It’s Wednesday morning and I’m writing this in my kitchen, surrounded by empty wine bottles, Domino’s boxes, and a leftover mountain of green tops discarded on the floor, outfit options which never came to fruition. Whilst the evening itself was, as always, a laugh, and central campus offered its never-ending parade of side characters from our lives to run into, I can never help but think that one of the best parts of the night was getting ready.
Despite spending years getting ready for events, there is still a particular beauty in the fact that no matter how hard we try, no matter how prepared we think we are, we will never be ready on time. This is a minor crisis we have had to confront recently, having overused the term “fashionably late” for the multiple balls we have miserably failed at arriving punctually to.
The beauty of getting ready together is that it creates space for everyone to excel. Each person has their designated role. One of my flatmates is unbeatable at eyeliner, a task the rest of us cannot do to save our lives. Another has a top collection that seems to have no bottom, an endless resource for any occasion. And if you want your hair straightened, curled, blow-dried or slicked back, I will already have something plugged in and heating up before you’ve even asked. With both flatmates leaving for their year abroad next year, I am already experiencing a preemptive nostalgia for these moments of the specific intimacy of girlhood lived out in a shared flat, in a small room with too many hot tools and not enough mirror space.
Music is undeniably the backbone of the getting-ready process. The right song can elevate the whole room; the wrong one can quietly derail it. When desperate times call for desperate measures when energy is low, pyjamas are comfortable and the prospect of blow-drying your hair feels genuinely insurmountable music is reliably there for the rescue. Our favourites span a surprising range: Drake’s ‘Nokia’ (we remain genuinely unsure whether we’re being ironic), Bleachers’ ‘Modern Girl,’ Rizzle Kicks’ ‘Down with the Trumpets’, and the reliable early-era Taylor Swift.
For me, the excitement of getting ready doesn’t even have to be attached to an event I’m attending myself. There is equal joy (perhaps even more) in dressing a flatmate for a date. The deliberation is taken to entirely unnecessary levels — are these jeans just one shade too dark? We approach it with the energy of a dedicated personal styling team, feeling something close to proud parents as they head out the door, almost certainly carrying one of our lip glosses in their bag.
These moments of connection don’t have to be exclusive to nights out either. Putting on a good playlist and cooking dinner together followed by a dance-around tidy-up, or an afternoon making decorations for the flat offers the same quality of time. It’s worth holding onto these rituals, because one day your best friends won’t live just down the hall.
Illustration by @studioflorencemary for The Student