Golden Hour Hamburgers / Time Perception

Pinafore and shirt are thrifted, socks are from Tutuanna, necklace is from Clear It and shoes are from Japan.  Photos are by Ana Andrés. I love golden hour! It is without doubt the best time for taking photos because you can't go wrong with golden hour lighting - shadows are super soft and the light is warm and nostalgic. And these photos ended up kinda romantic too - if you look very closely you can see two separate couples in their wedding gear in the background (nawww). These photos finally prompted me to slightly adjust my blog layout so that I can have bigger photos! From now on, all my photos will be of this size (and please ignore the inconsistency between this and the last post!) A science paper that came out in the last week has utterly fascinated me, and I needed to share it with you all. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you will know that I am also fascinated by perception and have talked in depth about colour perception in particular. Your perception can be totally different both to another person's, and to other animal's perception of the world. But I've usually only focused on visual perception. Today, I'm going to talk about time perception. You've probably been in this situation before - endlessly trying to swat at a mosquito or a fly, but it always moves away too quickly for your hand to reach it. Well, a new study shows that small creatures probably perceive time as much slower than we do. That noisy flying insect starts seeing your hand moving slooooowly towards it, yawns, has a scratch, then leisurely moves out of the way. For that insect, you might as well be moving though honey. Image source Smaller animals, and animals with faster metabolisms, have their visual system send updates to their brain more frequently than larger, slower animals like humans, elephants and turtles. In order to discover this relationship, researchers from Ireland and the U.K. correlated body size and metabolism with the ability to recognise flashes of light per second. A light that appears constant to us (such as televisions, which are actually a series of images rather than a constant stream), will appear like a strobing light to animals such as dogs and flies, as TVs refresh more slowly than the visual systems of these animals do. And just as colour perception could theoretically vary from person to person, it has left me wondering if time perception can too (children certainly seem to get bored a lot more quickly than adults - could this in part be due to them perceiving the world more slowly?) A lot to think about! Read more here, and have a great day, Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Giant Snails & Floral Yellows

top is DIY (from a thrifted dress), skirt it thrifted, shoes are from Japan, socks are from Tutuanna and hat is c/o Wholesale. Photos are by Ana Andrés. Sometimes, Sydney can be pretty cool. These snails have been popping up all around the city as part of an art project, and while I was taking photos with Ana Andrés the other day we decided they'd be a good prop for one of my outfits! I made this top from a frumpy floral dress that I got from a second hand store in Japan - I couldn't go past the sunflower fabric. In fact, I made it into both a cropped top and a skirt, and it's much more flattering than it was in its previous form! I'm really getting into making my own clothes again - now I've stopped constantly buying new things, it's really forced me to start tackling my pile of "to do" clothing! I was hoping that some kind of giant snail like the one above actually existed (or had existed, though all I could find when looking up giant snail fossils was places to buy them...). However, the actual largest living snail in the world is called the Australian trumpet snail (and I'll let you google them yourselves if you want to see pictures of them, because they're pretty freaky and I learnt my lesson after people freaked about me posting about underwater spiders). Here's a picture of a shell which once contained a trumpet snail, so you can imagine how huge they are. Anyway, these snails can weigh up to 18kg, and be almost one metre long. Apparently they live in Australia - though I've never seen one haha! They exist right up at the top of Australia, in the oceans (they are in fact a sea snail), and also live in some parts of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. These snails are actually about the same size as the pet snails in Spongebob, so now I can't help but imagine that they all look like Gary. I hope that you're all having a most wonderful day! P.s. have a read of the swimsuit styling article I did for Birdee magazine! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

DIY Watermelon Print Cropped Sweatshirt

Whenever I have had a spare moment lately (a rare occurrence - I've been working every single day in the laboratory) I have been making my own clothes - something I've really been wanting to do more of since around the time of this post. Anyway, I finally finished this project - a watermelon print cropped sweatshirt! Instructions for making your own are below. First off, draw a watermelon shape like this on a piece of cardboard, and cut it out. This will be your stencil. Figure out what you want your design to look like. I used this watermelon printed top and basically copied the design exactly, haha. But whether you decide to draw this style of watermelon or use some other picture - or something entirely different from watermelons - it helps to find a picture of what you are drawing before you start (particularly if you are not good at drawing, like me). It will also help to draw your design onto a piece of paper first, to make sure that you can get it right and like the design before committing pen to fabric. Place fabric pins or some other marker in each place where you want a watermelon. Make sure you're only pinning one side of the fabric (you will need to insert a piece of paper inside later). Insert a piece of paper inside the shirt so the pen doesn't bleed through to the other side of the fabric. Use your black permanent marker and the piece of cardboard you cut out before to draw watermelon outlines wherever you placed a pin. Then simply colour them in one-by-one using fabric markers (making sure you always have a piece of paper behind the fabric). Now you're nearly done! Iron the shirt to seal the colour into the fabric. Then, if you want to crop the shirt, simply cut across the bottom, a little bit longer than the desired length, fold the edge up twice, and sew across the bottom using a straight stitch. I picked up this tip from Rachel for making sure the edges don't pucker when hemming - simply sew across a piece of paper, then rip it off when done! It works a treat for any kind of stretchy fabric. Extra tip: be smarter than me, and place the piece of paper below the fabric, so you can actually see where you are sewing. You're done! Congrats, enjoy your new super sweet watermelon top! Have a lovely day, Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Among the Flowers / Tamarin Whispering

