There’s a scene from Mad Men that I think about a lot. Peggy Olson, the young copywriter, is confidently delivering a pitch to an important client. The client licks his teeth at her in what she reads as a crude but ignorable gesture. The meeting ends successfully, she smiles at her colleagues and is told matter-of-factly that she has lipstick on her teeth. Her colleague, a man she’d argued with earlier, had deliberately not told her in order to humiliate her. A small disrespect in the context of 1960s ad agencies but one that still stings.

There is something incredibly humiliating not only about being marked by something embarrassing but in being blissfully unaware of it, especially if you’re a woman. Spinach in your teeth, toilet paper on your shoe, visible snot in your nostril or — if you’re really unlucky — menstrual blood on the back of your skirt. For the most part, I genuinely do not care if I find myself at the end of the day with a smear of chocolate on my cheek or if I have sleep in the corner of my eye at 4 p.m. I’m a human and these things happen to humans. Who cares!

But like Peggy in that conference room, hurriedly rubbing red from her teeth, I feel like I am constantly on the verge of humiliation when it comes to how I smell. In particular, that I would unknowingly smell bad.

For a while we were away from other people and their accompanying scents and during that time became even more acclimatized to our own bodies. This isn’t helped by the fact that you can’t really smell yourself anyway. According to Pamela Dalton, PhD, MPH, at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, your olfactory systems are desensitized to your own scent. Even if the scent is clearly bad, the odor receptors in your brain acclimatize and after a while stop sending messages about a lingering scent. And that’s before you take into consideration how COVID-19 has wrecked our senses. Anosmia (loss of smell) is a prominent symptom of the virus and although sufferers’ sense of smell should return within a week, there is no guarantee and a significant number of people who were infected, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, continue to have their sense of smell affected.

Until fairly recently I was conscious of, but not too focused on, my scent. To my mind I didn’t have a particular scent either way. I am a sweaty person and an oily person but I shower regularly and I feel like post-workout stink is understandable on others when they’ve clearly just exercised. But in recent years that indifference has morphed into a hyperawareness.

Even if you account for viruses and your own standard scent perception, all sorts of things can affect both how you smell and how you perceive it. Anxiety can change your sweat in a bad way and can alter your smell perception to make benign odors smell worse. So can paranoia, and the fixated thinking common with conditions like OCD or dysmorphia can be smell-specific, too — there are cases of olfactory reference syndrome (ORS), whereby sufferers are so convinced they stink that they cannot leave their homes, despite having no bad scent at all. On top of that, fatigue (brought on by anything from COVID to malaise to a whole range of chronic illnesses and mental health conditions) can make it harder to wash as often as you once did (even if the change is only minimal). Likewise, not washing as frequently can be a response to trauma or can be tied up in sensory issues. And, of course, we are on the edge of a summer heatwave.

You’d think that all of this, plus time away from sweaty, sticky crowds, would make people more understanding of the fact that we all have a scent. But the reacquaintance with the scent of humanity, for me at least, has made me significantly more self-conscious about it.

The fear of smelling bad to other people doesn’t just rest in your own head. The fear comes from how other people will interpret it: You are lazy and you don’t take care of yourself. You are disgusting and, especially if you are read as a woman, failing to live up to gendered expectations. To be a sweaty, greasy woman is unfeminine and only acceptable in contexts that can be linked to desirability — either changing or “improving” your body by working out, or in sexual scenarios. Sweaty foreheads in a meeting or sticky pits on the bus need not apply. And tied up in this is an assumed foolishness: either you know you don’t smell “right” and aren’t ashamed of it (which is something women should reject) or you don’t know and are therefore an idiot for not realizing who should be taken down a peg.

After decades of marketing of soaps, salves, toothpastes and creams that promote cleanliness alongside smelling good, it’s no wonder we have such clear delineations between good and bad people based on how they smell. The fear, for me at least, is ultimately being unable to control how people see me and that, without knowing it, I could be repelling people.

But human beings have a smell! We all do. And that is not a bad smell that necessarily needs to be masked by perfume or vigorously washed away three times a day.

The solution to this problem isn’t to wash constantly, at least not for me. That is my impulse but I can tell you now, as someone with a history of OCD, that behavior like that can quickly lead you into desperately anxious territory, where the scale of what is acceptable gets worse and worse.

Nor is the solution to reject hygiene and embrace the stink. Human beings smell, yes, but there’s a reason certain scents repel us. Maintaining basic hygiene is important for yourself and for others.

Beating yourself up over pit stains in the summer or repeatedly sniffing your hair because it’s been two days since you showered is a waste of time and energy. The way you smell is not a rejection of womanhood or a sign of laziness or ignorance. Smelling bad one day is not a moral failing. Worrying that you do takes up valuable time that you could spend living your life, maybe even having the kind of fun that makes sweating worth it.

This article was originally published on Refinery29 UK.

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On Saturday I am close to tears for the first time in weeks. I can feel them blooming behind my eyes as I watch, of all things, the season one finale of Ugly Betty. “Somewhere” from West Side Story swells as Betty’s sister, Hilda, learns that her fiancé, Santos, has been shot. She collapses in sobs on screen while I valiantly well up, focusing on my tear ducts. I know I can do it. I can feel the brimming of emotion that always gets me during melodramatic moments; my cheeks and eyes feel swollen and my forehead is dramatically crinkled. Eventually, as Hilda’s sobs echo around the school hall, I feel myself blink out two distinct tears from each eye.

My wife, unperturbed by the dramatic performance on the sofa next to her, doesn’t notice until I wildly, enthusiastically, throw a balled up sock at her.

“Babe, look! I did it. I cried!”

I’ve always been a crier. Tears would spring to my eyes unbidden for the silliest reasons: a deliberately emotive ad for a bank featuring a queer couple; a puppy tripping over its paws in the park; seeing friends on Zoom for the first time in less than a week. I am an advertiser’s dream. My feelings are always on the surface or ready to rise to it, and they can absorb me in seconds. I recognize how ridiculous it is to be swayed so easily – especially by media that is designed exactly to catch suckers like me – but it is an integral facet of my being. I am someone who is moved deeply by innocuous things. There’s a catharsis to being so absorbed by a feeling (whether it is joy, anger, or sadness) before it dissipates. More often than not, I feel renewed.

