Shoe Carnival Inc a leading retailer of value-priced footwear and accessories reported sales increased 5.4 percent to $154.8 million for the thirteen-week period ended August 4, 2007 compared to sales of $146.9 million for the thirteen-week period ended July 29, 2006.

Comparable store sales for the thirteen-week period ended August 4, 2007 decreased 7.1 percent compared to the thirteen-week period last year ended August 5, 2006.

Sales for the first six months ended August 4, 2007 increased 1.6 percent to $320.5 million from sales of $315.4 million for first six months last year ended July 29, 2006.

Comparable store sales for the twenty-six week period ended August 4, 2007 decreased 5.4 percent compared to the twenty-six week period last year ended August 5, 2006.

Second quarter financial results will be released before the market opens on Thursday, August 23, 2007. Later that day, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, the Company will host a conference call to discuss the second quarter results.

The public can listen to the live webcast of the call by visiting Shoe Carnival's Investor Relations While the question-and-answer session will be available to all listeners, questions from the audience will be limited to institutional analysts and investors.

A replay of the webcast will be available on our website beginning approximately two hours after the conclusion of the conference call and will be archived for one year.

How to survive pregnancy in style

Paula Cocozza
Guardian Unlimited

1. Enjoy tunic and trapeze dresses without having to worry, like all your non-pregnant friends, about whether you will look pregnant. Of course you will!

2. Don't change your cut of jeans. For skinny, go to Topshop; for boyfriend or bootcut, go to Gap. If you like straightleg jeans, spend money. These, by Paper Denim & Cloth, cost �119 from {pushmaternity.com} (020-7359 2003).

3. Wear a long vest under your regular tops to lengthen their life as they rise up your middle. The best tops we found are from Gap, home to great T-shirts. This one costs �19 and will be in store early August (0800 427 789 for stockists).

4. Don't be ashamed of your lingerie: these print briefs, �16, and bra, �32, come from Blossom (0845 262 7500).

5. Be fashion forward. This Mamas & Papas dress is Miu Miu-esque and has autumn's grown-up midi length. It costs �45 and will be in store from August 6 (0870 830 7700 for stockists).

6. Blow out on handbags, jewellery, a posh brolly, scarf, gloves and flat shoes. Anything, in short, that the bump has no say in.

7. Try on all your old clothes - then re-try them every few weeks. Look at what you've got with an open mind: a belted trench will go on working well into the sixth month if you stop knotting the belt and buckle it above the bump instead.

8. Don't exile yourself from nonmaternity shops. Cos has great T-shirts, Gap is full of roomy dresses and both have slouchy, long-line cardigans for autumn/winter. Just be prepared to look a little harder.

9. If you pick up something that you wouldn't wear in "normal" life, put it down ...

10. ... Unless you want to experiment. I doubt that I'll wear dungaree shorts once I've had the baby, but right now they look good, have excited inquiries from non-pregnant friends, and they're an experience only pregnancy would have aff orded me.

It was not altogether my usual Wednesday morning routine. I was somewhere north of Oxford Street, trying to find the Daniel Galvin hair salon. And it was a shade before 8.15am; aka ridiculous o'clock.

Sam Leith

Already, I was out of sorts. The deal I had struck with the Telegraph's fashion department was, that as a distinctly low-maintenance man, I should spend a day learning what it was like to be a high-maintenance woman. Ladies who lunch, I had imagined, would start their day sometime around - oh, let's see- lunchtime?

Worse, my itinerary indicated that I was not expected to emerge from this salon until 1pm. I didn't know hairdressers opened before breakfast, still less that it was possible for a human being to spend five hours inside one.

I really don't have that much to say about my holidays. "You're going to have a whole day of being pampered and getting treatments," one colleague had promised. "It will be hell."

I had decided that I was safest not knowing in advance what was coming. I would endure it all - though I quailed a little at the salon, which looked like a set from Doctor Who. The only thing I promised myself was that the moment anybody asked me to take off my clothes and squat like a frog, I was outta there. To paraphrase Meat Loaf: I'll do anything for the fashion editor, but I won't do that.

I didn't have to. But what I did undergo was, in chronological order: micro-dermabrasion and an ultrasound facial mask; eyebrow shaping; manicure; pedicure; hair colouring, haircut and blow-dry; wet shave (from Daniel Galvin's big brother Joshua, who spent his wartime military service as a ship's barber, shaving the men of the merchant marine with cut-throat and strop); suiting and booting by Selfridges' VIP personal shopper; half of a large drink, hour-long full-body massage, other half of a large drink; chest-waxing; very large drink indeed. It took 12 hours.

My host announced, early on, "we've tried to alternate nice and nasty treatments". For ease and speed, I can break my report down into a series of exclamations: "Yow! why are you shooting salt up my nose?"; "Yow! ouch! yow! stop that!"; "Mmm-"; "mmmMMMMM!"; "Blimey - I'm starting to resemble my byline photo- bloody hell - is that Paul McCartney going into the private room?"; "Aahhh- baby-smooth"; "These shoes cost how much? That's more than my car! Still, I'm looking kinda natty, no?"; "Glug, mmm- MMMMM- zzz- glug"; "Ohno, ohno, ohno, ohplease- oh - yaaARGH! Ouch! DAMN!"; "Glug- aahhhh!"

Certain fears were allayed. I had anticipated that the "Hemingway Treatment", at a Bruton Place establishment called Gentleman's Tonic, would involve daiquiris and a shotgun; happily, it involved a stonking Bloody Mary and an hour face-down on a special massage bench with a hole for you to push your face through so that when you fall asleep your drool lands on the floor.

That was lovely. I do still own eyebrows. The pedicurist, whom I imagined would scream with horror and faint away when confronted with The Toenail Of Smaug, did no such thing.

Chest-waxing is worse in the anticipation than in the fact (though I expect it would have hurt like hell if I'd had more hair; as it was, they could have done it just as fast with tweezers).

Some of it was a bit absurd. The reluctance to call conditioner "conditioner", when you could call it "deep conditioning treatment".

The peculiar discussion I found myself having about the relative "naturalness" of different sorts of salt. The promise that the effects of my eyebrow-shaping would be impossible to notice. (I earned my only dark look of the day by wondering what was the point of a paying for a painful treatment with no visible effect.)

But, as they say in South Park, I learnt something today (and not just what "facial threading" and "horny hair" is). I realised that, whether or not you get any real benefit from all these quacky unguents, the ritual is the important bit; the mixture of naked consumerism, crypto-scientific gobbledegook, and ego-massage.

The process is far more important than the results. The point is not to have shiny nails so much as to sit, like the Emperor Nero, in a comfortable barber's chair with a kindly stranger massaging yummy citrus-smelling unguents into your head, while another cleanses your fetid foot with soapy water.

The point is not to get the hairs off your chin so much as to sit with only your nose poking out while your face is swaddled in gorgeous, steaming hot towels. The point is not to relax your muscles so much as to have a snooze. Alles ist gut.

Apart from the whole agonising depilation thing, and the rubbish you have to talk, and the time you have to spend that you could spend doing something worthwhile, and the expense and all the rest of it- you know what? Being a high-maintenance woman completely rocks.

It is way better than working. And, come to think of it, I look down now at my chest and I can see the odd grey blur of bristle regrowing like something you'd see on an unsatisfactory pork scratching. And I think: hmm. Time to go back and get a refresher-