Apartment staging, Botox, and Brazilians

By Teri Karush Rogers| November 2, 2010 - 12:51PM

Apartment staging--aka the act of stripping your personality and personal effects out of your apartment to make way for someone else's fantasy--came into its own around the same time as Botox, Brazilian waxing, and real estate blogs. What happens if you don't conform to the erasure aesthetic? If you are Christine O'Donnell, you wind up savaged on Gawker by an anonymous 25-year-old raised on porn. (Sorry, but you are going to have to Google that one yourself.) If you are squashed with your young family into a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn that you try to sell without staging it first, you are going to get a picture of your messy toy-strewn living room posted on Brownstoner, followed by psychographic portraits like this:

3 rooms = no nursery
no nursery = family bed
family bed = no sex
no sex = depression
depression = don't even feel like picking up the damn toys to sell this f-ing dump

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