Racked: All Posts by Heather SchwedelThe National Shopping, Stores, and Retail Scene Bloghttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52809/32x32.0..png2016-06-10T11:02:02-04:00https://www.racked.com/authors/heather-schwedel/rss2016-06-10T11:02:02-04:002016-06-10T11:02:02-04:00Gaming the Wedding Registry
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<p>Both guests and marrying couples agree: The wedding registry process sucks. It’s awkward, outdated, and uncomfortably mercenary. And the dirty little secret is that many of the gifts given each nuptial season will end up getting returned.</p> <p>There’s no way to tell what percentage of the $19 billion people spend annually on wedding gift registries goes to presents that end up back at the store. But according to my friend Stephanie, whose name is not really Stephanie, "Everyone I know who has gotten married and had a registry always talks about how all you do is spend time returning and exchanging things." She got married a few years ago and, like many 29-year-olds, is a serial wedding attendee.</p>
<p>Wait, you’re telling me the item I lovingly picked out for your blessed union (okay, more like grudgingly ordered a week before the wedding because it was the only thing left that fit my budget) isn’t going to become a prized family heirloom?</p>
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<p class="caption">Brides scanning items at Crate and Barrel. Photo: Matthew Peyton/Getty</p>
<p>"I don’t think it’s a big deal that people do this," Stephanie says. ("It can be a little awkward if you’re writing a thank you card for a gift that you returned," she acknowledges.) "Stores understand they’re going to be working with you for a while if you have a registry with them and that you’re probably going to be exchanging a lot of things. I think the employees understand that you have no idea what you’re doing when you set up a registry. Why would you? You register for tons of stuff you don’t need. You sort of figure out what you do need, and then you just switch everything around."</p>
<p>Some people take it a step further, setting up registries while knowing full well they don’t want half the stuff on them. Melissa (also not her real name), who got married in New York in 2014 at 29, didn’t want to register for the typical housewares and kitchen supplies, but her mother insisted on it. "My mom made us order china, absolutely made us," she says. Melissa’s mom also considered honeyfunds, in which guests can contribute cash that you can put toward specific parts of a honeymoon, "tacky." "It was a very, very long fight that I lost," Melissa says.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">After the wedding, she returned the lion’s share of it, putting most of the store credit toward what she calls an "insanely luxurious bed," including a mattress with a $15,000 sticker price.</q></p>
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<p>Melissa and her fiance had been living together for several years by the time they got engaged and didn’t need much for their apartment. So when it came time to register at a New York department store, "It sounds horrible, but I really just picked very random stuff." After the wedding, she returned the lion’s share of it, putting most of the store credit toward what she calls an "insanely luxurious bed," consisting of fancy sheets and pillows and a mattress with a $15,000 sticker price. (What did her mother say to <em>that</em>? "Because we kept the china, she didn’t really care about any of the rest of it.")</p>
<p>"There was a real generational gap," Melissa explains. Her parents were concerned with traditions and appearances; she and her fiance just wanted gifts they would actually use.</p>
<p>In Boston, Tara, 25, is dealing with a similar situation right now. Her wedding is coming up in October, and Tara and her significant other want cash. "For the registry, [my mother] thinks it’d be more appropriate to go the traditional route, accept physical gifts, and return them to the vendor if we want the money instead," she told me via email. "[W]hile she’s a nice person and open-minded about a lot of things, she has certain Ideas about How Things Are Done. This includes wedding traditions. She says ‘Your marriage is for you, your wedding is for your parents,’ which I <em>violently</em> disagree with, but I’ve had to back down on a lot because she takes my desire to be in control as disregard for her feelings." The two got into a shouting match about the registry and still haven’t resolved what to do.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">On wedding forums like The Knot and Wedding Bee, brides frequently discuss which stores have the best return policies and the pitfalls of returning gifts for cash and credit, but it’s still a taboo subject.</q></p>
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<p>If couples want money, why can’t they just ask for it? On wedding forums like The Knot and Wedding Bee, brides frequently discuss which stores have the best return policies and the pitfalls of returning gifts for cash and credit, but it’s still a taboo subject. One D.C.-area woman who blogs about personal finance under the name <a href="http://www.onefrugalgirl.com/">One Frugal Girl</a>,noticed someone at Target returning a cart full of items from a registry a few years ago, and was so taken aback that she <a href="http://www.onefrugalgirl.com/2009/06/is-it-wrong-to-return-every-gift-on-your-registry/">blogged about it</a>. She got a lot of emails in response, some defending the practice, some outraged by it. "It seems like these days you should be able to be more open about what you want, with the people you’re close to," she says, remembering the incident.</p>
<p>"There’s so much discussion about etiquette when it comes to wedding gifts, people getting judgmental or looking greedy or worried about looking greedy," says Kathy Cheng, the founder of a universal registry site and app called <a href="https://thankfulregistry.com/">Thankful</a>. "There’s so many unspoken rules."</p>
<p>"I don’t blame the couples; I blame the system," says Josh Brooks, who, with <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjungleeny.com%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F6%2F10%2F11877024%2Fwedding-registry-returns-honeyfund-cash" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Jung Lee</a>, plans weddings and events with their company <a href="http://feteny.com/">Fête</a> and has a brick-and-mortar store, <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjungleeny.com%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F6%2F10%2F11877024%2Fwedding-registry-returns-honeyfund-cash" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Jung Lee NY</a>, that specializes in registries. "Wedding registry is sort of stuck in the 1950s."</p>
<p>There are some people out there looking to change that. Brooks and Lee, for their part, aim to provide more guidance and a more personalized experience to the couples they work with. And online universal registries, like <a href="https://thankfulregistry.com/">Thankful</a>, <a href="https://zola.pxf.io/c/482924/584112/9631?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zola.com%2F&sharedid=racked.com" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Zola</a>, and <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.myregistry.com%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F6%2F10%2F11877024%2Fwedding-registry-returns-honeyfund-cash" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">MyRegistry</a>, allow couples to include gifts from more than just one store on their lists, as well as honeyfunds and other cash requests.</p>
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<p class="caption">Erin Brady, Miss USA 2013, shops for her wedding registry at Bernardaud Flagship. Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty</p>
<p>It’s not just parents who like to stick to tradition, many attendees still prefer giving tangible gifts. There’s a mentality of, "This is what I would have wanted to receive, so this is what I’m going to buy for someone else," One Frugal Girl told me of the continuing popularity of physical, non-check or gift-card gifts. "I think it’s nice to give guests options," Lee says, advising against only having a honeyfund or asking for money. "I think more guests prefer to give a concrete thing."</p>
<p>Once a gift is yours, though, you can pretty much do what you want with it. Whether you do a mass-return or you end up using your honeyfund to pay off your bills, "At the end of the day, it’s an honor code," Cheng says.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">"It’s just one of those things that you have to do, because people are going to buy you stuff regardless," says Becky.</q></p>
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<p>Trying to opt out of the system by not registering at all might just make things worse. "It’s just one of those things that you have to do, because people are going to buy you stuff regardless," says Becky, a 30-year-old New Yorker who is getting married in October. Becky (not her real name) favors small and independent businesses, but reluctantly registered for a few items at big-box stores. "There is some pressure from friends and family members who want to use their Bed, Bath & Beyond 20 percent-off coupons, they want to use their Bloomingdale’s credit cards to get better deals."</p>
<p>Stores are well aware of the post-wedding returning frenzy. Though Bloomingdale’s declined to comment on the topic of wedding registry abuse, Brooks says he has heard of department stores that have trouble keeping employees in their registry departments, because too many were unhappy about losing commissions when brides would return gifts and exchange them for clothes.</p>
<p>There are also many smaller stores — Jung Lee NY and <a href="http://www.scullyandscully.com/shop.axd/BridalHome">Scully & Scully</a> do this, and Michael C. Fina <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.michaelcfina.com%2FDeliveryProgram.html&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F6%2F10%2F11877024%2Fwedding-registry-returns-honeyfund-cash" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">used to</a> before going <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/business/michael-c-fina-park-avenue-wedding-retailer-bets-on-amazoncom.html">online-only</a> — that provide registries that offer to hold all the gifts a couple gets until after the wedding, a tacit acknowledgement that couples may not actually want a good amount of what they register for and receive. This way, instead of receiving things piecemeal, one by one, couples can take stock of all their gifts at once — and decide what they finally want to keep. "The couple should be the final decision makers in terms of what they ultimately get," Lee says.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">Ten $40 bowls equal one $400 mixer. Sneaky!</q></p>
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<p>And then there’s the phenomenon of putting "decoy gifts" on your registry. Stephanie told me that the employee who helped her set up her registry at a New York department store recommended that she place decoys on her registry — cheaper items that would provide a wider range of prices on the registry, especially on the more budget-friendly end of things, and that she could later return all together to exchange for something more expensive she really wanted but was unlikely to receive. Ten $40 bowls equal one $400 mixer. Sneaky!</p>
<p>Another smaller, and totally acceptable, way to game the system is through the so-called registry completion discount: Many stores offer markdowns to couples on the items on their registries that didn’t get bought, and in some cases, they can keep adding things for months after the ceremony has taken place. One colleague told me she registered at Anthropologie before her wedding — not because she expected anyone to buy her anything from there, but because she knew she’d get a 10 percent discount on those items afterward.</p>
<p>The biggest irony might be that there’s no way to predict how you’ll feel about your wedding gifts — and all the machinations involved in your registry process — once you’re in the thick of married life. "We’ve gotten rid of quite a lot of stuff that we got on our wedding registry, I would say the majority of it," One Frugal Girl, who’s been married 12 years, told me. "Because you realize that maybe that’s not the life you were going to lead."</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">"I definitely should have doubled up on all of the flatware, because that’s really easy to take back," she adds.</q></p>
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<p>Still, if you plan to go the returning route, be prepared for some hassle. At the store where she registered, "if you return [a gift] via mail, it alerts the sender that you returned it, so you have to do it in person. It’s a real production," Melissa says of her returning marathon. "I went there like every weekend for a month."</p>
<p>"I definitely should have doubled up on all of the flatware, because that’s really easy to take back," she adds. The bigger the object, the more cumbersome it is to schlep back to the store.</p>
<p>But guess what? "It was all worth it in the end, because my bed is my favorite thing." All $15,000 of it.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2016/6/10/11877024/wedding-registry-returns-honeyfund-cashHeather Schwedel2016-05-10T09:30:03-04:002016-05-10T09:30:03-04:00Why Do We Still Pierce Our Ears?
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<p>Ear piercing has been around for thousands of years. Why, and how, do we still do it?</p> <p>Do you remember getting your ears pierced? For a preteen girl, it's one of those Judy Blume moments, like wearing your first pair of shoes with the slightest hint of heel, or living through that presentation you get in 4th grade about your first period, that marked a transition. Things were changing. Soon you'd be a woman. Sure, you look back on it now and see how young you were, but at the time, you thought you were on your way to maturity. Adulthood, thy name is an itsy-bitsy hole in each of my earlobes.</p>
<p>How did it take on this meaning in the first place? Having pierced ears is pretty bizarre when you think about it. Puncturing your ear so you can stick something pretty in it? God, humans are weird. And yet you probably wouldn't give yours up for the world. For anyone who had to beg their parents to get them or wait until they were considered old enough, that goes double. In the same way the clothes you love become part of your story, so do your piercings.</p>
<p>But whether the experience of getting your ears pierced left an indelible mark on you or you skipped the whole thing altogether, your earlobes are part of a larger story of ear piercing in America.</p>
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<p>It's hard to find reliable information about who exactly has their ears pierced. One statistic that's floating around the internet asserts that <a href="http://www.statisticbrain.com/body-piercing-statistics/">83 percent</a> of people have pierced ears. A 2005<a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-04-20/features/0504190327_1_pierced-lobes-occasions"> <em>Chicago Tribune</em> article</a> about ear piercing holdouts said that "estimates place the percentage of US women without pierced ears at 10 percent to 20 percent." No industry professionals contacted in the course of reporting this story could point to definitive numbers.</p>
<p>The same is true for the size of the ear piercing industry and the amount of money it generates annually. "That's a holy grail number that nobody's ever been able to compile," says Miro Hernandez, who works for the Association of Professional Piercers, or the APP. The business comprises disparate parts, from huge jewelry store chains like Claire's at one end of the spectrum to independent tattoo and piercing shops, where ear piercing is just one service offered among a full menu of body modifications, at the other. Yet if it's something even half of all women do, that's a not-insignificant chunk of the population. Maybe no one has bothered to find conclusive numbers because having pierced ears is pretty uncontroversial. But that wasn't always the case.</p>
<p>People have pierced their ears for millennia. The ancient Egyptians, both male and female, did it; earrings are referenced in the Bible. "Human beings wear jewelry. It's just natural to put something around your neck, put something on your wrist or your finger, and then to put something through your ear," New York-based jewelry designer Anna Sheffield posits.</p>
<p>In their book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Love-Those-Earrings-Popular-History/dp/0764345168"><em>I Love Those Earrings: A Popular History From</em> <em>Ancient to Modern</em></a>, Jane Merrill and Chris Filstrup write that the ancient Celts and Dacians wore earrings, and though styles and materials evolved over time, they were important signifiers up through the Victorian era. Then in the late 1800s into the early part of the 20th century, earrings didn't exactly fall out of fashion, but piercing one's ears did. Screw back and clip-on earrings, which could be worn without getting pierced, gained widespread popularity. "I pleaded with my mother to have my ears pierced," Cheryl Ireland Cooper recalls in a passage from <em>I Love Those Earrings</em>, "but she said no. It was the early 1950s, and there was a different ‘ear aesthetic' if you will — think clip-ons and screw backs." (Ever wonder why so many vintage earrings seem to be clip-ons? There's your answer.)</p>
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<p>According to <a href="http://www.antiqueweek.com/ArchiveArticle.asp?newsid=2423"><em>Antique Week</em></a>, at this time, "Pierced ears were not only unfashionable, they were considered by some to be a barbaric mutilation of the body, and worse, to show a lack of moral character in the wearer." In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fashionable-Ear-History-Ear-Piercing-Trends/dp/0533112370/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1460993749&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Fashionable+Ear%3A+A+History+of+Ear-Piercing+Trends+for+Men+and+Women"><em>The Fashionable Ear: A History of Ear-Piercing Trends for Men and Women</em></a>, Ronald D. Steinbach explains, "Although females in all parts of the world had pierced their ears for many thousands of years, the custom gradually died out in the United States beginning around 1880. Woman wanted the right to vote, to wear pants, and be freed of wearing impractical clothing, and of barbarous customs such as ear piercing (which males did not have to undergo)."</p>
<p>It was only in the late 1950s and the '60s that pierced ears began to make a comeback. A <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9905E7D9103CE733A25753C3A96E9C946491D6CF">1965 <em>New York Times</em> article</a> headline, "Pierced Ears: Distinction...or Just a Hole in the Head?" announced the resurrected trend. "Girls are collecting pierced-ear jewelry as avidly as they hoard Beatles records," the paper sniffed. "A decade or two ago the pierced earlobe was the mark of the foreign born or first-generation Americans of either Latin or Eastern European descent." Who knew tiny holes could inspire such xenophobia?</p>
