How I learned to stop worrying and killed a Smurf.

The Saturday before last I strolled into the salon my cousin works at and sat down in her chair. I was badly in need of a cut - I'd let my bob grow out a bit and the back was starting to drive me nuts. We chatted a bit and then I asked her the question I'd been considering since I'd booked the appointment.

"Can we bleach this?"

She looked me over, considered, and said, "Let me check my time."

Luck was in my favour, and soon enough I was sitting there with my scalp burning in that itchy, not-quite-horrible way anyone who has ever stripped their colour knows.

I've been dying my hair black for years - it's my default. As such I couldn't exactly go blonde, but my cousin bleached me out pretty good. (Took two sessions.) We then slathered on a deep cobalt blue.

Yes, at 32 years old, I have blue hair.

 Here are things I'd forgotten about having unnaturally-hued hair:

- Your bathtub will take on a new shade. Mine looks like I dismembered a Smurf in it.

- If you're like me and you figure you may as well go all the way, you'll spend time in the drugstore holding eyeliners up to your hair to try and match your eyebrows. (Shadows tends to have sparkle, so they're useless.)

- Your makeup routine may need adjusting. The blue tends to highlight the circles under my eyes (which I swear get worse every year) and also wash me out a bit. I actually had to buy blush.

- You will spend a few days adjusting to the looks you will naturally draw.

- Little kids will LOVE your new look.

So why did I dye my hair blue? I love being a brunette, but I've wondered since hacking my hair off what it might look like lighter. So this is basically Step One in that direction - once it grows out some, I'll talk to my cousin about taking it a bit lighter. Eventually I'd like to see if I can't rock a pale colour or possibly even a platinum. This may not work with my skin tone, but we'll see.

In the meantime, I am finally used to the bright colour in the mirror every morning. My biggest concern when I dyed it was that I would look too young - like I was trying to be a teenager again. Thus far that doesn't seem to be an issue, thankfully.

I realise that I may come off as a very shallow person, as I tend to talk about glamour and the power of visuals a lot, but I'm a Libra, what did you expect?  More seriously, I find it continually fascinating how our self image is entirely malleable and the past year has been an exercise in shifting perspective for me personally.

Every so often you need to shake up your image of yourself. 

Right, Creepy Tiki Mug?

Blue hair means relearning not to give a fuck. It means taking myself a bit less seriously. It means not settling into patterns because that's how I feel I should be. I can get locked into ideas of myself, and while they don't tend to make me miserable, they can limit my experience. Drastically altering my dumb hair colour proves, in a weirdly tangible way, that I can do shit I might not usually. I'm taking a can-can class next month. I'm seriously considering putting together an occult group. My body continues to become stronger, and my brain seems eager to catch up.

I encourage anyone reading this to do something just a little bit different with themselves, if only for a day. You might not shift your whole paradigm, but you might open yourself to the idea of such.

Both me, folks.

These photos were both taken last night with the same crappy filter on my cameraphone. The first is almost directly after I got home from preforming at the Taboo Revue, and the second is probably twenty minutes later after I'd taken off the false lashes, washed my face, taken out my contacts and thrown on my PJs.

"Glamour: an illusion so real as to fool an onlooker…"


In other news, recorded a new podcast with Messrs. Quast and Harron tonight on the spookiness of winter.

Growing Up Gawthic

Fallen a bit behind on the blogging lately, but not for lack of things to talk about!

First and foremost... Stripped, Scared and Sacred is back. Love That Lovecraft! (Part One.) The sound quality of the podcast is much improved, as we went and got a decent microphone. Part Two of the Lovecraft extravaganza will be up soon, and features Andrew Harron and David Quast, both of who were in the recent production of An Evening With Professor Byron Price.

Also soon to be featured on the podcast... Tristan Risk! We talk a little about her role in American Mary but mostly we discuss growing up spooky. Keep an eye out for those upcoming guests!

G is for Glamour

 (This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project. It's a week late. H is coming tomorrow.)

Tim Gunn is my spirit animal.

This realisation came to me while I was at work the other day, presented with yet another mountain of requests from our episode coordinator. But really, it's a deep spiritual truth.

Besides bestowing his chosen with the power to make it work, the Tim Gunn also imparts the understanding of the power of fashion.

"Mama, what the fuck, you drunken hussy," you may be saying. "What does fashion have to do with magic?"

