She likes to catch the early morning light in the autumn. It often swells into the bathroom like fairy dust, endowing shapes and forms with a remarkable luminosity. She is wearing a deep plum sweater that is soft and slouched; its plunging neckline bearing her chest.

The Colour Purple

The colour purple is certainly in the Zeitgeist this season. For most of antiquity, purple dye was scarce— pressed drop by drop from thousands of Mediterranean sea snails, so slow and costly to produce that it used to be rationed out to the very few. Purple still carries that majesty.

Colour theory places it at the meeting point of two opposing instincts — red's heat, blue's control — resolved into something that strikes us as neither; still powerful, yes, just more contemplative. 

The Necklace

The necklace she is wearing is of Sekhmet, the powerful Egyptian lioness goddess.

Sekhmet appears as a woman with a lioness head, crowned with a solar disk and protective cobra, carrying an ankh and papyrus scepter. As a solar deity, she was said to embody the scorching desert wind; it was believed to be her fiery breath. Pharaohs treated her as a protector in battle, and Amenhotep III commissioned over 700 granite statues of her.