At first glance, supermodel Iekeliene Stange looks like another cool specimen of Alien Beauty, joining the ranks of Sasha Pivovarova and Gemma Ward. But snapshots of Iekeliene’s personal style reveal another, charmingly goofier portrait.

Iekeliene (pronounced Ee-kel-een-ah) was discovered as a multimedia student in Holland, and didn’t know much about fashion before becoming a model. “I was a little punk rocker with red dreadlocks, a nose ring, and covered in rainbow bracelets,” she recently told Teen Vogue. Though she’s had to tone down her look for the runway, Stange still keeps it weird in regards to personal style, as can be seen below. Her hobbies include “photography, making amazing tutu’s and keeping it real.” Too cute!

• Iekeline Stange fan page (tons of pictures!)
• More pictures of Iekeliene’s personal style
• Video interview with Iekeliene on Flasher

– her cheekbones are very distracting in this video

Thew new issue of Elegy is out! Actually, I think it’s more that the cover got leaked, which means that it’s about to come out. On the cover, a mask by Madame Khufu, as photographed by Spanish photographer Eccehomo.

Every time I get a new issue of Elegy, I mourn the fact that I’ve forgotten all my French. Luckily, every issue of Elegy is so packed with gorgeous full bleeds of photos and art from all over the world that even though I can’t understand a thing, the magazine is worth every penny. As Elegy’s main focus is music, each issue comes with a CD sampler; last issue, it included Neil Gaiman, Neubauten and Nurse with Wound.

• Alyz Tale – Rédactrice en chef, photographer and muse
• Official Elegy Site
• Elegy Magazine on MySpace

Artist Soomi Park from Seoul has created a set of LED eyelashes that light up in the dark. In an interview with We Make Money Not Art, Park describes the motivation behind her design:

I tried to project Korean’s obsession to big eyes, and how this fetishism is interpreted into excessive plastic surgery done on the eyes among Korean women. I really thought the obsession with big eyes can be represented through media design, because both yearning for bigger eyes and projecting the look through lights can be done by distorting the representation and creating new images. The LED Eyelashes have a mercury sensor that controls the light on the face. When wearing the LED eyelashes, you look embellished as if you were wearing a piece of fashion jewelry.

Politicized wearable art that invokes cybernetic technology? Marry me! In truth, you had me at “light-up lashes.” Read the article for more about the eyelashes and about Park’s compelling Digital Veil projet. The article mistakenly refers to Soomi as a boy, but she corrects the misconception in the comments. The interview is excellent nonetheless.

Related:

• 5 Ways to Feel Like a Replicant
• May Your Nights be Aglow with Cats

a befuddling coroner’s photo of retired doctor John Bentley, 1966

Dear diary, today my heart leapt when Agent Scully suggested spontaneous human combustion…
-Agent Fox Mulder

Ho hum, the good old days. Pluto was still a planet, Nessie, Big Foot and leprechauns frolicked unfettered among us and the theoretical possibility of true Spontaneous Human Combustion seemed feasible. Well, to me, at any rate. I’m not really sure what’s to blame for that. (Repo Man? Krook from Bleak House? My unhealthy childhood obsession with Brad Dourif?) In any case, Ablaze! was required bathroom reading in my apartment for many years. Until quite recently, I clung to my hope that there was a chance, albeit remote, of my asshole ex being inexplicably reduced to a pile of ashes with feet.

Alas, thanks to a series of informative scientific articles and National Geographic specials, believers must face facts: SHC is a most likely myth.

I came across this image from Julie Heffernan’s new series, called Booty, in the new (very NSFW) blog of Trevor “don’t click it, mom” Brown:

Self Portrait as Post Script by Julie Heffernan

What is there to say, really? Trevor Brown writes the following:

while wasting countless hours and days lazily surfing the net (the cause of konomi’s beleaguering), stumbling upon amazing work like the above by julie heffernan only further reinforces feelings of inadequacy – while i’m “busy” right clicking and saving, konomi rants on, with incisive perception, artists must work like hell while they are young – skills improve until around the age of fifty – then, after building up momentum, it’s just blithely regurgitating the same old shit for the rest of your life – only craftsmen continue to improve in their old age – artists are too “me! me! me!” – smug

Last week, via Allison, I found a calculator that shows you Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age. I tormented myself with this thing for a good 45 minutes: at 25, Orson Welles had coscripted, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane! T.S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he was 23! Damn them, damn them all to hell.

Thinking that Julie Heffernan was another hot young artist who would only add to the complex about under-achievement ignited by the calculator, with Brown’s words fresh in my mind, I masochistically clicked on her bio to make an ecstatic discovery: Julie Heffernan, who completed the series above this year, was born in 1956! And then, of course, more research followed: Picasso completed his masterpiece, Guernica, when he was 55; Daniel Defoe wrote his first novel, “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” when he was 59.

Every accomplished person has another accomplished person that makes them feel like a slacker; catching a glimpse of that is somehow inspiring.