What Happens in a Signal Session | 3rd Iris

Hesitation is part of it. It means you take your choices seriously. And if The Signal keeps pulling at you, some part of you already knows there's more of you than your life is showing.

So here is exactly what happens, step by step, so you can decide with your eyes open. No mystery and no hype.

Why we start with a diagnostic

Most people shop first and ask who they are later. The Signal turns that around.

Before any clothes come into it, I will assess your current signal:

the full atmosphere you carry, what your presence says before you speak, and where it drifts from who you are.

Then we choose a more intentional direction.

The session, step by step

1. The Signal Snapshot. After you book, you fill out a short intake about your identity, your lifestyle, and your visual references, meaning images that draw you in, such as a film still, an outfit you love, or a mood board. This is how I prepare before we ever meet.

2. Your private session. We meet once, one-on-one, for 75 minutes over video. We start with your goal, your profession, and your pain points: what you want to be seen as, and where your current look gets in the way. For example, if you're an artist or exhibitor who wears black to every opening but feels invisible in the room, we might look at how you can show up as the art, too.

3. Your Signal Map. Within five business days of the session, you receive your personalized 3RD IRIS Signal Map.

4. One check-in. Within seven days of getting your Signal Map, we check in once to see how the direction is landing.

What you walk away with

• Clarity on your current signal and on what feels out of alignment.

• Your Signal Map. A personalized picture of where you are and where you're headed: your current signal, what feels out of alignment, and the direction you chose, along with the visual references that anchor it and a few clear next steps for how to show up.

• A check-in a week after your Map arrives, so the direction doesn't fade.

Who it's for, and who it isn't

The Signal is for you if you feel the most powerful when you embrace your alternative style, but know that the way you are showing up is not honoring that.

It is not a closet cleanout, a personal-shopping service, or a full wardrobe overhaul. It is not a body-analysis service, and it is not therapy or a mental-health service. It also can't promise a specific personal, professional, emotional, financial, or social outcome. You stay the final decision-maker on your clothes, your budget, and your identity.

Common questions

How much is it? One payment of $222. There is no subscription and no recurring charge.

How long do I have to book? You complete your Snapshot and schedule your session within 30 days of buying.

What if I need to reschedule? You can reschedule once, with at least 48 hours' notice. With less notice, the session isn't eligible for a refund or a reschedule.

Can I get a refund? Yes, within 24 hours of payment, as long as your session hasn't been scheduled and no intake materials have been sent.

What happens after? If you join Collective Altar within 30 days of your session, your first two months are free. If you join Mirror Room, your first month is free. I'll give you your code after your session.

Ready when you are

If you're still reading, something in you has already noticed the gap between who you are and how you show up. The Signal is where we close it.

Book Your Signal Session

Be weird, be witnessed.

Visibility Starts Within

Sometimes getting out and around people can reality check you, in a good way. I am someone who has always loved fashion, loved modifying it, looking at it, switching it up, etc. I'm not very good at making it but I will design a line in this lifetime! (My family of seamstresses are probably disappointed by my inability to sew despite their best effort). It is just something I've always loved. It can be really important to get out and just talk to people, to interact, and to realize that the voice in your head that tells you you're invisible is actually the only thing making it true.

I recently went to an event. I sat down and the person next to me (amazing human btw) commented on my style and I joked that "well it better be good my business is about style." It came up a few times and reminded me I started this business because I believe in it and I love it! Sometimes you can get so in your head about things that you forget that people can see you. My level of comfort in my own body has fluctuated over years through situations, medications, and all that. I always felt too thin on the bottom and too thick on the top. I now endearingly call it my lollipop-shaped body. I only know of two other people that have the same body shape as me. Actually three, but one of them is not real. I freaking adore all of them. One is my mom, which is not that surprising, you know cuz we're related. The second is Celina SpookyBoo. The third is the one and only Lady Glitter Sparkles (Trolls).

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  My mom and I

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  Lady Glitter Sparkles from Trolls

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  Celina Spooky Boo and Call Me Kris

I see pictures of my mom and her little lollipop body and expressions and it just makes me happy. To see that in myself is emotional for me now that she has passed. There is a story that has that really has bee n coming up in my mind a lot recently. My mom was a stoner; that's not the story; that's just a fact. When she would get super high and silly, which was always refreshing, her eyes get really squinty because she has big old apple cheeks. I always thought her face looked like a smiling Buddha when she was high. I wanted to get a little Buddha tattoo that said "Buddha Mama." Some time in the years leading up to her death, I realized that she thought I was referring to her belly. I did joke about a lot of her physical things but so did she. Now it is what it is. Karma does what it does. Genetics does what it does. Anyway, I explained to her that it was because of her smile and not because of her body.

