Increasing awareness about monarch butterflies
The annual Monarch Butterfly Festival took place over the weekend as the butterfly species faces survival threats.
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CBC
31 minutes ago
- CBC
Micro-fruit nails are this summer's sweetest manicure — here's how to get the look
Pro tips from nail experts for DIYing these mini motifs at home One of the most delightful warm-weather pairings is basking in the sun with a bowl of refreshing fruit salad. But an even sweeter combo for nail art lovers might be micro-fruit motifs and manicures, a look that's currently trending online and IRL. Over the past few years, we've witnessed the rise of food-driven fashion and beauty trends, like glazed-doughnut nails, butter-yellow fashion and this season's Guava Girl Summer. Micro-fruit manis follow suit, but experts have seen this nail art look coming for a while. Nargis Khan, a nail artist at Toronto's Tips Nail Bar, has noticed an uptick in fruit-inspired manis over the last three years or so, with requests ranging from bold prints to 3D styles. "There's always a spike in fruity manis during spring and summer," she told CBC Life. Content creator Alison Nguyen, known for her DIY manicures and nail art, also noticed these designs picking up in 2023 and 2024. She even created a bold, 3D-fruit mani tutorial for CBC Life last June. But this summer, we're seeing the trend reach new heights, with Pinterest searches in Canada for "fruit nails" more than doubling from this time last year. And on social media, some of the most popular designs feature itty-bitty produce, like strawberries, cherries and peaches. Khan credits this to trendsetting queen Hailey Bieber, who debuted a farmers' market–inspired mani by celebrity nail artist Zola Ganzorigt last summer. "Since then, people can't get enough!" she said. Nguyen — who recreated Bieber's look last August using decals — believes practicality is another factor behind the trend. "I think the dainty, minimal elements make it easier to wear versus larger nail art," she said. A scroll through social media shows most of these patterns painted on a basic nude base or a simple French tip. "It's a subtle, chic way of taking part in a trend without being super bold or out there," Khan agreed. Micro-fruit nails have a way of sparking joy, too. "People gravitate towards this style because of its fun '90s nostalgia," said Khan. She added that all things micro — not just fruit — are currently everywhere in the nail-art world, and that she thinks this trend will be sticking around for a while. Nguyen also believes in the manicure's longevity. "There will always be someone keeping the trend alive, and it's such a fun little element to spice up your nails," she said. Ready to try it out yourself? Scroll on for some fun ways to incorporate micro-fruits into your manicure, whether you're DIY-ing your own tips or looking for inspo to take to the salon. To achieve this look at home, opt for nail stickers or decals, which both pros said will help you achieve a flawless result. If you're feeling creative, Khan said you can use a dotting tool to make the fruit and a short liner brush to add fine details. Then, to make the fruit look juicy and realistic, you can add highlights using a bit of white polish or another lighter shade. Nguyen said you can also use a toothpick to recreate the look. Fruits that have rounder shapes — like blueberries, strawberries and cherries — tend to be easier to paint, said Khan. A charming addition to micro-fruit nails? Gemstones! For a picnic-themed look, try incorporating gingham, like Khan did in this summery set. Switch things up with French tips in different colours. Embed | Other To view this embedded content, please visit the full version of this story. Open full story in new tab For a set that really shines, ask for 3D shapes topped with cat eye polish. Not sure this look is right for you? Test it out with an accent nail.
CBC
31 minutes ago
- CBC
How punk made me the trans woman I am
Emerging Queer Voices is a monthly LGBTQ arts and culture column that features different up-and-coming LGBTQ writers. You can read more about the series and find all published editions here. It's Sept. 4, 2020. I've just moved into residence at Trent University, in one of a number of new townhouse-style buildings satellite to campus proper that are creatively named "the Annexes." My roommate and I, still barely unpacked, have just met our next-door neighbours. In this virus-blanketed, pre-vaccine world, they will be our nearest form of human contact for the next eight months. In that ever-so-brief period of time, we and the 16 other people who comprise our floor of Annex B will come together and crash apart. None of that matters now, however; in this moment, we have no idea what's yet to come. Instead, in a moment of semi-normalcy amid the warring tensions between youth and quarantine, we are piled into my neighbour's car, driving to Walmart. As we pull out of the parking lot, dead as it will remain for the coming months since parents have abandoned their children to fate, she punches the stereo and slips a disc into the CD player. A guitar lick begins to play. It's Morbid Stuff by PUP. This is the moment that cemented a friendship which has lasted — well, not exactly a lifetime, since I don't speak to any of the people who were in that car today, but which at least burned with all the clamour and vitality that only youth can briefly muster. Fitting for a friendship forged over a hardcore record that it should be short, explosive and involve no small amount of drugs. Punk is a common language like that. It's something shared, something which — at its best — can be a vessel, and even a sort of catalyst, for these very formative moments in one's life. Sept. 4, 2020, was also the first time I introduced myself to a stranger as a woman. I'd already come out to some close friends and had scheduled an appointment to get referred for hormones in a matter of weeks, but this moment was perhaps the most crucial for me. It was a clean break from the person I'd been in high school and yet it was also the logical extension of the woman my hometown's hardcore scene had made me. I spent my youth in Ottawa, a sleepy government town that had a bad rap for being boring among people who grew up there. I went to one of the city's most stratified high schools, which pulled from one of its richest neighbourhoods as well as the single poorest. A school like that is a bad place to be queer at the best of times, and the years of the first Trump presidency weren't that. Sure, we prided ourselves on our tolerance and enlightenment, but there were harsh social reprisals for sexual deviance all the same. The kids whose parents bought