But in recent years my tears have been less innocent. When I first got absorbed by anxiety (which turned out to be OCD) in 2019 I couldn’t understand why I was feeling such panic. I became increasingly terrified of my own thoughts and the fear and doubt that encircled me would make me sob in terror. This escalated until at its worst I was having what I called anxiety attacks almost daily – a thought that would once have seemed innocuous now felt paralyzing and I would feel trapped in a spiral of panic which I could only express in deeply overwrought sobs. Even when I was coping, balancing on the precipice between obsession and normalcy, my eyes felt like overfull buckets that could tip at a moment’s notice. I went from feeling my emotions at their fullest to feeling too much. It was a constant overflow.

Crying went from an innocuous expression of emotion to an indication of despair. It was no longer cathartic; it didn’t allow for healing for myself or anyone around me. The tears were symptomatic of a much larger problem: my inability to separate my thoughts from my feelings or recognize how my thoughts and feelings actually interacted with reality. I would cry at every therapist session as I explained how recently I’d had a sobbing panic attack. Some days I’d wake consumed by fear and spend the best part of the morning fighting the urge to give in and let the tears flow. Other times I would end up collapsed in a corner in my flat, trying to rein myself in, knowing full well that whatever was consuming me had no bearing on reality. Back when we worked in the office, I would steal away to the bathroom to attempt to calm down and wipe the evidence from my reddened cheeks; while working from home I would often have to take breaks to practice breathing and stem the flow.

In almost every instance, the scale of my distress was an overreaction. But the nature of OCD is that the pattern of obsessive thought and anxious response was being ingrained into my psyche. It would take much more than rationality to break the hiccuping, sobbing cycle.

My propensity for crying was now directly linked to my OCD and it was all-encompassing. I could well up at a memory or the reminder of a person or some other invention from my own head but I would also be caught up by the most obvious reality TV machinations designed to jerk tears. I wouldn’t know why I was crying as often as I would. If it was suffocating for me it was overwhelming the people I love, too – I had no room for anyone else’s emotions, no space to respond calmly. At its worst it felt like these tears were an inadvertent weapon to bring focus back to me. While I can say this was never my intention, when I was at my worst I was so in my head that I couldn’t always see those outside it.

Throughout this I was incredibly lucky. I had the financial support of my parents, which allowed me to go to private therapy, something I could not afford on my salary alone. Through diligent work with my therapist on understanding how my brain functions and disengaging from its most destructive patterns, the periods of time between panicked sobbing slowly lengthened. They went from daily to weekly to fortnightly and after two and a half years they were happening barely monthly. But they were always looming just beyond my direct line of vision. Tears lingered beneath the surface at any given time.

I worked hard to get better. I went to therapy regularly and practiced my CBT every day. I cut out drinking which could exacerbate obsessive, anxious patterns and I took up meditation, which acted as a daily reminder to disengage from my thoughts and not be consumed by them. Slowly, over the course of a year, I came more into myself again. But the overwhelming emotionality that was an inherent part of me and the worst aspects of my OCD lingered. My eyes felt overfull, ready to spill at a moment’s notice. I felt a constant emotional pull in all directions. I’d tell my therapist that despite feeling better I still felt trapped by the potential to be sucked in again. I may have turned the corner but I sensed that it wouldn’t take long for an overflow of feelings to catch up with me, no matter how hard I worked on myself.

Which is how I ended up finally taking antidepressants, two and a half years after I first sought help.

Antidepressants are increasingly contentious. In particular, the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) has risen steadily in recent years. During 2015 to 2018, over 13% of U.S. adults reported using an antidepressant medication in the last month, and roughly twice as many women (17.7%) as men (8.4%) used them, according to the Centers For Disease Control & Prevention. They are prescribed for a range of mental health conditions, though their primary use is for depression and then anxiety.

But as their prescription trends upwards, so too do questions about their usage, especially for depression. In November last year the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published new guidelines on managing depression in adults for the first time in 12 years, advocating that those with less severe depression “should be offered therapy, exercise, mindfulness and meditation before antidepressants“. This was followed by a study published in the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin which stated: “Much of the evidence of their efficacy comes from short-term placebo-controlled trials which tend not to include outcomes that are of greatest relevance to patients, such as social functioning or quality of life, but rather restrict outcomes narrowly to symptom measures. On such measures these studies do not demonstrate clinically significant differences from placebo for depression.” (Worth noting: No one should stop taking any medication they’re prescribed without first speaking and working closely with their doctor.)

These questions about the efficacy of antidepressants focus primarily on their use case for depression, particularly as the side effects can be significant: nausea, disturbed sleep, and sexual problems are all commonly listed. If they are not actually aiding your mood, then how useful can they be to help you get better?

But at least in my experience, their use for OCD seems somewhat remarkable. 

If my brain before felt like an angrily scrawled, jagged ball of steel wool, fluoxetine (also known as Prozac, the SSRI most recommended for OCD) encased my obsessive, anxious thoughts in rubber. It was like my mind was wearing soapy gloves and could no longer grip onto any passing thought that triggered an anxiety response. Instead the thought would glide on through and my body wouldn’t shudder with fear as it passed. What was torturously hard now felt easy and as the dose went up (40-60mg is recommended for the anti-obsessional effects) I regained a sense of normalcy that I thought I’d lost forever.

There is far less research into the use of SSRIs for OCD than into their use for depression (mainly because depression is far more pervasive) but what research is out there indicates that “SSRIs are more effective than placebo for OCD, at least in the short term, although there are differences between the adverse effects of individual SSRI drugs.” In particular, “fluoxetine is effective and well tolerated in OCD, placing it among the first-line treatments recommended by consensus conference guidelines.”

But with that efficacy comes the one side effect I have yet to list: emotional blunting.

This is the term for the fact that, among other things, I could no longer cry. It felt like there were small sponges padding the inside of my eye sockets, absorbing tears before they could spill over. Emotional blunting also comes in more extreme forms, which I’m lucky to have avoided. People are unable to feel any emotion in its entirety, be it joy, sadness or anger. Some describe it as ‘feeling beige’ and it’s believed by some to be not only a side effect of the antidepressants but perhaps a residual symptom of the condition (though this is only a hypothesis). As with the efficacy of the SSRIs themselves, there is limited research into emotional blunting in patients with OCD, though small studies have found “a syndrome consisting of apathy and indifference” reported among patients with OCD who are being treated with fluoxetine or fluvoxamine.

