Blushbaby, by Mary Quant

Blushbabies pink their cheeks with Mary Quant! A super find at a Batignolles flea market on a recent Sunday sortie: Mary Quant Blushbaby blusher, unused with brush and insert. Now that life is slowly returning to normal for the Paris half of pink milk, we will be doing a lot more of this sort of thing, and we can't wait.


A staple of the sixties London scene, Mary Quant is an iconic designer famous for the Swinging Sixties look of Chelsea girls-about-town, miniskirts, coloured tights and skinny rib knits. At the forefront of the boutique culture that took London by storm in the sixties, Quant's Kings Road shop became a favourite hipster hangout. In 1966, she was given an OBE by the Queen, for her services to British fashion.


Mary Quant cosmetics were launched in Great Britain the same year, and in Japan in 1971, where Nippon girls were going crazy for the London look. Quant made regular visits to the country thoughout the seventies and eighties, launching accessories and home lines as well, in the early eighties.


Quant designed the packaging herself, in iconic white, black and silver to highlight the product colours, all featuring the trademarked daisy logo.


Today, Mary Quant cosmetics are available for mailorder in Japan online, or from the London store.

Exhausted

What use is a luxe hotel if you only see your room for four hours a night?

In own bed

This is not my bed, nor even my headboard, but maybe one day it will be. MSTRF's Liber headboard is to my mind the sort of solid, heavy influence required in a bedroom, with a nod to mid-century geometric style.

After two months sleeping in empty flats, spare beds and unused beds, we are finally back in our own. A few weeks of respite while we wait for the four insurance companies to come to enough of an agreement to start the complete redecoration that is needed to rectify the water damage, time to breathe long and deeply.

Thank you dear friends, for your kindness in the bed department recently.

On the boulevard St Germain

Two weeks living in St Michel was lovely, and just around the corner is the chic shop of chocolate artist Patrick Roger. The windows are always whimsical, in a Left Bank kind of way, note the little chocolate conkers - when I took these photos, Autumn was on its way. Now it is here.

The chococlate honeycomb is a reference to his new range of chocolates, produced with the honey from the beehives he has kept since October 2009, in the garden behind the shop, and on its roof in Sceaux.

Nomadic newlyweds

Living in our flat still unlikely for the foreseeable future. On the upside, we are moving around a lot and getting to know areas of the city we didn't know before. Currently at St Michel, not far from the Jardins de Luxembourg, wonderful for a Sunday run. Unfortunately no Internet in our current appartment, but having Shakespeare and Co around the corner dulls the pain.