STARtorialist 2020 Holiday Gift Buying Guide

By Emily Rice, Debbie Kovalsky, & Kelle Cruz

Hello from STARtorialist HQ! We are over the moon to have finally launched our online shop this year and are proud to continue supporting fellow small businesses and independent designers, especially during the holiday season. For this year’s gift guide, we are sharing some of our favorite STARtorial products, the majority of which are designed and/or produced by small businesses, many of them women- and/or minority-owned (read more here). Some of them are even designed by scientists (including fellow astronomers), handcrafted, and/or one of a kind! 

We hope this gift guide gives you ideas for your loved ones, seasonal tokens of appreciation, and fun swaps, or even treats for yourself to close out an extra-challenging year. Fair warning that as a small just-opened shop our inventory is limited and many items may sell out, so shop early or send a Gift Card in case that perfect gift is still waiting to be discovered. You can even create a Wishlist directly in the shop (look for the orange buttons on each product page), and share it with family and friends with just a couple clicks. Sign up for the newsletter for a special preview of our Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday sale!

STARtorialist 2018 Holiday Gift Guide

By Emily Rice, Summer Ash, and Kelle Cruz

Hello from STARtorialist HQ! As we’ve ventured into the retail business via our conference pop-up shop, aka the BOOTHtique, we have learned first-hand how much of an impact your purchasing choices can have on small businesses and independent designers, especially during the holiday season. For this year’s gift guide, we are sharing some of our favorite startorial shops, the majority of which are small businesses, many of them women- and/or minority-owned (read more here). For full disclosure, some of the links below are affiliate links which might generate commissions for us and/or we have purchasing and promotional relationships with these companies. 

Clothing & Accessories

Left to right: Constellations glow-in-the-dark tee from Svaha, Amazing Women Pioneers canvas tote bag from Svaha, Space Lover socks bundle from Svaha, “Fleur-de-Lift-Off” Rockets infinity scarf from Princess Awesome.

2016 Holiday Gift Guide

Image From NASA: courtesy of The Cassini-Huygens Project team.

For the past few years, the Women in Astronomy blog has posted a holiday gift guide in preparation for the vast array of holidays celebrated in December. The 2014 post included links to various shopping and blogging sites focused on science and empowering girls (many of which are still useful today), and the 2015 post focused on a gift giving guide from the creators of STARtorialist. Just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, here's the 2016 Holiday Gift Guide, which is mostly links to help get the perfect gifts for the space fans in your life this holiday season.

Guest Post: Gift Giving Guide from STARtorialist creators Emily Rice and Summer Ash

Today's guest post is by Emily Rice and Summer Ash. Emily and Summer created STARtorialist, the astronomy-fashion blog “where science meets fashion and scientists get fabulous!” in 2013.

Emily Rice is an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research focuses on the atmospheric properties of very low mass stars, brown dwarfs, and directly-imaged exoplanets. You may recognize her from Astronomy on Tap NYC and those parody songs that get stuck in your head.

Summer Ash is the Director of Outreach for Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy. Having been both a rocket scientist and a radio astronomer, she’s now harnessing her powers for science communication. She is the "In-House Astrophysicist" for The Rachel Maddow Show and has written for Scientific American, Slate, and Nautilus Magazine.

As we approach northern hemisphere winter solstice and Earth’s perihelion, we also begin customary exchange of benefaction in many hominin clade cultures.

Translation: it’s winter holiday season, and that means presents! Here at STARtorialist, Summer & I have been curating astronomy-inspired fashion, decor, and more for nearly two years, and the WiA blog has asked us to share some of our favorites with you. The Universe of astrofashion seems to be affected by dark energy so it was a challenge to keep this short.  

Each category below has links directly to the shops mentioned as well as links to explore related tags on STARtorialist. The survey presented here is definitely biased, but you can use tags on each post to search by store (e.g., Old Navy, Modcloth), item (shoes, hat), or subject (Saturn, stars, galaxy, Hubble image). Or you could browse through all 1200+ posts on our archive! We’ll be posting more startorial gift ideas in the coming weeks so make sure to follow us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, or your favorite RSS reader.

Clothes

Starstuff Clothing* might as well be the official uniform of professional astronomers. Since a successful Kickstarter in summer 2014, the company has expanded from three prints to over a dozen, all real images from Hubble, Spitzer, WISE, and VLT. With five different t-shirt fits plus tank tops and dress, that’s 115 options, available in sizes XS-2XL. Explore all of our Starstuff Clothing posts.

Caption: T-shirts from Starstuff clothing

2014 Holiday Gift Guide

With the holidays fast approaching, a common question that I see many of my colleagues struggling with is what to purchase our next generation of budding scientists for the holidays.  A recent study featured in CBE-Life Sciences Education showed that family plays a vital role in initially attracting young people to the science, technology, engineeringand math (STEM) fields.  As we look towards toy aisles, we are distracted by the massive aisle of pink for girls and robots, action figures, and toy weapons for boys, which have lead to many calling out the normalization of gender roles at very early ages that may also impact the career paths young girls take later in life.  All of this leads to a dilemma for many of us with young girls in our lives to look outside of the standard pink aisle for gifts for those that have a genuine interest in the sciences.  Legos, one of the greatest toys of all time, has stepped up several times and recently posted this great commercial for girls, which even focuses on the difference between how young children play (boys typically follow the design on the box, while girls tend to build from their imagination).  Here are some shopping and blogging sites focused on science and empowering girls for my version of a 2014 Holiday gift guide (aside from Legos, found nationwide, and etsy, or as I call it, the online land for everything homemade).