For many, myself included, this is the greatest and longest lasting cost of getting better. Is moving through the world with more ease really worth a sense of detachment? What am I missing out on by being unable to feel? It is surreal to have this tap that dripped so liberally and literally turned off.

Everyone has their own relationship with medication like this. I would never insist that others do what I do or take what I take. I hope that I do not have to remain on these antidepressants for much longer than a couple of years. But the relief of being able to think clearly, to not feel weighed down by your own head – it still makes me giddy.

I may not be able to cry anymore without deep concentration and the music of Leonard Bernstein. This is a cost to my life now. Crying has been, for better or worse, a facet of who I am and how I communicate with the world. I love to feel things deeply, to be swayed by a piece of music or sniffle at a video of a kid getting cochlear implants for the first time. I miss that freedom to be so freely and fully overwhelmed by feeling without fearing it will tip me into collapse.

If I’m honest with myself I didn’t lose that when I started fluoxetine. I lost its clarity long before, when these deep, cathartic cries were subsumed by panicked, uncontrolled, constant sobs, triggered by practically nothing.

I hope one day to get the tears back. To experience that emotive release of the first 10 minutes of Up, wringing you out and making you feel anew.

But for me, for now, the benefits far outweigh these costs. I may feel muffled at the most extreme ends of experience but I also feel unbridled joy again. The relief of no longer feeling like you are being chased by your own neurotic thought patterns is uncontained. One day, who knows when, this contentment won’t feel surreal and foreign but will once again be my normal. Perhaps then I can take steps to return to my absolute fullness, brimming with angry, sad, confused and joyful tears. Until then I will live in this strange, slightly muffled world where I can finally see clearly again.

If you are struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder and are in need of information and support, please call the National Alliance on Mental Illness at 1-800-950-6264. For a 24-hour crisis line, text “NAMI” to 741741.

If you are experiencing depression and need support, please call the National Depressive/Manic-Depressive Association Hotline at 1-800-826-3632 or the Crisis Call Center’s 24-hour hotline at 1-775-784-8090.

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“Can we stop referring to having children as ‘starting a family’? Couples are a family regardless of whether they have children or not.” 

This was a comment on a recent article I wrote about the cost of having children keeping women in unhappy jobs and it made me reflect on the way we describe families. It’s a conversation I’ve been having with members of our Money Diaries Facebook group, too.

‘Family’ is a word that has many definitions but the most common usages are along generational lines. In this context, a family is a group of (normally biologically) connected generations, primarily centering on parents and children. In society at large, this definition has long been normalized along the lines of the nuclear family – a catchall term coined in the early 20th century to describe the familial ideal of mother, father, and biological children (plural).

This definition of family has been useful, particularly politically. As Sarah Jaffe writes in her introduction to Work Won’t Love You Back: “The family itself was and is a social, economic, and political institution. It developed alongside other such institutions – capitalism and the state – and, like them, developed as a mechanism of controlling and directing labor, in this case, the labor of women.” The labor in this instance is the labor of love, the act of caring for and sustaining the money-earning labor of the man as well as raising children to repeat the cycle. Reproduction through family lines was necessary across the classes both to produce new workers and bring in more essential income, and to keep wealth and land within the clear boundaries of biological ties.

The necessity of defining family in this way is less acute than it was in the 19th and 20th centuries but echoes of it remain, particularly in the popular, more euphemistic definition of family that many (myself included) have unwittingly used. Family is a surrogate term for having children: bringing in a new generation is ‘starting a family;’ a focus of feminist liberation is that women shouldn’t have to choose between work and ‘family’ (aka having children); and questions about whether or not you’re trying to get pregnant are couched in the more indirect phrase: ‘When are you starting your family?’

Despite the pervasiveness of the concept of a ‘nuclear family,’ the ways in which families form have always been as much in flux as they are today. Generations of caregiving and caretaking are the defining factors as opposed to biological connection or even the number of parents. And yet the idea of an explicit parent-child dynamic (ideally biological children of cis man and woman) as the epitome of family persists. Your family, therefore, ‘starts’ only when you become a parent — not a moment before.

I am a lesbian who is both personally and professionally invested in understanding how families are formed outside of the ‘nuclear’ dynamic but I’d never considered the implication of the phrase ‘starting a family’ before. The moment you are encouraged to look at it directly, the implications are obvious, almost jarringly so.

Lara, one of the women who pointed this out to me in our Money Diaries Facebook group and who is childless rather than child-free, tells me: “This terminology contributes to the narrative that we’re incomplete without children and that our family of two is less important than those with children. Once you look for it, you start to see how pervasive the language is — politicians love to talk about ‘hardworking families’ and they always mean people with children.” She adds that this rubs her the wrong way as her childlessness is not deliberate. “Involuntary childlessness is an emotive topic anyway and this just compounds the feeling of being ‘less than.’ I imagine it really pisses child-free people off for similar reasons! I think it’s a very non-inclusive way of asking someone about their home life.”

Kelly, another of the women who commented in the group, adds that she used to use the phrase until someone pointed out to her that it implies that families without children are not families. “In the same way that assuming everyone is aspiring to the nuclear family of a husband, wife, and 2.5 children, this is outdated and excludes everyone who does not fit that default ‘family unit’. I understand that people are not being intentionally hurtful with that comment because it is so ingrained in our society but calling it out is the first step to changing that language and stereotype.”

Shifting our wider definition of family is not just about including those who are childfree or prospective parents who sit outside of the heterosexual, cis norm. This is obviously very important, particularly when it comes to the ongoing inequalities in how non-normative families are treated and what treatment they have access to.

More broadly, it enables us to think of family beyond the individual, isolated unit and as part of a growing, interconnected community. That might be chosen family for trans people isolated from their biological relations, single mothers forming a commune, or even intergenerational friendships.

The language we use doesn’t define how we live but it does shape how we perceive it. It isn’t malicious or ill-intentioned to think of children as the point at which a ‘new’ family ‘starts’ but when you begin to see the patterns in phrases such as this, you begin to recognize how they can subtly warp our expectations of each other. In rejecting them we can make more space for every iteration of family, from childfree to sprawling to chosen, and everything in between. This gives legitimacy not to childrearing or parenting above all else but to the support and community that family can and should give, however it is formed. 

