(When you have an old-fashioned shape and are fortunate enough to have the correct carriage and sense of movement and dress to go with it so you do not have an anachronistic look, that's a mercy, anyway.)

The funny thing is that this was a very low-fuss, unplanned photo. For assorted reasons multiple people, including the yearbook organisers and a newish suitor-of-sorts, have been bugging me for ages to send them a photo, and I keep saying (truthfully) that I hate having my photo taken and will they go away please? Finally on Saturday I decided to DIY with an iPad propped up on a bookshelf (having discovered the self-timer function) against an empty stretch of my bedroom wall.

A posed photo, but also deliberately meant to be "as-is": I'd just come home after five hours at an alumni event that afternoon, and that was the dress I was wearing; it's beginning to come loosely rumpled. I did have makeup on in the morning, but by then it was largely faded and smudged, and I considered but decided against touching up. I'm growing out an inverted bob from before Chinese New Year, and it just happens to curve that way at the chin. My hair is wilting in the humidity and becoming slightly strandy, but also not really more untidy than it would be after an average day. In other words, I think this is honest. Of course I did have to slap on a greenish-grey filter because the light source in my room is an immovable fluorescent overhead lamp, but there are only so many places you can stand opposite my bookshelves. The filter helped correct for some of the worst distortions of glare and exposure but does not fundamentally alter the original look.