In the marginally-watchable Silo series on Apple TV, the people of the future are stuck in giant silos—art-directed relentlessly in the dullest browns and grays—that protect them from the toxic outside world. The silo’s lone window gets clouded over time. Whenever a person is sentenced to die and expelled into the toxic landscape, their invariable final act is to helpfully clean the window from the outside for their former compatriots, after which they stagger dramatically to their death.

Each day, multiple times a day, I reenact this scenario: my phone, my sunglasses, my computer, and my plastic-aviator reading glasses (recommended to me by the genius makeup artist Jeanine Lobell of Stila and now Neen fame) require near-constant desmudging. This is the cost of my obsession with oils: face oil, hair oil, body oil, not to mention olive oil, the food. Cleaning a screen more often than I might otherwise is a price I am happy to pay.

The most non-beauty-industry aspect of oils is that a great oil is . . . a great oil. It refuses to satisfy the need for the “newness” that the much of the beauty industry runs on; find an oil you love, and you’ll find yourself always returning to it.

Oil-free was the thing, forever. Then, some time in the early 2000s, after hearing about it for years, I tried the Shu Uemura cleansing oil. People (especially makeup artists) said it was great for oily skin, which made no sense to me (more oil on already-oily skin?). I tried and almost instantly converted: it not only cleansed thoroughly, it left my skin soft instead of squeaky.

A few years later, Josie Maran came out with her (still-incredible) face oil—a moisturizer, of a sort I’d never seen before. It, too, surprised me: not only did it not make me break out, it made my skin feel (and look) fantastic.

When, some years after that, the brilliant makeup artist Alice Lane told me about this incredible oil called Vintner’s Daughter—she said it was a full-on miracle, no matter what type of skin you had—I was skeptical. “I mean, what’s with the name?” I remember saying. Then I tried it.

HAIR

I realize that even before I’d heard the words “Shu Uemura”, before I was really a beauty editor, I already loved an oil. The first beauty “event” I ever went to, in maybe 1990, was to meet a kid from Boston named Philip B. at his friend’s apartment, where he was reportedly performing miracles on people’s hair. My friend worked for Vogue; she dragged me along, together with another Voguette. Philip, towering and effusive, poured oil in our hair, warmed it with a blow-dryer, waited, and then washed it out in his friend’s kitchen sink. The transformation—particularly on the other two, who were blonde and thus already coloring their hair—was jaw-dropping. Frizz, dullness, and split ends were replaced with unbelievable shine, softness, bounce, and great texture. What is perhaps even more amazing is that 30 years later, it delivers the same mind-blowing results.

30 years later, I now also color my hair, so the hair oil from Philip B. makes an even-more dramatic difference for me than it used to. Look at it! It’s insane! And if you could feel it, before and after the treatment, you would be more amazed. And if you could smell it, you would definitely be like, I have to buy that oil. Put it in your hair and sit in the sun/blow-dry briefly/go in a sauna/any sort of brief or long warmth, and then shampoo as usual. True magic.

Unrelated Hollywood picture-taking tip from Philip B.:

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Summer is sort of the Instagram of the seasons. It purports to be only fun and relaxation, 24/7; its whole reason for being is effortlessness. Even the phrase “summer trouble” sounds fun, more like thrilling mischief than a problem.

I realize there are real problems in this world, even real summer problems, like hurricanes; I might better have titled this column Summer Irritants, or Summer Inconveniences. I’m talking about sand-in-your-sandwich problems. I have to swim through the lily pads to get to the open lake water and it fills me with panic sort of problems.

Lily pads fringed the lakeside of the property where I was staying, a property belonging to one of the most famously tasteful people ever on the earth. There, where the gorgeous lily pads were the only inconvenience (why is all underwater plant material so unnervingly prehistoric/dinosaur/Loch Ness monster?), I had an unexpected and resounding summer triumph.

Long ago, part of my job was to convince the “merch” team what products were cool and might sell well. My wildly-stylish compatriot Megan (now a designer of gorgeous shoes) and I discovered a fresh, essential-oil-infused body wash that came in the best 70s-California-but-also-now glass pump bottle with a rainbow arching over it. We lobbied hard for it, and were met with resistance. This resistance was admittedly a critical part of the process: if any beauty retailer were 100% 70s-California and 0% Sephora/Rhode/Glossier, they would not make much money.