As Kelly puts it: “My husband and I are a family. My friend and her cat are a family. My uncle who lives on his own has a family who cares for him. None of those is missing anything to become a family, they already are one in their own right. If we ever decided to have a child, adopt a child, adopt a pet, or welcomed anyone else into our family, we would consider it expanded, not started.”

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Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a largely invisible mental illness. To those who have never experienced it in themselves or loved ones, it may seem easy to spot: you imagine people repeating phrases, compulsively turning lights on and off or washing their hands until they are raw. It is seen to revolve around a love of cleanliness or perhaps a desire for order, leading people to describe themselves as “a bit OCD” if they enjoy a meticulously organized desk. This public image glides over the churning internal turmoil of OCD and the ways it affects around 1 in 40 adults in the U.S.

The simplest definition of OCD is that it is a serious, anxiety-related condition whereby a person experiences frequent, intrusive and unwelcome obsessional thoughts (obsessions). The recurrence of these thoughts is intensely distressing and the individual feels out of control and seeks to soothe the anxiety through repetitive behaviors or rituals (compulsions) in order to prevent a perceived harm and/or worry on which their obsessions have focused. The irony is that the relief is only temporary — every time the obsession is triggered, the panic starts anew. It can develop at any age and affect anyone, and can be triggered by life events or past trauma (though this isn’t always the case). Its impact can range from mild to severe, although the book Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: The Facts reports that a disproportionately high number (50%) of OCD cases will fall at the severe end.

Compulsions can be external but can often be internal — repeated analysis of memories or checking of actions, a compulsion to confess to imagined sins. Crucially, whether external or internal, compulsions are often hidden. The shame around the obsession itself as well as the inability to dismiss those fears like everyone else keeps it bound up within you, perpetuating the cycle. At its worst, it can take up hours of your day in rituals or absorb every moment of your waking life, leading you to distrust your own memories, overanalyze dreams, disconnect from the present and deeply fear the future, all while withdrawing from the world around you.

I know this because I have struggled with OCD since 2019 and the hardest thing to convey about it is how much it hurts. OCD is a kind of despair — a deep, gnawing panic that can be set off by the most inconsequential thought or phrase. That thought or phrase splinters and balloons in your mind and before you can respond, waves of emotions engulf you. At its worst, thoughts aren’t words anymore, they are a screaming static and reality feels like it’s fallen away from beneath your feet. All you have is a terror that what you’re scared of will come to pass because of you, unless you carry out the soothing compulsion. Until you begin to recover it is constant. Daily, hourly, minute by minute, you are in a mental battle with yourself.

It is only in Hannah Norton’s photo series 20 Seconds To Safety that I have seen a visual depiction that reflects this reality.

The collaborative project is based on her younger sister Katie’s experience of developing OCD around a fear of infecting her vulnerable mom with COVID-19. Hannah tells me it was an attempt to reflect the emotional, all-encompassing nature of the disorder. The result is almost claustrophobic, panic and distress swarming and pushing out any feelings of calm or trust. The series captures what is most impactful to me about OCD: It transforms life’s mundanities into threats. In this way it can feel inescapable.

Katie’s OCD is clearly linked to the pandemic: “I was studying for a food degree at university at the time and I got a phone call from Dad to say that Mum had been diagnosed with breast cancer.” She and her sister went home to spend time with her mother and a couple of weeks later, coronavirus hit. The need to protect her mom was immediately clear, she says. 

“Because of Mum’s treatment, we were told by consultants at the hospital that we couldn’t wear shoes in the house, we had to wash our oranges, we had to literally be [so conscious of infection],” Katie says. As Katie was at university and interacting with people (albeit socially distanced), it became increasingly worrying to her to think that she could have a detrimental effect on her mom: “That’s when the OCD started.”

Her compulsions focused on fear of contamination — from door handles, from other people, from groceries brought into the house — and centered on the dominant government advice about how long to wash your hands for. This ultimately led to the name of Hannah and Katie’s project, 20 Seconds To Safety.

“The name came about because Katie’s compulsion is hand washing,” says Hannah. “The government advice was [to wash for] 20 seconds, so 20 seconds became a real point for Kate and she would count it out compulsively.” As with all compulsions, this only momentarily alleviated the panic and the counting could often run in cycles. “I wanted to focus on this idea that when she washes her hands for 20 seconds, there is some sort of comfort and safety on the other side of that. But it’s only temporary — the 20 seconds would end and then the cycle would start again.”

As is often the case, the scale of the obsession (as well as the responding compulsions) can bloat and expand over time. It has reached a point where Katie’s response is all-encompassing. She gives this example: “You know when someone pushes past you and they don’t say sorry — if someone did that to me in the street, I’d probably have to go home and have a shower. That’s the seriousness of it that people can’t ever comprehend.” 

It was only when talking to Hannah about the extent of her anxiety around coronavirus that Katie sought help. She spoke to her GP about it and he suggested that she probably had OCD.

This informal diagnosis inspired Hannah to create the photo series. “I remember I was almost surprised: what I’d seen was something so emotional and something so consuming, which hadn’t aligned with what I thought OCD was, having had no experience of it before. It was so consuming. I wanted the world to know what an emotional struggle it is and how wrong the narrative around OCD is,” she says. 

Hannah collaborated with Katie and their mom (whose safety was one of Katie’s triggers), aiming to produce a body of work that looked nothing like the assumptions about OCD. They zoomed in on otherwise mundane parts of a person’s day, like going for a walk, with Katie explaining to Hannah how she now approached these tasks. “I asked Katie to explain the process of opening her front door,” Hannah says, “and the level of detail and thought and planning that’s gone into that — I wanted that to be apparent. These things that I don’t think twice about and the way that someone who doesn’t suffer from OCD can move so easily through life. I wanted to touch on those micro moments that become huge when you’re suffering with OCD and anxiety.” In the photos, colored dots depict the minutiae of each thought, feeling, and decision, crowding Katie and jostling for attention. Each emotion flares and subsides depending on the activity but they remain constant — lingering or swarming with each trigger.

Despite a clear pattern to how Katie’s obsessions developed, as well as an informal diagnosis from her doctor, she initially struggled to find a therapist who understood what she was going through. Therapies that focus on how past events shape us and believe that there is a deep root to all our problems do not necessarily work with this form of anxiety. Put frankly, taking thoughts seriously is how the problem started and being encouraged to lean into these thoughts in a therapeutic context can exacerbate distress.

