I'm Maintaining

One of the regular pleasures of my week is the Sunday Star Times lifestyle magazine. There's ususally at least one article that'll sustain a serious rant, and enough lovely little features to keep you giggling for a good ten minutes, particularly if you have someone to share the experience with.

I'll always have a soft spot for the 'window shopping' feature, the first true pleasure I got from the colour supplement. Each week they take a theme (today it's black clothes vs. white clothes), and show you what you can get, and how much it costs. So you can see that a ridiculously impactical white trench-coat sells for $698, and let your mind be boggled. Window Shopping sometimes has complete outfits, but its best features contain many different examples of one item of clothing. It's going to be hard to beat the scarf issue, where one, extremely skinny scarf that I could have knitted myself (well I couldn't because I'm complete unco, but anyone else could have) was on sale for hundreds of dollars, but I live in hope.

But my appreciation for Sunday deepened when I realised what their term for the what would once have been known as the 'beauty' section. Sunday obviously finds the term 'health' too mundane, too common-place, and so have settled on 'maintenance'.

Ever since I noticed that I've developed a new game called 'what the fuck are you maintaining'. It started with perfume, and I still don't know what you could possibly maintain with perfume, but each week it just gets a little more ridiculous. This week we are being maintained by:
* 10 different kinds of lipstick
* Coloured Mascara
* A range of products that 'amp up the lashes, making them darker, wetter looking and sexier.'
* Pale Shimmer Shadow (no idea what that is)
* Botox
* Laser teeth whitening

This is obviously some new use of the word maintenance that I wasn't previously aware of.