Darkoshi

What ISIS really wants - interesting article. I hadn't known that ISIS had declared a caliphate, or even the implications thereof.

.

R2D2 and Darth Vader shower heads - Of all the things, shower heads? Personally I wouldn't want R2D2 or Darth Vader streaming water down on me, in the shower or anywhere else.

It continues to delight me, seeing so many colorful athletic shoes now available and marketed towards both men and women, both boys and girls. Sometimes it isn't even immediately obvious which gender they are intended for.

A K-mart ad has a kids' shoe decorated with a cartoon skull bedecked with a pink bow. Based on the colors, it is marketed towards girls. Till now, I've only seen skull emblems on boys' clothing. Personally, I don't care for skulls and death symbols, but it's interesting to see this kind of gender cross-over in fashion... Ah, the pink bow skull emblem is from Monster High. I suppose it isn't really cross-over then... a marketing distinction still remains, of things for girls being made to look cute, and things for boys being made to look ominous / dangerous.

At Kohl's, I found an awesome pair of shoes with orange and turquoise highlights, non-leather and made by Asics.

Kohl's also impressed me with colorful dress socks in the men's section. There were bright red ones, pink ones, and several multi-colored patterned ones. Bright neon-colored athletic socks also caught my eye. I don't think men's socks would fit me well though. Besides the foot size being larger, they tend to go partway up the calf, and I don't really understand what keeps them from falling down, compared to knee-socks where the top elastic is above the calf.

I recently bought scent samples from The Mad Poet's Perfumery Menace. Because all of the descriptions sounded intriguing, I got one of each available scent. They are made with essential oils... I've got a nice collection of essential oils of my own, and sometimes use them to make a room smell nice. I enjoy sniffing new scents and combinations of scents; it's like opening a present to discover what's inside. So now I've got a bunch of little presents to open and sniff. So far, most of them have been quite a wonderful experience. I might even take to wearing them on my skin once in a while.

There's some underlying ingredient (I suspect artificial musk) in many commercial perfumes which is off-putting to me, but I don't have the same reaction to essential oils.

I got to wondering about the logic in having some scents marketed as "feminine" and some as "masculine". I'd expect heterosexual people to choose scents for themselves to wear, which are pleasant to both themselves and their existing and/or prospective partners.
Therefore a "feminine" scent should be pleasing to both women and men, and a "masculine" scent should also be pleasing to both women and men. So why are the scents marketed by gender? Why do women prefer a certain type of scent on themselves versus on their partners, and vice versa? If they like a certain scent on themselves, why wouldn't they like it on their partners too?

Or is there a non-cultural bias of men towards favoring certain scents, and women towards favoring other scents? As long as either group of scents isn't off-putting to the other gender, that could lead to a scent divide along gender lines. But that wouldn't explain why a woman would prefer one scent on her and a different scent on her masculine partner.

That seems to simply be cultural... certain types of scent have been deemed more acceptable for women, and other types have been deemed more acceptable for men.

Based on traditional divisions of work by gender... Food scents may be associated with women, because if a woman smells like nice food, that may indicate that she is a good cook. Woodsy scents may be associated with men, because if a man smells woodsy, that may mean he's been hard at work in the woods. Or if he smells spicy, that may mean he's been hard at work in the spice-mines. :-)