This is what happened to Katie, who describes her initial experiences as “absolutely shocking.” Her first contact was solely concerned with whether she was suicidal and was uninterested in anything else. Her second therapist was, in some ways, worse. “He was agreeing with all the things that I was doing and just reinforced the OCD. I gave up. People say the hardest thing is to seek help but I was doing that and I wasn’t getting any help.”

The lack of understanding only added to the isolation of the condition. If the therapists cannot understand, how can you expect anyone else to get it? The sad answer, too often, is that you can’t. 

“It changes your life,” Katie says. “I’ve stopped seeing friends, I’ve stopped going out… I am getting better at that now but in the past I didn’t go and socialize because of the OCD. I still have a few friends but I have one friend that says, ‘Oh Katie come on, just get over it now’.”

Happily, Katie has now found a therapist who gets it. “She’s very patient, which is key, and she’s not judgmental. That’s so important. I’ve met so many therapists who are so judgmental. So many think that all your past life is so important — it probably has some impact but not as much as the therapists think.”

Katie is slowly getting better, but the path is not linear. You cannot undo all your compulsions at once and she still wears a mask at work though no one else does. She says to her manager that she does this to protect her mom but thinks she probably clings to it because it makes her feel safe. However she doesn’t know how to explain this to her colleagues. “I don’t feel like I can tell anyone I’ve got OCD because I know no one will understand it. So what’s the point? You shouldn’t have to feel like that. That’s what needs to change – it needs to be much more understood.”

20 Seconds To Safety shows that although the focus of obsessions can vary hugely, the way that OCD can distort your life remains constant for people who have it. OCD itself is far more common than you feel it to be when it is at its worst. Realizing this can be a lifeline — knowing that you are not alone, and recovery is possible. As projects like this help us to better understand OCD, perhaps those who are struggling won’t be left feeling so misunderstood and isolated. Far more needs to be done — more investment in mental health services being a crucial piece of the puzzle — but if we’re encouraged to treat each other with greater patience and kindness, we can all help in our own way to alleviate the distress.

If you are struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder and are in need of information and support, please call the National Alliance on Mental Illness at 1-800-950-6264. For a 24-hour crisis line, text “NAMI” to 741741. 

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If only relationships were as simple as they are in rom-coms. Everyone except you can see your other half is blatantly wrong for you, and the only thing keeping them around is the need for dramatic tension. When you eventually break up, it's as though you've been released into the world to finally Be Yourself, before finding your one true love. Two hours, one big night out, and an impulse haircut later and your love life is tidily wrapped up.

But real life isn't like that and relationships don't work for a whole world of reasons. The problems that can arise between two people are complicated, often hard to explain, and can go against every instinct of what you want. Maybe they're the problem, maybe you are. More likely, it's a combination of the two. But even if you don't end it until much later, there is always a moment when you realize, quite clearly, that what you have cannot work anymore. It's this moment, more than anything, that we're interested in.

We asked different people about the moment they knew their relationship was over and why it was the trigger point. For some, it was heartbreaking; for others, liberating. Most importantly, they all survived – even thrived – once the dust had settled.

If these stories can teach us anything it's that relationships, and their endings, are never as clean-cut as we'd like. But that doesn't mean we cannot also find hope and joy after the pain has passed.

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DMTBeautySpot

via https://dmtbeautyspot.com

Sadhbh O'Sullivan, DMT.NEWS, DMT BeautySpot,

#DMTBeautySpot #beauty

If you’ve never seen it before, you should look up pictures of London’s “Big Biba” shop. The seven-story department store opened in Kensington in 1973 following the explosion in popularity of Barbara Hulanicki’s fashion brand. While Biba is often associated with the 1960s (the first store opened in ’64), the interior of Big Biba was, in many ways, quintessentially ’70s. There were loud prints on the home floor, curved edges, soft geometric shapes, and a special commitment to earthy browns and oranges. It was a mishmash of art deco-inspired interiors reminiscent of the golden age of Hollywood, animal prints and beaded fringe, with an eclectic mix of trinkets and low lighting that really brought it all together. It was made to feel intimate, almost seductive — an explicit rejection of the stark lighting and synthetic color palettes of the ’60s.

Until the last few years, ’70s home design remained a largely reviled aesthetic. The rise of Britpop in the ’90s created pockets of ’70s nostalgia and a few trends from the decade have taken on a life of their own (hi, houseplants) but for the most part, ’70s home styling, particularly the swirling wallpaper and autumnal palette, was understood to be an ugly mistake. Sneering books have been written about it, such as Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From The Horrible 70s. Online, there are forums full of people asking, “Why were such awful colors popular in the 1970s?“

Yet ’70s interiors have come back around. Bit by bit, small trends like macramé, rattan, and houseplants have been leaking into modern home decor and the decade is now being embraced with open arms. But why the ’70s? And why now?

When it came to design, the ’70s was an era of play, eclecticism, and optimism. According to Dr. David Heathcote, senior lecturer in graphic design and illustration at the Liverpool School of Art and Design, the period was defined by the transition from modernism into something much more free-form and forward-thinking. “There was no heterogeneous style or styles — it was a free-for-all. Even where it referenced earlier, historic styles, which it began to do, it was in a very obvious and playful way, a kind of non-nostalgic timelessness.”

For homemakers and homeware consumers, the ’70s marked a shift towards the idea that your home could be playful. “I think there was a lot more broad playing with aesthetic ideas which people accepted,” says Dr. Heathcote. “They got used to the idea they could have things in many, many different styles. It was a massively eclectic period.”

What Dr. Heathcote calls the “dressing-up-box culture” of all the subcultures in the ’60s meant that there were many people coming of age in the ’70s who took their subcultural approach from their fashion to their interior design. “You’ve been a rebellious teenager, you leave home, you find a flat you want to stay in, and then you redesign it — all the effort that you put into your dressing is suddenly put into your housing.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Estelle Bilson (@70shousemanchester)

This desire to experiment can be linked to a broader sense of liberalism and curiosity about the world which emerged in the ’70s. Much of the craft revival (particularly with materials like rattan and skills like macramé) can be traced back to what Dr. Heathcote calls an “increasing interest in, for want of a better word, ‘ethnic’ cultures.” There was an idea that a liberal outlook involved not just an acceptance but an enjoyment of other people’s cultures, and by showcasing these influences in your home, you were parading your “embracing the world type approach.” It’s the home design mentality equivalent of popular ’70s backpacking route, the hippie trail — seen just recently in BBC One’s The Serpent.

