Another quick one. Sorry guys, Horace was back in town for most of last week, though I think he finally packed his bags today. But even with his nonsense, I couldn’t wait to get online and thank all of you who donated a Solidarity Dollar (or more!) to the Billboard Project.

Because Ragen reports: “Exactly a week and a day after we started the Georgia Billboard campaign we have 1010 donors and $21,721.20. Enough to launch a good campaign in Atlanta.”

And as if that weren’t enough, Alan Guttmacher, MD, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Child Health & Human Development issued a statement to Fierce Freethinking Fatty Shannon Russell, agreeing that Georgia’s Strong4Life ad campaign “carries a great risk of increasing stigma for those children who are overweight or obese which, in turn, can reinforce unhealthy behaviors.” And this was after NIH representatives told her that it was against the rules for any government spokesperson to comment on a specific private campaign.

As Shannon says: “This is an unprecedented condemnation by the NIH of a private healthcare organization’s public health campaign. When the NIH begins bending rules to send a message that you are harming children, it’s time to listen.”

Meanwhile more folks are submitting pictures like Kate’s and mine to the I Stand Against Weight Bullying Tumblr — because the more body positive images and messages we have out there for kids (and everyone!) to see, the better.

And — attention graphic designers and such! — Ragen is ready to accept design submissions for the Georgia Billboard Project, which will be using the money raised to develop an campaign to counteract the fat-shaming Strong4Life messages.

All in all, a fine week’s of grass-rooting. Good work everybody!

PS. While we’re celebrating things, a BIG hug to my girl Jackie, who is over on Eat The Damn Cake eating ice cream to celebrate two years of eating disorder recovery. Yay! (Backstory: Y’all might remember Jackie’s awesome writing from when she visited us here. She’s also kinda like my little sister, because when my real little sister went to a women’s college, I scored a whole bunch of extra and super amazing Smith Sisters. I’m pretty sure that they’re now going to take over the world.)

Just a quick one to say that the STAND Campaign’s Billboard Project is thisclose to its fundraising goal — and y’all can totally help us get there by donating a buck. Yes, just a buck! Or more, of course. But they need 217 more donations to unlock a $5,000 matching grant, so right now, it’s all about the Solidarity Dollars.

Here’s the scoop from my girl Ragen Chastein of Dances With Fat fame, who is organizing this awesomeness:

Support All Kids Billboard Project Update

Y’all we are so close to getting that $5,000 More of Me to Love Matching donation which will pay for small billboards in downtown Atlanta and signs at bus shelters. We just need 217 more individual donors.  Today is “Ask a Friend Day”.  If you’ve already contributed, consider asking a friend to donate a Solidarity Dollar (or posting http://www.SupportAllKids.com on your Facebook and/or Twitter) and asking people to Stand Up for these kids.  I know is that when our giant billboard and all of our posters go up to support the kids of Georgia who’ve been shamed, stigmatized, and humiliated for the last 9 months, I will be so proud and grateful to have been part of it.

In case you missed it, here’s my first post about this amazing project, and my awesome cousin Kate, standing with me in the picture above.

Off you go! It’s only a dollar! Tell your friends!

Hi, my name is Virginia and I’m addicted to Pinterest. (If you’re already confused, click here to find out what it’s all about.)

My friend Amy got me hooked way back in September 2010. I’m fairly sure it’s the only thing we’ve ever early adopted! Since then, she’s pinned a reasonable 268 items. Meanwhile I’ve pinned 839 things.

Ahem. That total actually went up to 845 pins since I wrote the first draft of this post.

But for a looong time, I kept this Pinterest thing in the closet, because most of what I pin there is, well… Domestic Girl Porn. Think cocktail recipes. Knitting patterns for leg warmers. Lots of feelings about the kitchen I will have when money, time and building codes are no object. This all stuff I love to make/do/discuss in my off hours, but it doesn’t really relate to primary themes of this blog or most of my work as a writer. And I’ve had this idea that people won’t take me seriously as a journalist if they know how much time I spent picking out a new sink for my bathroom. (A lot. And it’s so pretty.)