We argued our case strenuously, and eventually prevailed. The body wash was sustainable, beautiful, clean, and it was undeniably cool: it sold well.

But then we discovered that Bathing Culture also made a towel: the coolest towel we had ever seen. It’s a sort of woven rainbow, in the style of one of those potholders you weave on a miniature plastic loom when you’re a kid. Except in the lushest, plushest terrycloth. Megan and I were instantly entranced. We had to have the towels—or, more accurately, we had to alert our readers (the merch team’s customers) to their existence. But the merch team, for whatever reason, had had enough. Hard no on the towels. They didn’t get it.

The hours of despair and consternation that Megan and I were plunged into over this issue were of course silly, but there you are. Our restless minds eventually settled on something else to obsess over.

When I opened up a beautifully-made cabinet for a towel to dry off with after my lily pad/lake experience, there it was: a stack of the Bathing Culture towels. There wasn’t even another option available—only the luxe, idiosyncratic, eternally chic towels. My nervous system flooded with validation. This is not what people mean when they say “it’s the little things”; this sort of inner-crowing-to-oneself could be described as pitiable, small, or petty at best. I texted Megan, of course. I wanted to text the merch team, but where would that have got me? They probably work somewhere else at this point anyway.

Frizz

Back to problems—frizz, I think, being #1 for many. It’s beautiful on so many people, and it looks good on me until all of a sudden, it telegraphs frazzled, progressing to quickly to unhinged. I don’t know what tips the balance, I only know when it’s been tipped.

I love humidity because it gives me significantly more waves and curls. But then the tipping point arrives, and it’s time to deploy serious strategy. Here it all is, with the most significant-difference-making items first:

1. You need something for ad-hoc, in-the-moment, emergency frizz deflation, because all the preparation and styling in the world cannot prevent the sudden necessity of it. When your hair is dry—done, except for the errant frizz—smooth a cream or oil between your hands, then hover your hands over the frizz, at first barely touching it, progressing to working it in if needed.

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First-day jet lag is tough, especially on a hot Rome afternoon: I treated myself to a delicious salad under a wide umbrella, ordering several espressos to go with, and discovering much too late that I’d left my wallet at the hotel. Stumbling over the cobblestones on my way back to and back from the hotel, I sweated off and reapplied sunscreen, Sisyphus-like, as the sun blazed like a bed of hot coals.

Collecting myself, I set out again after paying the bill. I remembered that I had sunglasses—new, cool ones—and slipped them on. I stumbled around several corners, ending up at the Trevi Fountain instead of Schostal Roma, where I had intended to go. It was of course standing-room only at the Trevi; the air was thick with melted gelato and stale Peroni. You had to fight your way out, as if lunging for the door at a Who concert.

Feeling like Siri must when someone turns the wrong way despite her clear instructions, I redirected. I made it to Schostal, where the exquisitely made pajamas are so Wes Anderson that Wes Anderson himself cannot resist them.

There was a green linen pair with red piping—yes red and green, like full-on Christmas, but the Schostal aspect is so strong that the red/green dares you to call it Christmas, and laughs at your provincial assumptions. The pajamas thrilled me, but, as is the case in many autentico Italian shops, how to actually purchase something (let alone try it on, or taste it, if you’re attempting an olive or a prosciutto, or god forbid ask the price) is a mystery than you are strenuously discouraged from trying to unravel. The shop was crowded with perhaps-Wes-Anderson’s-personal-assistant types, plus rich Italians, all of whom clearly knew the procurement protocols.

I milled and drifted for perhaps 10 minutes, at which time I had to resign myself to leaving empty-handed. Jet lag saps my decision-making powers and tolerance for humiliation in equal measure.

*******

Back at the hotel, I had a jet-lag massage in the underground-catacombs spa. A candle was lit, and the melted wax, which smelled incredible—lavender, cyprus, vanilla, pepper, geranium—was poured over me, then massaged into my skin. When I say this treatment revived me, I mean that I jumped up from the table a new person, able to tour architectural achievements on foot for an hour and then sit for a long, multi-course dinner heavy with wine and lengthy (but fantastic) conversation.