The problem with our perception of the ’70s as dark and dingy is actually not so much an issue of color as of lighting and fabrics. This was the era of dimmer switches, plush materials like velvet and, frankly, explicitly seductive design. The boudoir feel of places like Biba was inviting after the stark, jolly brightness of the ’60s. To design in a way that was seductive, by ’70s standards, was precisely the point. “There was a heavily eroticised angle to a lot of ’70s design,” says Dr. Heathcote. “It’s as if the permissive society that evolved in the late ’50s and through the ’60s turned itself into designs because there was an awful lot of dalliance with dungeon-like interiors at its most extreme.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Estelle Bilson (@70shousemanchester)

Ultimately, despite economic hardships at home, the ’70s held a sense of optimism about the future as travel and technology grew. This was reflected in home design: things may be bad now but they could be better. Perhaps our renewed interest in ’70s design in 2021 speaks to our wish to return to this sense of optimism and curiosity and even (whisper it) joy. But unlike the forward-looking ’70s, we’re now looking back, seeking comfort in a decade that seems a world away.

Estelle Bilson, the woman behind the much-loved Instagram account @70sHouseManchester, has been collecting ’70s homeware in some form since she was a small child, in part thanks to her father’s career as an antiques dealer. While there is something about the ’70s that she inherently loves, there is also a clear link back to her childhood.

“My parents think it’s really funny because I’m literally buying back the stuff they had in the ’70s. The sunburst rug I have in my dining room is so similar to the one my parents had in the ’60s and ’70s when they lived in London. That style rug was in my bedroom ’til I was about 13 and then it mysteriously got thrown away. I was really upset about that. It took me 15 years to find one to replace it. I had that, and I loved that as a kid, it anchored me in my childhood and really happy times so finding it again was almost like a security blanket. There’s probably some Freudian reason behind why I collect.”

This sense of nostalgia continues with the story that secondhand pieces carry with them, says Natasha Landers, a diversity consultant in Walthamstow who has a love of interior design. “I’m a child of the ’70s and the designs are very nostalgic for me as they remind me of pieces that we had in my home growing up. I am really interested in the fact that each piece will have a story behind [it]. Last year I bought a coffee table from a house clearance and the woman who sold it to me, it was her deceased parent’s house. When I was putting it into the car, she said she remembered playing cards on the table as a child.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Natasha Interiors (@untillemonsrsweet)

There is a wealth of reasons why people are drawn to the ’70s in the 21st century. For some, it’s just a gut pull towards the shapes, textures, and colors of the decade. “If you look at the Evelyn Redgrave piece of fabric I’ve got on my wall,” Estelle says, “with the big swooping colors and the oranges and browns… There’s obviously something in me that I look at it and go ‘Wow.’ I’m sure other people go ‘Eurgh.'”

For others, it is a more explicit rejection of “modern aesthetics.” Isabella Bondo, a student living in Denmark, finds the dominant Scandinavian style “impersonal, clean, and boring.” “In Denmark, it feels like everyone else has the exact same interior style. If that’s what counts as modern design, I’m really not into it. The most important thing for me when it comes to interior design is personality and personal style, and I don’t feel that with modern design aesthetics.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Estelle Bilson (@70shousemanchester)

It is also a rejection of consumerism. Yvonne Chappell, who works in education and lives in Scotland, was initially drawn into ’70s design when she and her fiancé moved into their house, which was built in 1973. “I was immediately fascinated by retro interior design and particularly the colors seen throughout ’70s homes of the time. Being 24, I’ve grown up in a sort of throwaway society where styles change so quickly and things aren’t often built to last (I realized this after buying SO much flat-pack that kept breaking). Seventies furniture can be found in excellent condition to this day; the quality of furniture clearly stands the test of time. I like the idea of loving something that was designed well and designed half a century ago.”

We can even thank (?) the pandemic for accelerating some facets of ’70s design. With access to outdoor spaces severely limited by a series of lockdowns, the desire to bring nature inside both literally and figuratively has soared. The craze for houseplants and other forms of gardening shows no sign of abating. Equally, a pull towards warmer, earthier tones in homeware and interiors can be linked to a growing movement towards design that brings nature into our homes, says registered interior designer Nicola Holden. “Another growing movement in interior design is that of biophilic design, or bringing a connection to nature into our homes. A lot of the ’70s trends incorporate this, such as wood paneling, shag pile carpets, fringing, the use of natural materials and texture (exposed bricks and textured walls), and curved shapes.”

This ties in intimately with the trend towards sustainability, whether it’s earthenware ceramics made by independent artists to house our cheese plants, taking up hobbies to DIY our own crochet blanket or macramé wall hanging, or using more sustainable materials like rattan and cork. By choosing to support small businesses or buy products with a lower carbon footprint, you are inadvertently embracing a ’70s approach to design.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 🌼Isabella Bondo🌼 (@isabellabondo)

Even our pull towards statement lamps is ’70s-esque. Our current desire to create a sense of coziness as well as accommodating home offices has inadvertently led to a return to the low lighting of the ’70s. And the most popular lamp right now, the mushroom lamp, is a direct design import from that era.

The most divisive part of ’70s design is unequivocally the color palette. But after years of minimalism, Scandi chic, and the dominance of cream, grey, and beige, what once seemed gaudy now has a kind of charm. “The ’70s was a time of lurid patterned wallpapers and brightly colored upholstered furniture,” says Nicola. “Today we are definitely moving away from the beige/grey era and towards more color, as people are subconsciously realizing the energy and positivity that color gives us, which has been scientifically proven in the field of color psychology.”

Still, brown needs far more rehabilitation than the oranges, yellows, and avocado greens of the period. 

“People still have a deep hatred for brown,” says Estelle. “It is a really polarising color. But actually, it’s a really good neutral to start from and it’s a really versatile, warm color.” When Estelle found the right shade for her dining room she was delighted to prove to everyone who told her not to paint it brown that, actually, it can look good.