Dress is c/o Romwe (no longer available), hat is c/o Wholesale, shoes are from Japan and socks are from Tutuanna Photos are by Ana Andrés. It was a nice change of affairs to not have to be both the model and photographer for once, while having these photos taken! I recently met a lovely physicist and photographer, Ana (who is actually my best friend's housemate), and yesterday we got together to take photos around "iconic" Sydney spots - yes, I even got some in front of the Harbour Bridge (more later). These photos were taken in Hyde Park in the middle of Sydney, while I tried not to crush all these beautiful flowers with these giant shoes. And did you notice? My hair has changed colour... again. I can't help myself. Today I found what is probably the cutest scientific paper that's been released this year. Tamarins are little fluff-ball primates that are highly cooperative with one another. Zookeepers had assumed that everytime someone walked into their enclosure at Central Park zoo, these tamarins would just fall silent. But it turns out that they were actually whispering their alarm calls to each other, rather than shouting them. This is the first evidence of non-human primates whispering to occur (birds have been known to be able to whisper for a while). Cute, right?? image from Wikipedia Their whispering was detected by a spectrogram, which is a device that can maximize quiet sounds and then represent that sound visually (like this). These whispering spectrograms were compared to the shouting calls the tamarins make when not in the presence of humans, and it was found that they were still communicating with each other - just very quietly, so the zookeepers couldn't hear them (maybe they were plotting against the zookeeper?) I hope you're all having a brilliant day, Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

I've Got Butterflies

Dress and boots are from Dotti, tights are c/o Chicwish and bag is c/o Chicwish. Glasses are from Dangerfield and headband is from Japan. I was in the mood for darker hair and makeup today to match this dress and boots. I haven't worn black lipstick in such a long time, and I really need to remind myself to wear it more often - even though the lipstick that I have requires constant reapplication, and if I ever try to eat while wearing it I end up looking like I have a chin beard - which is not the best look haha. I was thinking about writing about butterflies (the creature) for this blog post, because they undergo metamorphosis which is kind of an amazingly cool process (here's a picture of it, anyway). However, I then discovered this insanely cool image of a "butterfly nebula" taken by the Hubble space telescope and knew I had to write about that instead. This "planetary nebula" is in fact the remnants of a dying star. When 95% of stars die, when they have burned away all the hydrogen in their cores, become red giants and then shrink to white dwarfs,  they eject a mass of gasses - like what you see above (the other 5% become supernovas - but to become a supernova, they have to start out life at least eight times the size of our own sun). This butterfly nebula actually has two orbiting stars at the centre of the gas cloud, which makes it even cooler. Planetary nebulae are credited for spreading "heavy elements" - things like carbon, oxygen and nitrogen which are what we ourselves are mostly composed of - throughout the universe. Without these dying stars, life as we know it wouldn't exist. I hope that you're all having a great weekend so far! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Edible Accessories & Waterspout Science

Top is from Forever 21, skirt is thrifted, socks and necklace are from Dangerfield and shoes are from Italy How great is this hamburger necklace?? Though I'm a vegetarian and don't eat actual hamburgers, I'm happy to honor them in wooden-necklace form! I've been wearing it with absolutely everything, and I'm sorry if I wear it in the next 50 outfit posts I do (actually, not sorry, because it's awesome). There are a bunch of them going for $2 at Clear-It (Dangerfield's clearance store on King street) if you live in Sydney ;) It was extremely windy while trying to take these photos - the majority of the photos did not look like the above one, which somehow looks like it was taken with an artfully-placed wind-machine. The rest of the photos feature hair flying everywhere, including my mouth, and I just lucked out with these ones. Still, I should be thankful I wasn't caught up in a waterspout, as cool as they look. Waterspouts, often featuring wind speeds of up to 200km/h (124mph), are a mild type of tornado that occurs over water, and are spinning columns of rising moist air - though they can be very dangerous. In fact, some people think they might explain the "mystery" around some disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. Image by Joey Mole Waterspouts usually form where there are patches of warm water, and a strong current of warm air rises from the surface of the water. Other air then rushes in to replace the rising air, which makes the air spin around and upwards - and as this cycle continues, a waterspout is made. Most of the water in the spout isn't being "sucked up" from the surface, though - moisture is actually sucked out of the surrounding air. (I was imagining fish flying around in the waterspout. Doesn't happen.) Apparently waterspouts are pretty common in Florida, which Google Analytics tells me is one of the states who most reads my blog out of anywhere in the world (California is still winning, though). So can I ask my readers from Florida - has anyone ever seen a waterspout?? Please let me know! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr