You know what to buy for your always considerate office mate.

Queen of Hearts and Modern Love Gift Certificate

You know what to get for your sensitive, caring, reliable sister.

Classic Frye Campus boots and leather care products

You know what you should buy for your new nephew.

Baby Moccasins from Laurentian Chief-- Back in stock!

You know what to get your mother

Hobo "Lauren" Wallet

and your father.

Wool Brixton Hat

But what do you buy for the friend who you sometimes don’t want to answer the phone for because every time you take her call you wind up too drunk, laughing too hard, way too late at night?  The one who you almost forgot to add to your shopping list because she never seems like she actually needs anything from anybody?  The girl who has a look that can melt a man into puddle of butter, and another that can freeze that grease spot to the floor for someone else to scrape off before she walks away without looking back?  The woman that you won’t hear from for weeks and then will show up on your doorstep, unannounced, with a bottle of wine and a jaw-breaking grin?

What’s a good gift for a bad girl?

You’d take her to a movie or ballet if she could sit still long enough or stay quiet– but she won’t.  You’d take her to a nice dinner, but she scarfs her food so fast it seems pointless to waste the chef’s talent.  You’d buy her something practical if you hadn’t just seen the Target gift card you got her last year poking out from underneath the fridge, forlornly glued to the floor with a paste of coffee grounds.  She’s strong and brash, stony silent or wicked loud.  Without saying a word, she makes a statement.  So why don’t you get her something to match?

Range and Sky Earrings

The Jan Michaels collection arrived this morning, clambered into the jewelry case, and proceeded to intimidate and awe the staff and customers.  It’s tough. It’s beautiful.  It’s brass.  It behaves like no other jewelry in the store, and never apologizes.  Semi-precious stones are used; precious never.  Stars galore, with no trace of a heart.

Masmary Star Ring

The earrings cascade in effusive fountains of joyfully chaotic, jangling chains of daggers, angles and points

Stars and Rays Earrings

sometimes running on for a length much past what you expected.

Comet Earrings

The rings are, we’ll not dance around it, big.  They’re a size you have to take seriously, and in designs that drip gorgeousness and never acquiesce to Cute.  She won’t be able to break one by accidentally smashing it into a wall during a series of wild gesticulations, and it will be slightly harder to lose on a shelf cluttered with black eyeliner and unpaid utility bills.

Deco Ring

Symbolism Ring

Cutout Ring

The single bracelet we received is glamorized chain mail.

Good Knight Bracelet

The necklace– oh, the necklace.  It begins with a pair of buttonlike exoskeletons that perch like tiny epaulets on her collarbone, the mouths of which expel eighteen strands of variegated fused brass chain and tiny hammered brass plates from one end to the other in an eternal swoosh of hard-edged, twisting elegance.  It would be at home paired with a male friend’s forgotten undershirt, with a silk toga on a slow-moving raft on the Nile, with, let’s face it, a burlap sack.

Gold Fountain Necklace

Do this woman a favor and come to the shop for a peek at the wares.  Because while she may be naughty, she’s also very nice.

P.S.  We would be remiss if we didn’t also include some of the TokyoMilk fragrances in this post, available at Homestyle, which is conveniently located across the street from Queen of Hearts.  Offering scents that smell like actual things that exist in the world (like wood, grass, and cocoa) in place of the cloying  representations of conceptual lust that give you a migraine in the mall, TokyoMilk is perfume for the woman that hates perfume.  It comes in sexy black square bottles with names like “Arsenic”, “Crushed”, “Bittersweet”, and my personal favorite, “Bulletproof”.  They even have one that smells like salt.  Salt.