<div class="float-left hang-left"><div class="c-sidebar"> <h3 class="p-sidebar-title">A Brief History of <br>Body Piercing</h3> <p> </p> <p><em>The history of the world is littered with cultures who stuck jewelry (and non-jewelry) through their bodies, whether for spiritual reasons or just to look cool. Below, a few facts about the first known body piercings.</em></p> <p>EARS: The earliest piercings were probably earlobe piercings, and the oldest mummified body ever found had holes in its ears; King Tut's mummy had them too. They were larger than the holes we typically see today though, at one-quarter to three-eighths of an inch.</p> <p>NOSES: Moghal emperors brought nose piercing to India in the 16<sup>th</sup> century from nomadic tribes of the Middle East, though it was mentioned in The Vedas 1,500 years prior. In Ayurvedic medicine, an acupuncture point on the left nostril is associated with the female reproductive organs, so piercing was said to alleviate childbirth and period pain.</p> <p>TONGUES: Mayan and Aztec people were the first to pierce their tongues, but as part of a ritual bloodletting — an offering to the gods — and not a permanent modification. The Mayans and Aztecs did, however, wear septum piercings.</p> <p>LIPS: In what is modern-day Alaska, the Eskimos wore lip piercings, called labrets, to signify their social status. Tribes in what is now Mali and Ethiopia also pierced their lips for religious reasons.</p> <p>NIPPLES: The first men to pierce their nipples were Native Americans belonging to the Karankawa tribe, who lived in Texas. There's some evidence that the first woman to pierce her nipples eventually became the queen of France: Isabelle of Bavaria, who was born in Germany in the 1300s.</p> <p>GENITALS: One of the oldest references to genital piercing appears in the <em>Kama Sutra</em>, which was written in the first century A.D. Piercing the glands of the penis was said to be one method of enhancing sexual pleasure.</p> </div></div>
<p>The trend was only deemed acceptable thanks to its embrace by the hip girls of "Greenwich Village and West Coast coffeehouses." The next year, the <a href="http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1966/11/20/page/125/article/the-pierced-ear-craze-whos-doing-it-and-why"><em>Chicago Tribune</em> did a spread</a> on "the pierced ear craze." "I think it's a barbaric custom," one doctor was quoted as saying. "If girls pierce their ears, the only logical next step is to put bones thru their noses." Yikes. Jane Merrill, author of <em>I Love Those Earrings</em>, recalled that getting your ears pierced was banned at her prep school in the 1960s. Years later, the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/news/piercing-fad-is-turning-convention-on-its-ear.html"><em>Times</em> would summarize</a>: "Not so long ago, pierced ears were associated with immigrants or with people like gypsies and pirates. It was not until the 1960s, when all kinds of customs began changing, that more American women began piercing their ears."</p>
<p>In <em>The Fashionable Ear</em>, Mia Farrow is singled out as having been an especially influential pierced-ear pioneer. Novelist and essayist Laura Wallencheck is quoted as explaining, "The sight of those really cool, really darling little pearl studs Farrow wore as the perpetually dazed, fawn-like Allison MacKenzie on TV's <em>Peyton Place</em> sent young girls in the 1960s stampeding off in conspiratorial pairs in search of cork, needle, thread, ice, matches, and rubbing alcohol: ‘You do mine and, if I don't die or anything, I'll do yours.'"</p>
<p>Why all the supplies? At the time, there weren't many commercial avenues for getting your ears pierced — mall chains came later, in the late '60s and '70s — so people did it themselves, using the old needle-and-potato method. (You held the potato behind your ear to catch the needle, apparently; you could also use cork. Either way, you'd use ice to numb your lobes.) If you look online, you can find <a href="https://www.bme.com/media/story/872897/?cat=pierce/01-ear">women's</a> <a href="http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=37698">accounts</a> of their amateur piercings: "I pierced my own ears just before Christmas in 1964," one woman wrote on a forum. "I sterilized a safety pin by holding it in the flame of a match and then cleaning both the pin and my ears with rubbing alcohol. I tried using an ice cube behind my ear, but found that with only two hands I could not control the safety pin, the ice cube and my ear all at the same time, so I dropped the ice cube into the sink and just shoved the safety pin through my ear."</p>
<p>Or we can let <em>Grease</em> do the illustrating. Remember the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J40ZNwrpJ2o">sleepover scene</a>? Frenchie asks Sandy to let her pierce her ears for her. "Isn't that awfully dangerous?" Sandy responds. She's a good girl, and piercing your ears is something only bad girls like the Pink Ladies would do in 1959, when the movie is set. Sandy protests that her father won't like it before Frenchie drags her into the bathroom with Marty's virgin pin (a <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22virgin+pin%22&rlz=1C1LENN_enUS449US451&biw=1366&bih=643&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIh7eZ9LnMAhUpg4MKHeo6CMoQ_AUIBigB">circular pin</a> girls wore in the '50s to signify that they were either "spoken for" or still virgins or both), so as not to get blood on the carpet. At the end of the movie, when Sandy shows up to the carnival post-makeover in a skintight black getup, you better believe she has <a href="http://wildbeautyworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/sandy_after.jpg">hoops in her ears</a>.</p>
<p>Another good way to learn about the history of ear piercing in America is to ask your mom. I'm serious. My own mother went to the doctor to get her ears pierced in the early '70s, along with her sister and her mother, my aunt and grandmother. My grandmother, like many grown women at the time, hadn't had her ears pierced yet.</p>
<p>Though my mom recalls piercing guns existed and you could get your ears pierced at the mall by then thanks to piercing's rise, her family was cautious and requested that the family doctor do it. This isn't uncommon. Many doctors used to do ear piercing, though they weren't trained in it (piercing certainly wasn't covered in med school), and this frequently resulted in the kind of crooked angles that befell my mom's ear piercings. It wasn't until about 25 years later that she got her ears re-pierced — with me, at a special ear-piercing clinic, still too cautious for the mall — and became the earring fiend she is today.</p>
<p>You could also look to Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton as examples of the 20th century's piercing mores. Like Sandy, Hillary had been a good girl growing up: "When she got to high school, she rejected offers to have her ears pierced with a needle and potato, according to her best friends, didn't smoke in the bathroom, didn't make out with boys in ‘The Pit' at [her high school's] library, didn't even wear black turtlenecks," the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/01/11/the-education-of-hillary-clinton/371300bc-40ef-408b-8f52-b9d7d55adc97/"><em>Washington Post</em> reported in 1993</a>.</p>
<div class="float-right hang-right"><p><q class="pullquote"><span>"I was 100 percent sure they were going to make me look </span><em>so</em><span> grown-up and fancy. I don't think I was so wrong. Earrings can really change your face and your general vibe a lot."</span></q></p></div>
<p>As of that year, Hillary's ears were still unpierced, but her daughter Chelsea was begging to get hers done. "We've agreed not to talk about it until her 13th birthday," Hillary <a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20113135,00.html">said on the 1992 campaign trail</a>. Somewhere between then and now, it seems like both female Clintons took the plunge — "seems" because even though Hillary <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=hillary+clinton+earrings&rlz=1C1LENN_enUS449US451&biw=1366&bih=643&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZ3r629rnMAhWLk4MKHSj2ChYQ_AUIBygC">wears a lot of earrings, there's </a>precious little information out there about when she may have gotten them pierced, and it's theoretically possible that they're all clip-ons (speaking as someone who recently went on a Google Images deep dive of Hill's ears). Don't tell Donald Trump that, though.</p>
<p>Hillary's hope that Chelsea would do what she did — "I don't have pierced ears, and her grandmothers don't," she said in 1992 — is striking. In ear piercing, there's a tendency, probably frequently broken, but a tendency nonetheless, to do what your mom did. If your mom got her ears pierced as a baby, you probably did too. If she didn't, you probably didn't either. And if you have a daughter, you might just keep the tradition going. "I got my ears pierced on my 10th birthday, and I think I counted down the days for more than a year," remembers Rony Vardi, founder and co-creative director of <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.catbirdnyc.com%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F5%2F10%2F11602034%2Fear-piercings-history-culture-claires" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Catbird</a>. "I was 100 percent sure they were going to make me look <em>so</em> grown-up and fancy. I don't think I was so wrong. Earrings can really change your face and your general vibe a lot. Now my daughter is getting her ears pierced for her 10th birthday next month, and I can see how she is as excited as I was."</p>
<p>Some girls see getting their ears pierced as a rubicon to be crossed. Anna Sheffield, the proprietor of an<a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.annasheffield.com%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F5%2F10%2F11602034%2Fear-piercings-history-culture-claires" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank"> eponymous jewelry brand</a> as well as another line called<a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bingbangnyc.com%2F&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F5%2F10%2F11602034%2Fear-piercings-history-culture-claires" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank"> Bing Bang</a>, couldn't wait to hurl herself over it. "I was pretty young, but I absolutely demanded to be allowed to get my ears pierced, because I wanted to be like Wonder Woman," Sheffield says. She was all of 4 or 5. "At the time — I was born in the '70s — Lynda Carter was Wonder Woman on TV. She had this amazing '70s outfit and part of it was these big, red plastic stud earrings." (We'll take a momentary pause here so you can <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=lynda+carter+wonder+woman+earrings&rlz=1C1LENN_enUS449US451&biw=1366&bih=643&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj7lfWJgZfMAhXGPT4KHUoRAk4Q_AUIBygC#tbm=isch&q=lynda+carter+wonder+woman&imgrc=usvz_WLxntq0HM%3A">check 'em out.</a>)</p>
<p>"I basically begged and cried and pleaded, and my mom kept telling me, ‘It's gonna hurt,' and I was like, ‘I don't care, I wanna be like Wonder Woman,'" Sheffield remembers. "So she took me to get my ears pierced, and of course they don't pierce your ears with giant plastic Wonder Woman studs. So I started out with two little fake garnet studs that were my mini Wonder Woman stand-ins until I could get the big plastic ones."</p>
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<p>All in all, "It was kind of an amazing day, because of course it hurt, but I felt like it was this amazing rite of passage to becoming a super person, like a superhero." To this day, Sheffield says she still gravitates toward some iteration of "Wonder Woman studs" in her personal earring selection.</p>
<p>In the '70s, Sheffield was an outlier to get her ears pierced at 4 or 5, and though that's still on the young side, it's not uncommon for elementary school-aged girls to get pierced these days. If it seems quaint that Hillary and Bill were trying to delay Chelsea's ear piercing until teenagedom, it goes to show how much times have changed since the early '90s and how much the Clinton parents stuck to the conventional wisdom they'd grown up with.</p>
<p>But their worry that ear piercing meant something more than that Chelsea would have holes in her ears, that it somehow went along with growing up, wasn't completely unfounded. They certainly weren't the first parents to make their daughter wait. Maybe it goes back to that association with bad girls, but getting your ears pierced marks the beginning of something — soon you'll be wearing makeup, shaving your legs, going to school dances, having crushes — and maybe it's the beginning of the end of childhood. If you want to be high-minded about it, maybe it even fits into Leslie Jamison's "<a href="http://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain">Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain</a>." Isn't suffering for beauty a particularly female kind of suffering?</p>
<p>This mainstreaming of ear piercing, from fast-girl marker to everygirl aspiration, has echoes in the trajectory tattoos and body piercings have followed in more recent years: Once they were <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/fashion/25tattoo.html">controversial and even extreme</a>, but now nearly anything goes. And we haven't even gotten into earrings for men and the lost salience of earrings among gay men! Piercing: It's more than meets the eye (or ear).</p>
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<p>Claire's, which bills itself as the world's top piercer, has been in the ear piercing business since 1978, right on schedule for ear piercing's '70s boom. The store started a few years before that, in the 1960s (it sold wigs initially, Lauren Sherman recently reported in her <a href="http://www.lennyletter.com/style/a250/body-glitter-and-slap-bracelets-a-brief-history-of-claires/">history of Claire's for <em>Lenny</em></a>), and by 1992, there were over 1,000 stores in the US, many of them in the malls that <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fnode%2F10278717&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F5%2F10%2F11602034%2Fear-piercings-history-culture-claires" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">sprung up throughout suburbia</a> over the previous decades. Now, there are more than 3,000 stores in the world. As the company has expanded internationally, "Claire's has become stronger and stronger in ear piercing, and we've invested more and more in that area," says Hind Palmer, Claire's global communications director.</p>
<div class="float-right hang-right"><p><q class="pullquote">The chain does 3 million piercings a year, and its global piercing number recently hit 94 million.</q></p></div>
<p>Claire's takes pride in being known as <em>the</em> place to get your ears pierced, and it makes sense. Of course it wants girls to think of it as that place where you can do something as supercool and grown-up as getting your ears pierced. Of course they expect that positive association to result in increased loyalty and sales.</p>
<p>Its piercing stats are appropriately staggering: The chain does 3 million piercings a year, and its global piercing number recently hit 94 million. It's a volume business — if you visit your local Claire's, there's probably someone getting pierced right now. And it's also one they have down to a science. Pick your stud, sit down in the chair, get pierced with a gun, admire it in the mirror, and then pay at the cash register. It can all be done in less than 15 minutes.</p>
<p>In the <em>Lenny</em> piece, Sherman wrote that the company's heyday was in the '90s and that "sales really haven't grown much since the company was acquired a decade ago." Just last week, its <a href="http://www.chainstoreage.com/article/ceo-claires-stores-resigns-replaced-industry-vet#">CEO Beatrice Lafon resigned</a> and was replaced by Ron Marshall, a board member and former CEO of A&P and Borders. For years, the company has had trouble living up to its past successes, and at this point, it is also <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-claires-stores-ceo-0506-biz-20160505-story.html">"significantly" in debt</a>.</p>
<p>While in charge, Lafon had been mulling ways to capitalize on the company's status as a top ear piercer, the <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-claires-ceo-beatrice-lafon-0614-biz-20150612-story.html"><em>Chicago Tribune</em> reported</a>: "So famous is Claire's for its ear piercing that the accessories retailer historically hasn't done much to promote the service, CEO Beatrice Lafon said — and that's one of the things she's changing as she works to right the company's rocky fortunes." It remains to be seen what changes Marshall will make. For 2015, Claire's <a href="http://www.clairestores.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=68915&p=irol-news&nyo=0">reported revenues</a> of $1.4 billion. Palmer declined to specify how much of that comes from piercing.</p>
<p>In contrast, Piercing Pagoda, Claire's most visible national competitor, was founded in 1969 and is now owned by the <a href="http://www.racked.com/2015/8/7/9111683/kay-jared-zales-signet-jewelers">Signet group</a> of jewelers. It has 610 locations and sales of $210 million, down from 930 locations and sales of $300 million in 2000.</p>
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<p>Palmer cited Claire's jewelry selection as one of the main things that sets it apart from its peers. "You lose yourself," she said of the store's famous earring towers. "Me personally, having worked for Claire's for six years, you can't ask me to choose a pair of earrings." The company is also pushing its proprietary "<a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.claires.com%2Fus%2Fproducts%2Fear-piercing-rapid-3-week-after-care-lotion-68276&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F5%2F10%2F11602034%2Fear-piercings-history-culture-claires" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Rapid Ear Piercing After Care</a>," a cleanser that allows the earring holes to heal in just three weeks, as opposed to the usual six to eight.</p>
<p>Lately it seems like celebrities have been a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/apr/09/pierced-like-beckham-how-claires-accessories-went-a-list-one-ear-at-a-time">focus for the Claire's brand</a>, and Palmer was quick to point out that Brooklyn Beckham, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/femail/video-1181103/Kaley-Cuoco-clutches-teddy-bear-gets-ear-pierced.html">Kaley Cuoco</a>, and Vanessa Hudgens, among others, have all recently gotten piercings at Claire's. Some celebrity visits are arranged in advance, but others are impromptu. "They don't need to close the store. Like Victoria and David Beckham, they went to our store, they shopped in our store. We didn't want to make a big deal out of it, we didn't want to promote it," Palmer says. "If they want to talk about it and put it on Instagram, great." Her dream celebrity ear-piercing customer? Justin Bieber.</p>
<p>On a store visit to a midtown Manhattan Claire's in March, it was clear that the company's reputation as a piercing destination remains strong. Amrit Rattan, 28, had been wanting to get her cartilage pierced for years, but had always stopped short of actually doing it. "I was walking past, I saw Claire's, and I thought, ‘Let me just go in and get it done,'" she said. Katie Clark, 21, works nearby at Macy's Herald Square and also made a spur-of-the-moment decision to come in. Two college students on spring break from schools in California, 20-year-old Rhea Handa and 19-year-old Manka Garg, cheered each other on through the addition of new holes. "If we can get through midterms, we can get through this," Garg said.</p>
