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She's Gotta Have It

Fashion, beauty, shopping, social life and things that make you go hmmm; come scroll with us for the She's Gotta Have It guide to girlitude


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On Beauty
Vacation, vacation, vacation

Since sun-kissed skin needs less make-up to look lovely, limit your holiday beauty bag to a few sun-proof essentials: a moisturising lip tint, a glow-enhancing sunscreen, gloss-giving hair de-frizzer and a truly waterproof mascara. You'll knock minutes off your morning routine and keep plenty of bag space for duty-free booty. Kim Parker

Instant karma
Feminism is the most revolutionary idea there has ever been. Equality for women demands a change in the human psyche more profound than anything Marx dreamed of. It means valuing parenthood as much as we value banking.
Polly Toynbee (1946-) in the Guardian, January 19, 1987

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In Town Last Night

The glitziest events

Jemima Khan, Bill Nighy and Pierce Brosnan watched Chile beat England at the Cartier International Polo Tournament. More party pictures


Good news We’re loving Shower Shock Caffeinated Soap, which wakes you up while you wash and is scented with peppermint oil. From Thinkgeek.com Bad news Antonia Quirke’s brilliant solution to society’s drug ills - that anyone who’s ‘really good on them’, ie brilliant and amusing, should get a renewable five-year drug licence so the rest of us can hang out with them - will never be adopted

The Big Issue: saying please is no problem

Call me Miss Manners, but have you noticed the way the word ‘Thank you’ is dropping out of the language? A typical commuting exchange might go like this:
“Excuse me, is this train going to Lewisham?”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
Right? What’s that about? Why not ‘cheers’, or ‘thanks’? The other day I picked up a message from a mother whose child I’d invited to my son’s birthday. She was able to confirm that he would indeed be able to attend, while somehow managing to avoid saying thank you once. Or maybe she just forgot, having been not ‘brought up’ but ‘dragged up’, as the saying goes. In Starbucks I noticed a charmless American locution, now often used by the British, which goes ‘Let me have a skinny vente latte’, and the opposite sin, which is to use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ punctiliously and frequently, in a tone of emotionless

disdain, as if to say, ‘See, my manners are impeccable, despite the fact that you are clearly an incompetent’. Maybe the unwillingness to say thank you is connected to a dislike of obligation. If you thank someone, it means they’ve rendered you a service you might have to pay back - and despite our rampant debt culture, that is one kind of loan we’re no longer comfortable with. It’s why people sometimes unconsciously substitute ‘No problem’ for ‘Thank you’, as in ‘I”ll send those details over to you,’ ‘OK, no problem’. It’s all very sad, because there is nothing less attractive than an adult, or indeed child, with atrocious manners. Now I read that social skills are to be introduced into the school curriculum. It’s a reminder that Ps and Qs have to be taught, as anyone who has drummed them into their pre-socialised toddler knows:
“Mummy! Juice!”
“What’s the magic word darling?”
“Now!”
Laura Tennant


Bonkers health Recovering alcoholic Lindsay Lohan has to party in an 8oz grey anklet that measures the booze in her sweat and relays the information to a monitoring centre

Recipe of the Day

Street Seen

Quirky but cool

Wardrobe Mistress

Autumn/winter bargains

Going out? The Place

Hi sushi salsa
3a Camden Wharf
28 Jamestown Rd
London NW1
020 7482 7088

Camden might be a music mecca, but until recently its restaurant scene was significantly lacking. That looks set to change with the exotic culture clash of Hi Sushi Salsa, which blends Japanese minimalism with Latino flair. The combination is a counterintuitive surprise success; think jazzed-up Zen garden with dark wood and bamboo decor, a sunken sushi bar and - the piece de resistance - a waterside terrace. The menu is packed with fusion flavours - some more effective than others, so purists be warned. Despite the unsettled summer, DJs are already hosting fashion-friendly parties mixing food, cocktails and top tunes. Arriba!
Gabrielle Strachan


Read Me

I usually want to slap ‘Kooky’ heroines. Take Katherine Taylor, author and protagonist of Rules for Saying Goodbye (Sceptre, £12.99), in which she, in a more or less fictionalised account of her own life, tells us all about how she drifts aimlessly through her twenties living in her rent-controlled Manhattan apartment and taking bar work, while also somehow letting slip that she’s a beautiful blonde, effortlessly cool and, goodness, keeps getting her short stories published in literary magazines. To which the only response is, oh shut up. No, if you’re after kookiness, you are much better off with the genuine nuttiness and flashes of brilliance displayed by Antonia Quirk, whose memoir of a life lived through leading men is hilarious, utterly fab and just republished by Harper Perennial (Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers, £7.99). From the description of how her parents were forced to call an ambulance after exposing a 10-year-old Quirk to Marlon Brando in Streetcar, through a comic guest appearance by Bamber Gascoigne and the eccentric rationales given for Quirk’s bizarro taste in real-life men, to her insightful, original take on the brilliance of, say, Jack Nicholson, Madame Depardieu is a delight.
Laura Tennant
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