If you want to take a step into the world of ’70s interiors, you don’t have to go all-in like Estelle, Isabella, and Yvonne. Try a softly-softly approach, choosing key ’70s pieces to style as part of a wider eclectic home design. As Camille Montalbo, an American-based thrifting aficionado, told Refinery29, “The way the furniture mixes together is pretty effortless.” Key pieces of furniture like chairs and tables end up being statements, which mesh well with other eras thanks to the simple lines of the design. Camille’s Jerry Johnson Sling Chair remains one of her favorite finds for that reason.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ✨ɪ ʟᴏᴠᴇ ᴏʟᴅ sʜɪᴛ.✨ (@modern.thrifter)

Plus, finding secondhand goods from the era is made easier by the huge proliferation of pieces available. The volume of designs being produced and a sharp increase in consumption mean that there was a lot of design about. And if it’s lasted this long, be assured it will last well into the future.

Beyond furniture, there is a wealth of ’70s-style home decor — both vintage and modern — to add warmth to a room or a statement to a corner, from lamps to sunburst mirrors to velvet throw pillows. If you’re feeling particularly inspired, why not branch into patterned wallpaper — Estelle has recently launched a homeware business of made-to-order wallpapers and fabrics.

The most important thing is to use your instincts and buy what you love. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a ”90s does ’70s’ lamp or something a little bit silly,” says Estelle. “If you absolutely love it, you will have it in your home and you will never tire of it.” And if you’re still put off by the perceived dinginess of the ’70s, just make sure your space is well lit.

At Refinery29, we’re here to help you navigate this overwhelming world of stuff. All of our market picks are independently selected and curated by the editorial team, but if you buy something we link to on our site, Refinery29 may earn commission.

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

Quarantine Has Led To The Return Of The Homemaker

What Is The Meaning Of Home Now?

Is It Time To Move On From Minimalist Decor?

DMTBeautySpot

via https://www.DMTBeautySpot.com

Sadhbh O'Sullivan, Khareem Sudlow

#DMTBeautySpot #beauty

If you’ve never seen it before, you should look up pictures of London’s “Big Biba” shop. The seven-story department store opened in Kensington in 1973 following the explosion in popularity of Barbara Hulanicki’s fashion brand. While Biba is often associated with the 1960s (the first store opened in ’64), the interior of Big Biba was, in many ways, quintessentially ’70s. There were loud prints on the home floor, curved edges, soft geometric shapes, and a special commitment to earthy browns and oranges. It was a mishmash of art deco-inspired interiors reminiscent of the golden age of Hollywood, animal prints and beaded fringe, with an eclectic mix of trinkets and low lighting that really brought it all together. It was made to feel intimate, almost seductive — an explicit rejection of the stark lighting and synthetic color palettes of the ’60s.

Until the last few years, ’70s home design remained a largely reviled aesthetic. The rise of Britpop in the ’90s created pockets of ’70s nostalgia and a few trends from the decade have taken on a life of their own (hi, houseplants) but for the most part, ’70s home styling, particularly the swirling wallpaper and autumnal palette, was understood to be an ugly mistake. Sneering books have been written about it, such as Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From The Horrible 70s. Online, there are forums full of people asking, “Why were such awful colors popular in the 1970s?“

Yet ’70s interiors have come back around. Bit by bit, small trends like macramé, rattan, and houseplants have been leaking into modern home decor and the decade is now being embraced with open arms. But why the ’70s? And why now?

When it came to design, the ’70s was an era of play, eclecticism, and optimism. According to Dr. David Heathcote, senior lecturer in graphic design and illustration at the Liverpool School of Art and Design, the period was defined by the transition from modernism into something much more free-form and forward-thinking. “There was no heterogeneous style or styles — it was a free-for-all. Even where it referenced earlier, historic styles, which it began to do, it was in a very obvious and playful way, a kind of non-nostalgic timelessness.”

For homemakers and homeware consumers, the ’70s marked a shift towards the idea that your home could be playful. “I think there was a lot more broad playing with aesthetic ideas which people accepted,” says Dr. Heathcote. “They got used to the idea they could have things in many, many different styles. It was a massively eclectic period.”

What Dr. Heathcote calls the “dressing-up-box culture” of all the subcultures in the ’60s meant that there were many people coming of age in the ’70s who took their subcultural approach from their fashion to their interior design. “You’ve been a rebellious teenager, you leave home, you find a flat you want to stay in, and then you redesign it — all the effort that you put into your dressing is suddenly put into your housing.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Estelle Bilson (@70shousemanchester)

This desire to experiment can be linked to a broader sense of liberalism and curiosity about the world which emerged in the ’70s. Much of the craft revival (particularly with materials like rattan and skills like macramé) can be traced back to what Dr. Heathcote calls an “increasing interest in, for want of a better word, ‘ethnic’ cultures.” There was an idea that a liberal outlook involved not just an acceptance but an enjoyment of other people’s cultures, and by showcasing these influences in your home, you were parading your “embracing the world type approach.” It’s the home design mentality equivalent of popular ’70s backpacking route, the hippie trail — seen just recently in BBC One’s The Serpent.

The problem with our perception of the ’70s as dark and dingy is actually not so much an issue of color as of lighting and fabrics. This was the era of dimmer switches, plush materials like velvet and, frankly, explicitly seductive design. The boudoir feel of places like Biba was inviting after the stark, jolly brightness of the ’60s. To design in a way that was seductive, by ’70s standards, was precisely the point. “There was a heavily eroticised angle to a lot of ’70s design,” says Dr. Heathcote. “It’s as if the permissive society that evolved in the late ’50s and through the ’60s turned itself into designs because there was an awful lot of dalliance with dungeon-like interiors at its most extreme.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Estelle Bilson (@70shousemanchester)

Ultimately, despite economic hardships at home, the ’70s held a sense of optimism about the future as travel and technology grew. This was reflected in home design: things may be bad now but they could be better. Perhaps our renewed interest in ’70s design in 2021 speaks to our wish to return to this sense of optimism and curiosity and even (whisper it) joy. But unlike the forward-looking ’70s, we’re now looking back, seeking comfort in a decade that seems a world away.

Estelle Bilson, the woman behind the much-loved Instagram account @70sHouseManchester, has been collecting ’70s homeware in some form since she was a small child, in part thanks to her father’s career as an antiques dealer. While there is something about the ’70s that she inherently loves, there is also a clear link back to her childhood.