<div class="float-left hang-left"><p><q class="pullquote">"I liked it. It didn't hurt that much. It just hurt like a little pinch."</q></p></div>
<p>The only girls who seemed to be disappointed were two 17-year-olds named Sidney and Emma, who were in New York on a school trip from Virginia and hoping to get second holes in their ears. According to Claire's rules, you have to be 18 or have a parent or guardian with you to get a piercing. ("Notice: If you were born after today's date in 1998, your parent or legal guardian must provide their photo ID & complete the registry giving their consent for your ear piercing," a sign reads in the store.) "She said, ‘I'm just gonna do it myself,'" Emma said of her friend. "I do that kind of stuff sometimes," Sidney shrugged, saying she would look up instructions "on WikiHow or something." DIY culture lives.</p>
<p>The most exciting customer of the day was Emmie Bankston. On vacation with her family from Knoxville, Tennessee, Emmie managed to convince her parents to let her get her ears pierced. They had been wanting her to wait until her 10th birthday at the end of April, but they caved a month early. Not knowing where to go, her mother Julie said, "We Googled. We were like, ‘I don't even know where you would get your ears pierced in New York City.'" Before they thought of the world's number one ear piercer, of course, and made their way to the Midtown location. "I liked it. It didn't hurt that much. It just hurt like a little pinch," Emmie beamed afterward, as her three younger siblings looked on. One of her little sisters had just gotten her doll's ears pierced at the <a href="http://www.racked.com/2015/6/29/8855683/american-girl-doll-store">American Girl store</a> earlier that day.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="p1">All Claire’s store associates are trained in the art of piercing. They watch in-house training videos and shadow more experienced piercers, but they also start piercing very soon after they begin working at the chain. Piercing is way different <span class="s1">—</span> more personal, more permanent — than the selling and customer service responsibilities of a typical retail gig, and employees have to deal with a wide range of customer reactions to the act. Some cry, some scream, some curse, some reach for the stuffed animal that Claire’s provides for comfort.</p>
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<p>Palmer declined to discuss the procedure for when something goes wrong with a piercing, but added, "Every matter is unique and we treat it that way."</p>
<p>The Claire's experience is easy and convenient, but it's not for everyone. Rachel Smith opened up <a href="http://www.clinicalearpiercing.com/">Clinical Ear Piercing</a> in Soho in 2014 to serve babies and children, and has been surprised that many adults seek her out as well. Similar private clinics run by people with medical backgrounds can be found throughout the country.</p>
<p>Smith is a registered nurse, and it's more expensive to get one's ears pierced with her than it is at Claire's, where piercing is free with the purchase of a piercing starter kit, which includes the ear-piercing cleanser ($20 for the three-week solution) and your choice of studs (<a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.claires.com%2Fcontent%2Fear-piercing-kits%23claires-exclusive&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2016%2F5%2F10%2F11602034%2Fear-piercings-history-culture-claires" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">options</a> range from a 3mm titanium ball in purple or cobalt for $18.99 to the "diamond collection" set in 14-karat yellow gold for $99.99). Starting at $130, Clinical Ear Piercing charges more than twice what the average Claire's piercing costs, and Smith said her business has done well enough that she's been able to make it her full-time job. Most patients seem to come to her after doing their research online; much of the time, they're picking her over getting a piercing at a place like Claire's. Claire's is kind of the elephant in the room when it comes to piercing: Even when you don't go there, it still looms large over your decision.</p>
<p>Judy, an 8-year-old from Brooklyn, got her ears pierced one Saturday in March at Clinical Ear Piercing. "She earned it," her mother, Claudia, explained. Judy had just completed an important performance for piano school, and she had asked to get her ears pierced after the concert. At first, "my dad didn't really agree," Judy mentioned. Claudia piped up, "He actually said, ‘Oh no, my little girl.' But he's fine now. She's the first of three girls."</p>
<p>Of course, ear piercing doesn't have to be some big decision, and for the many people who get their ears pierced as babies, it isn't. For some cultural groups in the US — Latinos and Indians among them — piercing infant girls' ears is the norm. If you're looking for controversy in the ear-piercing world, this is one of the few sources of it. You can find <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemcneal/baby-ear-piercing-debate">endless</a> <a href="http://www.today.com/parents/cute-or-cruel-parents-debate-whether-its-ok-pierce-babies-1B7953540">internet debates</a> over whether the babies should be able to decide for themselves.</p>
<p>Alice, a 2-month-old, was one of several infants to get her ears pierced that same day at Clinical Ear Piercing. Her parents, Priscilla and Taiago, are Brazilians living in Manhattan, and they were getting her ears pierced so everyone knows she's a girl. "We think of girls like dolls," Priscilla said. "You have little dresses, you have little bows, and the earrings just complement the look."</p>
<p>Still, she had been scared for Alice to get it done. "I wouldn't hold her. I didn't want to even see it," she said. "I think it's better to do it now when they are younger and I knew she would cry and everything, at the back of my mind, it's always the question, ‘Is it worth letting her go through this just because of a pair of earrings, just to look nice?'" Priscilla seemed happy with the end result. "Even babies have the right to accessorize," Alice's father, Taiago, added with a smile.</p>
<div class="float-left hang-left"><p><q class="pullquote">"We think of girls like dolls. You have little dresses, you have little bows, and the earrings just complement the look."</q></p></div>
<p>Another couple brought in their 7-month-old that day. She screamed like an opera singer when the piercing gun snapped, but a few minutes later was good as new. "You look so pretty!" her mother cooed. The mother was Indian-American, and the father was white (they didn't want to use their names), and they wanted to get her ears pierced in time to see family for Easter.</p>
<p>His family, the mother explained, "were like, ‘No, wait until she's 8. It's her rite of passage.' And I'm like, ‘No, it's not.' She got a pair of earrings as her birthday present when she was born. We like that tradition." The mother had gotten her ears pierced as a baby and wanted her daughter to do the same, even if she didn't have a particularly specific argument for it. "I don't really know why they do that, but every Indian baby girl gets her ears pierced. Piercings in India, jewelry, it's sort of a sign of wealth."</p>
<p>"It's pretty much all the same story with the babies," Smith summarized. "That's a very cultural thing. Normally African Americans and anybody of Latin descent, they bring their babies in, and it's gender identification."</p>
<p>Sandra Gutierrez, 27, was in New York from Washington, D.C. for the weekend, and came to Clinical Ear Piercing to look at its selection of medical-grade earrings because she has sensitive ears. Her husband, Carlos Fernandez, also 27, decided to get his ears pierced while they were in the office. "Oh wow. It hurts less than when you pop my pimples," he said to Gutierrez afterward. For him, it definitely wasn't a rite of passage: "It has no other meaning except how it looks."</p>
<p>Gutierrez, though, remembered a time when her earrings made her stand out. She had her ears pierced as a baby in Peru, but grew to resent them when she was growing up in Texas. "I do remember one time when I was really little, I thought that it was unfair that my parents had done it for me without me asking for it," Gutierrez said. "There was one or two years where it was such a big deal that I took out my earrings and put on the stickers that other girls were wearing, because I just didn't want people messing with my ears anymore. Do not touch them, do not point out to your parents that I have them. I didn't like feeling different."</p>
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<div class="float-right hang-right"><p><q class="pullquote">"People come in from out of town for the 10th birthday, go to the Plaza, they have a little party and ear piercing. Ten, I find, is really the big celebration age of ear piercing."</q></p></div>
<p>The cultural differences continue to surprise Smith. "I have Chinese and Korean women who come to me every single weekend, lots and lots, and they're always adults. They get their first piercings always in their late teens, when they get to college, or when they're getting married or they have a corporate job. I was thinking about that this morning, how it's a different rite of passage in that culture, where it's more about sophistication." Sure enough, two NYU undergrads, both from China, come in together for first piercings that day.</p>
<p>"I do a lot of 10th birthdays," Smith added. "I go to the Plaza a lot. People come in from out of town for the 10th birthday, go to the Plaza, they have a little party and ear piercing. Ten, I find, is really the big celebration age of ear piercing. I did a 9th birthday the other day, but I feel like 10 is really when they take the trip to New York and go to the theater and it's a big, big celebration."</p>
<p>Smith offers several accommodations Claire's doesn't: She makes house calls, you can pay extra for numbing cream, plus her office is quieter and more private. Before going into nursing, she was a hairdresser, and she said that informs ear piercing as much or more than her medical background does. "I do consider this a medical procedure because you're puncturing skin, but it has a huge beauty component because there's no reason to do this. I spend so much time really looking at the shape of the ear, standing back, let's make sure, let's make sure."</p>
<p>Smith said she frequently fixes mall piercings gone awry. "The placement is wonky half the time. They're in a hurry." Even professional accessories designers aren't immune to this. Erica Weiner, who designs her <a href="https://ericaweiner.com/">own line of jewelry</a>, remembers, "The first time I was 12 and got them done at the mall in New Jersey with a gun, a teenager with a piercing gun, and because of that they both are uneven and they sort of angle forward. So any earrings I wear always are sort of pointing at the ground." She loved them anyway. "I felt different walking down the street. I felt absolutely different. Nobody noticed."</p>
<p>Another way to set your experience apart from Claire's is to go to a tattoo shop. That's what Judy Amsalem, a 26-year-old graduate student who grew up in New York, did for her first piercing.</p>
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<p>"Most New Yorkers still definitely get their ears pierced at Claire's. We have those even though they're not in malls," Amsalem says. "I was not one of those people. I was really afraid, actually, of getting my ears pierced, and afraid of needles. So I waited and waited until the last possible moment, which to me was six weeks to the day before my senior prom, because I wanted to be able to wear earrings to prom, and I wanted to be able to change my earrings, and you have to wait six weeks after getting your ears pierced to do that."</p>
<p>Her older sister took control of the situation. "She went to NYU and she lived in the Village, she's not about to take me to Claire's," Amsalem remembers. "So she took me to St. Mark's Place instead. We went into this classic St. Mark's Place piercing and tattoo joint, and the guy who pierced my ears was this huge burly dude with tattoos all over his neck and hands and he had his forehead pierced, which is really confusing. So I sit down and he's like, ‘What are we doing today?' And my sister's so excited, she's like ‘My little sister wants to get her ears pierced.' And this dude's so confused. He's like, ‘Like, for the first time?'</p>
<p>I'm pretty sure he had never done this before. It was a pretty hardcore place. I remember sitting in the chair, and the wall in front of where I was getting my ears pierced was covered in all these different ways to get your vagina pierced. All these vaginas and different ways to lace up your piercings on your vagina. He did actually have a piercing gun and he was very gentle because he was so excited that it was my first piercing, and he pierced my ears. And six weeks later I changed my earrings and I went to prom."</p>
<div class="float-left hang-left"><p><q class="pullquote"><span>"I felt different walking down the street. I felt absolutely different. Nobody noticed."</span></q></p></div>
<p>Amsalem's not the only one to forego the mall. "We have had a huge influx of people coming in for earlobe piercings over the past couple of years," says Miro Hernandez, of the APP and a piercer himself at Dandyland in San Antonio, Texas. The increasing mainstreaming of tattoos and body piercings helps here, too. "We're getting a lot more parents who are doing their research and they're opting to bring their children into tattoo or ear piercing studios to get their ears pierced as opposed to going to Claire's or some chain in the mall."</p>
<p>This brings us to the other site of potential controversy in the piercing world, piercing guns. "We have a no-piercing-guns stance because of all the repercussions and potential damage they can cause, the questions about sterility and the quality of jewelry, all this stuff comes into play." Rachel Smith of Clinical Ear Piercing says there is limited research on the difference between piercing with a gun or a needle, but that it is one of the most common questions she gets. She ultimately concluded that "there's no difference. The tissue damage is virtually the same."</p>
<p>Still, people like Hernandez take a hard line against the guns: "With a piercing gun, it's a stud that's basically loaded in a spring-load cartridge and it's forced through, and it's ripping and it's causing trauma and damage. Whereas with a piercing needle you can make a really clean, simple single incision." With the rare family doctor who still does piercings, they tend to use guns, though maybe a dermatologist — again, the rare one who actually bothers doing them — will opt for a needle.</p>
<p>In fashion circles, J. Colby Smith of <a href="http://nyadorned.com/">New York Adorned</a> has developed a reputation for being <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jcolbysmith/?hl=en">piercing's No. 1 stud</a>. He doesn't pierce kids — "I'm past that point in my career," he says — but he sees 150 people in an average week, many of whom give him free reign to do what he thinks will look best. He favors a delicate look, not one statement earring but a smattering of smaller complementary ones that form an overall pleasing picture, customized to flatter your individual ear shape. (See this aesthetic on display on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jcolbysmith/?hl=en">his Instagram feed</a>.) He also spends a significant amount of time helping clients choose the jewelry that will work best with their piercings. It fits into the current vogue for all things dainty in jewelry — subtle necklaces and rings and earrings that won't look bulky or loud even if you pile three or four on top of each other.</p>
<div class="float-right hang-right"><p><q class="pullquote">"They're opting to bring their children into tattoo or ear piercing studios to get their ears pierced as opposed to going to Claire's or some chain in the mall."</q></p></div>
<p>"The piercing that's popular today, Colby's style, it's so different from how it was when I got pierced," says Wing Yau, the designer behind jewelry brand <a href="http://wwake.com/">Wwake</a>. "I think it's a lot more personal these days. Colby looks at your entire ear with a holistic perspective and thinks about how he can balance the entire look of the ear out over time. I think that's why he has such a great following, because people can come back and build their collection and have their ear be like a whole outfit in itself."</p>
<p>Last fall, Yau threw an ear piercing party in Brooklyn where guests could get pierced by Smith with Wwake earrings. "At least two people came who had never had theirs ears pierced. One of them was my friend and she got these two really cool constellation-style earrings in both her ears."</p>
<p>Designer Erica Weiner was one of the guests at the party. "I just thought it was a really different experience than what I was used to," she says. "When I was a teenager or in my early 20s in New York City, I got a lot of body piercings done. You used to always have to go into one of these scary tattoo/piercing stores. There was no in-between, approachable, fun piercing. It was either absolutely horrifying outsider piercing culture thing or the mall, that was it. Now it's much more casual, with the ear stacking."</p>
<p>Yau agrees. "I think when I got pierced with a piercing gun it was the way everyone, all of my girlfriends, got pierced, and we shared that common denominator of that experience, which is fun. It's definitely a lot more impersonal, both in how you're getting pierced and who's piercing you, and also the selection of jewelry was more commercial back then. People like Colby provide a more curated and special experience, not that it wasn't romantic."</p>
<p>Maybe the personalization of piercing is poised to spread from New York across the country. (Smith himself is bicoastal now.) "Piercings are something that sticks with you," he says. "It doesn't matter if you're 18 or you're 25 or you're 36, you always remember getting pierced. It just leaves a mark on your brain. I love that all my clients come to me through word of mouth, so somebody gets pierced, they go to dinner, they talk about it at dinner. I love that it's like I'm with them and I'm part of them. It's incredibly flattering. I very rarely can go anywhere that I don't see somebody that I've done something on. And they're just like, ‘Thank you for making it a good experience,' and I'm definitely not going to forget." He won't forget your ears, or becoming part of your story, and obviously, neither will you. Because unlike other things you wear or own, your piercings stay with you, stay on you. "It becomes part of the map of your body, like looking at a freckle or something," Weiner says.</p>
<p class="end">As Anna Sheffield puts it, reflecting on her piercings, "Those little decisions when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, putting more ear piercings in, and later getting tattoos, and even now, being who I am, it becomes a part of who you are and how you express yourself."</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/heathertwit"><em>Heather Schwedel</em></a><em> is a writer and copy editor at Slate.</em></p>
<p><em>Editor: </em><a href="http://www.racked.com/authors/julia-rubin"><em>Julia Rubin</em></a></p>
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https://www.racked.com/2016/5/10/11602034/ear-piercings-history-culture-clairesHeather Schwedel2015-11-25T10:00:02-05:002015-11-25T10:00:02-05:00Is Holiday Layaway a Predatory System?