The revivifying candle, which comes from Seed to Skin, does not just smell and feel spectacular: it also makes for a sexier-than-usual at-home massage, and looks beautiful flickering on an ottoman or even a table. (I know the world hates that a candle with any sort of scent might be placed anywhere near food, but I disagree. I agree if we’re talking about a Pink Pineapple Sunrise candle from the mall, of course. But an essential oil and a mysterious botanical—of course there are exceptions—wafting past bothers me not at all, and in fact enchants me.)

The next day I went to the source, high in the hills of Tuscany.

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Beauty and glamour are related, but not exactly the same thing; glamorous things are generally beautiful, but they possess the distinct charm of having been imagined by a person.

Natural beauty—say, in a person, or a cat, or the Grand Canyon—induces awe. The simple fact that something exists in the world and is somehow just occurring the way it so beautifully occurs: you feel humbled and even dwarfed, pleasingly.

Glamorous things somebody had to think up. Champagne coupes for example. Like form follows function blah blah blah, but then there’s something like a champagne coupe that’s just silly and beautiful for the sake of it. Oh, the bubbles lose their fizz faster? Well, like the rose that’s at its most beautiful right before it dies, ok. Sip a little faster.

The other night I had strawberries, raspberries, and unsweetened whipped cream in a giant champagne-coupe-like dish at Marcel, the new Roman and Williams restaurant in the Brutalist Breuer building that once housed the Whitney. It was glamorous, and it made me feel glamorous.

The very next night I had the very same dish, this time in a more prosaic bowl, but served en plein air at a table where the guests were seated only along one side, so as to view the long, deep, blue-tiled pool directly in front of us, surrounded by trees framing a stunning view of the Hudson River beyond. The waning light glittered on the water; the glamour was unstoppable.

But put delicious berries and unsweetened whipped cream (from the sweet I infer Cool Whip) in practically any setting, I think, and there’s some glamour to be had.

Beauty products can of course be glamorous: spritzing on perfume, for example. At the poolfront-riverfront dinner, we spritzed ourselves not with perfume but with something new: eucalyptus water from tall canisters. Like the Evian mist they used to spray at you by the pool at fancy hotels, except in chic, pale green aluminum, and smelling ephemerally yet addictively of eucalyptus.

Lips, Scent, and People

Like a bar with no name that you sneak into down a mysterious hallway to get into, for a perfume to be truly glamorous, it should require some sort of pursuit; a person should have to be close to you in order to to detect it (should! should! therapists everywhere are shuddering).

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I slept extremely well, all my life; before 2024, I could count on exactly two fingers the number of nights I’d been upset enough that it disturbed my sleep in the slightest. Through breakups romantic and platonic, work injustices, deaths, divorce, infants, teenagers, firings, hormonal shifts, and the fall of America, I had slept peacefully. My mother’s always slept well, too, so I believed that I would always be that way.

A series of unfortunate events during a single 6-week period changed everything, however. Suddenly I was wide awake, fully wired, way way way too early: 4 am ish. To add insult to injury, sometimes I couldn’t fall asleep, either.

I’m an eldest daughter; I live for approval, and my Oura ring had previously been a source of deep satisfaction for me. Oh I slept well, again? That’s fantastic! Never mind beauty sleep: medical experts and optimizer bros alike confirmed that there was nothing in this world as health-promoting and even death-defying as a good night’s sleep.

But suddenly The Oura trumpeted nothing but bad news. 5 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours. The Oura tried valiantly to look on the bright side: “It’s going to be all right,” it said some days. “You were efficient,” it offered on others, noting that I’d managed to cram in deep and REM sleep into the few hours. The Oura couldn’t lie, though: “Pay Attention” it said in red, on many days, on many metrics. It got a new metric, a sleep deficit calculator called Sleep Debt. A Rumination and Racing Thoughts metric is doubtlessly being worked on.

At the suggestion of everyone, I tried forgoing the Oura. I discovered that no, the Oura was not the problem. On the contrary, the Oura was the only one not gaslighting me, my only companion in fully acknowledging my sleeplessness. As with dreams, no one actually wants to hear about another person’s bad sleep; at some level no one wants to believe in it, either. “Are you sure it’s that bad?” “I’m sure you’ll sleep tonight then.” “Have you tried …?”