The fact that she was still very excited about the tattoo idea is telling. Her self image and my lack of realizing it created this completely different interpretation of something that is really a symbol of connection and joy in life. It's a reminder that the way that we see other people, especially people we love, the things about them that we love, don't have anything to do with societal norms or outward perception. It is a reminder to trust the people that love us, to trust their love. I listened to a reading today that reframed this for me. It said:

"It's easier to love others because you have control. It's much harder to be loved and be open to being loved because you don't have control over it." It is a gift to find the joy in who you are be through fashion or other ways of self-expression and connection. Health and stuff is important, of course, but health is a dynamic system, not just your body, not just your mind, and not just your soul. They have to work together.

Charlesice, 3RD IRIS Founder, reviewing journals

I was getting in my head about trying to find an outfit for the pitch and making sure that I would convey I know something about style. What actually worked though was just me going in my closet, being like, "I like this, this, and this. They go together; it's totally gonna be cute with my shoes, cool beans," doing my makeup in less than 10 minutes and eating it up. From people on the freaking metro to the event, my presence counted more than my look and because I was so just immersed in talking about the idea and the business that I didn't really think about it. Sometimes it takes going out and meeting people to realize that "Maybe I'm not invisible. Maybe my hair does look good. Maybe the way I feel comfortable in this dress is more important than how someone thinks I should look." Visibility starts within.

Ready to see yourself clearly again? The Signal is a private 75-minute session that turns who you are into a visual direction that feels unmistakably like you.

Book Your Signal Session

Dark Academia Is Just Academia

Dark academia looks like everything I was taught to want: heavy wool coats, battered books, Oxfords echoing down stone hallways, coffee cooling beside a half‑finished draft. It sells us a fantasy where learning is decadent, suffering is romantic, and a blazer can turn a burned‑out grad student into a tragic heroine.

I know that fantasy from the inside. I was the first‑gen kid who used homework to drown out screaming in the next room, the teenager who realized education might literally be a way out, the adult who ended up in a PhD program and later working at NIH. For people like me, school was survival, it was life.

That’s why dark academia as a fashion trend sits so strangely with me. On the surface, it’s just “boarding school meets goth enthusiast”: tweed, turtlenecks, pleats, loafers, dark lipstick, a moody palette of black, forest, burgundy, and tobacco. Underneath, the visual language is built from institutions that have always been about gatekeeping. Elite universities, old boys’ clubs, secret societies, and spaces that historically excluded women, poor and working‑class kids, and people of color.

Misogyny and elitism show up in who gets harassed, who gets believed, whose clothes are considered “professional,” whose body is watched more closely in the hallway. I’ve watched trainees in crisis because the system they worked their whole lives to enter turned out to be hostile, extractive, and indifferent to their mental health. Online that same system is romanticized: depression as a candlelit desk shot, insomnia as “study grind,” institutional violence as a cute Latin quote.

None of this is abstract. You have to be wealthy, white, cis, able‑bodied, and male to belong. The 19th News published a powerful piece by Jessica Kutz critically examining the receipts for how deep the boys’ club runs. Recent releases of the Epstein files show powerful scientists and funders explicitly strategizing to keep women out of elite STEM spaces, mocking their bodies and doubting their intelligence in writing. That’s the same ecosystem dark academia romanticizes: the conferences you’re not invited to, the fellowships you never hear about, the rooms where your body and your outfit are discussed before your work.

If the only way to be read as “serious” is to cosplay the old regime, then are our clothes are protecting us by erasing us?

I’m not interested in telling people to stop loving dark academia or to claim that fashion can fix these broken systems. I just want us to imagine what happens if we keep the intellectual drama and mood, but change who the silhouette centers? Swap the Eurocentric prep school references for alt silhouettes, disabled and fat bodies, Black and brown romantic leads, trans scholars in lace and leather who don’t have to tone themselves down to be believed. What if “academic” means corsets over hoodies, Docs with sari fabric, harnesses with thesis drafts? If they are going to talk anyway, why not give them something to chew on?

I don't believe that dark academia is worth romanticizing generally, but I do believe in romanticizing . the desire for thought, depth, mystery, study, and community. Those are the parts I want to dress for.

3RD IRIS is my refusal to let elitist institutions own the look of being a thinker.

Want the mood without the institution's rules? The Signal is a private session to build a look that is entirely yours.

Book Your Signal Session