them SUVs were never going to slum it with gender trash like me. So, instead, I found solace in the scene. Contrary to popular belief, the ByWard Market does not represent the entire spectrum of possibilities within Ottawa's nightlife. On any given day, I'd be forwarded a Facebook invitation to some DIY show at 8 p.m. on a Thursday night. The venues for such gigs were often "normal" spaces by day — bookstores, coffee shops and the like. But by night, they'd shove the furniture to one side, plug some amps into a power bar at the back of the room and have garage bands play 15-minute sets until the noise bylaw kicked in. Crowds of maybe two dozen tops, aged anywhere from 14 to their late forties, would gather in these impromptu concert halls to chat, drink and mosh until they were soaked through with sweat and their ears were ringing. My friends started dragging me to these shows sometime in the 10th grade. Being a Good Kid™ at heart, I first went under performed duress. However, the more I went, the more I kept coming back. Punk shows, I found, were a space to both figuratively and literally let my hair down — to be myself at a time when I felt I couldn't anywhere else. Part of it, no doubt, is that the demographic — especially in the younger crowds — skewed exceptionally queer. Stereotypes about blue hair's comorbidity with certain pronouns are easily reinforced at basement shows frequented by angst-ridden 16-year-olds. Adolescence is a period of social experimentation, and a subculture already relatively tolerant of weirdness and diversity is as good a place as any to do it. Being in the punk scene was the first time I made trans friends — the first time I made queer friends, really, who weren't white bisexual women. Some nights, I'd go and find the person I'd been chatting to the previous week had changed their pronouns twice in the interim. More than to just come as you are, the sense was to come as you wanted to be. No one at a punk show cares who you are, what you wear, whether you're not-quite-a-girl or just a guy with long hair. So dark are the interiors of these dives and holes that, really, it'd be remarkable if anyone even noticed. You're just one of a dozen, one particle orbiting the frenzy of the mosh pit, colliding at random with strangers, buzzing the whole time. Nobody's looking at you. No one's even listening to the band. They're just the social adhesive holding this moment together, enabling this collision — enabling you to lose yourself. It's in this moment that you're able to become somebody else. Doing this as long as I did, I developed something of a split personality. Well, being closeted had already bequeathed me said split personality, but my night life embodied it: Public me wore button-downs and skinny jeans to school. Other me wore friends' makeup and Harley boots to shows. And then we'd sit — my friends and I — on the steps outside these empty warehouses and all-ages clubs, bumming cigarettes off the older punks and fuelling teenage angst into urgent confessionals: "I think this body of mine is slowly killing me." "Don't you ever wish you were just born a woman?" We'd hug, and smoke, and cry, and rest on each other's shoulders on the bus rides home. Every night was the most important night of our lives. By the end of 2019, I knew I had to transition. I'd give you a date, but I can't remember much before my first hormone consult, just a jumble of self-loathing punctuated by these occasional one-night crescendos. I'd confessed my intentions to a friend at 2 a.m. one night while listening to Dark Days. She'd told me she was thinking of changing her pronouns. We decided to room together at university. Flash forward to Sept. 4. She's in the car beside me. See You at Your Funeral is playing over the tinny speakers. In two years, we'll stop speaking. This is one of the last good memories she'll leave me. The other is a year and change later, at the Bovine Sex Club in Toronto — our first show since the world shut down. Just like old times, but we're older now and both women. I'm wearing the same Harleys I'd worn at my first show. The steel toes poke through in places where they've been battered in the pit. I feel like a different person — in control now, for the first time, of my life. Yet under that skin are the same muscles that screamed after basement shows, the same vocal chords that ached from screaming too hard. The marks of the scene are still under my body, in my tastes and mannerisms, and in my ears, which still ring in spite of everything. I'm still the woman that punk made me, and whenever I hear those first notes of Kids, I remember that.
CTV News
41 minutes ago
- CTV News
This is the new home for Ottawa's Kinetic Clock
The City of Ottawa says the Kinetic Clock, initially commissioned in 1989, is now located at Britannia Park. (City of Ottawa/release) The Kinetic Clock is now located at Ottawa's Britannia Park, 37 years after it was initially commissioned by the City of Ottawa and placed along Sparks Street. The city announced on Thursday that the Kinetic Clock has been fully restored and 'reinstalled in a setting that beautifully complements its unique design.' It's located adjacent to the Ron Kolbus Lakeside Centre on Greenview Avenue, near Britannia Beach. It was originally unveiled on Sparks Street, between Metcalfe and O'Connor streets, in 1989. 'Kinetic Clock is a hybrid of clock and sundial, blending science and art to explore the duality of time. Mechanical time is reflected by the sculpture's moving elements, while natural time is represented through evolving shadow patterns cast by the sculpture,' the city said in a release.' 'On the summer solstice, these shadows gradually form a square – a nod to the passage of time through nature.' The city says the Kinetic Clock was built using electronic and robotic technologies. 'The sculpture's planes shift and rotate every 15, 30, and 45 minutes, to align on the hour,' the city said. The Kinetic Clock was commissioned by the former Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton in 1989 from artist Andrew Stonyer. According to the Ottawa Citizen, the Kinetic Clock was removed from Sparks Street in 2013. 'Its one-of-a-kind function and sculptural style are reflective of Stonyer's unique approach to art, which is influenced by mathematics, geometry, and scientific principles,' the city said in a media release.' Local company Heritage Grade conducted a full-scale restoration on the sculpture, which included surface repairs and repainting. The city says Public Art staff and Facility Services selected the space in Britannia Park for the Kinetic Clock, 'that allows both natural sunlight for shadow casting and proximity to electrical infrastructure at the Ron Kolbus Lakeside Centre.'