People with migraines understand the singular misery of the “Have you tried …?” I tried: meditation, therapy, magnesium, YouTube EMDR, intense exercise, cyclic sighing, ashwaganda, hypnosis, no food 3 hours before bed, yoga, the Pennebaker technique (where you write about the trauma or trouble), aromatherapy, acupuncture, the 4-7-8 breaths, baths before bed, sauna not right before bed, l-thianine, a 3-day retreat with binaural beats. I listened to Huberman and faithfully got sun in my eyes (as soon as it rose), made sure my bedroom was cold, and avoided screens at night. I had my cortisol tested (much too high in the mornings, quel surprise), my thyroid tested, and my hormone levels checked several times. I don’t like drugs, mainly because most of them have very little effect on me, but I tried CBD, THC, Xanax, and Valium: nothing.

I got to what finally worked when, desperate, I asked two different doctors to prescribe me something stronger than Xanax or Valium. It was hard for me to believe that they both independently recommended the same solution, and still, it’s hard for me to believe it worked as well as it did. My feeling is that it worked in combination with some of the other things I was doing and still do, all of which are listed below (#10 is the doctor-recommended all-star, but 1-9 are serious, serious support that might easily be enough on their own for a less-entrenched problem, or the occasional sleepless night).

1. Creatine in your morning coffee. While I take it primarily for muscle-building/retention, I swear creatine makes an unslept brain noticeably (if marginally) more functional. (Great studies back this up, btw.) Note that this tip is not about sleeping well, it’s about coping if you haven’t/

   

2. A bath before bed—with this oil. Any bath or shower before bed will help you fall asleep easier: the drop in temperature that happens when you exit is the main reason.

   

3. Cyclic sighing takes down the physical sensations of anxiety better than anything I have tried: inhale fully through your nose, then do another inhale on top of it. So two inhales, with no exhale in between. Then exhale as slowly as you can. Repeat until the whirring in your chest subsides. It’s kind of a miracle.

4. Magnesium threonate. Huberman was adamant about this one, and when (before the no-sleeping), the Oura complained that I wasn’t getting enough deep sleep, I started taking the magnesium threonate and immediately—like the first night—I started getting enough deep sleep, with many congratulations from the Oura.

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This past Sunday was the summer solstice—the longest day of the year, the first day of summer—as well as Father’s Day. I spent it lounging in my friend Molly’s World-of-Interiors-worthy garden, lazing by her enormous pool as the bees buzzed in the flowers. It happened to be 100% ladies, mostly in their teens or their 50s—I was the Elder—each more exquisite-looking than the next. (Where were all the fathers? Wait for your 50s to find out.)

I jumped in the pool to wash off my mascara, then lay on a chaise in the sun (sunscreened with this, ofc) while Molly attempted to tint my eyelashes with a small paintbrush and a tube of Just for Men.

I felt a bit like the pool itself, the edges of which had also been painted by Molly—she’d used a much larger brush and much more brilliant colors, in a groovy scalloped pattern, then splashed one poolhouse in sea-blue and the other in cabana stripes for good measure. Lying there with my eyes closed (tinting your lashes with Just for Men or anything else is not exactly legal nor a smart idea given the possibility of eye injury, but there you are), the dappled sunlight warming my stomach, and the sounds of laughter and gossip a few yards away, I realized that summer had in fact arrived that day, suddenly in full swing, perfectly on time.

I was the guinea pig; once the Just for Men was wiped away (Weleda toner in a gorgeous green bottle), everyone else had a look and immediately clamored for a treatment. (It doesn’t produce full-on salon-lash-dye drama, but my lashes are now very naturally but nonetheless significantly more defined.) As people took turns swimming and tinting, we sat under the umbrellas eating baguettes and cashews and strawberries, sipping fizzy cocktails (a champagne, seltzer, Cappelletti, and lemon concoction for the over-21s), discussing at length, and just soaking it all in.