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<p>Why heart-warming 'layaway angels' are only part of the story</p> <p>If you’re looking for a new genre of heartwarming YouTube video, may we suggest searching "layaway angels"? This will lead you to dozens of clips, many of them local news segments, about good samaritans who visit stores during the holidays and pay off shoppers’ layaway balances. Like a scene out of a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, a frequently anonymous donor will contribute $12,000, $20,000, $50,000 of his or her own money to help strangers who have put gifts on hold have a happy holiday. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovXx9JOq99o">Hugs and tears</a> often ensue. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jJB6WsOzEw">In Indiana</a>, after paying off all the layaways, one "angel" walked around a Kmart just handing out $50 bills. The clear implication of these videos is that the Christmas spirit is alive and well.</p>
<p>Angels are just one part of the larger story of layaway, a retail strategy that, while not used by most people, describes the shopping habits of a significant segment of Americans. The principle is simple: Reserve an item without putting its total cost down, and take it home once you’ve paid it off in full, hopefully in time to shower your loved ones with gifts for Christmas or the holiday of your choice. Though some stores have online, mobile, and other newfangled components these days, layaway is an old-fashioned idea, associated with the scrimping and saving of the Great Depression, and in more modern times, the realities of living on a budget.</p>
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<p>Over the past five years, a narrative emerged that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/business/wal-mart-to-bring-back-layaway.html" style="background-color: #ffffff;">the recession had brought</a> <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44963459/ns/business-consumer_news/t/old-way-shop-holidays-new-again/#.Vkonb2SrR-U" style="background-color: #ffffff;">back layaway services</a>, which had been popular during the 20th century but declined with the rise of credit cards. Although the economy has improved in the intervening years, layaway programs have persisted in many stores, proving more than anything else to be an important <a href="http://www.retaildive.com/news/how-enhanced-layaway-programs-lure-holiday-shoppers/406369/" style="background-color: #ffffff;">marketing tool for retailers to lure customers</a> during the holiday season.</p>
<p>Walmart, Kmart, Toys R Us, Burlington Coat Factory, and Marshalls are among the stores that offer layaway plans. Walmart discontinued layaway in 2006 but reintroduced it in 2011, and since then has continued to tweak its plan each year. This year’s innovation was <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/08/27/walmart-holiday-layaway/" style="background-color: #ffffff;">kicking off its holiday season and layaway program at the end of August</a>. Kmart, part of Sears Holdings, has always had layaway, and in contrast some of its competitors, offers it all year. The details of the plans differ from company to company — whether a down payment is required and if so, how much, whether there are cancellation fees, how often contributions must be made, etc.</p>
<p>According to a <a href="https://nrf.com/media/press-releases/retailers-very-digital-holiday-season-according-nrf-survey">National Retail Federation survey</a>, 7% of consumers cite the availability of layaway services as one of the most important factors in deciding where to shop, and 5% said they began shopping for the holidays in October or prior in order to take advantage of layaway programs. "It’s used by all levels of consumer," said NRF spokeswoman Kathy Grannis Allen. "Companies started realizing that this service was a tremendous value for all of their shoppers who were shopping on a budget. The recession affected everyone."</p>
<p>"I think people are still concerned about overspending, they’re concerned about what’s going to happen next, and layaway is pretty tried and true," added Joe Valenti, director of consumer finance at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.</p>
<p>Low-income shoppers tend to have financial situations that make layaway a particularly natural fit for them. They are more likely, for instance, not to have credit cards, bank accounts, and other financial tools that the rest of the population takes for granted. "It’s definitely something that appeals to people who may not have a lot of money, may not have strong access to credit, and are looking for something that’s pretty reliable," Valenti said. "I think you also see that in the types of stores that tend to offer it. It’s not something you’re going to see at the top end of the market because people will be using credit cards or will be using other products."</p>
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<p>If you Google "layaway," you’ll find a bevy of advice warning against it. <a href="http://www.dailyfinance.com/2015/09/09/holiday-shopping-layaway-trap/" style="background-color: #ffffff;">"Will You Fall for the Layaway Trap This Year?"</a> asks a Daily Finance article from September. "Layaway can be a great deal when it works. It doesn’t always work. There are a few things that can go wrong during the process," Valenti said, citing shoppers not getting the exact products they reserved, cancellation penalties, and other consequences, all of which are examples of the ways that <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fnews%2Funited-states%2F21663262-why-low-income-americans-often-have-pay-more-its-expensive-be-poor&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2015%2F11%2F25%2F9783170%2Flayaway-angels-kmart-walmart-toys-r-us-recession-holiday" style="background-color: #ffffff;" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">it’s expensive to be poor</a>. Experts advise that shoppers be very aware of what they’re getting into with any particular layaway plan.</p>
<p>For Kmart, layaway is a key part of the company’s holiday strategy as well as a way to set itself apart from other retailers. "Every year we try to have some fun with it, get out there, really encourage people to use this as a way to shop earlier, make sure that they can get their products, that the hot toys aren’t sold out when they’re looking for them, etcetera," said Jai Holtz, president of financial services at Sears Holdings. This year, from the beginning of September through the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Kmart is letting customers put items on layaway for no money down for the first two weeks. Holtz added that Kmart offers very few restrictions on what can be put on layaway —sale items and Black Friday doorbusters are fair game. The goal, Holtz said, is to provide customers with the "ultimate flexibility." From the sound of it, the approach is working: "We see a higher basket when we run the no-money-down, and we see individuals who haven’t done layaway in the past really trying it for the first time," Holtz said.</p>
<p>Holtz declined to provide specifics on what portion of its sales come from layaway but noted, "It is a significant driver of business at Kmart. It is a service that we don’t see any time in the near future even considering removing."</p>
<p>And as layaway continues to be a profitable draw for stores, the layaway angels will remain a popular tradition with stores, patrons, and local news stations alike. Cathy O’Grady of Watertown, Massachusetts, runs a charity focused on random acts of kindness called <a href="http://sofiasangelsfoundation.org/">Sofia’s Angels</a>. She had heard of people paying off layaway plans as layaway angels, but "I never thought I would be one," O’Grady said. That is, until last year, when <a href="http://www.today.com/news/layaway-angels-pay-over-50-000-wal-mart-toys-r-1D80379202">she was able to pay off about $20,000 in other people’s layaway fees</a> at Toys R Us.</p>
<p>O’Grady recalled one woman who had come to the store to cancel her layaway purchases. She had to be told three times that she didn’t have to, that her bill had been paid. "That’s when I lost it," O’Grady said. "She came around and she hugged me and she kissed me and she said thank you. That’s when I said, ‘Hurry up, I need to get out of here before I do the ugly snot cry.’"</p>
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<p>New Yorker Lee Karchawer founded a charity called <a href="http://www.payawaythelayaway.org/">Pay Away the Layaway</a> to crowdsource money to fund layaway angel missions in 2011. He read an article about an anonymous layaway angel and was inspired to do something similar — but lacked the thousands of dollars to make it happen. After raising several thousand dollars in its first few seasons, last year the organization raised $60,000 in crowdfunding, most of it from relatively small donations, Karchawer said. When it comes time to dole out the money, "We work very closely with Kmart, Toys R Us, Walmart, and Babies R Us, and we identify stores that are in typically lower-income neighborhoods to help families that are struggling to pay for gifts for their kids during the holidays," Karchawer said. He added that part of the organization’s promise to those who donate is that their money will only go toward paying for items for children. "Being able to be there and give that person a hug and let them know that things are gonna get better and we’re trying to at least alleviate one thing, that maybe they can take that money now and buy groceries… that’s kind of what our organization’s really all about." This year, in addition to the holiday season, Pay Away the Layaway experimented with paying off some layaway contracts for families buying back-to-school supplies.</p>
<p>Layaway angels make for a convenient, feel-good story in the media, so it’s no surprise that stores have embraced them. Kmart frequently works with Pay Away the Layaway, for example, to arrange for news media to be on hand when the organization makes its store visits. "We absolutely thank and love our layaway angels," Holtz, the Kmart executive, said. "The idea of charity during the holidays especially for layaway, it’s a great feeling, we love seeing it. Our store associates get so excited."</p>
<p>As inspiring (and tearjerking) as the layaway angels’ generosity can be, Valenti made a point about their context in our overall economy: "It would be great if we were in an environment where people felt like their incomes were sufficient and the wages were higher, where folks wouldn’t be so concerned about their finances and where it wouldn’t necessarily take acts of charity for people to get things that in some cases may be really important or maybe essential." How angelic that would be.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2015/11/25/9783170/layaway-angels-kmart-walmart-toys-r-us-recession-holidayHeather Schwedel2015-10-19T11:00:33-04:002015-10-19T11:00:33-04:00Re-Evaluating Pop Culture's Craziest Ex-Girlfriends
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<p>The technical term is "pulling a Felicity." That's what it's called when you do something crazy for a guy. In the case of the titular character of the 1998 WB drama, it was following her crush Ben across the country to go to college in New York, all because of what he wrote in her yearbook. In this fall's new CW show, <i>Crazy Ex-Girlfriend</i>, the main character Rebecca finally restores balance to a universe that has been slightly off-kilter ever since Felicity Porter fled the left coast: After a chance run-in with her ex from camp, Josh, she heeds the call to "Go West, young woman," and follows him to California.</p>
<p>Like canceling out a fraction, you can simplify the phrase "crazy ex-girlfriend" down to its roots: crazy girl. Felicity Porter may not have been a crazy ex-girlfriend — she and Ben had barely ever spoken, much less dated — but she sure was a crazy girl. All it takes is some swoony feelings that harden into an obsession and one rash decision. Then bam, you've joined the lineage of the crazy girl.</p>
<p><span>For </span><i style="line-height: 1.44;">Crazy Ex-Girlfriend</i><span>'s Rebecca, played by Rachel Bloom, who has a touch of Natasha Lyonne about her, it means leaving a plum position as a junior partner in a New York law firm to put her Ivy League degrees to use in a dinky law practice in the not-particularly-cosmopolitan California town her object of desire calls home. He dumped her after a teenage romance, but when they see each other on the street in New York 10 years later, he calls her hot, and it makes her reevaluate her life. Or maybe she was already reevaluating her life when he appeared. </span><span>Because it's never really about him. The crazy girl's crazy is so big that it tends to swallow up everything else in its path. She's crazy because she is too much, always overreacting, considering the proportionate and reasonable response to a thoughtful yearbook message or a "hey, we should hang out sometime" to be a cross-country move.</span></p>
<p>How can you recognize the crazy girl? Mascara runs around her just-as-crazy-as-she-is eyes, like Taylor Swift in the "Blank Space" video. She is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juM99Ke9D6g">Carrie Bradshaw going off on Berger's friends</a> when she runs into them at the club after being dumped via Post-It. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQZvGRvoxjg">Marnie on <i>Girls</i> pathetically Facebook-stalking</a> her ex's photos, muttering, "Ew. Gay. What?" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8_5uPfGXjA">Kristen Wiig freaking out and destroying the "stupid fucking cookie"</a> at the wedding shower in <i>Bridesmaids</i>. An angry Molly Ringwald asking, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l7LGK2hnQw">What about prom, Blane</a>?"</p>
<p>In most examples, the crazy girl isn't actually scary. Imagine if a guy followed you across the country. That would be the stuff of restraining orders. <i>Crazy Ex-Boyfriend</i> basically already exists, minus any jauntiness: It's the 1996 movie <i>Fear</i>, the one where Mark Wahlberg gets so mad when Reese Witherspoon tries to stop seeing him that he imprisons her family in their home and tries to kill them. In comparison, <i>Crazy Ex-Girlfriend</i>'s Rebecca is a peach. Felicity? A marshmallow. They have their quirks — Rebecca sometimes bursts into song (the show is a musical comedy), and Felicity's a tumbleweed of hair, knitwear, and neuroses. But crazy? Pshaw. Which raises the question: What if everyone who seems like a crazy girl is actually, if not sane, unfairly maligned? Below, we reevaluate some of our favorite crazies.</p>
<h3>
<span>Miss Havisham</span><span> from </span><span>Great Expectations </span>
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<p>The O.G. crazy girl. You know the deal: tattered wedding dress, witchy vibe, hatred of all men. After being left at the altar, Miss Havisham stops all the clocks in her house and sets out to ruin a young man's life just because she can. And yet. "We see these wounded women everywhere," <a href="http://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain">Leslie Jamison wrote</a> in a defense of this type: Who are we to ignore a woman's feelings? Jamison continued, "I'm tired of female pain and also tired of people who are tired of it. I know the ‘hurting woman' is a cliché but I also know lots of women still hurt. I don't like the proposition that female wounds have gotten old; I feel wounded by it." Some man screwed Miss Havisham over — before peacing, he also defrauded her of her fortune — doesn't she have a right to be mad? #TeamHavisham.</p>
<h3>Alex from Fatal Attraction</h3>
<p>Surely you remember the famous bunny boil? When a married man, played by Michael Douglas, sleeps with a single career woman — innocent mistake, we've all been there — she goes psycho on him and his family (and their pet!). But he should have seen it coming: just look at that out-of-control curly hair! Characters like this — see also every other Michael Douglas movie of the era — were so baldly a reaction to the gains women were making in society after the '70s and '80s that Susan Faludi practically wrote a whole book about them, called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Backlash-Undeclared-Against-American-Women/dp/0307345424"><i>Backlash</i></a>. Hence the part where she gets taken down in the end, defeated by a wholesome, upstanding, philandering-but-eh-can't-win-'em-all man.</p>
<h3>Stacy from Wayne's World</h3>
<p>You know who was an under-appreciated crazy ex-girlfriend? Stacy, played by Lara Flynn Boyle in <i>Wayne's World</i>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJRvPmONjVY">In one scene, she brings Wayne a beautiful gun rack</a> and all Wayne does is ask her if she's mental (<span>meanwhile Garth calls her a "psycho hosebeast").</span><span> So she does seem a little off — her "Wayne" necklace, her way-too-fancy-for-the-doughnut-shop pink dress, her choice of gift for a guy with no previously expressed interest in firearms — but we also never get to see anything from Stacy's perspective, learn why they broke up, or even the circumstances of their going out in the first place — she's mostly a punchline (and punching bag). Meanwhile, Wayne is the with a basement cable-access TV show obsessing over a guitar he'll never buy. </span></p>
<h3>Madison from Swimfan</h3>
<p>Because the world needed a teen spin on the crowd-pleasing tale of <i>Fatal Attraction</i>. Jesse Bradford stars as a high-school swimmer who's dating sweet-as-pie Shiri Appleby but accidentally winds up hooking up with Erika Christensen in the very pool where he practices. (Hey, it happens.) Because this is high school in 2002 and not <i>Fatal Attraction</i>'s go-go '80s business world of secretaries and answering machines, she stalks him over dial-up Internet. Her screenname? SwimFan85. Christensen looks normal, and dresses cute, save for one bad leather skirt: She mostly hides her crazy in her dead eyes. The message here? Girls who are sexually aggressive are nutcases.</p>
<h3>Amy Dunne from Gone Girl</h3>
<p>Our current era's finest example of the crazy girl, Amy Dunne first captivated readers of Gillian Flynn's novel before being portrayed by Rosamund Pike in last year's film version. Under Amy's accomplished and beautiful façade lurks the soul of a psychopath who fakes her own death and frames her husband for it in a manner so well-executed that the horror of it hardly detracts from its sheer impressiveness. She is truly the Martha Stewart of do-it-yourself foul play.</p>
<p><i>Gone Girl</i> emphasizes the intense, unknowable nature of the crazy-girl stereotype: Don't put anything past her! She'll move clear across the country if you so much as flirt with her! She'll fake her own death if it comes to that. Amy is gorgeous, blonde, <i>cool</i>, and by the time she begins her plot, fed up with the many pressures those things bring. Also, her husband is kind of a dick. Can we blame her for using her talent and smarts to get a little revenge? When a girl does something crazy, maybe the full <i>Gone Girl</i> is what guys fear — not a spur-of-the-moment act of violence, but a meticulously planned war of attrition. If you can't handle her at her <i>Gone Girl</i>, fellas, you don't deserve her at her <i>Crazy Ex-Girlfriend</i>.</p>
https://www.racked.com/entertainment/2015/10/19/9565629/crazy-ex-girlfriend-cw-swimfan-gone-girlHeather Schwedel2015-09-16T10:00:02-04:002015-09-16T10:00:02-04:00Well-Armed: A History of Teen Bracelet Crazes
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<p>Lanyards! Karma Beads! Silly Bandz!</p> <p>What if I told you that a Minions slap bracelet, available for $6.50 at Claire's, in its own small way encapsulates our society and how we got here? No, I have no idea why it says "banana" on it. But I <em>do</em> know that in its taut-one-second, curled-the-next form, it carries a succinct, full-circle history of the last 30 years of American youth culture.</p>
<p>Slap bracelets were the biggest fad of Christmas 1990. Years earlier, friendship bracelets were all the rage. More recently, it was Rainbow Loom-weaved bracelets that were hanging off the wrists of girls around the country. Every few years, a new bracelet craze; every few years, a braided, beaded, collectible, dispensable, authentic, synthetic peek into young people's lives. As millions of girls head into another school year, their wrists blank slates on which we will project the next chapter of cultural history, it is time to ask the question: What does it all mean?</p>
<p>This is a working paper toward a grand unified theory of bracelets. Specifically, we're talking bracelets for teens and tweens. It is girls who drive all of society's innovation, be it in tech, style, or elsewhere — <a href="http://www.inc.com/issie-lapowsky/inside-massive-tech-land-grab-teenagers.html">we</a> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/teens-clamor-to-smartphones-texting-and-girls-lead-the-way/2012/03/19/gIQAIxiLNS_blog.html">know</a> <a href="http://www.tweentribune.com/article/tween56/teenage-girls-have-led-language-innovation-centuries/">this</a>. So naturally it is girls who are on the bleeding edge of that new-new next-next bracelet shit year in and year out. And here we will define "tweens" as kids aged 6 to 12, like the marketers do. A caveat: Words are meaningless/a 6-year-old is not an actual tween. It's also true that things aimed at teens inevitably gain traction among tweens, just like it is true that <em>Seventeen</em> is often read not by 17-year-olds but by 12-year-olds.</p>
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<p>In terms of how trends work, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5WWy_0VLS4">cerulean sweater scene</a> in <em>The Devil Wears Prada</em> is practically a cliché at this point. Has any other bit of Meryl Streep dialogue so perfectly distilled a complex industrial process? The scene illustrates the concept of trends coming from on high. But perhaps more applicable when we're talking about teens and tweens is the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPwrmfRVwoA">scene in <em>Mean Girls</em></a> when Janice Ian cuts two holes over the boobs on Regina George's tank top. Regina shrugs and decides to just go with it; because she is the most popular girl in school, she kicks off a trend, and everyone else starts cutting holes over the boobs in their tops too.</p>
<p>You see, Regina is an influencer, that particular breed of trendsetter young girls are especially susceptible to. If a school's queen bee has a cool new accessory, it won't be long before the lemmings start copying her. Historically, this was true, anyway; social media may be changing things, according to Heather Lunny, director of youth and culture at trend forecasting company Fashion Snoops. "There's something you might know about because the cool older girl is doing it, but you might have seen it first on Instagram," Lunny says. Across the world, girls today are listening to the same music, wearing the same styles, shopping at the same stores online: "They're just such a global generation."</p>
