Flavor 13: A closet for jewelry, the bottle-sized chair, and making your house smell expensive
The best buys of September!
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Hi y’all! Took a few weeks off to tend to my mental health. I could not bring myself to write these, and was feeling super uninspired. A reminder that the last year and half of our lives have been an absolute mind-f*ck and none of this is normal so it makes sense that we’re all coming from a place of “no” right now. You are not alone. If you need a break, I hope you’re able to take it. xx, Caroline
Since a took most of the month off from FLAVOR, I decided to highlight a few of the best and most popular buys from the Gee Thanks! community over the last month, starting with THE JEWELRY CLOSET:
What: A jewelry closet that doubles as a full length mirror and can be mounted to the back of a door.
How Much?: Usually in the $130 range but it’s on sale at the time of this post (Edit Note: Did you know Am*zon Affiliate rules state you can’t publish the exact price of a product because prices change? They emailed me about it because I guess I was doing that here. So moving forward I will provide you a ballpark.)
Anything I Should Know?: If you’re handy and you know it, you’ll be fine (clap clap). If not, get a roommate/spouse/neighbor to help you mount it. Just in case!
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the better part of adulthood hanging your necklaces over doorknobs and putting your earrings in your desk drawer hoping you’ll remember you put your earrings in your desk drawer in two weeks when you’re looking for your earrings.
I needed a solution that wasn’t a jewelry box requiring dresser or counter space, or a jewelry tree (I just don’t love them). What’s more is that I have a lot of jewelry; I went through a phase where I’d buy vintage costume jewelry in bulk from estate sales and now I’ve amassed a major collection in addition to my everyday, more modern pieces.
The jewelry closet is a major upgrade from all other jewelry storage, it doubles as a mirror, and I am so glad I bought it. It saves floor space, is slim enough that it doesn’t bulk up when you try to open the door it’s mounted to, and it holds a LOT. It also has space for things like nail polish, sunglasses and makeup if you wish to use it for those things.
It’s very sleek and chic, comes with a lock and key, and also sports LED lights when the door opens that illuminate from the top down.
What: The Hotel Lobby Miami Candle
How Much?: $54
Anything I Should Know?: This is a divine smell! Ayana Lage brought it as her product pick when she was on the show, and since then I’ve acquired one of my own.
If my coping mechanism for 2020 was Bravo TV and Law and Order, my coping mechanism for 2021 has been CANDLES.
The Miami candle from Hotel Lobby is one of the only summery scents I’ve ever been taken by. As a classic sandalwood/evergreen hoe (FYI, my fav for these right now are Borough Home candles, a woman-owned, geezer-owned small biz!), it takes something amazing to transport me from a place of woodsy cabin and put me on the beach, a place I don’t go that often because I think sand feels weird, I easily overheat and I’m almost always dehydrated.
The Miami candle? Everything I love about summer, vacation, and luxury without actually having to drag a chair across burning dirt to, what…sit? Without having to pay for a luxury vacation! If my house is clean and I burn this candle, I feel like I am having an expensive experience. It’s that good. And my bar is that low.
$54, of course, is not $10, but a ten buck candle often has a very plasticky, migraine-inducing scent, and it would take five $10 candles to fill a room with that scent, and then another $8 for a bottle of Advil. The Hotel Lobby throw is impressive. One candle can fill my house with a scent that’s light, noticeable, but not overwhelming.
Look, I didn’t want to get addicted to a $54 candle either but when something’s this good it feels like you’re getting a deal. Buy it with the money you didn’t spend on vacation last year. Or this year.
What: The CLIQ Chair
How Much?: Around $110
Anything I Should Know?: There are dupes at half price, but the reason why the CLIQ is my pick is because there are no parts. There is no assembly or pieces to keep track of.
The beach. The dog park. The backyard. Someone else’s backyard. The Big Game. Camping. Black Friday line at Best Buy. Around a firepit.
Here’s the thing: Chairs? Big. heavy. Even the ones that aren’t big and heavy are somehow…big and heavy. I literally just wrote this sentence above: dragging a beach chair across hot sand? No.
The CLIQ chair was first introduced to me by my friend Kaitlynn, who keeps two of them in her trunk at all times. Last November we met up halfway between LA and SF to see each other from afar, and found a public entryway to a fishing beach in Harmony, CA.
The ground was rocks. But Kaitlynn had chairs.
“You can’t live in California without CLIQ chairs in your trunk,” she informed me. (I didn’t know!)
The size of a wine bottle and roughly the weight of one too, a CLIQ chair can unfold into its final form in less than 10 seconds and then go back to wine bottle size in another 10 seconds. No extra pieces or parts to worry about or store. Doesn’t require its own storage space (I keep mine in the car). Sturdy, easy to shake out if it gets sandy, and can support up to 300 pounds.
So far I have used mine at the park, at the beach, at the dog park, and once I brought it to a friend’s house because everything is outside now and BYO Chair!
Makes an amazing gift, too. With holidays coming up, I feel like this could be a great Dad present.
But also, who couldn’t use a place to sit?
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