Beauty and the beast: It hurts to be pretty
Fashion icon Coco Chanel said, “Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.” 
Clearly, Ms. Chanel never met the $900 Jimmy Choo stilettos that send many a well-heeled woman to the podiatrist.
Too often, looking really good can mean feeling really bad.
Other times, we don’t realize until we’re out and about that things are going to get bad. Like on an overseas flight when it occurs that buying the “irregular-sized” thong at the outlet mall wasn’t a good idea.
Since we agree with Billy Crystal’s mantra, “It is better to look good than to feel good,” we know that QuirkOut stamina is needed when sacrificing comfort for compliments.
Belt It Out
The Wall Street Journal has us cringing. A recent article (“Tight Ties, Killer Heels: Clothes Make the Fashion Victim“) warned that our clothing is causing real damage — to something other than our bank accounts.
The story reports on a woman who saw a neurologist for numbness in her legs. His expert diagnosis: Her belt was too tight. It compressed a major nerve with a long Latin name. But luckily she’s in good company. The doctor says this happens to police officers who carry guns on their hips and ballet dancers who wear tight tutus.
Now the American Chiropractic Association says women should carry no more than 10 percent of their body weight in their purses or risk extreme back pain. Only 10 percent? We have 30 percent in our wallets alone, thank you FroYo customer loyalty punch cards.
We appreciate the warnings, although we probably won’t heed them. Especially if our skinny jeans make us look like we’re 16 years old again. How about we make the QuirkOut promise to loosen our tutus?
GoodBuy Girl
Roberta loves to combine her love of clothes with her love of a good deal. Normally this is a match made in heaven — until it creates discomfort from hell.
Take the Norma Kamali outfit she bought at Walmart. The designer outfit was gorgeous and cheap, but they were out of her size, so she settled for the dress in an 8.
Roberta explains, “In the morning, I’m fine, and the tight dress forces me to sit up straight. At lunch I’m so squeezed that I order water and a toothpick. By 5 p.m. I pray I can make it to my car before the seams split and I’m naked.”
We’ve all made QuirkOut bargains with ourselves in the dressing room to justify a bargain buy. “I’m just bloated today,” or “Spanx will fix this” and the mother of them all, “I can lose 10 pounds by the party next weekend.”
The Wax Museum
When it comes to beauty, we’d like to wax poetic. But there’s no poetry in having burning hot wax applied to the most sensitive parts of 
your body, then having it ripped off with the intensity of a Navy Seal on a mission.
There are rumors that bikini waxing began as a form of torture used during the Crusades, but we have no proof. What we know for certain is that this is pain only women could endure — like childbirth.
And, if the pain doesn’t do you in, the humiliation will. After all, the aesthetician goes places where husbands aren’t even allowed to venture.
So follow our QuirkOut tips for the pain — drink a vodka martini in the waiting room, bite your lip during the procedure and at the end, scream out like Steve Carell when he got his chest hair waxed in the movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin.” For the record, we don’t shout “Kelly Clarkson,” we shout “Bradley Cooper!”
What clothes do you have that create pain?
