Last summer Nicole Gordon posted an Instagram snap of herself framed in a doorway at home. In a slinky sleeveless dress, vivid makeup and towering heels, Ms. Gordon, a writer and art adviser, was the picture of cocktail-hour glamour.

Just weeks ago she posted a nearly identical image: her lips tinted scarlet, hair swept back from her face. That dress, as she noted, still fit, though she’d filled out in the interim. Her caption, a cross between boast and lament, read: “What a difference a year makes.”

Ms. Gordon, 51, was alluding of course to the pain and sense of powerlessness that the pandemic has sown. “It has stripped me of everything that I knew of myself,” she said last week — not least the semimonthly lash extensions and Botox treatments that were among her cherished maintenance rituals.

She had rigorously prepped for her most recent post, tugging on two pair of Spanx, rimming her eyes in dark liner, and coating her feet in Lidocaine to help her squeeze into the stilettos she had not worn since March.

Source: New York Times

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