Cel-e-brate! Five! Years, Come On!
Cel-e-brate! Five! Years, Come On!
Happy Newsletter Birthday To Us All!
Dames Nation, did you know that we launched this newsletter from our hearts to yours exactly five years ago this week? It’s true! You can time travel by reading Issue One right now, and though we can’t vouch for the continued validity of any of the links therein, we think it still slaps.
We love to write this newsletter for you all, and kind of can’t believe it’s been five whole Earth years already. We hope you love it, too, and because we are shameless praise-cravers, we’ll ask you to share your favorite experiences with Dames Nation, whether digital or face-to-face. Has Dames Nation yielded new friendships in your life? Romances? Feats of cultural or emotional or physical derring-do? Tell us all about it in this handy open thread!
If you’re a newer reader or just want to take a stroll down memory lane, you can read a couple of our special birthday issues of years gone by: a 2015 origin story / process nerd Q&A with Kathryn VanArendonk, and a Q&A from readers in 2016.
As always, if you like the work we do and want to support it materially, we’d be delighted to count you among our paid subscribers:
Dame Sophie’s Premium Bossy Spotlight Rerun: A Pencil Rivalry For The Ages!
Surrender to the multicolored pencil hypnosis
I first wrote about the rivalry between two pencil-and-pen houses, both alike in dignity, way back in 2015. Since I just started a new job last week, office supplies are on my mind & I thought I’d dust this one off for fun & erudition. Enjoy!
As longtime readers & even casual perusers of our Twitter feed(s) will know, both Dame Margaret & I are very into office supplies. Stationery, pens, notebooks: these things matter to us. A well-balanced writing implement is a thing of beauty and a useful tool.
Gather ‘round, then, Dames Nation, to hear the wonderful tale of Germany’s rival houses of industry & innovation. Yes, we are talking about Faber-Castell vs. Staedtler! These high-quality suppliers of stationers’ shops and art stores everywhere have been cranking out ever-more-specialized and high-performing writing implements since the 1700s. So far, so whatever.
German industry is known for attention to design and detail, and for its thriving tradition of family-owned businesses. But did you know that both of these companies are based in Nuremberg? And that their healthy, centuries-long economic rivalry over things like ink reservoirs, custom-engineered coatings and pigments, and something one Faber-Castell employee earnestly explained as an ergonomic “no-slip zone”specially designed for their youngest customers, eventually blossomed into an all-out legal drama over which noble company can boast the strongest pencil-making pedigree?
It all comes down to bragging rights. Carpenter Friedrich Staedtler created the first graphite-based wooden pencil in the 1600s, but his company’s existence as a corporation was muddied by various dissolutions & re-formations over the years. Meanwhile, Faber-Castell has been in continuous operation since 1761, and in 1995, won an injunction against Staedtler, who were trying to celebrate their 333rd anniversary.
Faber-Castell also commands the luxury pencil market. “In our industry, there is no doubt Faber-Castell is the Mercedes,” -- a thing said with a completely straight face by pocket square-sporting CEO Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, I am not making this up, I swear! Old Anton-Wolfgang gave that quote to a Wall Street Journal reporter!
Is there anything more pleasing than a highly regional business story with international consequences? I really don’t think so. If you have some hot business dirt on a long-simmering rivalry between, say, Dixon-Ticonderoga and Eberhard Faber (absolutely related to Faber-Castell), or Sharpie and Mr. Sketch, please do tell us all about it.
Related Link-o-rama!
I know that The Strategist’s list of the 100 Best Pens remains highly controversial. I think part of the problem with the list is that its scope is too broad. 100 pens? How am I going to keep track of that? After scrolling through the first ten entries, I just search-and-find for evaluative comments about the pens I usually use, and where the editors’ assessment disagreed with mine, I shrugged and muttered something about how even sensible criteria are subject to personal preferences. A Good Enough version of this list is also a Strategist offering, their list of the 23 Best Pens (as rated by enthusiastic Amazon reviews, last updated in 2018).
Helen Zaltzman covered the history of Bic & Biro ball-point pens on The Allusionist a few years back. This episode tickled some faint memory about the Great Pencil Rivalry and prompted me to go down this little rabbit-hole in the first place. Thanks, Helen!
Want more, including interviews with employees of both companies? That’s what the BBC World Service is for, friends.
Rad & Hungry: office supplies from around the world (with a subscription box service for the truly obsessed).
Pilgrimages to Manhattan’s CW Pencil Enterprise and Goods For The Study await! (CW Pencil has a quarterly pencils, etc. gift box subscription, too).
Our friends Anna & Alene hosted an episode of Bellwether Friends with special guest & DamesPal Cecily Walker all about pens!
If you have favorite pen & pencil resources not mentioned here, please do let me know!
Dame Margaret Brags, But Only A Bit
Not shown in this gif: the fact that the cover GLITTERS!!!
Just UNDER a year ago, in a fit of inspiration, I did something I often do: I tweeted a wish for a particular type of romantic comedy to appear before me, and with haste.