I love summer in New York. This wasn’t always so. I grew up in endless-summer California, so I grew up worshipping that—mostly because every year, I missed it entirely. My father’s research was in the Rocky Mountains, not the beaches of Santa Cruz, a fact that filled me with an ungrateful rage until I was well into adulthood.

Counterintuitively though, for my first summer of freedom—post-freshman year in college—I went not to the beach but to New York. I had never really experienced humidity before; I had never imagined that summer air could be such torture.

In an un-air-conditioned kiosk deep in the bowels of Penn Station, I scooped ice cream at a Fruzen Gladje (an also-ran competitor to Haagen Daaz). As you descended the station on the lengthy escalator on the way to your 8-hour shift, the air grew thicker and hotter with each level you went down; the Fruzen Gladje was ofc at the very rock-bottom, lowest level. I felt I couldn’t survive the sweat and the grime and the supremely un-Endless-Summer-ness of it all—and yet I did.

I ended up loving not just New York, but somehow, even its summers, even, impossibly the humidity. It’s sexy and Tennessee-Williams-palm-frond sultry and, not unlike a snowy winter, it forces the world to slow down. Humidity is kind of the opposite of an Instagram feed.

Of course, I love an arid summer too. I mean: Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

7 New Items for Summer Lounging

Whatever sort of summer you relish, lounging is the key. In the spirit of the Just for Men, a little beauty treatment here and there can deepen the sense of lounging significantly. Because lounging is an attitude—rather than simply a state—it can continue both inside and well outside the confines of an actual chaise:

1. Poolside pedicure

2. Washing your face

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Women are irresistible targets when they’re up on soapboxes. Even if they’re only soapbox-adjacent, like: “We’re doing Conscious Uncoupling to save the children some of the damage that can happen in divorce”. Or: “I gave birth naturally.” Or, since I’m reveling in the fantastic new Lena Dunham: appearing naked-but-un-airbrushed on national television. I…

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You know how you just have to get something out of your system? One Louis Vuitton year—2002—Marc Jacobs made red-satin-slingback flats that ignited a fire within me. Even though I could anticipate the satin scuffing instantly and irreparably upon contact with, say, a cobblestone, and even though I could never really get a slingback to grip the back of my foot in such a way that I might walk normally, there was nothing to do but search wildly, then breathlessly purchase. Here they still are, unscathed after 24 years because I can count on two fingers the number of times I attempted to wear them:

The end-stage end-times consumer culture of now inspires a markedly less-rabid desire in me than in the more innocent days of overconsumption. But every so often something comes over me.

In the early weeks of the pandemic, I watched the first few episodes of Bridgerton, then came upon this pink silk, puff-sleeve, smocked empire fantasia from Doen. The dress would best suit a dreamy, princess-fixated 6-year-old; a 9-year-old would probably be like, hmmm, I think I’m past that stage, tempting though it is. But momentarily hopped up on Bridgerton hormones, I could not resist.

Somehow more embarrassingly, the specter of the Haastens mattress has played upon my mind for longer than I’m prepared to say. The Haastens can cost over $100,000; you can get one for $10,000. Either model comes upholstered in the brand’s signature jaunty-Scandinavian, blue-checked fabric. I lingered as I walked past a Haastens store, and I paused on the gorgeous Haastens advertisements as I paged through World of Interiors, but also knew I could not countenance such a thing.

But on the hunt for linen sheets for the summer (there is no sensory/ASMR delight that even approaches the feeling of sleeping between worn-in linen sheets), I landed on something even more satisfying to me than the Haastens: blue-checked, OEKO-TEX®-certified, yarn-dyed European linen sheets on Quince.

Delivered, washed twice, and made up on my bed, they astound me anew every time I consider them. Not only do they totally scratch the jaunty-Scandinavian, blue-checked itch for an infinitesimal fraction of the cost, but the linen aspect represents a seriously-life-enhancing bonus.

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It wasn’t exactly true, because the Heather Locklear is impossible without whatever freak genetics she was blessed with. Any attempt leaves even an expert mired in bogs of concealer.

Like only the celebrities used to, anyone can now have the full Heather Locklear on Instagram, of course: myriad apps will erase whatever it is you’d like people to think you don’t have. But how much do you want to erase, and what will all the erasing get you? You do still interact with at least a few people in-person in this world intent on making us all incels; they will see plainly that you are not, in fact, Heather Locklear.

