I am Blythe Ferraro, and this site is a running list of the small, specific things that make an ordinary day feel looked after.
None of it is expensive. That is not a constraint I imposed to make a point, it is just what turned out to be true. The things that actually changed my days were a heavier hand towel, a candle I finally lit on a Tuesday, a plate I stopped saving, ten minutes with one song and nothing else. The word luxury has been borrowed by people selling four figure handbags, and I would like a bit of it back for the ordinary end of the scale.
The thing I kept getting wrong
For years I owned nice things and used the worse version. Good towels in the closet, thin ones on the rail. Good olive oil at the back of the cabinet, the cheap one in the pan. A candle on the shelf waiting for an occasion that kept not arriving. I was not saving those things, I was just quietly deciding that an ordinary Tuesday, and by extension me on an ordinary Tuesday, did not qualify. Most of what is written here works backwards from that.
What the eight sections are for
Worth the Upgrade, for the ordinary object that turns out to be worth replacing, and the one that is not. Ten Minute Treats, for the small thing you can finish. The Good Stuff, for whatever you own and are not using. Bath and Bed. Eating Alone Well, which is about cooking the real recipe when it is only you. Small Splurges. Making It an Occasion. Saying No to More, which is the other half of all of this, because a drawer of thirty candles is not thirty times the pleasure.
What this is not
It is not a review site and it is not a shop. There are no star ratings here, no scores, no best of lists, and no invented product cards with prices in them. I write about the kind of object rather than the brand, because a brand gets discontinued and a heavier towel is still a heavier towel. Where the specific thing genuinely matters, I say what about it matters, in terms of weight, material, or how it behaves after a year.
How a piece gets written
I live with the thing first, usually for months, and I write once I can say what actually changed rather than what I hoped would. If something only worked for a week, that goes in. Several of these pieces exist because the upgrade turned out not to be worth it, and that is a more useful sentence than most of the ones I set out to write.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell me. The page gets fixed with a note saying what changed rather than being quietly rewritten. Write to hello@littleeverydayluxuries.org.