consume

As if you needed another good reason to purchase the fine formulations of Kiehl's Since 1851, the L'Oreal-owned apothecary brand has launched a limited-edition holiday collection of its famed Creme de Corps that features label artwork by KAWS, the artist also known as Brian Donnelly. Better still, Kiehl's is donating 100% of its net profits from the sale of the creatively labeled lotion to RxArt, which brings contemporary art to healthcare facilities. The label's mix of color planes and cartoony gloved hands marked with an "X" is indicative of KAWS's more recent paintings, which deconstruct his graphic signatures and trademark characters. The limited edition KAWS Creme de Corps is available in three sizes, and prices start at $26.50. "Continued use for 10 days will provide a skin texture heretofore unattainable," promises Kiehl's.

Like Christmas and National Candy Corn Day (which happens to be today), the Moss and Moroso Warehouse Sale happens just once a year, or just about. Dear UnBeige readers, it is almost upon us. Next Saturday, November 7, design-minded bargain shoppers will make their way to Soho (25 Greene Street, to be precise), just down the street from Moss' perpetually full-priced design emporium. At the stroke of 11 a.m., usually calm, placid, black-garbed urbanites wearing all manner of interesting eyewear will jostle their peers for selected items from the Moss warehouse (which we always picture like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, complete with Comme des Garçons-clad Oompa Loompas) priced at up to 80% off. We've been told to expect chairs, sofas, tables, lights, assorted small goods, and "many special items of particular note." The sale runs through Sunday, November 8 at 6 p.m., but note that it's a first-come-first-served situation (translation: get there early), and all sales are final. We're bringing along a Ted Muehling candlestick to fend off the hoards!

(Photos: Oakley)

We're skeptical when clothing and accessories that aren't designed for use in say, combat, come tucked inside large padded cases with glossy pamphlets and instructional CD-ROMs, but buying a pair of Oakley's newest sunglasses will get you all that and more. The price tag? $4,000. But think of it as $2,000 per eye.

Crafted from pure carbon fiber, the C Six (named in a shout-out to carbon's atomic number!) is "the most technically innovative sunglass ever created." Oakley explains:

Specialists in building F1 racecars, the experts at Crosby Composites of London have been producing C Six frames with meticulous craftsmanship. To make just one, five-axis Computer Numeric Controlled machines spin diamond-tipped milling heads at 10,000 rpm, shaping a 40-layer billet of carbon fiber composite for more than 24 hours.

To deal with the rigid nature of finished components, Oakley engineered spinal structures of Beta Titanium memory metal to achieve precise zones of tuned flexibility. Radial cams augment the stem mechanics, and the lenses are a showcase of the best optical technologies ever invented.

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Missing that fresh Trapper Keeper and a good excuse to load up on new pens? Get in the back-to-school spirit by junking your standard-issue tape dispenser—that clunky black plastic thing—for a wooden one inspired by literature's most famous whale. The Moby tape dispenser is the latest covetable creation from Jonas Damon, a creative director at Frog Design who has even found a way to improve upon the product design dogma of form following function. His pared-down version, "Form follows," promotes the idea that "Form is content embodied." In the case of Damon's beech wood tape dispenser for Areaware, that content is the squarish face of a whale viewed in profile. Now available for pre-order from Areaware, it's sure to get you back in the swim of things.

Don't feel bad. It happens to the best of us: pesky professional and personal obligations prevent you from finishing that sweeping John McPhee piece. You miss Jeffrey Toobin's latest dispatch from the Annals of Law and lose all perspective on the Supreme Court. "If only I didn't have to eat! To sleep!" you exclaim, shaking your fist at the sky. "Then I would be able to read every word of The New Yorker, every week, like architect Deborah Berke does." The solution to your problem is simple: time management. Which is why the magazine of magazines has created the Eustace Watch, a Swatch-style timepiece that can be yours for $49.95. Presbyopic mascot Eustace Tilley keeps his monocled eye on things from the watch's face, while the band—crafted from the finest vinyl—features a collage of classic covers from the magazine's inaugural art director, Rea Irvin. "Vintage artwork and contemporary design go hand in hand (no pun intended) in our first-ever New Yorker wristwatch!" notes The New Yorker Store. No, we can't picture anyone actually wearing one, either, but with a little luck, a Eustace Watch will make it into some sort of time capsule and really confuse the people of the future.