But then Slate’s Jessica Grose got me thinking about the Zooey Deschanel Problem. Which is where feminists get super impatient with Zooey’s wide-eyed girly-girl schtick that’s all about baking cupcakes and wearing vintage dresses. They want her to grow up already and stop playing into male fantasies that women have to be uber-femme and domestic, even if you’re hipster-domestic, not Stepford-domestic. At the end of the day, you’re still frosting the g-d cupcakes.

Grose was irked because last week’s episode of “New Girl” tackled that criticism via a fight between Zooey (aka Jess)  and Lizzy Caplan’s pant-suit-wearing lawyer character, Julia. They go a few rounds:

Julia: It’s a great thing. I mean, the big, beautiful eyes, like a scared baby. I’m sure that gets you out of all kinds of stuff.

Jess: Yeah. Yeah, except my peripheral vision’s, like, almost too good.

Finally, Zooey/Jess wins when Julia sheepishly admits that really, she just loves her some girly crochet time. But “I want those Murphy Brown-talking, pantsuit wearers to be just as acceptable and palatable as the cupcake clan,” Grose writes.

And I agree with Grose. “Find the insecure little girl hiding inside every kickass female character” is a pretty tired plot device.

And yet I also agree with Zooey/Jess when she says:

I find it fundamentally strange that you’re not a dessert person. It freaks me out.  I’m sorry that I don’t talk like Murphy Brown [...] but that doesn’t mean I’m not smart and tough and strong.

So I’ve been wrestling with these two ideas. Should I be Murphy Brown when I’m in work mode and Zooey Deschanel at home? And should I scrupulously keep those identities separate, especially online? How does that even work (especially when, hi, I work from home)?

It’s the now-cliched “can we have it all?” debate, and for me, it’s all just crystallized with social media. Because as Pinterest gets more popular (but fails to add any privacy options — what up?), my boards — 800+ pins of pure Zooey-ness — are suddenly being followed by random acquaintances, work colleagues, and total strangers. Some of whom I never would have invited over to see that new bathroom sink in real life. And who I would rather see me as Murphy, not Zooey.

Especially since we’re increasingly told that we can’t have it all. “Success is about prioritizing some things and sacrificing others,” Katrin Bennhold wrote two weeks ago in “The New Goal for Women? Rising Above Having It All,” a New York Times piece wherein she argues that women will never climb as high as men on the career ladder as long as we keep simultaneously wanting things like a happy home life and a smaller jeans size. She writes:

We were raised to believe that we could actually have it all: A stellar career, a happy family and time for a social life and that crucial workout.

Ambitious men tend to be more focused: They want that stellar career.

Yeah. That’s unacceptable to me. When we continue to force women and men to choose between happy personal lives and stellar careers we simply reinforce all our age-old problematic gender roles, as well as the stereotypes and limitations that come along with them.

And that goes double for the Zooey Problem and the beauty standards and assumptions about femininity that are attached to it. As I’ve argued before, breaking up with the Beauty Myth didn’t get us anywhere.  And so we need to do something much subtler and more difficult: We need to parse out the Beauty Myth and the Have It All Myth and all of these other narratives about modern womanhood (and manhood too — I’ll add the Ambitious Man Myth on that list, since I know plenty of guys who want great careers and a happy personal life, thanks).

I find this exciting, because it means we get to decide which aspects of these narratives apply to our own lives. But it can also be scary — because life is a lot like Pinterest. We love to pin people to specific boards, all tidily categorized away. There are many careers — corporate lawyers, say or finance executives, and yes, some kinds of journalists — where you just can’t be Zooey, or at least, you sure can’t bring Zooey to work with you. And there are just as many places where Murphy, with her store-bought, high fructose-containing bake sale goodies, gets written off as a bad mom and failure of a woman.

