Swarovski crystals (or diamonds if they're able) because it attracts the eye. It, itself, is pretty; therefore the wearer must be pretty by association or by osmosis. If you disagree, do tell me your opinion on the etiology of the pink-shiny-sparkle-fascination syndrome.
In other news, H moved in this weekend and while his striped marlin took up residence for a few days on my sofa, it has now settled into its new home on the wall in H's office. He's also banging around on the walls of the living room (next to my office where I am trying to study and where I wrote this article) like a madman. He gets his shit done, though, and thus cannot be blamed. He also single-handedly solved a space-dilemma when we realized that merely saying we could figure out how to squeeze three sofas and an armchair into 1 townhome wouldn't actually create the solution. :-)
Doesn't that cupcake make you drool? Yum.