“Everyone has undereye circles,” Bobbi Brown has told me. “It’s a human feature—why have we decided we shouldn’t have them? Aren’t they kind of sexy?” She is not wrong. Looking tired is an amalgam that can involve dark circles but doesn’t have to, to be sure, and you can definitely have dark circles and not look tired. Further, you can look tired and look sexy: witness, back in the day, the brilliant but very tired Cat Marnell sitting in my office, steadily re-applying more black eyeliner and shadow around her eyes, hour after hour. So take my looking-tired fixes—this week is more makeup, last week was more skincare—with a big grain of salt.

Fix #1: Shrug with extra drama

I got this from the incredible aesthetician Kristin May Lee at Onda Beauty in NYC, after getting a facial from her that left me looking more rested than seemed possible. Instead of some miracle product, Lee says that massaging/manipulating/moving your neck and shoulder area helps with undereye fluids/bags/trouble. Given all the world’s recent discoveries around fascia, the lymphatic system, and—the newest—the interconnected interstitium, I certainly find this idea more credible than I do magic serums or creams. So as often as it occurs to me, I shrug my shoulders, roll my neck, even do a little twisting/swinging my arms.

Fix #2: Concealer for dark circles

If you have redness and/or dark circles that bother you, concealer is the solution. Like any makeup, it’s worth taking time to find the shade you love—and then practicing with it.

• The true beauty of concealer is that it allows you to wear much less makeup. Foundation and/or tinted moisturizer do not work in place of concealer, but people try to force it to. Trying to cover things that bother you with even the thickest foundation leaves you with visible layers of not-skin-like texture on your face, and the bothersome spots still plainly in view.

• Concealer should be thick, and concentrated with pigment because you want to use as little of it as possible. The more makeup that’s on your skin, the less it will look like your skin. Start with the littlest amount—it’s mind-boggling how less is more in this case.

• The right shade of concealer is kind of everything. There is no formula: you have to go with your gut, or the appraisal of another person. If I were shopping with a friend, I’d try on some concealer and make the friend take a picture of me with their flash (it is in flash pictures that a too-light concealer makes itself unpleasantly known). The reality is, I shop online, go with my gut, and hope for the best.

Exactly exactly how to apply concealer:

• As advised last week, start with moisturizer.

• Apply the tiniest dot of concealer directly on the spot you’d like to erase; some people think you need to blend the concealer with the skin nearby—the skin that’s not too dark or too red—but they are wrong. You only want the pigment where the darkness or redness is.

• Remember you can always add more but you can’t add less.

• With your middle finger, lightly pat the concealer into the dark or red spot. You will think that this action won’t be enough to blend it, but keep patting gently and it will disappear in a few seconds—along with the dark or red spot. Rubbing concealer in instead of patting it moves it to a part of your face that doesn’t need the concealer, and it leaves the spot you’re trying to conceal…unconcealed. Never rub, only pat.

• I have redness at the outer corners of my eyes, so I dot a little there first.

• If there’s trouble at the inner corners, I take a little from the initial dot on the outer corners and pat it in there.

• Last last of all is dark circles. This takes the most skill because, Donald-Trump-like, I also have alarmingly pale circles under my eyes, directly adjacent to the dark ones. I have to be careful that in covering the dark, I do not highlight the light. So I pick up only the whisperiest trace of the concealer I was dotting at the corners, and pat it only on the darkness.

• The only thing that helps the pale circles, I am sorry to say, is self-tanner. I have experimented with bronzer and I do not recommend.

Fix # 3: Color-correction

Color-correcting makeup is a thing that works, but that rarely works in practice—certainly for every day. There are makeup artists with all manner of green and pink pastes that they wield for specific effects, but day to day, for your average person, there is only one color-correcting solution that I’ve tried that’s doable. It’s essentially concealer in two steps and it is outstanding:

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As you lie on your deathbed, will a concerned and loving person lean over, wrinkle their brow, and tell you you look a little tired? I’m sure it’s happened more than once in the history of the world.

