Oh hey there.

As you might have noticed, I haven’t been around much.

Mr. Fox and I went to Florida back in March, and then his gall bladder tried to kill him so time was spent in the hospital. Then I launched Philly Loves Lacquer and tried keeping up with that. I fell behind in both my online classes due to hubby’s illnesses, and thankfully both my teachers are graciously lenient to my surprise. I managed to launch a website I had been working on, Paul Meyer Studios. Then hubs was back in the hospital for a crippling kidney stone, and I got behind even more. After that debacle, I started getting ready for my first restock at PhLL, and right before I reopened the Etsy shop, my asthma decided to rear it’s ugly head and put ME in the ER. And now it’s today.

Needless to say, it’s been an eventful time since the last non-Instagram related post I made. And honestly, blogging hasn’t been on my mind at all. Well, I take that back. Blogging at estherfox.com hasn’t been on my list of priorities, however, I had been rolling around the idea of starting a nail blog. If you know me, you’ll know that I adopted an obsession with nail polish last November thanks to a friend, and it’s been all downhill (in a good way of course) since. I’ve been battling dry skin and brittle nails for quite some time, and I’ve only recently fixed the problem with the help of daily moisturizing, cuticle oil, and 2500mg of high potency biotin once daily. I am finally at the point where I want to swatch my whole collection and then some.

So that brought me to a dilemma yesterday. While I was in the shower, I seriously considered archiving the entirety of estherfox.com and combining my identities into “phillyloveslacquer”. But then I remembered that I like to rant about shit on here and on Twitter, and I don’t want that associated with my business. I eventually decided that, rather than scrapping EFDC and making a new blog, I would instead segment EFDC into the areas that I want to continue writing about: life, health, nails, and the occasional bitch fest.

My reasoning for wanting to bring nails into EFDC is because there seems to be somewhat of a lack of interesting *honest* reviews. There are tons of nail bloggers, and I get annoyed with several things: one, the bigger bloggers are all blogging about the same things (and while it’s nice to see different takes on one color, it does get a bit annoying); two, I see more and more “products used in this post were provided for an honest review” and less “I bought this with my own money and I just want to talk about it honestly”. Don’t get me wrong though, because I don’t mind company-endorsed reviews. My issue with it lies with the fact that I feel like a lot of these review posts are too fluffy and robotic. I mean, surely there must be *something* wrong. It can’t all be rainbows and ponies.

You may be thinking, “but, don’t you make polish too? aren’t you going to send your stuff to some bloggers?” And you would be correct. I have every intention of sending my stuff to some nail bloggers (some of my favorites in fact!!). But I went to great lengths to make sure that the bloggers I was sending stuff to were part of the few honest reviewers out there that’ll let me know if I did something wrong so I can fix it.

And I digress. I seem to have lost my train of thought.

Oh yeah, refocusing!

I am going to be making a few changes here on EFDC. If you don’t want to read my nail posts, you don’t have to. You’ll be able to subscribe to a separate RSS feed/mailing list for those if that’s all you want to read. You will still be able to subscribe to everything though, if you so desire. One of the first projects on my list of things to do is an indie polish challenge. Using xoxojen.com‘s indie shop list, I plan on going through all of them and buying 1 to 2 bottles (this will obviously be a slow process, since money is rather tight these days) to swatch and give a brutally honest review. If I don’t like it, I’m going to tell you why. If I love it, I am going to shout it from the roof tops. There may be snark. I may start a war in the indie polish world. But, I would think that most people would extend the same brutal honesty to me if they were in my shoes. As I mentioned before, if I don’t know what’s wrong, it can’t be fixed.

My return to the blogosphere may not be exactly like how I imagined it when I first started estherfox.com, and even though I am NOT a big fan of change, sometimes change is good. And I am confident that this change will be better in the long run.

So, for now, I shall catch you later.

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esther fox dot com refocusing blogosphere blogging change