Why We Should Get Ready Even When We Have Nowhere to Go

Scarlett Column No. 002 | 3 min read

There is something rather lovely about putting yourself together for a day that has made absolutely no demands of you.

There are days when staying in your nightwear until four in the afternoon is exactly what you need. You wake up, brush your teeth, tie your hair into whatever arrangement will keep it out of your face, and somehow find yourself at your laptop before you have properly decided what sort of day it is going to be. By lunchtime, you are still wearing the oversized T-shirt you slept in. By three, you've reheated something from the fridge, answered several emails and possibly taken a delivery while standing strategically behind the door. Nothing terrible has happened. In fact, there is something quite satisfying about a day on which your appearance is allowed to be completely irrelevant.

And then there are other days when, despite having nowhere particularly important to go, I suddenly cannot bear the sight of myself in that T-shirt for another minute. So I shower. Not necessarily an everything shower, like Scarlett Column No. 001 has already made a case for those, but a proper one. I moisturise instead of promising my elbows I'll deal with them later. I do something with my hair. I put on clothes I would happily answer the door in. Sometimes earrings appear, which is ridiculous because nobody is coming. Perfume almost always does. Then I return to exactly the same desk, the same emails and the same lunch I would have eaten anyway, except I feel inexplicably better doing it while smelling wonderful.

The perfume nobody else will smell

There is something interesting about making yourself beautiful when there is no obvious audience for it. So much of getting ready is connected to going somewhere: work, dinner, church, a wedding, a date, the airport, lunch with friends. Even getting ready implies that something is about to happen. Women have also endured enough instruction about “making an effort” to last several lifetimes, look presentable, don't let yourself go, dress for the job, keep yourself attractive, make sure your hair is done. I have no desire to add look good while sitting alone in your own house to the list. If you want to spend Sunday looking like you have recently survived a minor natural disaster, I hope it is a very restful Sunday.

But perhaps that is exactly why getting ready for nowhere can be so pleasurable, because there is nothing to prove. Nobody is going to compliment the dress. Nobody knows that your legs are freshly moisturised underneath your trousers. The earrings are not completing a look; they just happened to make your face look nice when you caught yourself in the mirror. And the perfume, which may be the most unreasonable part of the whole exercise, is being consumed entirely for your own benefit.

I used to think wearing my favourite perfume at home was wasteful. The bottles I loved most were for dinners, trips and occasions worthy of them, preferably somewhere another person might lean closer and ask what I was wearing. But perfume does not improve while sitting obediently in its bottle, and neither does the beautiful body lotion you are saving, the expensive candle you refuse to light or the dress hanging in your wardrobe waiting for a sufficiently important evening. We can become very good at preserving beautiful things for a better version of our lives. Meanwhile, an enormous proportion of actual life happens on unremarkable Tuesdays.

An ordinary Tuesday is still your life

Perhaps that is what I like most about getting ready with nowhere to go. It gives an ordinary day a little ceremony without requiring the day to earn it first. You can shower at ten in the morning, put on the dress that is supposedly “too nice for the house,” spray perfume behind your ears and then spend the afternoon doing accounts. You can wear lipstick to make stew. You can put on the gold hoops and sit on the sofa watching something embarrassingly bad. There is no profound transformation required. You simply get to enjoy yourself looking nice.

And it does change something, even if only slightly. There is a difference between catching sight of yourself after six hours in the same clothes you slept in and catching sight of yourself with your hair done, skin moisturised and a little colour on your lips. Not because one woman is better than the other. She is the same woman, probably with the same unfinished work waiting on the laptop. But one version of the afternoon has been given a little more attention, and sometimes that is enough to lift it out of the blur of all the other afternoons.

Of course, tomorrow you may return to the old T-shirt. Keep it. Every woman needs clothes in which she can disappear from civilisation for a while. But occasionally, when there is no dinner reservation, no meeting, no date and absolutely nobody expecting you, take the shower anyway. Moisturise properly. Do your hair. Wear something you like. Spray the perfume you have been saving.

Then go nowhere at all.

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