As well-meaning sentences go, “you look tired” is up there with the most unfortunate. What the person usually means is, “I’m fond of you and I’m doing some caretaking,” but what the recipient most commonly hears is, “you’re not looking so hot”. Looking tired can indicate actual tiredness, or it can indicate nothing. You can be exploding with energy and look tired, or fighting to keep from falling asleep and look bright and well-rested.

You can be any age and look tired. I used to think that “tired” translated directly to “old”, but in retrospect I think it just means “you don’t look as alive as you normally do”. Cold comfort, I know—not to mention splitting hairs.

Antidotes, part 1

Because I have been heralded with this comment at least as often as you have, I have developed antidotes. I have so many antidotes that I’m breaking this post into two, lest a single lone scroller be the only one who makes it to the tips at the end.

What looks most “tired” is our eyes, followed by skin. Obviously these two things interact, but this week is mostly about waking up the skin.

Antidote #1: Invigorate your body, and you invigorate your skin.

For me, there’s nothing as powerful as a yoga class for this purpose: on more than one occasion, famous makeup artists have demanded to know who did my makeup when I in fact had no makeup on save mascara, but had just come from a yoga class. I do think yoga is magic, but any activity—a walk or a run, a cold shower or a hot one, or of course a roll in the hay—does the trick.

Antidote #2: Massage does make a difference

I used to think massage just felt good. But the discovery of the fascia—an entire, critical system of waste removal in our bodies that, like dark matter or junk DNA, was considered useless and beside the point until a few years ago—turned me around. I’d always has to admit that people did look better after a facial, and while products are great, and personal energy/being cared for is great, I’m now convinced that massage is the biggest factor.

People love gua sha for face massage/lymphatic drainage at home. I wish I could get with it—I’m sure it works—I don’t know what my problem is. What I can get with is makeup artist Jillian Dempsey’s vibrating gold-bar roller. If I need to look really good for something, I pull it out: it always delivers. Dempsey realized she was using a vibrating roller on every red-carpet client before she started their makeup, and decided to make her own. Hers is gold-plated, with the best tech—incredibly easy to use.

There’s no better argument for the power of massage than a facial with the sublime Anne DeMamiel: you emerge looking astonishingly less tired than when you went in. Her magic is a combination of incredible products, acupuncture, lymphatic drainage, whatever miracle energy it is that DeMamiel herself possesses and treats her clients to (just being in her presence is like sitting in sunshine), and light but powerful massage.

Antidote #3: “Tired” can actually mean “pasty”

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I am a little Howard Hughes about the sun. After I’d spent my early years desperately trying to tan with maybe an SPF 4 for protection, my stepfather died of melanoma in my early twenties. From there on out, I rolled down my sleeves, wrapped my limbs in towels, and sat squarely under the umbrella.

Being a beauty editor enabled me to all but swim in sunscreen, too. Beauty editors spend lots of time talking to dermatologists—the people who try to fix the brown spots, redness, sagging skin, wrinkles, and other damage we all insist on inflicting on ourselves—and if ever I forgot that I needed to be constantly swimming in sunscreen, a dermatologist reminded me. Compare the skin on your butt to the skin on the back of your hands if you’re not quite understanding the whole sun-damage thing, goes the spot-on dermatologist advice. (If anything, the comparison will quickly convince your to carry sunscreen in your bag so you can smooth it on the backs of your hands whenever you wash them.

I still swim in sunscreen, but slowly, I’ve relaxed my Howard-Hughes-ness just a bit; I’ve come to agree that we do all need the sun. It’s probably not just vitamin D. Everything in moderation, as the world reminds us unceasingly (and not terribly successfully).

(Mineral) Only Fans

So I go through a lot of sunscreen. Only mineral-only (the kind that’s harder to rub in) for reasons I will cover below. The sunscreen-industrial-complex insists that the only way to ensure “compliance”—to get people to wear sunscreen at all—is to use chemical sunscreens, because they’re easier to blend into your skin. The fact that they’re often bad for your health, for you skin specifically, and for the environment, never mind, at least you’re putting it on.

I disagree. The very best way to ensure compliance is to deliver chicness and glamour: a gorgeous tube you love pulling out of your bag, a nice scent, a luxe, lush formula.