So maybe those of us who are lucky enough to have some control over our own narratives should be taking better advantage of that fact. As in: I write about health, body politics and social issues. (And sometimes, also home decor and of course, beauty.) And I like to bake brownies, decorate my house, and braid my hair. I am not just Murphy Brown. But I’m not just Zooey Deschanel either. Because I don’t think we need to pin ourselves as neatly as I’ve pinned so many cool things to do with vintage wood boxes (omg).

All of which is the longest way ever to say: Goddammit, I heart Pinterest! So feel free to follow me there if you also heart any of this stuff.

I’ve even gone ahead and created several boards that are more work-specific: New On My Blog, My Work, Women’s Health and Body Thoughts.

I’m especially excited about the last two, because I’ll be using Pinterest in a whole new way — to track stories and other finds that won’t appear on this here blog. Because Pinterest is first and foremost a visual place. So let’s work on getting some more diverse representations of beauty and body positive messaging pinned up in there, shall we? (Trust me, there are more than enough troubling images carrying the opposite messages already getting pinned.) Pinterest may have started as a place to redecorate your house or plan your wedding, but I’m thinking we can harness its power in a whole variety of different ways that are both personal and political.

After all, this pinning thing works both ways. So there’s no reason we can’t bring a little Murphy over to Zooey World, too.

Thoughts? Do you struggle with this Murphy vs. Zooey thing? Do you use Pinterest (clandestinely or not)? And if so: How and why and how can we be using it to further these conversations?

But did Big Pink really get the message? iVillage Health asked me to drop by and discuss it.

Bottom line: If you stood with Planned Parenthood and/or breast cancer organizations that don’t play politics with women’s heath, good on you! We made a difference and 170,000 low-income women will be getting breast cancer screenings this year as a result.

(Also Mayor Bloomberg helped.)

But I’m going to continue to support breast cancer research and awareness efforts without a Komen-brand pink ribbon — or pink pom-pom gloves, pink (and probable carcinogen-containing) perfumes and pink handguns. Because shopping for the cure doesn’t work if your dollars don’t get spent on the women who need them most.

PS. Major kudos to Erin Ryan Gloria on Jezebel for following the Komen money — and figuring out that “under investigation” doesn’t mean much as long as you’re not a pro-choice organization (but are, say a major state university embroiled in a sex scandal).

And if you want the full story on how the pinkwashing and industrialization of breast cancer, time to reread Barbara Ehrenreich’s epic “Welcome to Cancerland.“

And today we’re taking a stand for children’s health. Which really blows my mind because, really? We have to have a debate about that? 

This is me and my cousin, Kate Summers. We are participating in I Stand Against Weight Bullying, a grass-roots online response to Georgia’s Strong4Life campaign against childhood obesity.

But wait, you say. Strong4Life? That sounds like it’s all about healthy kids, no? What have you got against that?

Let’s take a look at some of the Strong4Life images, which have been plastered all over billboards around the state of Georgia and run as TV commercials.

These are pretty bad. Objectifying, stigmatizing and shaming. But they aren’t even what got me so mad about this. That was the one with the slogan “it’s hard to be a little girl when you’re not.” running across a little (yes!) fat girl’s tummy.

Now I think the Atlanta public health folks had good intentions with this campaign. They have sky-high levels of Type 2 Diabetes, hypertension and other health conditions that correlate with bigger bodies — and they’re seeing more of those health problems in younger patients. They want to take action. They want to encourage parents to feed their families healthy meals and take everyone out for a walk or a game of basketball.

So why not make an ad campaign that encourages us all to feed our families healthy meals and take everyone out for a walk or a game of basketball? 

Why do we need to point fingers at body types? Thin kids need to be eating well and exercising too. Everybody does. And fat kids don’t need to hear that their bodies make everybody uncomfortable. Chances are, they’re already hearing that on a daily basis — from kids on the playground, from family members, from the world — without a government-funded ad campaign to remind them.

