
Today is Tinsel Creation’s one-year anniversary.
Many thanks to the friends who encouraged me to create this blog, and to the readers who continue to visit it!
Image: Young woman operating a Sholes & Glidden typewriter (1872), via Wikimedia.

Today is Tinsel Creation’s one-year anniversary.
Many thanks to the friends who encouraged me to create this blog, and to the readers who continue to visit it!
Image: Young woman operating a Sholes & Glidden typewriter (1872), via Wikimedia.

Just about a year ago, the product-sampling club Birchbox invited me to take part in a competition. Twelve bloggers were submitting their ideas for a new nail polish color, with a name, a description and a “mood board.” Three winners would see their concepts made into actual products by the nail-polish brand Zoya.
How could I refuse?

I’ve just started a Tumblr as an homage to the novel The Secret History by Donna Tartt. You can view it here…
In the process of setting up this blog, I’ve already put up an introductory post or two (please see below)… but today is the official grand opening of Tinsel Creation!
Welcome, and enjoy.
Image: Grand Opening (1948), via Gettyimages.
This blog is a work in progress. I’m envisioning it as a place to gather all my internet musings beyond the weekly perfume articles that I write for Now Smell This: a mix of beauty product reviews, photographs of odd and lovely things I’ve seen around New York City, quotations about beauty and fragrance from literature and film, visual analyses of perfume advertisements (the art historian in me is never quiet for long!), and so on.
In this spirit of appreciation for small pleasures, I’ve taken the name for this blog from a poem by the artist Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). Stettheimer was a New York resident, a privileged bohemian who acted as hostess to a fascinating circle of cultural figures, a painter who created fantastical portraits of friends and family and captured the details of her life with wit and whimsy. I have loved her work for a long time, and she is the first of many “influences” that I’ll mention in these pages.
I’m planning on starting with three or four posts per week; I’ll see how things go, and take it from there.
Note: I’m still something of a novice at using blogging platforms, so I may make a technical slip from time to time; please bear with me. Thank you for reading!
My attitude is one of love
Is all adoration
For all the fringes
All the color
All tinsel creation
-- Florine Stettheimer