<p>Even if top-down trends are on their way out, as long as girls have wrists, they will be adorning them, and those adornments will say something about the way we live. So now, let's revisit some of the crazes that have led to our current bracelet moment.</p>
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<h3>Friendship Bracelets</h3>
<p>When you're learning to make them at sleepaway camp or from instructions in a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Friendship-Bracelets-Klutz-Laura-Torres/dp/1591747007">Klutz book</a>, friendship bracelets seem timeless, an ancient tradition passed down from a society composed entirely of cool babysitters. But they had to start somewhere. During the friendship bracelet mania of the late 1980s — the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/11/style/once-was-a-time-sharing-the-60-s.html"><em>New York Times</em></a> fingered them as part of a nascent '60s revival in 1987, and a couple of months later, the <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1987-08-12/entertainment/8703010377_1_bracelets-beads-and-wire-friendship"><em>Chicago Tribune</em></a> declared them the hot teen fad — people speculated about their origins, but no one really knew where they came from.</p>
<div class="float-left hang-left"><p><q class="pullquote"><span>It was a point of pride to wear one until it rotted off. It was symbolic, it was a gesture.</span></q></p></div>
<p>In 1988, the <em>Tribune</em> <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-11-06/features/8802130263_1_bracelets-guatemalan-jump-rope">interviewed a folklore professor</a> who traced the bracelets back to the hippie macramé trend of the 1960s, kept alive by Deadheads into the '80s as "kind of a statement that you're a little outside the square world." But it's safe to say that for many of the girls making them in the '80s, ‘90s, and 2000s, counterculture wasn't a big priority. We believed in counterculture insofar as we bought peace sign keychains and yin-yang chokers at the mall.</p>
<p>We knew even less about the bracelets' connection to Guatemala. A 1990 <em>Chicago Tribune</em> article (so I guess we know who the paper of record was when it came to friendship bracelets) <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-02-07/entertainment/9001110507_1_bracelets-friendship-guatemala">posited</a> that the bracelets actually came from Mayan Indians in the country, who had a long tradition of woven crafts, and spread due to political unrest in the 1980s that forced many people to leave their homes. The article was subheadlined, "There's a compassionate history lesson to be learned between your wrist and elbow."</p>
<p>Friendship bracelets also ushered in an all-important element of the bracelet-craze formula: meaningfulness. "They were cool because they indicated how many friends you had," explains Jacqui Ma, director of accessories and footwear at trend forecasting company WGSN. "That age group is really influenced by their peer group. It was all about the status symbol of how many friends I've got."</p>
<p>Some kids wore the bracelets up and down their arms. It was a point of pride to wear one until it rotted off. It was symbolic, it was a gesture. "When you're making something for a friend, it's more about, ‘I made this for you,'" says Ma. In the same way little kids draw pictures for their parents, "The next step up is, ‘I've made this thing for you to wear.'"</p>
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<h3>Lanyards</h3>
<p>There's a certain kind of girl who never did master friendship bracelets, but got big into their foil, lanyards. Friendship bracelet vs. lanyard: To this day, maybe only Backstreet Boys vs. NSYNC could more thoroughly polarize a room of '90s girls. Both are dichotomies it's hard not to read into. Friendship bracelets at least had the appearance of authenticity. Lanyards were less sentimental, more neon, visibly plastic. And one of the enduring mysteries of our time is why some people call the stuff and activity itself gimp, boondoggle, or in France, scoubidou. This is not helped along by the further confusion of "lanyard" also being a name for a dorky strap you wear around your neck to hold your keys or ID card.</p>
<div class="float-right hang-right"><p><q class="pullquote"><span>Friendship bracelets at least had the appearance of authenticity. </span>Lanyards were less sentimental, more neon, visibly plastic.</q></p></div>
<p>Lanyards never seemed to reach the trend piece saturation point that friendship bracelets did, but they're an important part of the bracelet story nonetheless. Like many before him, Lane Lowenstein fell in love with lanyards at camp, first as a camper, then as a counselor. Now he's 29 and works in corporate finance in Indiana, where he's a married father of two, but seven years ago, he started posting tutorials on YouTube under the name <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/Laneyards?feature=mhee">Laneyards</a> — what better way to simply show people how to start the box stitch, for instance? Back then, the landscape was fairly barren, but after about a year and a half, his channel started taking off.</p>
<p>"What I notice less is a few big channels, and instead tons and tons of smaller ones," he explains of the current craft YouTube space. That <a href="http://www.laneyards.com/2008/10/square-stitch.html">box-stitch video</a> he made? It now has nearly 2 million views. Like friendship bracelets, making lanyards can wax and wane in coolness, with a younger group of kids always waiting in the wings to discover the practice once the older ones discard it. YouTube enables this cycle to repeat itself in perpetuity.</p>
<p>Although, it's hardly just bracelet-makers that make use of the plastic lace on the internet: Lowenstein cites fellow YouTuber <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCot1_LjgaGnt4txKr9dWvjg">Yonatan Setbon</a>, who constructs outlandish, three-feet-wide sculptural creations with the familiar camptime material.</p>
<h3>Slap Bracelets</h3>
<p>The tale of Slapwraps is one of chance meetings and corporate deceit worthy of a period-set prestige cable drama. Slapwraps would also be the first bracelet trend to become a parable about globalization and industrialization, but definitely not the last.</p>
<p>In 1984, Stuart Anders had a vision for what would become the Slapwrap, the original slap bracelet, based on a self-rolling tape measure from his mother's sewing cabinet that he played with as a child. He held onto it through a stint in the army and the beginning of a career as a fashion designer, until 1989, when a toy executive named Philip Bart came into his shop. "When he said he was a toy inventor, I ran out to my truck and got my prototype," says Anders. "And I grabbed his hand and slapped it on his wrist. His eyes got really big. It was from there that the concept of Slapwrap was born."</p>
<p>Together, the two partnered with an upstart toy company called Main Street Toys that was founded by some of the people who had struck gold with Cabbage Patch Kids. They brought their idea to Toy Fair, an annual industry gathering, and it was set to be the breakout gift of the 1990 Christmas season. Unbeknownst to Anders and Bart, though, the sample Slapwraps they made to show buyers — meant to be kept under the level of lock and key reserved for a secret Beyoncé album — were compromised, a turn of events that led to the invention being ripped off by foreign manufacturers. "We sold over 6 million products through the major retailers," Anders tells me. "We suspect that there were 20 or 30 million of the knockoffs sold during that same period of time."</p>
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<p>These knockoffs weren't as stringently produced, resulting in injuries and classroom bans. "You can destroy a stainless-steel Slapwrap by bending it in half, but you cannot break it," he adds. Meanwhile, they also had trouble with Main Street Toys, which turned out to be both ill-equipped to actually manufacture the orders they'd taken and guilty of several bits of creative accounting, according to Anders. Anders and Bart ended up in arbitration with the company, and "we never got any of our royalties. I believe there are somewhere above 2 million Slapwraps still in the warehouse of the original Hong Kong manufacturer."</p>
<p>Despite the debacle, Anders looks back on it all fondly. It helps that he's gone on to invent several other products, for pets and tool storage, some of which have been extremely successful, though never quite in that lightning-strike Slapwraps way. "Interestingly, if you look at some of the original patent applications for the Apple Watch, they were actually submitted to the patent office on something that looks amazingly like a Slapwrap," he says.</p>
<p>What is it about toys you can also wear? As per Anders, "I think with children, the more things something can do — can you play with it? Will it read out something? Can you hear a sound from it? — this is what's necessary to keep a child's attention long enough so that they can play with a product."</p>
<p>Slap bracelets may never again reach their '90s heyday, but thanks to our culture's endless appetite for nostalgia, they're being sold at Claire's again, there was that Opening Ceremony <a href="http://fashionista.com/2013/03/opening-ceremony-made-a-fur-slap-bracelet-for-fall-2013">fur slap bracelet</a>, and trendy companies like <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/08/15/swanky-helicopter-service-has-hamptons-visitors-flying-high/">Blade, a Hamptons helicopter service</a>, now give them out as Millennial-bating swag.</p>
<h3>Power Bracelets</h3>
<p>Remember that whole ‘90s spirituality moment — feng shui, kabbalah? Circa 1999, power bracelets, also known as karma beads, were how that manifested itself in wrist-adorning form. "Groovy bracelets have ‘powers,'" Wilmington, North Carolina's <em>Morning Star</em> declared. "Evil, Begone! My Jewelry Says So!" a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/06/style/noticed-evil-begone-my-jewelry-says-so.html"><em>Times</em></a> Style headline blared.</p>
<p>They were comprised of spherical, bigger-than-pearl-sized colored beads on stretchy strings, and naturally each one "meant" something, like aromatherapy: pink quartz for this, jade for that. I had completely forgotten about them until a friend mentioned them during the reporting of this story, and the first one I had popped right back into my head: The beads on my bracelet were clear purple and it was from Old Navy. (Its specific power I am less clear on.)</p>
<div class="float-right hang-right"><p><q class="pullquote">Unlike most other bracelet crazes, this trend started with adults and crossed over into teen and tween territory.</q></p></div>
<p>Unlike most other bracelet crazes, this trend started with adults and crossed over into teen and tween territory — how could it not, what with possessing many of the qualities that make bracelets such a perfect match for young people in the first place? Anyone of any age and size can wear them, check. They're relatively cheap, check. Kids love to get compulsive and load up a whole armful, which the suite of colors and meanings enabled. Check again. But it's easy to see in these yet another American trend made possible by mass production that capitalized on a foreign culture. Accessorizing is not always pretty.</p>
<h3>Jelly Bracelets</h3>
<p>In <a href="http://glamradar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Madonna-rubber-bracelets-stack.jpg">her early days of fame</a>, Madonna used to load her arms up with jelly bracelets. It was an innocent time, the ‘80s, when wearing multiple bracelets could apparently register as shocking and alternative. As we know, our wristly zeitgeist is cyclical, and we trace the full-blown craze of jelly bracelets to a later and decidedly more shocking iteration.</p>
<p>Around 2003, the bracelets resurfaced, first as an ‘80s throwback, then as a media controversy that managed to completely overshadow its original incarnation. Somehow, teachers and parents became convinced that jelly bracelets were part of something <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20031220191943/http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/12/10/sex.bracelet.ap/">very untoward indeed</a>: a game, sometimes called "snap," wherein different colors signified different sexual acts. <a href="http://www.snopes.com/risque/school/bracelet.asp">Snopes debunked</a> the myth of "sex bracelets," the bracelet world's answer to "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/30/fashion/thursdaystyles/are-these-parties-for-real.html">rainbow parties</a>," but the legend lives on.</p>
<p>Tweens and teens wearing plastic bracelets is, on its own, hardly notable at all, just what kids do. As is imbuing the bracelets with specific meanings. Jelly bracelets were particularly versatile though: Teens could go for an Avril Lavigne-style, punky look with a stack of black ones from Hot Topic, while on the younger end of the spectrum, tweens could load up on glittery, rainbow options. It's the media fascination that may have turned a popular style into an out-and-out craze. First comes the moral panic — picture a Salem witch trial where all the accused had been shopping at the mall — then comes increased attention and sales. Which is why jelly bracelets, for better or worse, remain inextricably and probably inaccurately linked with sex.</p>
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<h3>Livestrong Bracelets</h3>
<p>Before he was a disgraced vampire, Lance Armstrong was a rather beloved cultural figure. Known for overcoming cancer and winning a bunch of bike races, Armstrong launched a charity foundation called Livestrong in 1997. But it wasn't until 2004, when its namesake yellow bracelet launched, that Livestrong really hit the stratosphere. Through a partnership with Nike, over <a href="http://www.thewire.com/business/2013/05/nike-livestrong-lance-armstrong/65646/">80 million</a> of the bands were sold to support cancer research. So of course every other disease got in on the action too: "Teal for ovarian cancer. Red for tobacco-free kids. Silver for cancer survivors," as Florida's <em>Sun-Sentinel</em> reported.</p>
<p>Circa 2005, the ubiquitous silicone accessory had become the most unlikely style movement of the new millennium. Compared to the earthier bracelets that came before them, they seem so very post-9/11, George W. Bush-era: wear bracelets now, ask questions later. As a 2004 <em>Times Magazine</em> column <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-8-29-04-consumed-yellow-fever.html">pointed out</a>, the bracelets were rooted in earnestness: ''This ties into some very deep-seated emotions that the American public has. There is a desire to have something to believe in.''</p>
<div class="float-left hang-left"><p><q class="pullquote">Compared to the earthier bracelets that came before them, they seem so very post-9/11.</q></p></div>
<p>Let she whose wrist was naked in 2005 cast the first stone; we all had at least one of these things. Demand so outstripped supply that there were waitlists for them. The audience who really went crazy for them, though, who wanted to amass collections of them, were kids. Allow the <a href="http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050613/news_1c13bracelet.html"><em>San Diego Union-Tribune</em></a> to explain: "The bands have moved from charity symbol to fashion statement. Some teens wear five, six, seven at a time. Elementary school kids trade them at recess, just like earlier generations did with Pokemon cards and Pogs." Also, the bracelets were about fashionable as pogs. Pogs!</p>
<p>Soon enough, kids cut the charity component out of the equation altogether and started ordering custom-made bracelets for events like Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. We could probably fill entire landfills with them. Thank you, Lance Armstrong, for your lasting sartorial contribution, sorry that your foundation no longer wants to be associated with you.</p>
<h3>Silly Bandz</h3>
<p>An idea so diabolically simple, of course it struck gold — jelly bracelets you can stack on your wrists, but this time, they snap back into fun shapes when you take them off: guitars! Animals! Fruit? The bracelets hit the big time in 2010, when inventor Robert Croak spoke of sales upwards of $100 million.</p>
<p>Around then, the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/fashion/01silly.html"><em>Times</em></a> Style section ran a piece with the headline "Older Audience For Child's Bracelet Is Not a Stretch." As one 30-year-old woman told the newspaper, "I thought, ‘This is nuts that a rubber band is causing so much hype. If kids are going crazy over these, I have to have them.'" But the bands were ultimately too beautiful for this world, and not long for it.</p>
<p>"The big question is: When will it drop dead?" a youth consultant was already asking in <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/2010-07-01-sillybandz01_CV_N.htm"><em>USA Today</em></a>'s initial report on the craze. The answer ended up being <a href="http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/12/17/snap-silly-bandz-death-creates-alternative-uses/">six months</a>, <a href="http://fashionista.com/2011/01/does-the-death-of-silly-bandz-mark-the-return-of-the-slap-bracelet">a year tops</a>. Do trends without a DIY element have a shorter shelf life by nature? As per this bracelet analysis, it sure seems like it. And well... just read on.</p>
<h3>Rainbow Loom</h3>
<p>Cheong Choon Ng puts your meddling dad to shame. One day in 2010, he noticed his daughters making bracelets out of rubber bands, and despite his larger fingers rendering him less dexterous, he became determined to build a machine that would improve the process. The result was the Rainbow Loom, heir to lanyards and friendship bracelets and an ace tool for weaving rubber bands together into bracelets and other doodads.</p>
<div class="float-right hang-right"><p><q class="pullquote"><span>"I couldn't tell my daughters, ‘You know what, all our money is in the rubber bands.'"</span></q></p></div>
<p>He — and his daughters, and their friends — was so taken with his invention that he decided to see if he could market it. "The idea was to be like a startup home business," he tells me. "That was the initial plan, but we didn't have any real business background except that I'm an engineer. I know how to design stuff." Instead he wound up creating a company that enjoyed sales of $40 million last year. (He left his engineering job in 2012.)</p>
<p>It wasn't exactly an overnight process though. Ng put his family's savings into the business ("I couldn't tell my daughters, ‘You know what, all our money is in the rubber bands'") and initially struggled to get noticed by mainstream retailers. One thing that helped the product catch on was YouTube tutorials. Several years into the craze, there are still new videos posted every day, wherein kids show off projects ranging from basic bracelets to more complicated structures. Ng is skeptical of less complicated trends like Silly Bandz, which left his daughters, now 13 and 16, bored after a couple of days. As he puts it, "It makes it a lot more meaningful if you create something yourself."</p>
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<p>There really is something special about bracelets. They've been compared to Beanie Babies, trading cards, and other collectibles, it's true, but don't tell that to the DIYers: they'll maintain that there's something extra-special about the handmade element.</p>
<p>"When you talk about lanyards and friendship bracelets and Rainbow Loom, the difference between those and slap bracelets, is the other items are creative," says Laneyards' Lowenstein. "Some of what makes them so fun is that you are involved in a creative activity, you work on something and then you have a finished product that you can be proud of. Slap bracelets, from what I remember, were more of a fun thing to collect, but they didn't have the same passion to them as making something."</p>
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<p>But let's also consider for a moment the inherent properties of the wrist that make bracelets so darn craze-worthy in the first place. After all, the last few decades were not without their other jewelry trends — mood rings come to mind, tattoo chokers too — most of which never quite reached the fever pitch of their bracelet trend counterparts.</p>
<p>You can wear multiple rings and necklaces, but not as many as you can bracelets. Think of all that forearm real estate! And then there's anatomy to take into account. Fingers come in many different sizes and rings must fit just so; when you consider the ease of slipping a bracelet off your wrist, heads are major obstacles in the way of increasing the shareability of necklaces. Bracelets simply have an evolutionary advantage.</p>
<p>Trend forecaster Lunny agrees, summing up the salient points thusly: "First of all, they're cheap. They're easy for anyone to get. If it's the hot item of the moment, you're probably gifting it in the loot bag of the birthday party. Very quick, an entire class can have them. It's not like, ‘Oh, this doll is really cool' but not everyone can afford it or you can't find it. They're so accessible and they're so easy. And they're also so easy to trade."</p>
<p>Put another way, with bracelets, "You know you can pick up something that your mom, your best friend, your girlfriend will like," says Hind Palmer, global PR and communications director for Claire's. There's also the feels factor: "It's more about the act of giving and the act of sharing and the act of creating something for someone," Ma says. "Kids will always be kids. One of the most beautiful things is that those urges to share and give and have best friends and all that will always remain the same."</p>
<p class="end">But there's also always going to be a difference between mere trend and full-blown craze. "A craze is a trend that becomes very, very successful overnight, that everyone is just obsessed with," says Palmer, citing Rainbow Loom. "I will give you another example that came to mind just now. Have you heard of Minions?" Oh, I have.</p>
<p><em>Editor: </em><a href="http://www.racked.com/authors/julia-rubin"><em>Julia Rubin</em></a></p>
https://www.racked.com/2015/9/16/9331215/bracelet-teen-trends-rainbow-loom-friendship-braceletsHeather Schwedel2015-09-03T12:01:02-04:002015-09-03T12:01:02-04:00When Did Pop-Up Ads Get So Passive-Aggressive?