Well, my darlings, I have two things to say in reply to that:

1) how did you know I was drunk?!

and 2) oh, witches, it's glamour.

I've spoken on the topic a bit already, but it's a big one and I'm going to revisit it here.

Physical appearance matters. You can argue about whether or not it should, if you like, but while you do that I'm going to excuse myself and get more gin.

In our society we have some pretty toxic beauty standards. Eating disorders and cosmetic surgery are a fact of life, and it is not my intention to encourage such things or to foster body hatred. Far from it. I truly and honestly believe that beauty is not a dress size, and women in particular need to nurture a true love for their own physical forms, no matter their perceived 'flaws.'

Style is not about hating your body. It's about dressing it to your advantage.  People will react to you based on how you present yourself, and no matter how comfortable you might feel, sometimes you need to make adjustments in order to get the reaction you want.

My favourite episode of 'What Not to Wear' is a good example of what I'm getting at. (It's a TV show in Salem. You're gonna see Christian Day, although he amuses me in this. "She looks like Joan Crawford meets the Whore of Babylon and I LOVE IT!") Here's a woman who dresses like a Halloween decoration, and while twenty-something me adores it, it really is not appropriate for someone trying to make suburban housewives feel comfortable while getting a tarot reading.

Now. The rest of the world isn't Salem. Most pagans I've met tend to be more... well. Frumpy. Big t-shirts. Jeans that don't fit. Huge ponderous piles of jewellery.

I'm going to quote old Uncle Anton, here:
"Concerning amulets, wear only one at a time, and tastefully, so it looks like a functional piece of jewellery. Would-be witches are notorious for loading themselves up with so much hardware in the form of amulets and talismans that its a damn good thing they don't really ride broomsticks since they'd never make it off the runway."

Bitch had a point.

(Although if I ever find a replica of the inverted pentagram Margaret Krusmark wears in Angel Heart? I am buying it.)


By now you might be thinking you've accidentally started reading Cosmo... although if you had there'd be a lot more terrifying sex tips that could result in severe bodily injury.

"Mama, I know what friggin glamour is. It's that scene in The Craft when Sarah turns her hair blonde via green-screen!"

You ever try that? I did, when I was a teenager. It didn't work any better than you'd expect.

But ignoring the Hollywood bullshit, lets turn our attention from the mundane tricks of glamour - waist definition, groomed eyebrows, killer shoes - to the purely magical. After all, we're witches. We don't play fair.

If glamour is, as I've said, about projecting a certain image, then it makes sense to approach it in much the same way you would ritual. First, pick your aim. Are you influencing for wealth? Sex? Staying out of prison? Next, consider your tools - in this case clothes, hair, jewellery. From there you can turn to correspondences of colour and scent.

I'm not saying you should go entirely nuts - have you ever noticed that wearing all of one colour besides black makes you look like you like a crazy person? - but incorporating a bit of colour magic into your outfit is a good way to boost your enchantment. It can be as subtle as purple eyeshadow to command respect or see more intuitively, or a tiger's eye ring to boost your follow-through and make you seem more dependable.

I read once that a lady's perfume should be subtle enough that one has to lean in to smell it. So in other words, don't drench yourself in the stuff. A subtle touch of fragrance, however, can work wonders in your favour as smell is probably the sense most likely to totally bypass the thinking portion of people's brains.

Smell of SEDUCTION.

My personal go-to for scents remains Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs, although you can find some good witchy sellers on websites like Etsy who make perfumes specifically designed for magical purposes. The key is to find something that a) doesn't reek like patchouli or Brut, and b) has ingredients that would traditionally correspond with your goal. (And I may have just shit myself because I noticed BPAL has a fucking Labyrinth Series...)

 And of course, the most important part of glamour magic is to actually charge all your various elements with your intent. Don't just get dressed - get dressed, look in that mirror, and tell yourself what you damn well mean to accomplish. Own it. After all...

"Throwing a glamour, an illusion so real as to fool an onlooker, is one of the oldest forms of magic..."

You can do that. You're a witch, darling.

Twin Glamours: Burlesque and Witchcraft

Or: What glitter can do for you.

No, I don't know what I was thinking.

