The Eye of the Beholder

A lot of people will tell you that in order to run a really successful blog, with lots of comments and followers and traffic, you need to find a niche area and basically stick to talking about that and little else. That way you will build up an audience, who can go away for a while and trust you to still be talking about the same sorts of things when they come back.

This is not that sort of blog.

However, I do like doing different themes where possible, because it gives me a bit of structure. Frinstance, the theme for the last couple of weeks was News in Briefs, aka spoof news stories of the type I used to write at university to try and get Captain Tact to like me.

But that was just to take us up to the end of May, for I would like to dedicate the month of June to the modern-day phenomenon that is beauty blogging. Although not in a particularly sensible way, I hasten to add.

Beauty blogging is popular, like cheerleaders and hard drugs. In the last couple of months, two totally disparate people of my acquaintance (an illustrator and a trainee lawyer/freelance writer) have started up beauty blogs in addition to their main pages (called Give Yer Face a Wash and On Beauty, should you wish to have a look). At the start of this year, The Edinburgh Reporter did a series of interviews with local bloggers, and far and away the most popular one was Cupcake Couture, which is a beauty and baking blog. And of course there's Go Fug Yourself, which is celebrity fashion gone wrong.

The basic premise of these sites is that people share their thoughts and tips on clothes, makeup, hair, and other girly paraphernalia. If you find a girl whose style is like yours, you follow her avidly and leave lots of comments saying 'OMG your hair looks amazing there' and so on.

I do not propose to copy the method wholesale, because frankly this area is perfectly well covered by ladies who are far better equipped than I. What I am going to write about, however, is the disasters and misfortunes of my style career.

Want to hear about the time I got a surprise ninja full body massage against my will? Stay tuned. Fancy hearing some artistic uses for colours of nail varnish you're unlikely to ever use again? I've got a suggestion or two. And then there's the history of my hair, a grim and terrible warning to anyone with follicles.

I'll be aiming to update two or three times a week, so check back in a couple of days if you're compiling a list of what not to do, or if you fancy feeling a bit better about yourself. I'm totally pro-schadenfreude...