Many Happy Returns OOC: Fuzzytime from mid-September
She had somehow drawn the blankets up to her forehead in the night, and the moment Alicia turned them back, she realized why. She shivered as the air made contact with her face and bare arms, and thought longingly for a moment of simply turning the blankets back up over herself and going back to sleep.
Over a decade of habit, however, propelled her to her feet, which she promptly slid into soft houseshoes before tiptoeing through the dark to her dressing room, which was not substantially warmer. Rubbing her eyes with one hand, she took up her wand with the other and lit the lacy filigree lamps all at once. She did not move the curtains covering the window, not least because there was no real point to doing so; not only would it lower the temperature further inside, but the sky outside, she knew without looking, was still deep black, as it almost always was when she first rose in the morning. Instead, she removed her dressing gown from its hook and slid it over her head. A quick detour to the washroom to clean her teeth later and she was ready to sit down at her vanity table and begin, without ceremony, to go through the same ritual she did every morning before the rest of the house got up.
First, of course, came tea. One of the drawers was opened and from it she withdrew the box with the morning tea set. Another drawer produced a tiny, elaborately carved tea chest full of golden Assam lightened with a dash of Darjeeling. She took out a small metal pot first; a flick and a tap later, she had hot water, which she poured into the empty small china teapot with stylized camellias on it. She swirled it around the pot twice before pouring the water into the two matching teacups on the tray and then measuring out four spoons of tea and tipping them into the pot. That done, she went back to the first pot, refilling it and heating the water again before pouring the new water onto the tea leaves and replacing the lid. One clockwise turn was given to the pot before she turned back to the permanent contents of the dressing table, leaving the tea to its own devices for a few minutes.
First she wiped her face with warm water, just enough to dampen it. Then came the thick, cooling, opal-toned cleanser, meticulously smoothed over her whole face and neck before being just carefully massaged away with the cloth. After that, on went serum - thin, translucent, like milk mixed with water - followed by slightly denser cream, both especially concentrated around her eyes and the sides of her mouth and the line directly atop the bridge of her nose, where smiling creased the skin frequently. Once that was done, she turned back to the teapot, turning it counter-clockwise twice before going back to her skincare routine, this time going into her lightly tinted, brightening moisturizer, which smelled like orange sherbet and made her worry about the twins trying to eat it if they ever succeeded in invading her dressing room while unsupervised. For now, though, it avoided all mouths, and she was able to pick up her wand and levitate the tea leaves out of the pot and onto a little dish for later composting without incident once the moisturizer was on and her face had begun to finally look awake.
She emptied the warming water from one cup, poured tea, and covered the pot with a small crocheted cosy before she picked up her hairbrush and gave it two spritzes of jasmine-scented hair mist. As it settled, she began brushing her hair scalp to ends, counting strokes up to one hundred. That done, she twisted it around her head with one hand and pulled a silk turban over it with the other before giving her nail polish a quick check for chips and beginning to drink her first cup of tea of the day.
When that was gone, she put her cup back down, put on a thin coat of hydrating tinted lip balm, and dumped the water from the second cup as well before picking up the tea tray with one hand and extinguishing the lamps with the other. Once she was sure the tea tray was securely placed on the table on her side of the bed, she slid out of her slippers and back into bed to doze until Thad woke up, thus beginning her thirtieth birthday the same way she had the vast majority of her days for the past eleven years, ever since she was married.