“My parents think it’s really funny because I’m literally buying back the stuff they had in the ’70s. The sunburst rug I have in my dining room is so similar to the one my parents had in the ’60s and ’70s when they lived in London. That style rug was in my bedroom ’til I was about 13 and then it mysteriously got thrown away. I was really upset about that. It took me 15 years to find one to replace it. I had that, and I loved that as a kid, it anchored me in my childhood and really happy times so finding it again was almost like a security blanket. There’s probably some Freudian reason behind why I collect.”

This sense of nostalgia continues with the story that secondhand pieces carry with them, says Natasha Landers, a diversity consultant in Walthamstow who has a love of interior design. “I’m a child of the ’70s and the designs are very nostalgic for me as they remind me of pieces that we had in my home growing up. I am really interested in the fact that each piece will have a story behind [it]. Last year I bought a coffee table from a house clearance and the woman who sold it to me, it was her deceased parent’s house. When I was putting it into the car, she said she remembered playing cards on the table as a child.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Natasha Interiors (@untillemonsrsweet)

There is a wealth of reasons why people are drawn to the ’70s in the 21st century. For some, it’s just a gut pull towards the shapes, textures, and colors of the decade. “If you look at the Evelyn Redgrave piece of fabric I’ve got on my wall,” Estelle says, “with the big swooping colors and the oranges and browns… There’s obviously something in me that I look at it and go ‘Wow.’ I’m sure other people go ‘Eurgh.'”

For others, it is a more explicit rejection of “modern aesthetics.” Isabella Bondo, a student living in Denmark, finds the dominant Scandinavian style “impersonal, clean, and boring.” “In Denmark, it feels like everyone else has the exact same interior style. If that’s what counts as modern design, I’m really not into it. The most important thing for me when it comes to interior design is personality and personal style, and I don’t feel that with modern design aesthetics.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Estelle Bilson (@70shousemanchester)

It is also a rejection of consumerism. Yvonne Chappell, who works in education and lives in Scotland, was initially drawn into ’70s design when she and her fiancé moved into their house, which was built in 1973. “I was immediately fascinated by retro interior design and particularly the colors seen throughout ’70s homes of the time. Being 24, I’ve grown up in a sort of throwaway society where styles change so quickly and things aren’t often built to last (I realized this after buying SO much flat-pack that kept breaking). Seventies furniture can be found in excellent condition to this day; the quality of furniture clearly stands the test of time. I like the idea of loving something that was designed well and designed half a century ago.”

We can even thank (?) the pandemic for accelerating some facets of ’70s design. With access to outdoor spaces severely limited by a series of lockdowns, the desire to bring nature inside both literally and figuratively has soared. The craze for houseplants and other forms of gardening shows no sign of abating. Equally, a pull towards warmer, earthier tones in homeware and interiors can be linked to a growing movement towards design that brings nature into our homes, says registered interior designer Nicola Holden. “Another growing movement in interior design is that of biophilic design, or bringing a connection to nature into our homes. A lot of the ’70s trends incorporate this, such as wood paneling, shag pile carpets, fringing, the use of natural materials and texture (exposed bricks and textured walls), and curved shapes.”

This ties in intimately with the trend towards sustainability, whether it’s earthenware ceramics made by independent artists to house our cheese plants, taking up hobbies to DIY our own crochet blanket or macramé wall hanging, or using more sustainable materials like rattan and cork. By choosing to support small businesses or buy products with a lower carbon footprint, you are inadvertently embracing a ’70s approach to design.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 🌼Isabella Bondo🌼 (@isabellabondo)

Even our pull towards statement lamps is ’70s-esque. Our current desire to create a sense of coziness as well as accommodating home offices has inadvertently led to a return to the low lighting of the ’70s. And the most popular lamp right now, the mushroom lamp, is a direct design import from that era.

The most divisive part of ’70s design is unequivocally the color palette. But after years of minimalism, Scandi chic, and the dominance of cream, grey, and beige, what once seemed gaudy now has a kind of charm. “The ’70s was a time of lurid patterned wallpapers and brightly colored upholstered furniture,” says Nicola. “Today we are definitely moving away from the beige/grey era and towards more color, as people are subconsciously realizing the energy and positivity that color gives us, which has been scientifically proven in the field of color psychology.”

Still, brown needs far more rehabilitation than the oranges, yellows, and avocado greens of the period. 

“People still have a deep hatred for brown,” says Estelle. “It is a really polarising color. But actually, it’s a really good neutral to start from and it’s a really versatile, warm color.” When Estelle found the right shade for her dining room she was delighted to prove to everyone who told her not to paint it brown that, actually, it can look good.

If you want to take a step into the world of ’70s interiors, you don’t have to go all-in like Estelle, Isabella, and Yvonne. Try a softly-softly approach, choosing key ’70s pieces to style as part of a wider eclectic home design. As Camille Montalbo, an American-based thrifting aficionado, told Refinery29, “The way the furniture mixes together is pretty effortless.” Key pieces of furniture like chairs and tables end up being statements, which mesh well with other eras thanks to the simple lines of the design. Camille’s Jerry Johnson Sling Chair remains one of her favorite finds for that reason.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ✨ɪ ʟᴏᴠᴇ ᴏʟᴅ sʜɪᴛ.✨ (@modern.thrifter)

Plus, finding secondhand goods from the era is made easier by the huge proliferation of pieces available. The volume of designs being produced and a sharp increase in consumption mean that there was a lot of design about. And if it’s lasted this long, be assured it will last well into the future.

Beyond furniture, there is a wealth of ’70s-style home decor — both vintage and modern — to add warmth to a room or a statement to a corner, from lamps to sunburst mirrors to velvet throw pillows. If you’re feeling particularly inspired, why not branch into patterned wallpaper — Estelle has recently launched a homeware business of made-to-order wallpapers and fabrics.

The most important thing is to use your instincts and buy what you love. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a ”90s does ’70s’ lamp or something a little bit silly,” says Estelle. “If you absolutely love it, you will have it in your home and you will never tire of it.” And if you’re still put off by the perceived dinginess of the ’70s, just make sure your space is well lit.

At Refinery29, we’re here to help you navigate this overwhelming world of stuff. All of our market picks are independently selected and curated by the editorial team, but if you buy something we link to on our site, Refinery29 may earn commission.

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

Quarantine Has Led To The Return Of The Homemaker

What Is The Meaning Of Home Now?

Is It Time To Move On From Minimalist Decor?

DMTBeautySpot

via https://www.DMTBeautySpot.com

Sadhbh O'Sullivan, Khareem Sudlow