I avoid purchasing tissues unless very sniffly or very sad. Tissue boxes are either too long or too tall, and they occupy far too much counter space. The patterns and palettes are curious and threaten to overwhelm the precarious balance of a New York apartment. And yet, the answer cannot lie in a no-tissue policy, nor will I ever warm to a tissue-box cover with rigid lines perched akimbo on the back of a toilet.
And so, when I was browsing up and down the long aisles of the Javits Center during the twice-annual gift show, I lit upon a simple, crisp lace tissue-box cover. It slipped over the display box, obscuring the contents underneath save for a small corner of a tissue flapping gently, like the wing of a dove. It possessed the qualities I imagined to be important in a tissue-box cover: It can be clutched softly in one’s arms (beautifully, even), like Sebastian Flyte’s teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited. It must look at home on a bed or a couch or the other places where one might sneeze or cry, and must not crack were it to tumble from any of these places.
Reader, I purchased it. (Admittedly, some time passed between that first sighting and my purchase, but I did make it mine.) By then I had a daughter, Bluebell, who is now 6, and that daughter had a bedside table with a box of tissues — uncovered! — on it. Bluebell is very neat and likes to arrange her room. The tissue box on the bedside table, displayed next to a Hello Kitty notebook, did not bother her — but I knew there was a lovelier solution. And so, I cocooned her tissues in a lace cover I found on eBay. “Oh, I love it, Mommy. It feels like me,” Bluebell told me when I asked what she thought of her new tissue-box cover.
One night at bedtime, Bluebell cried passionately in my arms (I cannot remember why, though I do remember it was the first time she seemed swept away in the tide of her own feelings). And this I remember because I wrote it down: She asked for her tissue box. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes and looked at me with velvety post-cry baby lashes and said, “I get all my sadness out, and all my anger out, and and my guiltiness out, and then I feel so much better.”
I squeezed her tight and gave her 1 million kisses, and as I slipped out of her room for her dad to put her to bed, I could see, tumbled onto the leopard-print rug, the little winged tissue box, a silly but stalwart companion for colds and small sadnesses alike.
Bluebell’s exact tissue-box cover is no longer available online, but this one is quite similar. I enjoy the intersection of de trop and simple, plus the neat little bows at either end of the tissue slot.
If an archival Simone Rocha dress were a tissue-box cover, this would be it. I mean this as only the highest compliment to both parties.
A cousin of the lace tissue-box cover is the lily of the valley tissue-box cover. Statistically, if you like lace, you are highly likely to like lily of the valley. This is a set of two, which is nice if you don’t want to carry your tissue boxes from room to room when sniffly. It’s also suited for a more vertical tissue box, which seems to be the more modern preference for tissue manufacturers.
A cousin to both lace and lily of the valley — the monogram. I like white linen with white thread. Ghostly, angelic, like Astier de Villatte ceramics.
An option in eggshell will be just the thing if eggshell is your preference.
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