But y’all don’t need me to explain why these ads are terrible. I’ve given my “focus on healthy habits, don’t hate on bodies” speech a zillion times. So instead of reprising that, I thought we should hear from a kid who knows from experience. Enter Kate: “I think it’s good that they’re promoting being healthy, but I don’t like the way they are doing it,” she told me. That’s because Kate, who is 16 now, had to deal with a lot of this crap when she was younger:

 As someone who was pretty heavy as a kid, I think about the way I would have reacted back then. I really don’t like the billboards about missing out on a childhood, looking bad, etc. I think that because of this ad a lot of people will start obsessing over their weight at a younger age. I agree with you that they should focus on healthier lifestyle changes instead. Because I may have weighed 125 pounds at age nine, but I could have certainly out-swam my fellow fourth graders!

And yes. Exactly.

Kate and I decided that we wanted to take a stand against this ad campaign and for healthy kids of all sizes — because health is about so much more than a number on the scale. Here’s how you can help us:

You can donate to the Big Fat Money Bomb drive, led by Ragen at Dances With Fat today, to raise funds for billboards and print advertisments that will counter these negative messages. They already have $5,000 and only need to raise another $5,000 to buy their first billboard — we can totally do this!

You can also like the I Stand Against Weight Bullying campaign on Facebook, and follow the blog to help raise awareness. And submit your own picture and slogan to be made into a Stand poster like ours.

And please, sign the petition and tell your friends to do the same. Or write directly to the people involved with the Georgia campaign (be respectful! spam doesn’t get us anywhere!) and explain why you find their ads so offensive:

Kevin McClelland (PR Director of the campaign)

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
404-785-7600
kevin.mcclelland@choa.org

Stephanie Walsh (medical director, handling interviews)
404-778-2400
stephanie.walsh@choa.org

Children’s Foundation
1687 Tullie Circle NE
Atlanta, GA 30329
404-785-GIVE
Fax: 404-785-7355
choagiving@choa.org

As you’ve probably heard, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation decided to yank their funding (hundreds of thousands of grant dollars) for breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood clinics around the country. The official line is that Komen can’t support an organization being investigated by Congress — but considering that the only people in Congress who care about investigating Planned Parenthood are anti-choice lawmakers who have sought to end all federal support of the group — some of us aren’t smelling that cheese.

Reports Kate Sheppard for Mother Jones:

Komen has been under pressure from anti-abortion groups to drop its funding for Planned Parenthood, which received $680,000 from the anti-cancer group in 2011. Most recently, abortion foes forced a Christian publisher to stop printing pink Komen bibles and pressured bookstores to take them off shelves. Groups have also called on supporters to boycott Komen entirely, and decried the group as a “lie from the pit of Hell.” [...] pressure to end the Planned Parenthood funding may have also come from within Komen itself. Karen Handel was named senior vice president at Komen in April 2011, and is now “leading the organization’s federal and state advocacy efforts.” But before joining Komen, she was a candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary in Georgia, and was critical of Planned Parenthood.

So. Fishy.

Three million women and men visit Planned Parenthood clinics every year; over the past five years, Susan G. Komen allowed the health centers to provide nearly 170,000 breast exams and 6,400 mammogram referrals, notes GOOD. That’s a heck of lot of boobs that won’t be getting good cancer detection from Planned Parenthood now, and may not be able to afford it elsewhere. All because anti-choice advocates don’t approve of what the owners of said boobs might be doing during none-of-your-damn-business hours.

Caitlin over on Fit & Feminist is also Standing and has some excellent additional reasons to be pissed at Komen:

• The CEO of Komen makes $459,406 a year.  Komen generated $421 million in gross revenue in 2010. The amount given to Planned Parenthood in 2011?  $680,000.

• Komen is also one of the worst offenders when it comes to “pinkwashing.”  Pinkwashing is problematic for many reasons, not least of all that it dresses up plain old consumerism as activism.  If you want to really make a difference in a cause, save the money you would have spent on a pink tchotchke and donate it directly to an organization that supports your cause.

• But maybe the worst aspect of Komen’s pinkwashing is that many of their pink products contain carcinogens.  I guess that’s one way to keep your organization in business, huh?