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<p>If you don’t want to read a <em>Cosmo</em> listicle of the sexiest movies ever, fine, it’s your loss — all you have to do is admit that you like sleeping better than sex.</p>
<p>Why is <em>Cosmo</em> suddenly interested in shaming you for your lack of interest in sexy movies? Why does <em>Women’s Health</em> force you to declare, "No thanks, I already have a bikini body" if you dare resist its 21-day bikini body plan? It’s all part of a conversion strategy that web properties are using to increase clicks and all-important email sign-ups, and a slew of major publishers are in on it. On <em>Elle</em>, you might be asked to enter your email address to unlock the "32 Surprising Things That Are Destroying Your Skin," or opt out by clicking "No thanks, I’m not interested in protecting my skin." Also on <em>Elle</em>, if you don’t care about the 10 best mascaras, no problem; simply click, "No thanks, I don’t enjoy long, luscious, clump-free lashes." <em>Food & Wine</em> wants you to officially acknowledge that not getting its newsletter means you’ll be knowingly staying out of the loop — horrors! These messages even pop up on ecommerce sites: At Loft, you can enter your email address for a 40-percent friends and family discount, or, like a total chump, you can click, "No thanks, I prefer to pay full price."</p>
<p>On many sites that use these overlays, if you look to the bottom left corner when one of them appears, you’ll see the words, "Powered by Bounce Exchange." Bounce Exchange is a three-year-old New York-based start-up focused on conversion strategy, and its co-founder and CEO Ryan Urban is the mastermind behind the "no thanks" pop-up. Bounce Exchange’s 103 employees work with companies like Hearst — the parent of <em>Cosmopolitan</em> and <em>Elle </em>— Rodale — the owner of <em>Women’s Health </em>— the Reader’s Digest Association, Gannett, and more to optimize the time your eyeballs spend online.</p>
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<p class="caption">Image: Women's Health</p>
<p>Urban described the work his company does as analyzing visitors’ "digital body language." When users’ clicks show that they’re consuming a lot of a certain type of content, or conversely, when their cursors show "exit intent" — movement toward the dreaded "close tab" — Bounce Exchange is able to respond in kind, with an overlay that might try to leverage their loyalty into nabbing an email address, or one that might direct them toward some content that will keep them engaged.</p>
<p>Writer Claire Zulkey admitted to being "weirdly fascinated" by these pop-ups. After noticing them on various sites, she <a href="http://zulkey.com/2014/11/no-thanks.shtml#.VdvG0fldWuJ">wrote about them</a> on her blog last year, compiling a list of all the ways she’d been asked to say "no thanks." "I was both amused and horrified at the same time," Zulkey said of her early encounters with the tactic. "You can’t just opt out. It’s forcing you to humiliate yourself… It makes you imagine the kind of person who would talk to you that way: if a human being came up to you and was like, ‘Do you want my new cake recipe?’ and you were like, ‘No thanks,’ and they said ‘Oh, you must like flavorless frosting!’ It’s really passive-aggressive and snobby, but in an amusing way. It’s just so obnoxious that I sort of enjoy them." Zulkey added that she couldn’t see the sites she reads more regularly or has bookmarked talking down to readers in such a way.</p>
<p>When asked about opt-out messages with a negative bent, Urban called the language "playful." He was also quick to point out that the pop-ups are tailored to the audience and don’t "attack" visitors the way other sites might. Instead of asking for an email address right away, for example, Urban said Bounce Exchange gives users a better experience by waiting until they’ve spent some time on the site and demonstrated their interests by clicking around. Most importantly, Urban added, these pop-ups get results.</p>
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<p class="caption">Image: Marie Claire</p>
<p>According to Beth Buehler, Rodale’s senior vice president of digital operations and strategy, the company’s brands have been working with Bounce Exchange for about two years in order to increase visitor email address acquisition. Echoing Urban’s point about providing a better experience for visitors than the attack-you-as-soon-as-you-arrive publisher sites, Buehler said via email that, "During a test phase [Bounce Exchange has] successfully driven a significant amount of new-to-file email addresses, while being able to provide our users something (such as exclusive content) in exchange." Buehler said that Bounce exchange works with Rodale’s "digital partnerships team and circulation marketing team." (<em>Women’s Health</em>’s online editor directed inquiries toward Rodale publicists. Hearst publicists and editors did not respond to requests for comment about their work with Bounce Exchange.)</p>
<p>Joanna Wiebe was initially skeptical of Bounce Exchange. Wiebe has been a copywriter for over 10 years and co-runs the blog <a href="https://copyhackers.com/">Copyhackers</a>. She specializes in conversion copywriting, which, unlike some more fluid forms of copywriting, "is designed to move the prospect to act," she said — this is what Bounce Exchange is trying to accomplish with its pop-ups. When she and her partner first noticed the Bounce Exchange pop-ups, the blog put up <a href="https://copyhackers.com/2014/01/fallen-scuzzy-design-trend-pop-ups/">a post calling their tactics "scuzzy."</a> "Where we came from at Copyhackers was we looked at this and thought, ‘OK, it’s one thing to get good conversion rates out of that,’" Wiebe said. "But what is it doing for your brand? Is it making your brand look bad because you are now are an aggressive brand that says nasty things about its users or prospects?"</p>
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<p class="caption">Image: Food and Wine</p>
<p>But then Bounce Exchange got in touch, and Copyhackers agreed to work with them as an experiment. "We’ve seen at least three times the sign-ups that we used to see," Wiebe said of her site’s email list growth since last October. "They’ve been really clever to work with." The <a href="https://copyhackers.com/2015/05/choices-consequences-opt-in-boxes/">experiment is ongoing</a>; Bounce Exchange doesn’t charge Copyhackers for its services, and Wiebe said she suspects that this is because the blog is such a good source of referrals.</p>
<p>In Wiebe’s opinion, the power of Bounce Exchange is not in aggressiveness or negativity, but in presenting consequences: "That opt-out makes the user have to make this choice and understand that there’s a consequence that comes with not opting in. And it’s not necessarily the world’s worst consequence — nothing will explode, nothing terrible will happen — but you have to say, ‘No, I don’t want this today.’ That’s very different. Actually saying no is very different than saying nothing at all."</p>
<p>Buehler did not provide figures on how Rodale’s performance has been affected by its partnership with Bounce Exchange, only saying that the company has "seen no reduction in engagement." As for how readers have responded to the pop-ups, "We are focused on our user," she said, "So it comes back again to testing. We test, adjust, and move forward with the initiatives that work the best for our users."</p>
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<p class="caption">Image: Cosmopolitan</p>
<p>Wiebe said, even after working with the company, she still finds some of Bounce Exchange’s language overly negative or aggressive. "I haven’t changed my point of view at all on what it is to message in an aggressive way or to make people feel bad… If Bounce Exchange came to us and said ‘Let’s do a test where we do negative, aggressive messaging,’ I would not go for that. I don’t even care if that would quadruple our opt-ins; it’s not something that works for our brand. I don’t want to be associated with being negative or making a person feel bad about themselves."</p>
<p>But Wiebe added that in such cases, maybe the problem lies not with the opt-in/opt-out strategy, but, say, with whoever’s trying to market certain lifestyles and attitudes in the first place. "It’s going back to the marketer at [that magazine] that thinks that it should sell bikini bodies to people. Sure, that negative opt-out button will make people feel bad about themselves, and it might increase conversion. It’s not the button that’s evil; it’s the person behind it."</p>
<p>To which anybody is free to say: no thanks.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2015/9/3/9242045/passive-aggressive-pop-ups-no-thanksHeather Schwedel2015-08-24T12:00:02-04:002015-08-24T12:00:02-04:00Meet the Woman Petitioning J.Crew to Help Fight Disability Stigma
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<figcaption>Hanna Agar</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>Liz Jackson wants J.Crew — preppy bastion-turned-dominion of Jenna Lyons, emporium of classics with that just-modern-enough touch — to sell walking canes. A few years ago, the thirtysomething Manhattanite was diagnosed with idiopathic neuropathy, an illness that caused weakness throughout her body and left her unable to work. Jackson realized that one not-so-small thing that would make it better would be if her longtime favorite store would start selling canes she wasn’t embarrassed to be seen using. Since then, she’s gotten thousands of signatures on a <a href="https://www.change.org/p/j-crew-will-you-help-me-show-j-crew-that-inclusion-can-be-fashionable">petition addressed to the store</a>, made contact with the mothership itself, and learned a few things about fashion’s commitment to inclusion (hint: it’s low).</p>
<p>We sat down with her to talk about fashion and disability, as well as to admire her spiffy cane — it’s a Top & Derby <a href="http://www.topandderby.com/collections/the-chatfield/products/the-chatfield">Chatfield</a>.</p>
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<p><strong>The thing that kicked off this whole thing is that you got sick. What happened?</strong></p>
<p>I got sick on March 30th of 2012. I just literally fell out of bed. I tried working for a time and realized I couldn’t, so I went on disability. I started my website because I’d fallen out of contact with my friends and family. I had recently seen <em>The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo</em>, and I was just like, "Oh: <a href="http://www.thegirlwiththepurplecane.com/">The Girl With the Purple Cane</a>." My goal with it was to tell my parents, "Hey, I’m getting better. I’m doing OK. I’m not struggling emotionally." It quickly evolved into an advocacy platform.</p>
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<p class="caption">Image: Liz Jackson</p>
<p><strong>When you got sick, right away what changed about your life?</strong></p>
<p>I started using a cane the day I entered the hospital. I immediately needed glasses too. I don’t wear the glasses to see; they literally just tilt my vision. When I wear them I don’t get migraines as much; it reduces the strain.</p>
<p>It took a lot longer to get ready, just because everything was a slow process. I would be worn out by the time I had gotten ready, but I would look like myself, and then when I needed to go out I would grab my cane and leave. The only thing about my outfit that didn’t fit was the cane. So you work toward this end goal of being a presentable person only at the last minute to have to grab that thing and go; it destroys you every time.</p>
<p><q class="pullquote float-right"><span>"The only thing about my outfit that didn’t fit was the cane... it destroys you every time."</span></q></p>
<p><strong>What changed for you when you traded in your old cane for customized versions?</strong></p>
<p>The difference between the old medical cane I got in the hospital and the Top & Derby cane is that when I go out, about half the time people say, "Awesome cane." That for me is incredible. Before, it was always, "What’s wrong?" and a pathetic tilt of the head. There is no way to navigate the world as a proud person when there’s something so thoughtless that you’re forced to lean on.</p>
<p>For me, it was a life changer. It was the thing that allowed me to start picking up the pieces.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.topandderby.com/">Top & Derby</a> is these two guys in Winnipeg. They make furniture for EQ3, it’s sort of a West Elm-type store that’s more popular in Canada. And they just one day decided, "Canes are ugly. We’re going to fix them." I discovered them, and we’ve become really good friends.</p>
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<p class="caption">Image: Liz Jackson</p>
<p><strong>How did you get the idea to lobby J.Crew to sell canes?</strong></p>
<p>I was in a J.Crew and it was sort of this one wild experience. First I saw the glasses, and I was thinking to myself, "How strange is it that you actually have to buy these frames and then take it to your doctor? Why is it that glasses are the thing that are mainstream and fashionable when no other assistive product sits on your face?" Many other assistive products can be purchased without even needing to go to a doctor. I was walking past this table of their T-shirts, and they had all these spring colors. I realized my purple cane would look beautiful with them, and I thought to myself, "Wouldn’t it be amazing if J.Crew had this seasonal line where it’s the same cane, but once a season it was a new color or a new style?" My whole vision has been, what if all the products were no longer carried in the one dreary medical supply shop and what if instead, it was a shopping experience?</p>
<p><q class="pullquote float-left">"<span>What if all the products were no longer carried in the one dreary medical supply shop... what if instead, it was a shopping experience?"</span></q></p>
<p>I want J.Crew to either collaborate with <a href="http://sabi.com/" style="background-color: #ffffff;">Sabi</a>—that’s the maker of my purple cane—or Top & Derby, the maker of my other cane. The Top & Derby cane was a little over $100, and then the Sabi cane was around $80. The interesting thing is, it’s about the price of a J. Crew pair of jeans.</p>
<p><strong>What have your interactions with J.Crew been like?</strong></p>
<p>A friend of mine told me that [J.Crew CEO] Mickey Drexler used to take calls from the general public. I felt like a crazy person doing it, but one day I called and said "Hey, can I talk to Mickey Drexler?" and then I got a call back from someone else at the company. She said that they were not aware that this was a product that could be marketable and they thanked me for bringing it to their attention. They said they were interested, but not right now because they’re focusing on their brand. My whole feeling was that I didn’t get to pick the moment that I became disabled. If I had the choice, I would have put it off and I would have put it off and I would have put it off as long as I could. But in disability, you don’t get that choice. I felt, and I said to her, that the best way you can pay homage to someone with a disability is to simply do it when it’s uncomfortable. Why are you saying that a cane is not your brand? A cane is not your brand because it never has been, but maybe it should be.</p>
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<p class="caption">Image: Liz Jackson</p>
<p>NPR included me in <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/07/25/425890021/from-canes-to-closures-designing-with-style-for-people-with-disabilities">a story about design and disability</a>, and they reached out to J.Crew for it. My impression is that they got a firm but respectful no on the cane question. My question was: Where is the respect in that no? Why couldn’t they reach out and say, "OK, this may not work for us, but we think it’s a solid idea. Let’s work together and find somewhere to make this happen?" That would have been respectful.</p>
<p><strong>How has your interest in fashion evolved throughout this process?</strong></p>
<p>In the beginning, I was hugely optimistic. Now, I realize that people are choosing to look away or choosing not to market to my need. There’s an anger there that wasn’t there in the beginning. In the beginning it felt very fun, like "Let’s try this." Now I know I am being actively [excluded]. I think my feelings about the fashion industry have changed, but I’m also more driven than ever to say, "Include me, include my peers."</p>
<p>When I started this journey, disability sites, advocacy sites, everybody was really interested in what I was doing. [But] I could not get anybody, not one person, in the fashion world to take interest.</p>
<p><q class="pullquote float-left">"I’m more driven than ever to say, 'Include me, include my peers.'"</q></p>
<p>In addition to looking at disability in the context of fashion and I look at disability in the context of sports. Nike is actually going to be the first major retailer to come out with a product for a person for disability, and it’s their <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.nike.com%2Fnews%2Fthe-flyease-journey&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2015%2F8%2F24%2F9189237%2Fj-crew-fashionable-canes-petition-liz-jackson-disability" style="background-color: #ffffff;" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Flyease</a> shoe. For me, it’s an amazing thing, because they made a shoe for this kid that has Cerebral Palsy. What it is is just a shoe, a really cool shoe, that’s just easier to put on. The back peels away and then you just stick it on. But you can go into a Nike store and you think to yourself, "Oh, that’s a cool shoe, and look, it’s easy to put on." When you make something for someone with a need, it benefits society at large. Under Armour has the one-handed zipper. And again, it was designed for an amputee, but who isn’t carrying groceries, or gets caught in the rain, that couldn’t use that?</p>
<p>You can name all the things that are happening in sports. And then you look at the fashion world, and there’s nothing. There’s no person, there’s no company, there’s no brand, there’s no discussion about it. Simply, there is an absolute disconnect. In some ways, the sporting world is kind of forced to pick up the slack. You can look at it and say, "Oh, look, they’re making progress," because last Fashion Week they featured people with disabilities on runways. I’m like, yes, but there was actually a model that was wearing a dress that hung over the wheels of her wheelchair. Her wheels could get caught in that dress. There’s actually no product that they’re making for these models. They don’t see them as a marketable entity. For me, that’s the frustration. I think that the fashion world needs to reassess and needs to include all bodies.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2015/8/24/9189237/j-crew-fashionable-canes-petition-liz-jackson-disabilityHeather Schwedel2015-06-04T09:00:02-04:002015-06-04T09:00:02-04:00Brides Get Real About What Their Weddings Actually Cost
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<figcaption>Photo: Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>From $55 nuptials to a $200,000 affair at the Plaza.</p> <p>This wedding season, you are cordially invited to keep your mouth shut when it comes to all things financial, thank you very much. You don’t need an etiquette guide to tell you that asking a bride how much her big day cost is among the bigger wedding faux pas. As much as people revel in nuptial small talk—the venue! the guest list! the bridesmaids!—it’s rare for the chatter to veer into monetarily revealing territory.</p>
<p>"I think the biggest thing that isn’t talked about is parental money," says one recent bride, who we’ll call Meg. (For the record, the wedding was last year in San Francisco and it cost about $16,000, a third of which her mother covered.) "It’s very obvious to me when I go to a wedding where parents are involved with the money and when they’re not. Except nobody talks about that. They’ll talk about the cost of the dress, but they won’t say, ‘My mom gave me $35,000 to spend on my wedding.’"</p>
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<p>It's all left to whispers and guesswork, raised eyebrows between friends and the annual wedding cost survey from that nonpartisan think tank known as <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-knot-the-1-wedding-site-releases-2014-real-weddings-study-statistics-300049675.html">The Knot</a>. Even concrete numbers can only tell us so much—there’s also all the <em>feeeeeeelings</em> that go along with the money we spend on weddings. This is why Racked talked to more than two dozen women who got married in the past five years (agreeing not to use their real names, so they would give us the full scoop) about how much their weddings really cost.</p>
<p>Even anonymously, it wasn’t the most comfortable topic to discuss. "I was not joking when I said I kind of blacked it out," one bride, Nicole, insists. "Do I have to answer that one?" another newlywed, Charlotte, asks when I get around to inquiring about who paid for her event. Sasha tells me her parents contributed "90," leaving me to fill in the "thousand dollars" part. "I just feel like maybe some of my aunts, if they saw how much we spent and how it all went down, they would hold it over my head," Jocelyn frets. Then there was this request from a bride we’ll call Haley: "Please don’t make me sound like a rich, entitled asshole." No matter if their weddings cost less than $100, more than $100,000, or somewhere in between, nuptial spending tends to get emotional, to say the least.</p>
<p>It also often brings with it a unique problem: "Most people who are getting married don’t have experience getting married," points out Amanda, who tied the knot in Brooklyn last year at the age of 29. She and her now-wife spent $15,000 on the event, $9,000 of which came from family. (Her wife was a grad student at the time and contributed some of her student loan money to the wedding pot.) "So we’re just like, ‘Of course the food will be $50 a plate, right? That’s how much an entrée is when you go out to eat,’" she recalls.</p>
<p>"I think we went into it being kind of naïve, thinking, ‘We’re doing it at the barn, it’ll be super cheap, we’ll just backyard-style it,’" echoes Joanna, who ended up spending $28,000 (about half of it contributed by her and her husband's families) on her Massachusetts wedding last year. "The caterer alone blew that out of the water."</p>
