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Constance Mary

@princess.constance

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CONSTANCE MARY HOLDEN MCDONALD
Photographer, Researcher, Writer, Long Hair Enthusiast, Angel’s Advocate 🍽️ [email protected]

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This 250 year old restaurant has lived as just a star on my map until today.

In all my days in Paris, this was the day my longing finally won, and I stepped inside (with my fingers crossed).

I asked about the private dining room favoured by presidents and diplomats and bohemians, who brought their mistresses there.

They led me upstairs, handed me a glass of water, and let me have the room for twenty minutes.

It is the mirrors I came to see, the glass etched with scratches.

When those mistresses were given diamonds, they would test their authenticity by dragging the stone across the mirror: if it scratched, it was real.

I added my own scratch, made with a diamond ring gifted to me by my sister. by @princess.constance

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a year ago

The Long Hair Competition of Lithuania. Backstage, waiting in the wings to be measured by @princess.constance

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8 years ago

I was in the Lithuanian Long Hair Comp yesterday it was so fun and man my hair is so short! filmed by my wonderful pageant mom @eliza.co.nz by @princess.constance

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8 years ago

At the site of Seacliff psychiatric hospital where Janet Frame spent many years, on and off, from 1945.

Her debut story collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories, won a major award and saved her from a planned lobotomy. by @princess.constance

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12 hours ago

playing with uv nail lamp to make cyanotypes today of me and snails on my belly button, on scrap watercolour paper by @princess.constance

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4 days ago

by @princess.constance

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5 days ago

I wrote about push up bras for @fashionjournalmagazine ❤️ #fun

All Euro-summer, the girls were in my phone. I scrolled through them. A stone street in Italy, a girl in a white tank, the lacy edge of a pink bra riding high above the tank’s scooped neck. Slide two is an Aperol Spritz (it’s always an Aperol Spritz). by @princess.constance

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8 days ago

@hinu.co self portraits

lots of love have a beautiful day by @princess.constance

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9 days ago

❤️ I wrote about hair for @hinu.co x > scroll through for some of my hair heroines

Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Sissi to her friends, had mid-calf-length hair.

It was washed once every three weeks in raw eggs and brandy, and it took a full day. Afterwards she would pace the palace in a waterproofed silk dressing gown (I want one) until it dried.

Nobody dared to rush her.

She wore hairpins made of diamonds and pearls, and if someone at a gathering particularly struck her, she’d take out one of her “Sissi Stars” and give it to them to keep.

She had two sets of twenty-seven made.

I found some glass ones in an op shop and wore them in Vienna last year, when I visited St Stephen’s Cathedral, where Sissi once attended church.

My stars in my hair.

Sissi on a mug in Vienna.

Then there’s the French novelist Colette, whose ash-blonde hair was famously “long enough to lower a bucket down a well.” She wrote about wearing it in two braids, using them as a paintbrush and as “ribbons to make the cat play.”

Her hair, in her telling, was something between a toy and a limb.

She cut it off at twenty-nine.

I’ve been in a hair cave. It’s in a small town in Türkiye, and its walls are papered floor to ceiling in notes with women’s names and a lock of their hair. A man runs it. His assistant cut a lock of mine while she told me how it began: he loved a woman from Germany, her visa ran out, and on her way out she left him a lock of her hair. He pinned it to the wall.

Then other women started leaving locks too. For him, I guess, or for the story. Fifty years later there are sixteen thousand of them, nailed and taped up the walls, most strands are still glossy.
Mine is there. I like knowing that somewhere in a cave, a small part of me is still held with everyone else’s. It feels like the first time I posted to the Long Hair Community forum.

The New Zealand artist Vivian Lynn worked with human and synthetic hair, tangling the two together so you couldn’t tell which was which without touching. The way she wanted to show it, and never got to, wasn’t in a gallery. She wanted it in a cave, lit by a single lantern. by @princess.constance

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9 days ago

my hair, self portraits for @hinu.co ❤️ by @princess.constance

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9 days ago

“For over a decade I’ve worn my hair long. It’s past a metre now, and that happened slowly. Growing hair is a life-long project measured in seasons. You have to tend to it and wait.” @princess.constance for our HINU Home Series live on our Journal by @princess.constance

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9 days ago

my obsessions for @meadowlarkjewellery

feat. @natperijewellery @priscillarosehowe @papier_darmenie_officiel @abelfragrance #teanau

I’ll put the link on my story if u wanna read x

I’m obsessed with YOU!!! Xxx the world is out to love you by @princess.constance

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12 days ago