I consider AgAuCu a romantic brand, designed to feel like I'm pulling stars from the sky, binding crystals from magical realms, and eternalizing the ocean in metal, all for us to wear. I've long considered my aesthetic dark romantic because I tend towards rust and decay and bones alongside the shiny and sparkly. Plus, I've always been a bit of a dark person, even though I'm pretty sure I come off as effusively bright. Something about compensating or masking or whatever. I've found out, though, that dark romantic means something else entirely, so I've been working on a new description.

To that end, I've been collecting quotes under two umbrellas (same rainstorm) that I'm calling bleakly romantic and romantically bleak. I'll touch on bleakly romantic when I post it.

Romantically bleak is when something shatters your soul or heart, but does it in a particularly lighthearted or beautiful way. Like when you feel something painful so deeply that you have to turn it into art, lest it consume you from the inside out. And then other people have to suffer it, too. I think humor is part of that concept. Laughing in the face of, etc.

I've broken romantically bleak into archetypes that I'm still working on solidifying. These quotes fall under romantically bleak - the witch archetype. Essentially, when a woman falls out of the mainstream ideal of a woman (whatever that may be), she leans into the witch. This doesn't have anything to do with magic, but instead the experience of being othered.

I paired some of the quotes I've collected with paintings from which I get the same feelings as I do the quote. I hope you understand.

I've left the quote credits in, and here are the artists and paintings:
-Brown Kimono (Portrait of Kathryn Beta la Forque) by Irving R. Wiles
-A Song by Alice Pike Barney
-Woman of the "Orient" [oof] by Henri Lehmann
-Study of a Model by Alfred Stevens
-Alma by Thomas Wilmer Dewing