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<p>"For us, part of it was trying to adjust to ‘wedding money,’" remarks Alexandra, who got married in Westchester last year; her parents paid. "My husband used to say, ‘You have to think of it as Monopoly money. If you think of it as real dollars, you’ll drive yourself insane so quickly because everything costs extra zeros above what you think it ought to.’"</p>
<p>Once expectations have been adjusted, there is still the matter of cash flow. Mary, 33, and her husband spent $25,000 on their wedding in Alabama last year, foregoing the East Coast city where they live for the less expensive South. She remembers, "There was always kind of this feeling of, ‘We’re not gonna have enough by the time the wedding comes, we can’t pay bills,’ the ongoing anxiety of, ‘Will we be able to save up enough before the wedding actually gets here?’ At the end of the day, we were a little short, and ended up having to put some on credit cards."</p>
<p>Some couples feel safe assuming that no family contribution is forthcoming. "My husband had been married once before, so I think there wasn’t really a question of asking his parents," Michelle, married in Washington, D.C., last year for around $9,000, discloses. Or you can hit the jackpot like Kerry, who had a $100,000 Texas wedding last year at the age of 29: "Since I was a little girl, I knew my father would pay for it," she says. For still others, there’s the sneak-attack windfall. "I was kind of surprised," says Caitlin, whose 2011 destination wedding in Palm Springs came to $40,000. "When we got engaged, my parents—they’re pretty traditional people, so I guess I should have seen it coming—were like, ‘We really want to do this for you.’"</p>
<p>The bride’s family paying for the entire wedding is still "a thing," so to speak, but so are all kinds of arrangements, from splitting the cost among the marrying couple and both sets of parents to the bride taking on most of the financial responsibility herself. "Originally I had wanted to have me, my mom, and my fiancé all do a third," Meg tells me. "But after a month of trying to save, it became very clear that he wasn’t going to be able to do that. I was completely fine with it."</p>
<p>That aforementioned survey from The Knot found that "on average, the bride’s parents contribute 43%, the bride and groom contribute 43%, and the groom’s parents contribute 12% of the total wedding budget (others account for the remaining 2%). Only 12% of couples pay for the wedding entirely themselves."</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><div class="c-sidebar"> <h3 class="p-sidebar-title">Most Surprising Expenses</h3> <p> </p> <p>"Bands. How much bands cost. They’re so expensive. We spent like $15,000 on ours. I think that was by far one of our biggest costs. We wanted everyone to dance. Our friends had actually used the same band. We heard horror stories about DJs." <em>—Sasha</em></p> <p>"We spent $15,765 for lighting. I remember both of us being like, ‘This is outrageous that we’re spending so much on this.’ But what I’ve learned, for better or worse, is that good lighting really does affect how the room looks, not only in person, but in pictures." <em>—Celia</em></p> <p>"Flowers were probably the one that most made me feel like I got punched in the stomach when I saw the numbers. Flowers just felt disgustingly expensive. The florists pitch a lot of that stuff as, ‘Well, yeah, I mean I <em>could</em> work with you on the price, but then you’d have to do low centerpieces.’ And they make it sound like ‘low centerpieces’ means you’re throwing an awful wedding." <em>—Alexandra</em></p> <p>"I was shocked to find that photography for weddings can be $10,000. Shocked!" <em>—Meg</em></p> </div></div>
<p>In the absence of a flush savings account or a sizable family contribution, one way to come up with the money is through old-fashioned sacrifice. "We cut down a lot on eating out," says Lola, 28, who got married last year in Chicago. "We bought groceries religiously, the same time every week, packed our lunch. We didn’t go to as many concerts. He and I love to travel and take road trips and we did none of that for a year." With $7,000 in gifts from Lola’s parents and in-laws, the couple was able to scrape together $25,000 for the ceremony and reception.</p>
<p>"I was so stressed out," Meg says of getting together the cash to reserve her venue, a restaurant in San Francisco. "They needed the deposit to hold the date, and if someone else wanted the date, they would give me 48 hours to come up with the deposit. For months, I wasn't sleeping because I was so worried that someone was going to get that date. I was saving on a weekly basis, so I just didn’t have the upfront $4,000 or $5,000 to give them."</p>
<p>Some brides who didn’t have family help confessed to feelings of jealousy. "I have a lot of affluent friends, and I’ve been to their weddings, and I just didn’t want our wedding to look like we were trying to be something that we weren’t," Meg admits. "It made me feel really bad about myself. I don’t want to be that person." This, of course, is endemic to the whole wedding industry, family money or not.</p>
<p>Alexandra recalls, "Even if you are spending tons of money on something that’s going to be absolutely beautiful, you’re always kind of made to feel as though you’re not doing everything that you could be doing. There’s always some other add-on option that you didn’t take. You can always spend $10,000 more on flowers, and is it really going to make a difference at the end of the day? Probably not, probably no one would notice. But you’re always made to feel like, ‘Ugh! You’re not doing a full cupola of roses? How could you not?’ There’s a lot of pressure to do that stuff. I think my parents maybe succumbed to that a little bit more than I did."</p>
<p>That’s another thing about family contributions—they often come with strings attached. Mary says that the only help she and her husband received was $5,000 from her stepmother. "Unfortunately my dad is passed. My stepmother mentioned that she wanted to do something, that she wanted to help in memory of my father. We sat down and kind of talked about the logistics, what that would mean," she explains. They never did nail down whether the money would be a gift or a loan; Mary’s still not sure which one it is. The couple hasn’t paid the stepmother back, and she hasn’t asked.</p>
<p>For Alexandra, her parents’ covering the cost of her wedding meant constant mediating between them and various vendors. "One of the things that frustrated me the most is that my parents refused throughout the entire process to ever give me a firm number," she laments. "Instead, every single little tiny decision had to be run through my parents, which slowed things down and caused a lot of stress."</p>
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<p>Other brides reported parents who demanded guest list additions, church approval, and even specific music. After all, it was <em>their</em> money. "I remember my dad and I had a huge fight about how the return address was going to be formatted on the envelopes," Alexandra recalls. "My mom got a little intense," Amanda adds. "It’s so minor, but she wanted this one <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvKyBcCDOB4">song by Darius Rucker</a>, who I despise. I refused to put it on the playlist. She was like, ‘You have to put it on the playlist, we gave you money.’"</p>
<p>Spending your parents’ cash willy-nilly can certainly lead to things getting out of hand. Amy was 28 when she got married in 2013. Her parents paid for the wedding, and they originally budgeted $70,000 for her Palm Beach, Florida affair. It ended up costing $100,000. "There was definitely some mixed emotions," Amy says. "Personally, from the beginning, I would have been fine doing a smaller wedding, but I knew my parents were interested in doing something like this, and I certainly wasn’t opposed to it."</p>
<p>It’s not that these brides regret how much money went into their weddings, exactly. Naomi got married almost five years ago, in her early 20s; her parents and in-laws split the cost of her $50,000 suburban New York wedding. "I’m older and wiser now," she says. "I’m not saying I regret it because I loved my wedding, and it was so beautiful. But because I was young and stupid, I expected such a fancy wedding, and I didn’t even ask my parents where they were financially. They just gave it to me."</p>
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<p>It’s situations like these that make some recently marrieds relieved to have avoided parental involvement, and for many, there is wisdom that comes with age. "Having the confidence to make really hard calls about where to cut the budget was something that only someone who has a lot of self-assurance is capable of doing," Meg, who got married when she was 31, says. "I don’t think me in my mid-20s would have had the same confidence to make those decisions."</p>
<p>Erin got married at 28 in 2011, and she and her husband did the whole wedding in Brooklyn for $13,000. "I really wanted to have complete control," she says. "Some parents are super hands-off and ours totally might have been, but I didn’t want anyone to be able to say, ‘Yes, we want this sort of food’ or ‘No, we don’t think you should do that.’ It was totally our party and our event and everything was organized the way that we wanted it to be and I think it was better for that."</p>
<p>While some people opt for cheaper weddings because they would rather put their resources elsewhere (on a honeymoon or a mortgage, for instance), others do so out of necessity. Jackie was 22 and her husband 24 when they got married in the D.C. area; with some family help, they managed to do the whole thing for about $7,000. They used a family friend’s farm as the venue, which had the advantage of being free, and ate off paper plates—"the classiest paper plates of course," she adds.</p>
<p>The couple tried not to get bogged down by wedding one-upmanship. "I don’t think we ever really worried about what our guests would think of our wedding," Jackie tells me. "We thought it would be a perfect reflection of our relationship together and just how our wedding should be. We definitely wanted it to be a celebration for our friends and family as well, but I don’t think that we really ever worried like, ‘Are our guests going to care that they have paper plates?’"</p>
<p>Nina, who got married in 2013, agrees: "Our love, it’s like, there’s no dollar sign on it. We didn’t need to prove anything." She and her husband used $3,000 from Nina’s father and spent an additional $3,000 of their own to pull off an intimate Southern California wedding.</p>
<p>For the few who are lucky enough to be able to afford their dream weddings on their own or who have family help that is non-intrusive, there’s still the problem of making sure your consumption isn’t <em>too</em> conspicuous. Because when you get married, it’s not just your or your family’s money—it’s also your guests’.</p>
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<p>Haley was 31 when she got married in 2013 in New York. The wedding cost over $100,000, $30,000 of which came from her parents. "I was aware of the fact that my then-fiancé and I had more financial resources than a lot of my friends," she says. "I really, really wanted us to be able to have a really fun, really indulgent, really elegant, slightly over-the-top, super cool, enjoyable experience without anybody feeling like we were asking them to pay for the privilege of celebrating our wedding. So when it came to my bridal party, it never crossed my mind for a second that I was going to ask any of them to pay for anything."</p>
<p>Haley made sure that the $10,000 she spent on hair and makeup for herself, her bridesmaids, her mother, and her mother-in-law came out of her personal pot. "Mostly it was just that I wanted to be ridiculous about my hair and makeup, and I didn’t want them to have to suffer because I decided that my princess moment was having someone who does hair for <em>W</em> magazine do my wedding hair."</p>
<p>Having to travel to attend a wedding can be a major cost for guests. When she was first considering doing a destination wedding in Palm Springs, Caitlin says she and her husband "asked a ton of people, maybe like 30 of the guests, if that would be fun for them. They were all like, ‘Oh yeah, do it.’"</p>
<p>They also made sure that there was a range of hotel options beyond the pricier Ace, where they were doing the ceremony and where the bridal party was staying: "There are a lot of really affordable hotels along the strip. Some people stayed across the street if they couldn’t afford staying at the Ace. It really worked for a lot of people’s budgets." This is a consideration not everyone makes. "I probably have spent more traveling and going to these weddings and giving gifts than I spent on my own wedding," Erin guesses.</p>
<p>It’s also worth remembering that even at the highest levels, there’s always going to be someone spending more. Celia's 2013 wedding at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel cost $215,000. She and her husband paid for it themselves, mostly through savings and his healthy salary. "We joke all the time that we were the poorest couple to ever get married there, because you see all these foreign royal families that have their weddings there, or so-and-so owns this sports team," Celia says.</p>
<p>And in the end, people do wind up more or less happy with their decisions. "Even though it sounds like such a crazy-ass number, even to me, the quality of what we got on everything was amazing," Kerry tells me. "We always just wanted to go ahead and do it, even if it cost a fortune," Amanda recalls. "We’re both the first gay people in our families to get married, so it was really important for us to get everybody together and see that it’s normal and we’re loving and we’re very happy and melt their hearts with our vows."</p>
<p class="end">"I thought it was great. It was the best day of my life," Meg remembers. "Seeing all of our friends and family together having a great time even though they’re from all different walks of life, nothing has made me more happy, ever. Plus, I looked super hot."</p>
<div class="c-sidebar"> <h3 class="p-sidebar-title">Six Weddings and What They Cost</h3> <br><p>SARA & ANDREW<br> $55 (a couple of beers and a New York state marriage license), paid for by the couple</p> <p><span><em>"We literally went to Borough Hall in Brooklyn and had a beer afterward. I find spending lots of money on weddings kind of obscene. We had priced out doing something small, and it still seemed like an enormous amount of money, and we felt like it was not worth it. We thought of getting married in the same vein as securing life insurance or making sure you have a savings account that the other person can access. It wasn’t a big emotional, ceremonial thing; it was just something we needed to take care of."</em></span></p> <p>EMILY & SAM <br>$10,000, contributed mostly by h<span>er parents, though his parents and the extended family also chipped in</span></p> <p><em>"We maybe had like a thousand dollars between us. It came down to, ‘Are we going to spend money on our rings or are we going to spend money on our honeymoon?’ We got both of our rings off of Amazon with an Amazon gift card. It was awesome. I think our rings cost like 20 bucks together and they’re just the cutest things. We weren’t shy at all about extreme money-saving like that."</em></p> <p>LAUREN & JESSE<br> <span>$22,000, t</span><span>he bulk of which ($15,000) came from the bride’s parents</span></p> <p><em>"I actually tried to have a dress custom-made. This was absolutely within the budget until things went awry with the seamstress who was doing it. We came to an agreement: I didn’t give her any more money and she didn’t finish the dress and no one left any terrible Yelp reviews. I lost a few hundred bucks on that easily, maybe $600."</em></p> <p>NATALIA & CHLOE<br> <span>$38,000, paid for with a </span><span>combination of gifts from both brides’ parents and student loans</span></p> <p><em>"It’s surprising looking back at it and being like, ‘Oh my gosh, we really did spend a lot of money.' What were we thinking? We were both students. We didn’t have any money! But I'm happy that we spent it. Of course, this is my view because I’m not struggling for money at the moment."</em></p> <p>ISABEL & JUSTIN<br> <span>$55,000, most of which came from the couple, excluding $5,000 from each of their parents</span></p> <p><span><em>"We both had unrealistic expectations in the beginning of what it could cost. We wanted a wine country wedding, but we didn’t set a budget that made a wine country wedding possible. I was not one of those people that had dreamed about my wedding my entire life and felt the need to have all these things. But once you get into it, all of a sudden you start caring about things you never realized you cared about. Once you commit to it, it’s sad, but an extra thousand dollars here or thousand dollars there? You just become so accustomed to writing these checks, you’re like ‘Eh, what’s another thousand dollars on top of $50,000?’ I definitely think a $55,000 wedding in wine country is a very affordable wedding. It sounds crazy, but it's true."</em></span></p> <p>SASHA & TIM<br> <span>$100,000, which broke down into $90,000 from the bride's family and $10,000 from the couple</span></p> <p><span><em>"We went into it knowing that my parents would cover the majority. We asked them what they were willing to help with, and they gave us a number. Obviously that number expanded."</em></span></p> </div>
<p><em>Editor: </em><a href="https://www.racked.com/authors/julia-rubin"><em>Julia Rubin</em></a></p>
https://www.racked.com/2015/6/4/8715607/wedding-cost-priceHeather Schwedel2015-04-21T10:00:02-04:002015-04-21T10:00:02-04:00Meet ‘Dr. Pimple Popper,’ the Dermatologist Who Became a YouTube Sensation
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<img alt="Photo courtesy of Sandra Lee" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/k-2VyiABbZyD7aStaa-kYhU-HtM=/225x0:3865x2730/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46146370/IMG_0287__1_.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo courtesy of Sandra Lee</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>Dr. Sandra Lee may just be the reigning queen of <a href="http://www.racked.com/2015/4/17/8420533/popping-zits-satisfying">pimple poppers</a>. A new entrant to the <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/inside-the-pus-filled-world-of-zit-popping-videos">world of zit popping videos</a>, the dermatologist has quickly built up a following of over 50,000 subscribers on her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/DrSandraLee">YouTube channel</a>, where she posts epic blackhead squeezes and whitehead pops that have earned her millions of views and an army of admirers on Reddit. When she’s not zooming in on her patients’ faces (with their permission, of course) at the <a href="http://www.skinps.com/">Skin Physicians & Surgeons</a> practice in Upland, California, she makes appearances on TV shows like <em>The Doctors</em>. We called her up to talk about how exactly she became a skin-squeezing sensation.</p> <hr>
<p><strong>How did you get into popping videos?</strong></p>
<p>I’d been doing TV segments for a while, maybe about five years or so, and would post them on my YouTube channel, which had a few thousand subscribers. When I joined <a href="https://instagram.com/drpimplepopper/">Instagram</a>, I began to post clips of things I’d do in the office to give people a window into my world. Then I thought, "Oh, this one’s a little longer, why don’t I post this on my YouTube?" I didn’t realize how big it would be. The first big one was this gentleman, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN20clyEdAU">the guy with the rhinophyma</a> and a lot of blackheads on his nose. Someone wrote in the comments, "Someone posted your video on the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/popping">Popping subreddit</a>." I didn’t know anything about Reddit! I went on there and was just floored. It's a whole community of people who like this sort of thing.</p>
<p><strong>What's been your experience with the community?</strong></p>
<p>When I started doing it, I was an amateur. I didn’t know how it worked! My name on Reddit is "DrPimplePopper." The people on the Popping subreddit know me now, and they’re really wonderful. I find this little subculture fascinating. I pop these things, and yeah they kind of make me feel good, they’re satisfying, but it’s not like I seek them out. <span>If a patient comes in, I ask if they wouldn’t mind me removing these for them in exchange for them allowing me to post it. I try to make it as anonymous as I can. The interesting thing is that nobody ever says no.</span></p>
<p>My Instagram following has increased too. It's hilarious to read the comments. People are like, "I can’t look away!" Then they tag their friends, and every now and then you’ll get a friend who says, "Why did you do this to me?!" or "Stop liking these photos ‘cause they’re showing up in my feed." I just learned about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response">ASMR</a>. I guess this is a form of that. It’s in dispute as to whether it's a real entity or not, but most people wouldn’t deny that you can get this sort of feeling. I can imagine what people are talking about, and they get that from my voice too. It’s a very calming effect. I hear people say, "I have to watch your videos before bed because they help me go to sleep."</p>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4lomktKPD88?showinfo=0" height="600" width="100%"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Do you feel like you're a part of the popping world?</strong></p>
<p>I don’t watch any of the other videos. They all kind of gross me out! When they’re amateur, I don’t want to hear screaming, I don’t like that stuff. That may make me not a true popper. Everyone says, "She’s one of us! She’s one of us!" but I’m not really. I mean, I like it, but I don’t need it.</p>
<p><strong>What’s your dermatology background?</strong></p>
<p>I’ve been in practice for a little over a decade. Actually, I come from a family of dermatologists: My father is a dermatologist and my husband is one too. I remember opening my dad’s textbooks and seeing the most horrible pictures. Skin is different than internal organs, and being a dermatologist is different from being a G.I. doctor or an ob-gyn—not a lot of us can relate to that. But we all know what skin looks like when it looks normal, so to speak.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">"I realized there’s a soft pop and a hard pop. Some people just like blackheads, it’s like soft porn, a soft pop."</q></p>