When I was in my early twenties, I had a brief affair with a Satanist. He looked remarkably like Marc Bolan, wore a leather jacket no matter the weather, and loved Conan the Barbarian. One night, over drinks in the world's ugliest faux Irish pub, he lent me a copy of Anton Szandor LaVey's The Satanic Witch. I'm sure I was supposed to be very scandalised and maybe a bit titillated. I read the book from cover to cover, and when I was later asked for my opinion I declared, with one eyebrow arched, “That book is about my MOTHER.”


I still have the book. It's dated, and nobody could claim it's a great work of literature, but I hang onto it because it continues to hold relevance in my life despite my disagreements with it. I will return to this fact later. But first, my mom, the accidental Satanic Witch.

Growing up, my mother always stressed the importance of 'looking nice.' This is not to say she was one of those women you see on Toddlers and Tiaras forcing her kids into makeup – she was nothing of the sort. I was a teenager in the 1990s, when grunge was king, and my mother never once questioned my fashion choices, even when they veered into the unusual; black lipstick and combat boots were my uniform throughout much of highschool, and my mother simply encouraged me no matter what my style to try and look my best in my own way. To look put together, even if that included vinyl pants. My mother knew looks mattered.


Human beings are visual creatures. We judge one another by our appearance long before we utter a word. Most would agree that this is a pretty simple fact. (Whether or not it's fair is not relevant.) Another basic truth is that physical appearance, to a large degree, is easy to manipulate, So easy, in fact, that I am constantly surprised by how many witches and magicians overlook the opportunity to do so.

During the aforementioned black lipstick phase, a friend and I once conducted an experiment for a class. We stopped strangers in the park and asked them a series of bullshit questions on camera, supposedly for a class assignment. In reality we didn't care about their answers – we cared about their reaction to the interviewer, caught handily on film. My friend was clean-cut, with brown hair and a button-down blouse. If memory serves, my hair was violent red and black at the time, and my makeup was straight out of Siouxsie Sioux's liner notes. I also wore an inverted cross necklace just to make things even more entertaining.

Not surprisingly, our hypothesis was proved correct: we got very different reactions. That silly little experiment hammered home at an early age the fact that people will assume all manner of things based on how you present yourself.


I'm thirty-years old, now, and I am a burlesque performer. Burlesque is a world inhabited by people (mostly women) of all shapes, sizes, and styles. The one thing every last professional of the art has in common, however, is the understanding that looks can be manipulated... and used to manipulate. Burlesquers are natural witches in the way old Anton would have understood.

In The Satanic Witch, LaVey discusses 'the Law of the Forbidden,' “Nothing,” he states, “is so fascinating as that which is not meant to be seen.” He has an entire chapter devoted to the correct way in which a lady should 'accidentally' expose herself! Now, while his suggestions are for everyday life, reading them I am struck by how similar they are to the art of the tease. Burlesque performers are strippers, yes, but strippers who seem to intuitively grasp the ideas LaVey talks about – simply taking off your clothes is not enough. He also discusses at length a witch's mode of dress. He suggests the aspiring witch look to the cartoons in men's magazines, as these are exaggerations of a style designed to elicit a particular response. Striptease is really no different – the corsets, false eyelashes, garters, and spike heels are all part of the act.

And that's really it. It's an act. My friend Diamond Minx, when seen at an event, is a vision in rhinestones from head to toe. You would think the woman lived in a state of constant luxury, all glitter and champagne. But here's a secret... I've seen her in sweatpants. It's a glamour. A glamourous glamour, to be sure, but as changeable as all the rest.


Glamour is not just for the stage. There is just as much a need for it in the office, at the PTA, or on your online dating profile. Your appearance is a statement, and may vary depending on circumstance: a corset in a fetish club is not shocking, but the same outfit in church is. This has nothing to do with calling out certain looks, either. This is about deliberate intent, not personal taste. Glamour is powerful everyday magic, and in my experience the witch who overlooks it is doing so out of sheer stubbornness and ego. It's as though nobody wants to believe that others could possibly judge them on their appearance, because we're special, and above such trivial things.

Uh-huh.

You can charge a piece of jewellery with the intent to draw love, but your chances are going to be better if you bother to comb your hair, brush your teeth, and tailor your clothes.

2012 is a big year for many of us. And so I encourage all and sundry to not neglect your glorious meatsack. Put your best foot forward physically as well as spiritually – take a moment to examine your style critically and make sure it's 'on message' with your goals. If it isn't, tweak it with intent. Glamour is the art of pairing the physical and the energetic. Use it!


“I advocate glamour. Every day. Every minute.” - Dita Von Teese