However, unlike my absolutely fire gay-wedding-plus-ones-fall-in-love romantic comedy, Insignificant Others or my Laura Dern and Angela Basset as Exes Who Must Road Trip Home Together After Dropping Their Kids Off At College (inspired by this photo), something magical happened with this tweet: it became an actual book, that is incredibly fun, and available for you to buy right now! When I sent that tweet, long-time #damespal, Reese Witherspoon-approved & New York Times Bestselling author Jasmine Guillory had just finished her final draft for The Wedding Party, a book that just happened to feature (as the main character’s mom) a black single mother who was also a social worker: Vivian Forrest. And when Twitter basically drafted Jasmine to make this book a reality, she and her agent both though: why the heck not? And so, the coolest gift I’ve yet received came into existence: my friend wrote me the book I dreamed of, and everyone gets to benefit from it. If someone would like to follow suit with the other tweets linked above, I would be eternally grateful. But, in the meantime, I am so happy to add this book to my Jasmine Guillory shelf.
Not everything is sunshine and rainbows for me, though: it is POSSIBLE (though not yet confirmed) that my current favorite lipstick-- ColourPop’s Lux Lipstick (wears beautifully and only costs $8!!!) -- has been discontinued in my current favorite share of red: Hi Striker, a really classic blue-toned red that suits my complexion exquisitely. Thankfully, when Capitalism closes a door, they open a window: as part of a collaboration with YouTube Makeup Scientist Safiya Nygaard, ColourPop has released one of their Lux Lips in a shade Nygaard named Fred, short for “Frankenred.” It’s based on the color produced by melting many different reds together that’s meant to contain a multitude of undertones. They also gave Safiya the money to make the World’s Largest Lipstick, which is exactly the kind of marketing stunt I’d like to reward. So, I am going to order myself a tube of Fred, and one of Berry Me In Lipsticks (a shade produced by melting 600 different lipsticks together), and hope for the best.
But if it’s not as good as my go-to, that’s okay. I have another go-to I can comfort myself with: Cabot Creamery’s Habanero Cheddar Cheese, which I discovered in the Vermont State Pavillion last weekend at the Big E, aka the Eastern States Exposition, aka New England’s federated state fair. It is spicy enough to give me the hiccups (a true mark of honor in the spice category), but not so spicy as to be unpleasant to eat, or indigestion provoking. Paired with a carefully sliced up honeycrisp apple, there is truly no better snack.
Bossy Reviews: We Love Colors Tights & Socks
Tights warm enough for an ocean-side photoshoot in the autumn dusk and pretty enough to be worth photographing!
Almost exactly a year ago, Your Dames set out to find new fall/winter tights that really worked for us, which resulted in us reviewing We Love Colors tights. As the air turns crisp again, we thought that sharing a truncated version of our review again would be strong #service #journalism.
The combined criteria we demanded from our tights:
High denier (or thickness), creating warm tights that are genuinely opaque
Colors that extend beyond black, brown, and navy
Tights that work for many dimensions: short and round (Dame M.), tall-for-a- lady-and-round (Dame S.), and many other shapes and sizes besides (because our audience is diverse and we like our reviews to work for as many of you as possible).
Sturdy: we are neither of us rich in either money or time, so we needed tights that would hold up well with much wearing, and that would wash easily
The (Abbreviated) Review:
Enter We Love Colors. We loved the options available (51 colors! Splash colors!) and were particularly impressed with the range of sizes they provide (for example, Size EE in their Plus Sized Nylon/Lycra tights fits wearers up to 6’0” and up to 375 lbs. They offer options for men as well!). We loved that they’re a small, family-owned company, who do a portion of their manufacturing here in the US.
Of their offerings, the tights we liked best were their Solid Microfiber Nylon/Lycra Tights -- Sophie liked them so much, in fact, that she went back immediately and bought a few pairs of the Microfiber Socks (which, despite reporting to be made from the same fabric, felt a little lighter-weight than the tights). Your Dames found both the tights and the socks excellent for three-season wear: they’re comfortable, hard-wearing, and are just the right thickness to wear with snug shoes. The colors in person are very loyal to how they’re represented on the site and often truly beautiful -- Margaret gets complimented on hers incessantly. We both started with the 1X-4X size but have since switched to the M-L size, after finding that We Love Colors’ sizing is quite generous (bonus: we aren’t having to pull up our tights a zillion times a day). They’re listed as preferring handwashing, but we have both been slinging them in the wash in a mesh bag on cold and air drying them, and they are 100% fine. No pilling, no stretching, no runs. And, one year later, they are still in impressively good shape.
TL;DR: We love We Love Colors’ Nylon/Lycra Microfiber Tights and Socks and HIGHLY RECOMMEND THEM to all Tights-Seekers of Dames Nation.
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
Bill Hader and his stupidly enticing rubbery face dancing to literally anything!
The Righteous Gemstones and The Horrible Goose, united at last!!
Indispensable podcast Thirst Aid Kit returning to our earbuds!
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