In a world of shrinking attention spans and contracting markets, a new breed of e-commerce company is banking on the one-shot deal: here today, gone tomorrow. One of our favorite newcomers to the fast-paced e-tail scene is RIPT Apparel, a Chicago-based online t-shirt shop that showcases one unique graphic t-shirt per day (yours for $10 plus $2.50 shipping in sizes ranging from small to 3XL) along with information about the artist behind the design. Since the site's launch in June, we've been impressed by the diverse bunch of wearable graphics, which have included Romanian illustrator Liviu Matei's Frank Kline-y take on the Japanese flag, an aviating platypus, a killer popcorn popper, and robots, lots and lots of robots. After 24 hours, each shirt "rests in peace forever," explains TJ Mapes, RIPT's web director. Think of it as Threadless with ADD.

(All photos: UnBeige)

It's New York International Gift Fair time! The fun kicks off this weekend at the Javits Center, where we'll again be prowling the aisles of the juried Accent on Design division as a judge for the "Bloggers' Choice" awards. In the meantime, take a look at our photo album from the February fair. Amidst the merchandise extravaganza, we found covetable goods from old and new favorites, including Artecnica (with a booth softly illuminated by Starlightz paper stars, pictured above), Areaware, Jonathan Adler, Harry Allen, and Alessi—and that's just the A's! First up, DFC's line of ceramic Skull Boxes. They were designed for trinket storage, but we prefer to think of them as ice cream bowls for Damien Hirst. At just under 11 inches tall, they're the perfect size for a spin art sundae topped with a spun sugar butterfly.

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Flowers, the American flag, a zooming eyeball, a boombox-toting geisha. There's something for everyone in Gap's new (PRODUCT) RED Artist Edition t-shirt collection. This season, the retailer has moved from blue-chip art stars such as Chuck Close and Jeff Koons to spotlight a range of graphic artists, designers, and typographers. The front of each t-shirt features original artwork by the likes of Geoff McFetridge (one of his designs features a group of people signing on to the mantra "What we collectively choose to buy or not to buy can change the course of this planet"), Deanne Cheuk, James Jean, and nomoco, while the backs are screened with a brief bio of the artist below the Gap (RED) logo. Half of the profits from each $28 t-shirt go to the global fund to fight AIDS.

On Saturday, Gap's ever-changing New York City concept shop on Fifth Avenue will open as a pop-up art gallery featuring drawings, paintings, and sculptures by ten of the artists alongside the new t-shirt collection, which also includes designs by Kjell Ekhorn and Jon Forss (of Non-Format), Keiko Itakura, Kari Moden, James Joyce, Stephen Kelleher (that's his forward-looking eyeball at left), Stina Persson, David Hollier, and Celia Calle. The gallery will be open through August 10. The shirts are also available at Gap stores nationwide, with select styles available at gap.com and the Whitney Museum Store.

Long Island Cheese Pumpkins. Double Yield Cucumbers. Mammoth Grey Stripe Sunflowers. Recognizing that these evocatively named crops are ripe for illustration, the Hudson Valley Seed Company created Art Packs, seed packages that feature the work of 11 artists from New York's Hudson Valley. Bridge to Paris Pepper, borne from a hybrid pepper called Paris and produced by Phillies Bridge Farm, features an antique photograph of the Eiffel Tower, while rodent-loving artist Ayumi Horie jumped at the chance to illustrate Rat's Tail Radish, named for its distinctively curled edible pods. Designed by Sarah Snow of Treeo Design, the colorful packages unfold like flowers and are printed using earth-friendly inks on recycled paper. At $3.50 each, Art Packs are a perfect (and economical) gift for anyone with a creative eye and a green thumb.

What's half joystick, half telephone, and all fun? The Ericofon! Designed in the 1950s by Ericsson, the one-piece phone (The Dial in the Base 'Comes to You'!) initially struggled to succeed in the United States, then firmly in the grips of Bell Telephone's monopoly, but steadily gained acceptance in the 1960s, when an Ohio company offered the spage-age contraption in a whopping 18 colors. Swayed by the promise of "Elegance...for eloquence," consumers could choose from hues such as Nordic Blue, Candle Glow (not to be confused with the sunnier Golden Glow), the grape jellyish Royal Dubonnet, and Taj Mahal, which sounds a lot more exotic than "white." An additional charge equipped one's Ericofon with the "World's First Electronic Tone Signal," billed as "The Sound of the Future." Sadly, Ericofons were out of production by the mid-1970s, but now, dear UnBeige readers, they are back—complete with push-button dialing (introduced in 1967). These days, they're known as ScandiPhones and available in an abbreviated—and more conventionally named—selection of colors. Pick one up at the Conran Shop for $65. We use ours to pretend we're Larry Tate summoning a flummoxed Darrin Stevens into the office to discuss how we're going to land the Bixby account.