Half of you will sit down at your dressing table each morning like it’s a date with yourself, moisturiser, brush your hair, hot-footpad day, minimum fifteen minutes. The other half rush past theirs like it’s something holding them up; pluck an earring off and leave it ten litter-pickers worse than when you found it. Neither are wrong exactly but stand a stool in front of it and suddenly it’s glaringly obvious which camp you fall into, because stools are seats of invitation and half of us never sit down.
In fact buying one of these stools is all about that. It doesn’t matter which table it is, it matters if you’re a sit-down person or a stand-and-get-it-done-in-eleven-seconds person, and the two groups will never agree. One of us bought the same stool six years ago and could name you every creaky floorboard it’s sat on since. Another bought one and it has never ever had a bum on it, it just holds her plant and a pile of post that never gets opened – honest to god physical manifestation of how she lives.
The sitters LOVE their stools.
Love them like you loved that chair you never thought you’d need until the day you found yourself in it.
It’s where you call your mum, pull your socks on, bawl a little after something crappy happened, apply mascara with your useless hand because you’re running late EVEN WITH THE SITTING DOWN, faff.
You quickly don’t use the mirror to check you look great, you use it to give yourself ten silent minutes before everyone else in your home needs something.
The non-sitters come to resent the stool. Hide it under the table. Let it gather jumpers. At one point one of ours had a cat living on it more consistently than either of its owners. Honestly the cat had sense.
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We can agree on one thing. If you’re going to buy a stool you want a big mirror. And we disagree on the drawers. Some of us need SIX OF THEM. Jewellery in one.
Hairbrushes and tangles in another.
All organised into precise locations.
Others of us think one cute little shallow drawer is plenty and after that you’re just filling it with stuff you’ll find in 2027 and have no idea why you kept. There is no reconciling this camp.
The one thing we can all agree on is that you need to make sure you test that flipping mirror first. Bad lighting is responsible for more grumpy mornings in our Whatsapp group than faulty products or late deliveries. Get yours near a window if you can. If not, invest in a lamp you trust, because yes you can have a stunning table but pair it with a mirror that makes you look sickly grey come 8am and it’s satire.
This has not been a ‘should you buy this or not?’ sort of article. It’s been more about which version of you arrives on the doorstep each morning. The careful sitter or the sideways hurdling sprinter. Buying this before you’ve accepted who you are is how half of us ended up with stools being used for cat swings.
