6 Ways to Embrace Your Glamour

6 Ways to Embrace Your Glamour, by Deborah Castellano

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Glamour is everything that makes you interesting and exciting to yourself and others. Using glamour gives you exciting opportunities to accomplish your deepest desires both magically and mundanely. Not sure where to start? Don’t worry! I’ve got you covered!

1. Let’s whip out a glam honey pot to get things going. (If you want to be fancy about it, do it on a Friday.) Write down your intention on a piece of brown paper bag without your pen leaving the paper. Sprinkle it with cinnamon (to bring your intention faster!) and roll the paper towards you. Put it at the bottom of a small jar. Add in some dried rose petals (to make you more alluring the the Universe), jasmine petals (to open yourself up to the glamour of the world around you and in you) and cedar (to open yourself up to prosperity, because who doesn’t need that). And, of course, a little glitter never hurt anyone. Pour honey into the jar, over your components and seal the jar. Put the jar in your sink. Use a chime candle in the color of your choice (I prefer beeswax chime candles, but whatever you can get is fine). Inscribe the candle with a pin with your intention. Put some rose oil on the candle, drawing it to you. Light the candle, say your intention out loud. Drip a little wax onto the top of the jar. Press the candle into the wax on top of the jar and let it burn out. Do this every night for 13 days and then every Friday.
2. Dress with intent. The makeover montage isn’t new. (If you want to sound really scholarly about it, it’s called kosmesis, which is also fun to say.) It’s been around since ye olde Iliad days when Hera and her girl posse wanted to keep messing with the Trojan War so they make Hera look fiiiiiiiiiiione to Zeus, have her sex him up, and when he falls asleep they zap him with magic to keep him asleep so they could go about their warfare business without Zeus making frowny faces at them. So, if playing dress up Barbie/Hera worked for Trojan war business, believe me, it’s going to do something for you on a Tuesday at the office. Think about what kind of impression you want to make for whatever you’re doing (going to a PTA meeting to face down Sheila, going on a date with someone you might like-like, getting your spouse to agree to watch a million episodes of Real Housewives, trying to skate out of work at three on a Friday, impressing a new group of friends at a cocktail party, bowling with your college dorm mates and you need to borrow bio notes, whatever it is you do). Think about what you want to wear to accomplish whatever you’re trying to accomplish—don’t be afraid to have a little solo dress up party. Get a glass of wine. Put on some music. See if you really like what you are wearing and how you look in it. Do your hair, skin care, make up, fragrance, whatever is applicable to go with it.
3. Let’s do a little quasi-alchemy. Why not you? Get some spirulina powder from your health food store or Amazon.com. Mix: ½ teaspoon spirulina, ½ lemon, 1 teaspoon honey, 1 tablespoon raw apple cider vinegar with 2 cups spring water (or filtered water). Spirulina is antioxidant-rich, lemon is cleansing, honey is a natural energy source, and raw apple cider vinegar is healing. Together, this will make your skin look radiant. It’s easier to be in touch with your glamour if you literally love the skin you’re in. Put everything in a glass (with a little room for stirring). Put your intention in the glass. Stir it all together clockwise while focusing on your intention. In Omnia Paratus! (Ready for anything!)
4. Get a glamour secret weapon. What is something you wear all the time? A fragrance, a piece of jewelry, moisturizer, a lipstick, anything that touches your skin and you can wear every day. Enchant your item by holding it and putting your intention into it every day for ten minutes a day for eight days. After that, wear it daily until you see your intention manifesting and then wear it as needed.
5. Practice working with your glamour.
   When I was younger, I desperately wanted my glamour to work all the time. I didn’t have a plan for what I would do if I could get it to work all the time (. . .unlike now), which was probably for the best because lordess only knows what I would have done with it at the time. Start by focusing on what you want to accomplish with your glamour for that day. That will help narrow the playing field, otherwise you’re just throwing spaghetti at the Universe’s wall. Practice working on getting your energy to flow in that direction. Practice making your energy work for you so that you are perfectly charming. This was a hard concept for me for many years. I wanted a very specific how-to-do-it. The thing is, everyone does magic differently. While many books focus on visualizations, what do you do if you’re not a visual thinker? Flail for a lot of years, if you were me. So keep your eyes on your own paper here; don’t worry about how other people use magic, focus on how you use magic. I personally like to think of a lightning bug. When I was younger, I felt like I couldn’t get my butt to light up. Then when I figured out how to get my butt to light up, I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. So let’s work on how to figure out how to make your . . . (metaphysical) butt light up. And how to turn it off. And how to turn it on or off on command. If my methods don’t work for you, play around with it until you find one that does. Maybe you need to chant, maybe you need to visualize, maybe you need to hear a certain song in your head, maybe it’s scent-based. The point is that there’s no wrong way to do this. If you are most people, you will likely not be energetically constantly lit up like the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. Ideally, you will be able to generate a pleasant level of copper wire fairy lights energetically on a near constant basis and then be able to jack it up to Times Square on an as-needed basis (as well as have the ability to lower it to a single tea light level of glamour when needed). Here’s a suggested method in working with your glamour. Start by drawing up energy from your root to your throat. It should pass through your tummy and your heart and feel effervescent and sparkling. Practice getting that energy up to your throat quickly. Once you have a good handle on being able to do that, the next step is to take that energy and be sure it shoots out of your throat, your mouth, your eyes, and the top of your head so you are a fountain of sparkling glamour energy. Practice doing this with your intent in various social situations until you are comfortable with it. Sometimes, for many reasons, we may want to dim that energy a bit, especially once we get comfortable with it. Pull all of the glamour energy back down into your root, in a reverse of what you did to brighten it. Get comfortable with that until you are well versed in turning it on and turning it off.
6. Make an Offering. So, if you read my blog you know I talk about the concept of modern day #QueensInExile. The idea is that most of us who practice witchcraft are in exile in some way in our modern lives. Some of that carries over to our occult practice. Maybe you wouldn’t talk to any of your ancestors Because of Reasons. Maybe you are in exile from your birth religion. Maybe you don’t come from a practice that talked to saints all the time so trying to integrate that now feels weird. Maybe you just never connected with a specific pantheon. Why not consider an actual medieval queen as a chosen ancestor to work with? Feel free to pick your own from whatever part of the world you like, but Queen Elizabeth Woodville is a good choice if you don’t know where to start. Getting into an offering practice would help boost your glamour because it never hurts to have someone looking out for you. Start a relationship the same way you would with a human. Give a gift/offering, tell her what you’re trying to accomplish, ask for assistance. A few sincere compliments rarely go amiss, too. Suggested offerings for Queen Elizabeth Woodville: pink roses, mead, maids of honey cakes.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2017. All rights reserved.