Don’t feel like shopping? Read these favorites from EcoSalon instead.

20 Unusual Uses for Coffee: Never feel guilty for needing your caffeine fix again. Coffee is useful!

We all have a story behind the piece in our closet we love most. Perfumier Amanda Walker wears a power necklace that gets her through every challenge. In this week’s Closet Stories, we learn about how the power within might start with the power we wear.

So you want to be a femme fatale like Rita Hayworth? Just start slapping men across the face and include plenty of pouting. This week’s Women in Film: How To Be a Femme Fatale shows how to do it best.

Dreams are vital, but there are times when you just have to let go. In Danielle LaPorte’s Find a New Target for Your Long-Unfulfilled Dream: A Love Story we learn how to do just that.

Speaking of jewelry imbued with powers, we were elated to read about peacock feathers as a “protective amulet against psychic attack.” In Rowena Ritchie’s piece on Alkemie’s Peacock Feather Necklace, we learn that the peacock feather is said to safe guard calm energy in every environment. Does this include the mall?

The post The Friday 5: Screw You Black Friday Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

Rita Hayworth’s Gilda was the ultimate femme fatale, but do we want to emulate her?

Becoming a classic Hollywood femme fatale is very simple. Start with the basics. Lean back in your posture at all times. Lead with your breasts. Work your eyelashes vigorously as if live tarantulas are in fact affixed to your lids. Keep your arms akimbo with your hands on your hips. Make direct eye contact a lot, but don’t look too alert. Then start slapping everyone you see. (*Don’t slap everyone you see.) You’re out for revenge.

Becoming a new Hollywood femme fatale is simpler. You flash your crotch at the camera and then take an ice pick to anyone who gets in your way. Luckily, you sometimes get to wear flats.

But back to the old school way of femme fatale thinking.

Rita Hayworth used to say “They go to bed with Gilda, and they wake up with me.” Her 1946 turn as Gilda was made iconic by her one-glove striptease, placing Hayworth permanently into the American cultural brain as the ultimate femme fatale. She played such havoc on the zeitgeist that her “bombshell” image was affixed to the first nuclear bomb tested after World War II. You know you’re sexy in America when your cinematic image evokes mass destruction.

We enjoy ourselves a femme fatale, but we’re not sure we ought to. Like a George Clooney girlfriend, they seem interchangeable. Sure, she might have red hair, or blonde ringlets, or sleek black bangs, but doesn’t it just seem like she’s there to make the man look good? We covet their style, their hair, their ability to work an evening glove. But the femme fatale is often a non-entity, a woman who doesn’t seem to be in control of her own life. Her central theme is inevitably a man’s downfall or redemption. And really, where’s the fun in that?

So let’s reclaim our femme fatales. Gilda does not have to be anti-feminist. She’s like a lollipop. They aren’t inherently sexist, until you place one in the hands of a greased-up 24-year-old woman on the cover of a men’s magazine. Instead, let’s see Gilda as a window of empowerment. We can all vamp in red lipstick, corsets, and elbow-length gloves, but we’re doing it for ourselves and carefully, in heels.

The post Women on Film: How to be a Femme Fatale appeared first on EcoSalon.