Cheryl Shops

You don't have to be in a relationship to celebrate Valentine's Day. In fact, the day has rather dark origins—in Roman times, it was a pagan matchmaking festival that followed a ritual animal slaughter, and also the day on which several men named Valentine were executed.  Now, who's in the mood for chocolates and romance? That said, I fully embrace the concept of love, whether that's the kind you share with someone else or just self-love. And while gifts are my least-favored love language, maybe that's because I rarely hesitate to treat myself. Here are some of my favorite options this year for you, for your significant other, or for both of you. 

I featured sweater vests in my fall trend report last year, and while I had meant to do an outfit post with one soon thereafter, it's better late than never, right? The other issue is that I was going to feature a sweater vest from. H&M—the cut of which I really love—but it started to pill like crazy after wearing it a couple times, and I didn't feel comfortable recommending something that was, to be frank, a piece of crap. The good news is that I found an even better option, and here's how I've been wearing it. 

As I mentioned in my inaugural Things I've bought on Amazon that I love post, I try to shop small and local when I can, but I'm only human and sometimes convenience wins out. Cheryl Shops is a judgment-free zone, so I feel safe sharing with you that I not only buy things on Amazon, but I thoroughly enjoy them as well. I've been making a bunch of upgrades to my apartment over the last several months, and here are some of my recent best buys. 

I tend to get into a winter rut of sweaters and jeans (and hoodies and leggings), and while we'll get back to that next week, I took advantage of the unexpected heatwave we've been having and wore a dress—with bare legs, no less! I should probably be alarmed that we're having 70-degree weather in January, but I decided to enjoy it now and go back to fighting global warming tomorrow. Anyway, this outfit is a little random, but so is life nowadays, and thus let's embrace it. 

It's been awhile since I've featured a Get the look post, but you all have definitely been busy pinning! The most-pinned look of the last few months from my Outfit ideas for ageless style Pinterest board is none other than America's Sweetheart, Jennifer Aniston, wearing a very seasonally appropriate look. Aniston has been accused of playing it safe on the red carpet, but clearly she knows what works for her and sticks to it. This is a casual yet classic look that could be several years old—and its timelessness makes it so good. Here's how to re-create it. 

As I was going through a bunch of 10-year-old bills that I found in my storage space this weekend (don't ask why I kept them), it occurred to me how so much of our lives are digital now. I can't even remember the last time I got a paper bill; do you remember the last time you took a non-digital photo? This is a long way of leading up to the fact that we accidentally deleted the original photos of this outfit, which, when you're a blogger, is a devastating loss of several hours' worth of work that makes you curse everything digital and threaten to go analog. Thankfully we re-created the outfit with (hopefully) even better results, and this time I backed them up. 

You, dear readers, seem to love my honest reviews, so I'm pledging to do more of them in 2021—at least one a month. You appear to be particularly curious about luxury items, so first up is my biggest splurge of 2020, my Celine Cabas Phantom tote. As I noted when I first featured it here, I'm generally not a bag person (I'm more of a shoe person), but I'd been in need of a new work tote and was eyeing this one for quite a while. And by quite a while, I mean dragging Sean to every Celine boutique we came across so I could try it on and debate getting the medium size or the small. (I got the medium, obviously, but more on that later.) I finally decided to take the plunge last year in Paris; while that's out of the question for the moment, I wanted to share my experience anyway with the hope that, god willing, we can travel again soon. So here's how I bought my Celine Phantom tote in Paris, why I went with the medium, and how I really feel about it. 

I don't know about you, but I've never been happier to write a new year—hello, 2021! I know it's only a few days into the new year, and considering we're still in lockdown, nothing has exactly changed overnight. But there's something so hopeful and promising about the idea of a new year, plus how could 2021 possibly be worse than 2020, right? (Actually, let's not answer that one, just in case.) The question is, given that it's winter and we're all still staying at home for the most part, what do we wear now? I'm sure we can't wait to dress up once we're allowed to live our lives and be free once again, but is that the most practical thing to do right now? Then again, do we really want to keep wearing our sweatpants in 2021? Part of me thinks we're all going to dress like amped-up flappers when this is all over, and part of me thinks that the pandemic is going to change fashion forever. What if there's a happy medium? It may be a bit too early to commit to a 2021 uniform, but here's my first contender.