How can you stand with Planned Parenthood on this? Donate to them and/or other organizations that support and advocate for women’s health, particularly breast cancer prevention, without the hypocrisy and judgment. GOOD has a great list. I’d also add the Breast Cancer Fund, which works to pinpoint environmental causes of the disease (something Komen has no interest in doing, seeing how it might cut into their pinkwashed, product-heavy fundraising efforts).

And don’t forget to tell the Komen Foundation where your money went — and why they won’t be getting it. 

UPDATE: You can also sign this petition at Credo Action, and this petition at Planned Parenthood its own self, and forward it to your email contacts and/or post on Facebook. Good work everybody! 

[Photos via Planned Parenthood.]

Hey, remember waaay back in 2010 when the supposedly “formaldehyde-free” Brazilian Blowout hair straightening treatment tested positive for — irony alert! — formaldehyde?

Lots of salon workers and customers reported all kinds of unhappy symptoms as a result of working with the product, but of course, the beauty industry had some hairs to split about it, even though their own textbooks and industry spokespeople had said years earlier  that formaldehyde doesn’t belong in beauty products. Ahem.

(More details on the whole debacle in this story I wrote for Health Magazine, now on CNN.com.)

Well. Here we are, two calendar years later and there is finally some good news to report: Thanks to a settlement with the California Attorney General, GIB, LLC, owners of the Brazilian Blowout brand, must now affix “CAUTION” stickers to the bottles of the two products to inform stylists of the emission of formaldehyde gas and the need for precautionary measures, including adequate ventilation. The company must also engage in substantial corrective advertising, make significant changes to its website and pay $600,000 in fees, penalties and costs.

And best of all? They have to stop calling Brazilian Blowout “formaldehyde free” and “safe.” Because it ain’t. 

“We commend the California Attorney General’s office for accomplishing what no other government agency in the U.S. has been able to do: force Brazilian Blowout to be honest with salons about the risk of their products. We are also proud that this lawsuit was the first legal action taken by the state under the authority of the California Safe Cosmetics Act of 2005, which forces companies to publicly disclose the presence of cancer-causing chemicals in cosmetics sold in the state,” says my girl, Stacy Malkan, co-founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and author of the blog Not Just a Pretty Face.

Of course, the settlement doesn’t get Brazilian Blowout off salon shelves. Which means, in plenty of salons, workers will continue to be exposed to formaldehyde, either because their bosses don’t care to heed the new “CAUTION” warnings on the bottles, or don’t think they can afford to take a popular and profitable service off their salon menu when  beauty salons have been hit so hard by the recession. (The industry’s own Salon/Spa Performance Index [PDF] fell to its lowest level in two years during the third quarter of 2011. Translation: Sales are down. Way down.)

It’s also important to remember that while this settlement focused on one particular brand of keratin straightener, there are lots of other brands of “Brazilian-style” keratin straighteners on the market. And independent lab testing has shown that most of them contain unsafe levels of formaldehyde too. Even if they say “formaldehyde-free” on the label. Even if your hair stylist thinks she’s using a really safe product because the rep from the company told her so.

The beauty industry isn’t playing by the rules on this one. These brands are misleading hair stylists and consumers alike, and putting all of our health on the line.

Even though their products have been banned for over a year in Canada, France and other countries.

Even though our own Food & Drug Administration issued a letter in August, 2011, accusing Brazilian Blowout of selling products that are misbranded and contain deleterious substances, in violation of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938. Failure to correct the violations “may result in enforcement action without further notice, including, but not limited to, seizure and/or injunction,” states the FDA letter.

So what’s next? The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and the National Healthy Nail and Beauty Salon Alliance are calling on the FDA to remove Brazilian Blowout products from the marketplace and to ban formaldehyde from all hair products.

You can get more information and support their work here and here. If you’ve experienced any health symptoms after exposure to Brazilian Blowout-style hair straighteners, you can help by writing the FDA a letter about your experience here.