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<p>When I went to medical school, I realized that dermatology is the best specialty, especially for a woman. It's a good lifestyle. We don’t deal with a lot of emergencies, I don’t get called in the middle of the night to deliver a baby. We deal with healthy people. It’s usually pretty common things that people come in with, and we can fix them. It’s very gratifying in that sense.</p>
<p><strong>What are the different categories of popping?</strong></p>
<p>The type of popping that's most popular is having blackheads and whiteheads extracted. That’s usually a form of acne, but older people can get blackheads and whiteheads for other reasons, like sun exposure. Blackheads and whiteheads are called comedones. Then there are milia; milia are really superficial cysts that are under the skin. They’re usually on the face, they’re white, and you can’t squeeze them. People often get them around their eyes.</p>
<p>Then there are deeper cysts—a lay term is sebaceous cysts, but they’re technically epidermoid cysts. Those are the ones that are on the body that you see people squeezing out like in <em>Animal House</em>. When you have a cyst like that on the head, it’s called a pilar cyst because it actually looks a little different since it's made from a different part of the hair follicle. The last thing that we pop out, which is very cool to see, is a lipoma. Those are so fun, you pop them out of a smaller hole and it’s this ball of fat. Not everybody likes that. I realized there’s a soft pop and a hard pop. Some people just like blackheads, it’s like soft porn, a soft pop. And then there’s a hard pop, where people like more of a cyst.</p>
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<p><strong>What’s your technique?</strong></p>
<p>It’s not completely sterile, but I use clean techniques, which is what I do with most of my procedures unless I’m doing an excision. I have gloves and my comedone extractor. It probably costs under $20, it’s not very expensive. It’s from a medical distributor, but I’m sure you could find very similar things at a drugstore. People at home, if they really need something, can probably use a bobby pin. It can get a little infected, but the main risk is scarring.</p>
<p>I can’t advise people to do it at home, but have I done it? Yeah. We’ve all squeezed pimples! People are going to pick, no matter what. The best advice I have is if somebody has a pimple, use a warm compress on it, because that helps it come to a head. Once it comes to a head, if it’s a whitehead, you can get a sterile needle and nick it and then that will relieve the pressure. Personally I would try to put a little antibiotic cream on it. When I make my nicks in the skin, I try to keep them in the direction of our skin tension lines. There are all things that I think about. Could a person do it at home? Probably, but I can’t tell you that you’re not going to scar.</p>
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<p><q class="pullquote">"I feel like <em style="line-height: 23.0400009155273px;">Game of Thrones</em> or something. I’m standing there, and there are all these pimple popper lovers behind me."</q></p>
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<p><strong>How do you make your videos?</strong></p>
<p>I do it all myself. I edit, everything. I use my iPhone and iMovie—that’s it. My staff has been getting better at videotaping me. I have Google Glass and it sucks; I can’t get that stupid thing to work. I might try to see if I can do some sort of GoPro or something like that, but I can’t wear something really heavy on my head. My staff knows I’m crazy.</p>
<p>I try to show a little of the human side of some of my patients, tell a little of their backstory—the last one I did was this gentleman. It’s so sad, because his wife just passed away. The last time I saw him, I didn’t know his wife had passed away, and he was choking back the words telling me that because they were inseparable. I just happened to ask him on his way out, "You know, you have these bumps on your nose. Do you want me to see if I can remove any of them?" He said yes and he was so happy that I did it. I never would have done that if it hadn’t been for all of this. I think it really helped him feel better about himself.</p>
<p><strong>Do you worry about being pigeonholed as the pimple popping doctor?</strong></p>
<p>People might construe that I’m addicted to this stuff, but I’m not. This isn’t everything that I do. In fact, it’s a very small part! I posted some of my other surgeries, and I realized not as many people are interested in that. I joke with my friends that I want to be a pimple popping sensation! I feel like <em>Game of Thrones</em> or something. I’m standing there, and there are all these pimple popper lovers behind me. They’ve got my back.</p>
<p>I’d be tickled if somebody was into pimple popping and they came in to see me. But I don’t actually think that someone would come see me if they were, because they’d want to do it themselves!</p>
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https://www.racked.com/2015/4/21/8438871/pimple-popping-dr-pimple-popper-sandra-leeHeather Schwedel2015-04-02T11:00:02-04:002015-04-02T11:00:02-04:00Goodbye, Tampons: Why Menstrual Cups May Be the Future of Period Care
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<img alt="Photo: Getty Images" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/OvOYwhfoLBT49-qjDSOxxxgA00I=/288x0:4896x3456/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46027578/463653042.0.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo: Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p class="c-entry-disclaimer"><i>Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods">The Goods by Vox</a>. You can also see what we’re up to by <a href="https://vox.com/goods-newsletter">signing up here</a>.</i></p>
<p>Feminine hygiene alternatives have reached heavy flow.</p> <p>"The menstrual business is booming!"</p>
<p>This is how Meagan Brockway puts it over the phone. She heads up customer service and account management at <a href="http://gladrags.com/">GladRags</a>, a Portland, Oregon–based company that sells sustainable feminine hygiene products.</p>
<p>"With the internet, everybody’s more connected than ever," she continues, "and there’s potential for a wildfire of discussion about menstrual cups and cloth pads."</p>
<p>That’s right, we’re no longer living in a tampons-or-disposable-pads-only world. In fact, if you wanted to borrow some familiar phrasing, you could say that period care alternatives have reached heavy flow.</p>
<p>First, let’s dispense with some vocabulary: A menstrual cup is an upside-down bell-shaped device made of a nontoxic material like medical-grade silicone and used to collect period blood. It can be reusable for several years, though disposable versions are also available. They’re most often inserted into the vaginal canal like a tampon, but some brands, like Softcup, are worn higher up, around the cervix.</p>
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<p>Cups can be worn for up to 12 hours, and users find they need to empty them far less often than they need to change tampons or pads. They typically cost between $20 and $40. Cloth pads are exactly what they sound like; you wash and reuse them. In the United States, both of these products are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. It’s the menstrual cup, however, that’s really stealing the show.</p>
<p>In November of last year, a <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/intimina/lily-cup-compact-the-menstrual-cup-reinvented">Kickstarter</a> launched by Intimina, a Swedish brand specializing in products for women’s health, outdid its modest target goal of $7,800 by some 4,000 percent. The money was being raised to produce a compact, collapsible, bright pink menstrual cup, and in the end, more than 8,000 people donated a total $325,000 to the cause. This put Intimina’s "Lily Cup" project in the top 2 percent of Kickstarters.</p>
<p>Elsewhere in the menstrual cup realm, the <a href="http://divacup.com/">Diva Cup</a> reports that its sales are growing by double digits in both the U.S. and Canada, and that they have been for the last 12 years. Other brands like Softcup also boast of impressive growth; there are a <a href="http://menstrualcup.co/compare-menstrual-cups/">couple dozen players</a> in the scene, from early pioneer The Keeper to Finnish favorite Lunette.</p>
<p>This may all seem like small potatoes, even (or perhaps, especially) within the <a href="http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/122-a70/#r3">$2 billion feminine hygiene market</a>. But these figures are significant given that issues of menstruation seem unlikely to attract millions in venture capital money. Tech bros aren’t pitching "<a href="http://www.dailydot.com/technology/its-like-uber-but-for/">Uber, but for</a> periods," and behemoths like Apple are still <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/25/6844021/apple-promised-an-expansive-health-app-so-why-cant-i-track">having trouble</a> mastering the fundamentals.</p>
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<p>Brockway’s path to discovering the menstrual cup seems to mirror many women’s: She used tampons for years before a friend turned her on to the cup. "I just didn’t know there was another option," she says. "I always thought tampons were so scratchy. The string just hanging down so you can get pee all over it, it was horrible. I hated it. I just thought it was disgusting—pulling it out when it was dry was just the worst feeling. I cringe if I think of it." She’s been using cups for about seven years, and has even come around to cloth pads: "I like to say it’s like wearing a pair of sweatpants."</p>
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<p class="caption">Pads, then referred to as sanitary towels, from the early 1900s. Photo: Getty Images</p>
<p>Kaitlin Ball, the brand director of <a href="http://softcup.com/">Softcup</a>, says the company conducted a survey among its Facebook fans and found that many of them came across Softcup when searching for alternatives to pads and tampons. "More and more there’s this sense of dissatisfaction with this current method," Ball says. "Who loves tampons at the end of the day? They’re not the most comfortable things."</p>
<p>Amandine Pranlas-Descours, the global brand manager for Intimina, says she saw a similar trend among her customers: "Women are definitely not satisfied with current menstrual products and are really looking for solutions." A survey found that over 70 percent of the donors to Intimina’s Kickstarter had never used cups before.</p>
<p>Still, getting women to try a new product can be difficult. "What I never realized before starting to work for Softcup is that feminine hygiene buying is a very ingrained behavior," explains Ball. "Most women use what their mothers taught them to use. There’s not a ton of products out there that that can be said of."</p>
<div class="float-left hang-left"><p><q class="pullquote">"Feminine hygiene buying is a very ingrained behavior. Most women use what their mothers taught them to use."</q></p></div>
<p>Lara Freidenfelds, a historian and author of <em>The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America</em>, adds, "You can understand why women don’t just decide to abandon what is working for them and try something new. It makes it hard for new products to find a place, especially if they’re very different."</p>
<p>Though both have been used for thousands of years, Freidenfelds points out that sanitary napkins and tampons only began to be mass-marketed in the first half of the 20th century, "the era when we were starting to have disposable culture." Disposable pads, starting in 1921, caught on quickly, but tampons, introduced to the market in 1936, took a few decades to gain traction. Similarly, the cup has been around <a href="http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/jwh.2009.1929">since 1867</a>, and in its modern form since the 1980s, but has yet to go mainstream.</p>
<p>For her book, Freidenfelds interviewed women about their attitudes toward periods. "What I found that people wanted was not necessarily lots and lots of discussion of menstruation in public," she notes. "In fact, sometimes that undermines women’s interest in having it more or less go away and be a nonissue. But I found that they <em>did</em> want to have control of the conversation. They wanted to be able to choose when to talk about it and when to have it be hidden, or not acknowledge it if they didn’t want to. Very few women told me they wanted to have a moon day and stay home and think about their bodies all day."</p>
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<p>The challenge of mainstreaming alternative hygiene products speaks to the uncomfortable truths of our society’s attitude toward menstruation. "For some women, it’s just easier for them to rip off a disposable and throw it away, and not ever have to think about the ramifications of disposable products," Brockway posits. "With things like pads and tampons, you’re often free to minimize the contact you have with your own body, but with something like a menstrual cup, you’re very aware because you’re having to insert it with your fingers. It makes you more aware of your own anatomy. I think that’s always a good thing, to be aware of what’s going on down there."</p>
<p>The fear and shame around periods is an issue that has <a href="http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/menstruation-is-the-new-development-fad/32285">received a lot of attention</a> in the international development community as of late. Celeste Mergens is the founder and executive director of <a href="http://www.daysforgirls.org/">Days for Girls</a>, a nonprofit that distributes kits of reusable pads to girls and women in the developing world, who, in addition to experiencing other struggles related to poverty, don’t have reliable access to feminine hygiene products.</p>
<p>Mergens draws a direct line from the stigma surrounding periods to women’s second-class status. "I believe this is one of the keys to why women end up in roles with less leadership options, how we end up having less opportunity around the globe, and how so often violence is perpetrated against women," she says. "There’s a failure to take this head on and say, ‘Hey everyone, menstruation is all of us.’ Even here in the U.S., we would rather talk about diarrhea than menstruation."</p>
<p>It’s for this reason that alternative menstrual products are considered revolutionary; they force you to acknowledge your period in a very immediate way. "It’s hard to get used to inserting a menstrual cup and finding out the best way to do it for you, what works best for your body," Brockway says of her early trials with the cup. "But I got over that learning curve and it worked flawlessly."</p>
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<p class="caption">Funding for the collapsible Lily Cup was raised via Kickstarter. Photo: Intimina</p>
<p>Others get over it, too. "Softcups certainly require a certain level of comfort and knowledge about your body," Ball says. "It is digital insertion. She is using her fingers to push Softcup in fairly high. I talk to a lot of moms and coaches through our outreach, and they say that the girls simply get past that. For swimmers, basketball players, there is always that horror around game time when you’re on your period."</p>
<p>However, the cup does tend to skew older. The Diva Cup targets women ages 18 to 35, according to Sophie Zivku, the company’s communications and education manager; women in their twenties were the biggest segment of donors to the Lily Cup Kickstarter. Pranlas-Descours started a collection of some of her favorite comments from these customers once they received the finished product: "This has changed my whole life," one woman wrote. "I can’t get over how amazing this product is," wrote another.</p>
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<p>Fans of alternative feminine hygiene products are quick to extol menstrual cups' many benefits. Not only are they better for the environment because they create less waste, they’re also cheaper, potentially saving a women thousands of dollars over her lifetime. Others simply find them more convenient and comfortable. Those who use Softcups, which sit higher up in the vagina, even praise the ability to have sex while the cup is inserted.</p>
<div class="float-left hang-left"><p><q class="pullquote">"Right now, you know more about what’s in your sweater than you do what's in your tampons."</q></p></div>
<p>With regards to health, there’s been recent chatter about whether the materials used in disposable pads and tampons are as safe as they should be. Last May, Rep. Carolyn Maloney <a href="http://maloney.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/maloney-bill-would-study-health-effects-of-menstrual-hygiene-products">called for</a> further study of the chemicals contained in menstrual hygiene products; her bill was not successful.</p>
<p>"Right now, you know more about what’s in your sweater than you do what's in your tampons," points out Sharra Vostral, a professor at Purdue University and the author of <em>Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology</em>. "Legislation just to say what is in this stuff has still not been passed. Even simple legislation requiring manufacturers to say, ‘Here is the ingredient list’ would help a lot in understanding what we are putting in our bodies."</p>
<p>"There’s huge work to be done in the menstruation world," echoes Rachel Horn. Horn, 25, is currently on a three-month cross-country bike trip for <a href="http://sustainablecycles.org/">Sustainable Cycles</a>, raising awareness about menstrual alternatives. "I actually find it quite unjust, the lack of research that goes on. I feel like women are Guinea pigs." She would like to see more education and more product options. "I am unhappy with the choices that conventional America sees in the grocery store. This is the point of the project: People do not know about cups and cloth pads. They just know what they’re taught in elementary and middle school when they first get their periods, and the pad and tampon companies show ’em a video and give ’em a little packet."</p>
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<p class="caption">Photo: Getty Images</p>
<p>Though there hasn’t been much formal study, doctors generally agree that menstrual cups are safe to use. (There are, however, the occasional "my cup got stuck" <a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/01/the-best-time-a-diva-cup-suctioned-itself-to-my-cervix">horror stories</a>.)<strong> </strong>Tampons are also thought of as safe these days, but still, menstrual cups have never been linked to Toxic Shock Syndrome, unlike tampons. "It’s always going to boil down to the woman’s preference," explains Mireille Truong, a gynecologist with Columbia University Medical Center. "Not one single option is the best for everyone."</p>
<p>If Horn had it her way, women would reclaim the period. "We often open our workshops with an icebreaker: Are you on your period right now or not, and what are you using?" she says. "I’m not in the workshop to push my ‘hippie viewpoints.’ I’m literally there to say, ‘Hey, what’s up? I bleed, you bleed. Awesome, let’s support each other. Let’s be educated people together.’"</p>
<p>Sarah Wilson, 27, is on another leg of the Sustainable Cycles bike trip. Six women started out on the West Coast at the beginning of March and are making their way toward the <a href="http://menstruationresearch.org/research/2015-conference/">Society for Menstrual Cycle Research Conference</a> in Boston in June. "I fantasize about us going into schools and talking to school-age girls about periods because it’s such an issue of shame," Wilson says. "You’re looking at a diagram on a projector that has no real connection to your body and what’s happening. It’s so disconnected. It’s such an intimate subject, but somehow they find a way to make it seem much more disconnected from your own physical being, which is insane."</p>
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<p>The next push for menstrual cup brands is to increase their products’ accessibility. The Diva Cup has an 85 percent penetration rate in drug stores in its native Canada, but here in the U.S., where the market is much bigger, it’s still fighting for placement in pharmacies and grocery stores, according to Zivku. Oftentimes stores are put off by the lack of future purchase opportunity: "When a store first learns about it and that the consumers are going to buy one a year, all they hear is that the customer is going to come once to your store," she says. There’s also what she calls "the ick factor": "It comes down to personal bias. They’ll find it different, uncomfortable."</p>
<p>Brockway agrees that there’s still a ways to go when it comes to acceptance. "If there are more voices requesting alternatives to what they’re being given, then maybe these stores will begin to think, ‘Well, if the people want it, the people get it,’" she says. "We’re certainly not everywhere we would like to be."</p>
<p>Distribution is important, as per Ball, because "we want to be an option that’s as easy as buying a tampon or a pad." This could be another problem the internet solves. "Maybe once we start ordering <em>everything</em> online anyway, it doesn’t matter whether your local CVS has it," says Freidenfelds. "People will be able to access stuff that’s a little more alternative."</p>
<p>Zivku believes pads and tampons maybe one day even become obsolete: "We can definitely identify a number of consumer products that have faded out. We used to have Walkmen, CD players. Now people don't even have iPods—it’s all on their phones, everything’s on one device. I would argue that we’re probably seeing a similar shift within feminine hygiene; 50, 100 years from now, who knows?"</p>
<p class="end">Wilson agrees. "Lunette has a really good slogan," she says. "‘Grandma didn't use tampons, your granddaughter won’t either.’ It’s like a blip in history."</p>
<p><em>Editor: </em><a href="https://www.racked.com/authors/julia-rubin"><em>Julia Rubin</em></a></p>
https://www.racked.com/2015/4/2/8327839/menstrual-cups-period-diva-cup-softcupHeather Schwedel