Ann’s Fashion Tarot, Isolation Edition: The High Priestess.

Good news! Your raging compulsion to cut bangs or use up that expired accidentally purchased wrong-shade of box color, or whateverwhatever, is essentially correct. This moment DOES call for change and these ARE drastic times but the change IS NOT to ruin your visage for longer than you’re stuck in isolation. Honor the urge itself, but then pursue a less damning option. Specifically, I am telling you to adopt a look totally different from your regular in-the-world look. For me personally this equals hanging-down hair and dark lips/bare eyelids. Also jeans. Jeans!

Some things I like to do during a pandemic are hold a broom, gaze at my knitting as if it’s a magic bird, and send love to local gathering places like Lost Sanity Brewing.

ARE YOU EVEN KIDDING ME, I thought to myself the first day of this. WHO EVEN IS THAT in the mirror?!?! Boom. Transfigured. Take that, new normal. If you live with people, you can ask them to play along, like if they’re like “what are you talking about you just still look like you” maybe be like “do you remember last time I cut panic-bangs and do you really want to live through that again” and then probably they’ll suddenly be like “whoa, wait, was that you just now in the kitchen?!?” Anyway. This is easier to accomplish if you’re usually overembellished like myself, in which case you just quit all that for now. If you’re less froofy, you’ll need to improvise, e.g.: 1) You’re a pants person, with no skirts in the house? Beach towel. Afghan. Curtain. Many household items make handsome sarongs. 2) You’re short-haired and often-baseball-hatted, no barrettes or pomades in your world? Vaseline. Spray starch. Maple syrup. I don’t care what you use, just start putting stuff up in there until you have a fauxhawk or whatever gets you to the point of terrifying/delighting yourself with your new, temporary, totally reversible, not-regrettable change. 3) Don’t own cosmetics? Sharpie will not kill you, as eyeliner. Same with melted crayon, licked lead of a colored pencil, paprika. You’re welcome for my lifetime of research to figure all that out. Honestly, the options are endless, and you can do this, and you WILL do this for the greater good. The greater good being that when we finally see each other again, in person, we might all be weirdly unfiltered, unable to not-blurt things like “what the fuck did you do.” There is hope, friends, hope of pleasant reunions despite atrophied social graces. But we‘ll only get there if we (wait for it) (actually I can’t believe I waited this long) practice scissor distancing.

The High Priestess says, honor your intuition but maybe don’t let her walk you off a cliff.