In the meantime, use your power as beauty consumers. When your hair stylist asks if you’d like to try a keratin treatment, say no (nicely!) and tell the salon owner that you don’t want to see toxic products on the salon menu because you’re concerned about the health of her workers.

Have any of you tried Brazilian Blowout or one of its competitors? Any stories to report — good, bad, ugly? Alex and Siobhan, over on No More Dirty Looks, say it ultimately turned their hair to crap, too. I mean, on top of everything else.

PS. Here’s the quickie refresher on why, from my CNN piece: 

Some epidemiological studies have linked exposure to formaldehyde over several months with certain forms of cancer, such as leukemia. In the short term, it can cause scalp rashes when it comes into contact with the head; when inhaled (whether you’re receiving the treatment or sitting next to someone who is), it can lead to burning eyes, nose, and throat, and even asthma attacks if you’re prone to them, says Julia Quint, PhD, a retired toxicologist from the California Department of Public Health.

[Image: "1966 Spiegel Catalog Salon Hair Dryer" from Genibee.]

Jennifer Aniston tells InStyle that it took “years of peeling back the onion to finally stop using makeup as a mask and feel comfortable in my own skin.” (Via PopSugar.)

Of course she also makes the requisite Pretty Celebrity reference to her “dumpy teenage” self. By golly, Americans love an Ugly Duckling-Turned-Swan story. But I’m stuck on the creepy yet accurate onion metaphor. It reminds me of cleansing clients during facials at Beauty U. Whenever someone came in with a full face of makeup on, the process did feel rather onion-like. And the face that was revealed once I swirled, swirled, swirled with my finger tips and cotton burgers didn’t always bear much resemblance to the face they walked in with. Sometimes they really did look older or less attractive without that mask. Sometimes they just looked… clean.

Still, I’m always a bit pleased when a Pretty Celebrity admits that she too, has struggled  to accept herself without the mask. And not in a “she’s just like US!” way. I think it’s for the same reason I wanted Tina Fey to be more honest about Photoshop (and I’m so pleased when magazines get Photoshop so very wrong): Jen is letting us see how the sausage is made and that reminds us that it is, in fact, sausage (with onions — oh dear, these food metaphors are getting away from me…).

Because these women have to encounter the masked version of themselves on every newsstand and TV channel. It’s got to be way harder to like what you see in the mirror when you first wake up in the morning when you’re constantly inundated with images of your perfected self.

In contrast, I may never achieve Jennifer Aniston levels of perfection (assuming we subscribe solely to the Hollywood Beauty Standard and don’t work on broadening that definition to include a whole spectrum of ideas about beauty, in which case, Jen and I are both hawt). But the difference between me first thing in the morning and me after I’ve put some effort in isn’t nearly so stark. (Mostly, it’s hair-related.) And that’s pretty freeing: Those of us who don’t need to fulfill the beauty ideal in order to keep our jobs also don’t need to work nearly as hard as Jen and friends to achieve and maintain that ideal. I think maybe that makes it easier to feel comfortable in your own skin — because you get to wear your own skin all day long, while they have to constantly change their skin. To please us.

Thoughts?

PS. The migration from old blog to new blog is complete — I’m hoping y’all have come along for the ride, but please do leave a comment or shoot me an email if you’re having any trouble with your email or RSS feed subscriptions. (And if you have any questions or feedback about the new site, I’d love to hear that too!) 

PPS. Oh and don’t forget to like the new page on Facebook! Okay, now go about your day.

[Image: "Jennifer Aniston - Original Acrylic Painting" because when you're this pretty, random people will paint you. And put a price on you. In this case $150,000. Or, $60 for a print. Wow. By Artist Jon Mick.]

Congratulations — if you’re reading this post, it means you’ve successfully found your way to my new and improved blog on my new and improved website.

In case you missed the news on the old blog, here’s the deal. For the past few years, I’ve maintained a professional portfolio site at a whole other domain. This made sense when I first started beauty school and had to keep a low profile. But it stopped making sense awhile back and so I’ve finally rectified the matter, bringing blog and portfolio together at last.

