silkidelic

I’m filling my digital sketchbook with writing and images about talismans, amulets, keepsakes, fetish objects, and charms, and the importance of holding items sacred in a time of overconsumption. 

Here’s me with my Coty Airspun setting powder, which has the same scent as the old perfume l’Origan, my grandmother’s signature. 

After my grandmother died, I bought the setting powder for the scent. I don’t wear strong fragrances, but I open the jar when I want its protective spell. 

These kid-leather gloves with pearl closures were passed down to her and then to me. They are almost too soft to be real. 

So much of what I have from her are objects – my diamond, my beaded clutch, my embroidered hand mirror, the Minnie Mouse and American flag trinkets that live in a precious box. My grandpa gave her things away quickly, crying as he handed me her jewelry. 

I know this powder is another object encased in plastic, but the ephemeral nature of scent is as close I can get to her spirit again.

My grandmother had raven-black hair when she was young, and green eyes. I wanted that when I was little! She told me I was lucky, because her mother had been disappointed that she didn’t come out blonde with blue eyes (I still don’t know if that’s true – either way it’s sad). A self-described diehard conservative, my grandmother was not a kind or particularly honest person – not bad, just not loving and open, even to her own children. But I know she concealed a soft and injured heart.

“The only people I feel bad for,” she would say, “are little children and animals.” I wonder if she felt unloved as a little child in the 1930s. When I was little, she was indeed one of my best friends in the world. She created a wholesome fantasy world of reading, bunny-watching, and dress-up. 

I loved her unconditionally. I’m not sure if she would love me if she knew me now. She had strict rules of propriety. 

But I live for her. Not despite all those rules, but because of them. I am here on earth to question the restrictive answers that my grandmother was given.

The things I remember best are feminine – the clinking of delicate gold, my cheek on the softness of a sweater, the scent of magnolia blooms in the garden, the ticking of a dainty watch. The forest-green tubes that held lipstick with a scent like clay. 

The unrelenting need to put on a polished face, especially in the face of death. 

The meaning of glamour extends beyond beauty into an area of intention, illusion, enchantment, and protective delusion. 

The trappings of glamour also tell of my culture’s golden rule: if you must, hide your true self to gain respectability.

My grandmother grew up in an era during which women – and men – were even more hemmed in by expectations of gender, class, ethnicity, race. You were taught you had to be an exact way to have the best chance of surviving. She surely internalized it, benefitted from it, and pushed it on others. My mom, her daughter, was fortunate enough to evade some of the trap by getting herself to college (you don’t have to go to college for that, but it was her way out). 

I am even luckier. But that trap persists today. We are told what a “real” or “respectable” woman is by people who have no idea. And physical violence is committed against people who don’t comply or cannot comply. Until that ends, I’ll never stop bringing up this topic.

Femininity is fluid, and my grandmother taught me, inadvertently, that it’s expressed through performance. At your vanity, you put on your outer self so that you can leave your room. Hair brushed, skin perfumed, lips painted, nails smooth and lacquered. It is a protection spell.

So much of my expression of femininity is a cosplay that I am fortunate to take on and off with ease and few consequences. Most of the time, I don’t have long lashes and stiletto nails, but I’m still me, I’m still feminine within, and it is so much more beautiful to think of it as more than body parts. It’s my spirit, my gender, my art. We owe so much to gender non-conforming people who have shown us this truth. 

As glamorous as my grandmother looked in her photo from 1957, I would never want to go back, only forward. I hope we can do the same with today’s styles – keep some of the looks but continue to lose the rigid gender rules, body obsession, and exploitative practices.

But please, Coty, don’t change the scent of your setting powder.