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
Suddenly Single
The adventures of a divorcee-about-town 
Agony Sisters
Advice from the women who know
People
Window Shopping
Hot or Not?
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On Beauty Sensitive souls
Watching our rugby team smashing their faces against the opposition’s ham-like thighs and fists last weekend got me thinking. Until now, women have had the pick of natural, nasty-free products, but where would one of those gargantuan guys turn if they had sensitive skin? Sure, their eyes may be black and their ears cauliflower-shaped but it doesn’t mean their skin doesn’t react to all that chafing and bleeding. These botanical ranges deliver the goods: fuss-free formulas that soothe without synthetics.
Kim Parker
Male remedies
Bulldog Post Shave Balm, £4.99 (meetthebulldog.com)REN Tamanu High Glide Shaving Oil, £15 renskincare.com)
Green People Pre Shave Face Wash, £8.99 (greenpeople.co.uk)
Neal’s Yard Olive Leaf Moisturiser, L’Occitane Grape Shower Oil, £12 (nealsyardremedies.com)
Instant karma
‘Women, it is alleged, use sex to get what they want whereas men are unable to do this because sex IS what they want. It is one of those observations, like “aspirins are small” or “dusters are yellow” that seem obviously true’
From ‘211 Things a Bright Girl Can Do’, by Bunty Cutler (Harper Collins, £10.99)
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In Town Last Night
The glitziest events
Burlesque dancers performed at Agent Provocateur’s raunchy launch party. More party pictures 
Good news I have yet to meet the British woman who can blow-dry her own hair, paint her nails, create an updo and apply slap to a professional standard. It’s just not in the DNA. So if you’ve got a posh party to go to, make like a celeb and book into the One Stop Shop at Neville’s Hair and Beauty. The salon is one of London’s best-kept secrets and delivers all the above for a very reasonable £130.
Bad news Just hit 30? You can expect your body’s metabolism to start slowing down, meaning you’ll have to reduce your daily calorific intake by 200 to avoid putting on weight... oh, and if you’re in your 4os, you’re probably losing up to 10,000 brain cells a day
The Big Issue: I’d rather be a multitasker than a mastermind
Mastermind has apparently launched a recruitment drive amongst women to try to rectify a ‘gender imbalance’ which, over the past 35 years, means that the title has gone to 21 men and only 8 women. This fruitless exercise is destined for failure, for the simple reason that the majority of women could not be less interested in acquiring and retaining large amounts of essentially useless information on a subject so dull and/or arcane that they can become a rare ‘specialist’ in the field. I mean what, frankly, could be more tragic than memorising factoids about the Victorian sewage system, or the history of Lancashire County Cricket Club? Whereas the male brain, prone as it is to an Aspergerish interest in train timetables and avian mating calls, is ideally suited to the task. That’s why trainspotters and twitchers are almost all men, and why
knowing stuff about stuff is how men show off to each other and make conversation. Now, I’m not denying that knowing stuff about stuff comes in useful when you want to invent things, or, more to the point, attend a high-profile society charity quiz (I went to one once and the only piece of general knowledge I was able to dredge up all evening was the Tolpuddle Martyrs. It was one of the most humiliating evenings of my life.) But it does rather depend on the quality of the stuff, and the history and genealogy of European royalty just doesn’t cut it. You wouldn’t catch a woman clogging up her superb multitasking capacity with that sort of pointless info on her mental Rolodex. In fact, with all those myriad facts loaded on to the hard drive, it’s no wonder the male brain can only compute a single task at a time.
Laura Tennant
Bonkers beauty Stateside, buttock augmentation surgery has reached epic proportions, giving recipients a shelf-like bottom cleavage to equal the one up top in front. It’s a look pioneered by Ice T’s girlfriend Nicole Austin (right), but over here, the flat-bottomed can take the less drastic step of acquiring a pair of Huit’s padded shorty knickers, which come with supportive cups to lift the bum.
Wardrobe Mistress
Stylish sportswear
Street Seen
Rock chicks
Fur, feathers, padding, chunky knits and tasseled leather; for autum/winter textures make a dramatic impact
elleuk.com
PARIS FASHION WEEK CATWALK PICTURES
Going out? The Place
Rivington Place
London EC2A
020 7749 1240
The rise of the gallery cafe continues apace with the arrival of Lati Ri, the destination diner at new arts super-complex, Rivington Place. Designed by acclaimed architect David Adjaye, this steel and concrete behemoth is London’s first public gallery since the Hayward opened its doors in 1968. Further evidence of the arts intelligentsia’s takeover of once-scuzzy Shoreditch, it boasts several gallery spaces, screening rooms and an impressive library. Lati Ri gives the space its social heartbeat, serving up a tasty array of international dishes. Throw in the promise of free wiFi plus an enticingly late (1am) Saturday license and you have a venue that looks set to be loved by hipsters and culture vultures alike.
Gabrielle Strachan
Read Me
It’s been 25 years since Peter York and Anne Barr’s The Sloane Ranger Handbook exploded into the national consciousness. The book anatomised a breed of public school-educated, upper-middle-class, tweed jacket and pie-crust collar-wearing conservatives - the traditional (not terribly bright) posh, who kept one foot in Gloucestershire and the other in Chelsea. What no one could have anticipated was that the thousands of aspirational children of Thatcher who bought the book didn’t want to laugh at the Sloane Ranger; they wanted to be him. With Cooler, Faster, More Expensive: the Return of the Sloane Ranger (Atlantic, £19.99), York and First Post columnist Olivia Stewart-Liberty wittily explain how Sloane Mark I met his or her demise, and why, with figureheads like Princes William and Harry, Zac Goldsmith, Trinny and Susannah, David Cameron and Jemima Goldsmith, they’re back. This time, though, Sloane world is very different from its previous cosily homogenous self. Meet Eco Sloane, Chav Sloane, Thumping Sloane, Sleek & Euro Sloane, Turbo Sloane, Bongo Sloane, Party Sloane and Sloane Off the Rails, all of whom York and Stewart-Liberty dissect with deadly and hilarious accuracy. And yes, just in case you do want to live the dream, the book comes complete with a contacts book and killer advice on the right schools, universities, holidays, postal codes and rehab clinics.
Laura Tennant
This week’s new books 