Or rather, Liz and Jeff, the geniuses at Super Runaway have rectified the matter and I can’t say enough good things about them. (They also designed my best friend Amy’s website, and we joke that we maybe have a collective crush on them. If you need web folk, hire them. Stat.)

So. Click around and check out the new, improved virginiasolesmith.com right now. 

And here’s one big change you might notice: Beauty Schooled — as in, the complete chronicles of my time in beauty school — is archived as a special project. So is Never Say Diet. You can still read every word of every one of those posts if your little heart desires, but those adventures are officially complete. (See where it says SPECIAL PROJECTS up in the top right corner? Click and this will all make sense.)

Here’s the other big change: As of Monday, January 30, my old blog at beautyschooledproject.com — where I wrote about beauty, body image and other women’s issues — will become this new blog that you’re reading right now on this here new site, where I’ll be writing about beauty, body image and other women’s issues. In other words, nothing will change beyond the URL. But as I said in this post, 2012 is the year for new adventures. So I do hope you’ll subscribe via email or RSS feed (or update your old subscriptions*) and come along for the ride.

xo

*Some helpful fine print:

RSS Subscribers: We think your feeds will automatically update, but please do double-check and resubscribe here (or by clicking the link in the righthand column) if you don’t see any new posts from me next week —I’d hate to lose you!

Email Subscribers: Your subscriptions will not transfer, so you’ll need to resubscribe to the new feed. As always, rest assured that I’ll never do anything unseemly with your email address.

WordPress Followers: Alas. I’m going where you can’t follow (to wordpress.org). So please consider swapping over to an RSS or email subscription — or just bookmarking this site!

Facebook: I’ll be retiring the Beauty Schooled Facebook Page and switching to a Virginia Sole-Smith Facebook Page, so I’d be extra delighted if you’d head over and like that. 

I know, right?!

Here’s the deal. For the past few years, I’ve maintained a professional portfolio site at a whole other domain. This made sense when I first started beauty school and had to keep a low profile. But it stopped making sense awhile back and so I’ve finally rectified the matter, bringing blog and portfolio together at last.

Or rather, Liz and Jeff, the geniuses at Super Runaway have rectified the matter and I can’t say enough good things about them. (They also designed my best friend Amy’s website, and we joke that we maybe have a collective crush on them. If you need web folk, hire them. Stat.)

So. You can go check out the new, improved virginiasolesmith.com right now. 

UPDATE: If you’ve been to the old virginiasolesmith.com recently, you may need to clear the cache on your Internet browser to see the new site. Good luck with that!

And here’s one big change you might notice: Beauty Schooled — as in, the complete chronicles of my time in beauty school — is archived as a special project. So is Never Say Diet. You can still read every word of every one of those posts if your little heart desires, but those adventures are officially complete.

Here’s the other big change: As of Monday, this here blog that you’re reading right now — where I write about beauty, body image and other women’s issues — will become this new blog on the new site, where I write about beauty, body image and other women’s issues. In other words, nothing will change beyond the URL. But as I said in this post, 2012 is the year for new adventures. So I do hope you’ll subscribe via email or RSS feed (or update your old subscriptions*) and come along for the ride.

xo

*Some helpful fine print:

RSS Subscribers: We think your feeds will automatically update, but please do double-check and resubscribe if you don’t see any new posts from me next week —I’d hate to lose you!

Email Subscribers: Your subscriptions will not transfer, so you’ll need to resubscribe to the new feed. As always, rest assured that I’ll never do anything unseemly with your email address.

WordPress Followers: Alas. I’m going where you can’t follow (to wordpress.org — hooray, no ads!). So please consider swapping over to an RSS or email subscription — or just bookmarking this site!

Facebook: I’ll be retiring the Beauty Schooled Facebook Page and switching to a Virginia Sole-Smith Facebook Page, so I’d be extra delighted if you’d head over and like that. 

If you have any questions or concerns about your subscription or just general feedback about the new site, feel free to leave a comment or email me: virginiasolesmith [at] gmail [dot] com.