Spa: Amy's Skin Care in Kirkland, Washington

It's time for an effeminate fashion post! Hurray!

Right before Memorial Day Weekend I decided to get my eyebrows and eyelashes tinted again. I know that might sound like an oddball, ultra-vanity sort of indulgence--especially during this recession--but I think my reasons are perfectly valid:

1. Mascara stings when it gets in my eyes. Being comically accident-prone, I manage to get mascara in my eyes very frequently when I wear it.
2. Having naturally transparent eyelashes and eyebrows give my face a mildly creepy-cave-fish vibe when I go without makeup, and this bothers me.
3. After eyelash and eyebrow tinting I can skip wearing eye makeup for two whole months without looking unkempt in formal settings!
4. Human beings always do weird things to control their appearance and I am very much a human being. This is a thing that I do to my face and that is OK.

So I went looking for a local, affordable and professional lash/brow tint in the Kirkland area and I found Amy's Skin Care! Her lash/brow tint costs $35 but the commute is almost $0 and takes maybe 8 minutes. My other regular place for lash/brow tinting, The Sweet Spot, charges $32 for the same service but requires a drive that varies from 20 minutes to over an hour, depending on the traffic on the 520 bridge.

Amy's Skin Care salon is a small home business, slightly hidden in a residential area. But the price was right, the commute next to nothing and her esthetician licensing in order, so I decided to give the salon a try.

Amy, the proprietor of this business, is so nice!!! A bit new to the facial tinting side of the business, but she's detail-oriented and obviously interested in providing clients with the best possible service. The eyebrow color I currently have is my favorite post-tinting color so far, thanks to her infinite patience with my color-adjustment suggestions. It was easily the most collaborative, personalized tinting I've ever undergone, and I am immensely grateful. I will definitely return to her salon the next time there's room in my budget for this kind of beauty treatment!

Also, her cat is a TOTAL sweetheart. (I told you this blog post was going to be effeminate!)

The Stranger's Economic Survival Guide

The perfect mixture of lowbrow and highbrow, our beloved local weekly newspaper The Stranger posted an article back in March that I haven't been able to get out of my head. I adore it so much.

Their Economic Survival Guide for 2010.

The article is a hearty jumble of practical advice, bad advice, good advice and potentially lifesaving information.

The bad advice covers such diverse topics as how to make money off of getting hit by a car (mostly just etiquette for the injured cyclist rather than a guide for scam artists) and the half-joking suggestion to build ridiculous bike-like contraptions to generate a little electricity. (I might actually try this one sometime, mostly for the exercise.)

The good advice includes ways to legally get into local art museums for free and the suggestion to read/perform the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at home with four friends. (Brilliant!)

The practical advice includes a recipe for homemade macaroni and cheese, info about a Seattle-specific iPhone app about the local bus service and detailed information about chicken ownership in the city, including info about local coop-building workshops and city municipal code limitations.

But best of all--very, very best of all--is the potentially lifesaving information that The Stranger opted to include in the article.

It explains how to use food banks, how to get low-income assistance on utility payments, how to get dental care when one is horribly poor, it supplies the name and locations of a cheap medical clinic for the uninsured (The Country Doctor) as well as FAQ information about getting extended unemployment.

I LOVE that this humanitarian service is being provided by the same article that lists which Seattle bars have free ping-pong! I wish a similar guide was available for people who live outside of Seattle. (If there is and I haven't heard of it, someone please tell me. A guide that covers the Skagit and/or Whatcom counties would be amazing.)

The truly adorable article ends by gushing about three gorgeous, local public parks.

What a city!