My Everyday Lolita App Review

On June 27, 2021, Rockuu made an announcement on Lolita Updates that she (with the help of developer Lheido) had created a new app specifically for lolitas. The app is My Everyday Lolita (MEL) for mobile, browser, and desktop use. Rockuu released a 25 minute video explaining the app’s use in detail. The app is natively designed for Android and can be added to iOS via the “add to home screen” option. You can also view the app from any website browser. So what is it and what makes it unique? Read on to find out.

MEL is a database of lolita items, updated by the community, that has four main functions: My Closet, My Wishlist, My Coordinate Checklist, and Search and Add Items. My Closet allows users to add items they own to their “closet”, if they’ve signed up for an account. My Wishlist allows users to add items they don’t own to their “wishlist”. Users can also put together coordinates with the Coordinate Checklist. If an item isn’t in the database, users can add it to MEL.

The Obvious Comparison

Rockuu acknowledges in her video that My Everyday Lolita is similar to other apps that already exist. It’s hard not to draw not to draw comparisons to Lolibrary. In many ways, the dress database is very similar to Lolibrary, but less complete. MEL allows users to add items and specific details including name, year of release, colorways, price, and measurements. It also allows users to tag items with keywords and substyles.

Divergence

The keywords feature is where it most diverges from Lolibrary. With a tag like “Halloween”, users can search and find items that might fit that tag but don’t contain that word in the name. For example, Angelic Pretty’s “Merry Making in the Ghost Town” is obviously a Halloween print. However, if you search “Halloween” on Lolibrary’s website, this dress doesn’t appear. On MEL, it appears on the second page because of the keyword function.

My Wishlist

The two most intriguing features of My Everyday Lolita are the “My Wishlist” and “My Coord Checklist.”  With My Wishlist, you can add any item to a wishlist. The wishlist also has a “dream dress” option that will make those items appear at the top of your list. This feature is extremely useful, because of the way that the site sorts multiple colorways, it’s possible to add the same dress in different colors to your wardrobe or wishlist.

My Coord Checklist

The other exciting feature is the “My Coord Checklist”. This feature allows you to use items in your wardrobe to build a coordinate, with spaces for mainpiece, blouse, head piece, leg wear, shoes, accessories, and wig. The coordinates can be saved for later reference, so you can easily pull together a coord on MEL and then wear it later. I can’t think of any other lolita specific apps that offer a feature like this.

There are so many great uses for this. One item, many ways become a snap with this coordinate checklist. Planning outfits on a trip becomes much easier if you use it as a packing list.

Drawbacks

Of course, there are some drawbacks to this app. The biggest is that the app is only as useful as it’s database, which right now is pretty small. Since I’ve been using it for a week, there have only been a handful of items added. This suggests that most users aren’t adding items very quickly. Without the robust catalog that a site like Lolibrary has, MEL’s other features aren’t as useful.

I’ve added a few items myself and found the process pretty simple. Additionally, My Everyday Lolita allows users to quickly duplicate an entry so that different colorways can be easily added. Rockuu mentioned in her video that there is some moderation of content, but it seems like the process is meant to be much faster than Lolibrary’s.

The other drawback to this app is that it does not host images on it’s own servers. Instead, users provide a link to an existing image hosted elsewhere. This means that the site’s database could suffer from “link rot”, where other websites disappear and those images are no longer accessible. The good news is that MEL is aware is this problem and has a Patreon goal that would allow them to pay for a server to store images.

My Own Wishlist

This app is still a work in progress, so there’s definitely room for new features or tweaking old ones. With that in mind, here are a few things I’d love to see:

• Item names when searching through the database without clicking on the item.
• Ability to chose from “My Closet” and “All items” when making a coordinate, so you could use it to make fantasy coordinates with items you don’t own.

Final Thoughts

MEL’s creator recognizes the fact that it is not a unique app idea, but it still offers interesting and exciting features. I think that the coordinate checklist and wishlist features are really useful. For that reason, MEL is an excellent new entry in the lolita community’s resources. I hope that the creator and developer continue to maintain this app, and I hope the community as a whole help the database grow. I know that I’ll be adding pieces of my wardrobe as I continue to use that app.

Also, thank you MEL team for sweet, gothic, and classic themed skins for this app! An unnecessary but adorable bonus!

If you want to check out or support MEL, you can find more info in their FaceBook group and Patreon. You can also follow MEL’s creator on Instagram and both her Youtube channels: French and English.

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