Gloves

The truth is, the battle between functional and stylish gloves, or anything for that matter, has been going on since the beginning of time. Everybody wants to look good when they go out. At the same time, they want to be warm, cool, safe, or whatever kind of feeling they're going after when they leave the house. And in the case of gloves, for those of us who live in climates that aren't exactly conducive to sun bathing all year round, wearing a stylish pair of gloves to a high tea can be a painful experience in the dead of winter, which begs to ask the question...

Can't they make fashionable gloves that also keep you warm?

The answer is unfortunately, no. Don't believe all the hype about how THIS company's fashion gloves are insulated. It's a bunch of nonsense. In order to get enough insulation inside a pair of gloves, the gloves themselves have to be made of a certain material on the outside and also have to be darn bulky besides. These thin little gloves that look like they came from Paris, France are not going to keep you warm when the temperature goes north of the equator.

And this leaves us with a terrible choice to have to make. Do we sacrifice our comfort because we are going to a grand ball and don't want to be the laughing stock when we enter with our heavy insulated hiking gloves, or do we want to risk getting frostbite just to make the right impression? Well, the answer is very simple ladies.

Get a pair of both. While you're outdoors, you wear your heavy insulated worker's gloves, making sure that your delicate extremities are protected. Then, as soon as you are about to enter the building of the grand event, you bury those ugly things in you handbag and pull out your $200 fashion gloves. Nobody will ever know the difference.

A little more costly? Sure, there is the added expense. And most likely you won't be wearing those very warm gloves for a long time anyway, but in cases where you're going to be outdoors for a long period of time, they will come in handy. And if your own personal feelings don't allow you to be seen in the company of such ugly things, think about how your hands will feel and how they'll thank you when you put on a pair of nice insulated gloves on that below zero day.

Yes, you really can have functional and stylish. Just not at the same time.