The pool routine at a very fancy Hamptons house with a very fancy pool made a permanent impression on me long ago: along with the plush towels that were unrolled over the chaises each morning, multiple tubes of luxurious sunscreens were distributed over the side tables. It’s no chore to reapply a sunscreen from a glamorous tube—it’s just not.

All the sunscreens I like are mineral-only; this is not goop-woo-woo-MAHA-adjacent hysteria. I still speak to plenty of dermatologists, and nearly every one specifies “physical” when they’re talking about sunscreen. During an interview last week with one of the world’s leading experts in the biology of aging and immunology—Dr. David Furman, head of Stanford University’s 1,000 Immunomes Project, professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, and member of Dior’s Reverse Aging Science Board, among other distinctions—went through a (long) list of the many inflammation-causing things we do. He of course mentioned sun exposure as a prime culprit and wearing sunscreen as a key way to protect yourself; he then quickly caveated that he meant physical sunscreen, not chemical.

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How to tell if a sunscreen is chemical or mineral:

1. Look on the “active ingredients” box on the label

2. If there is nothing in the box besides titanium dioxide and/or zinc oxide, it’s mineral and you’re good.

3. If there are other ingredients in the box, it’s a chemical sunscreen and if I were you, I would skip it.

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(Is zhuzh the ideal spelling? Another is jeuje. A.I. says jeuje is the “fashion” spelling, but I kind of feel A.I. is hallucinating when it says this. Or at least that A.I. is scraping its information off the wrong block of content—that all the SEO is driving it toward a too-basic place. But who knows: in our gatekeeper-less age, what might constitute actual “fashion” is hard to parse.)

The art of the zhuzh is indeed an art, and it is powerful, despite the fact that if you tried to demonstrate it in a makeup video, or with before-and-after photos, you might not see such a dramatic difference.

Watching hair and makeup people work on a fashion shoot, behind the scenes before a red carpet event, backstage at a fashion show, or even simply in a busy salon, you quickly understand that the best of the best do very little in the way of “makeovers”. The hair person will suddenly halt everything, swoop in over the model, and move the tiniest section of hair slightly to the left or to the right, and somehow, undeniably, they’ve managed to change everything wildly, significantly for the better.

Even the pleasure of looking at makeovers—the befores and afters gridded like a dating app or a perp lineup—isn’t always that the person is improved by their new haircolor or cheekbone-sculpting maquillage. I think what fascinates us is seeing the distance between two aspects of the same person; the greater the distance, the more remarkable, but not necessarily the more beautiful. That what’s-the-same-what’s-different detection is what’s so satisfying, like that old Who Wore It Best? column in US magazine.

Whereas a zhuzh is grounded in the idea that you’re already beautiful, and that a slight adjustment simply amplifies that reality. There is a self-possession and a quality of attention to a zhuzh that’s the opposite of the “fix me!” energy of a makeover. It’s pointing a person (yourself, your subject, or your client) in the right direction.

And directing your attention does work: they’ve done the studies. Praying, manifesting, putting whatever it is out there into the universe, the laws of attraction, it all does do something. Fluff the pillows on a sofa, and all of a sudden it looks fantastic.

Shake Your Hair, Darling

Hair is the most obviously zhuzh-able aspect of ourselves. There’s a cowlick that’s turned in the wrong direction, or a flat area that could use perking up. Or, like a cat that’s been pet one too many times, we just need to shake ourselves out and re-sort.

Brushing your hair is the most obvious move—but overbrush by any degree and you’ve just added a bunch of frizz that wasn’t there before.

Re-infusing your hair with volume can start with brushing your hair upside down, graduate to blow-drying (upside-down or otherwise) for a few minutes with some amazing thickening spray, and going all the way to teasing it with a comb and some hairspray. Or, do as my friend Jennifer used to in the day before we’d go out to a club: clip on a drugstore hairpiece that matches your hair. She called hers Trixie, and it had a pretty remarkable effect on the amount of attention she received.

For frizz, you can smooth with heat—a dryer or a straightener or a curler—or with product. Product recs must be taken with a grain of salt, however. What constitutes the slightest of zhuzhes in one person’s hair leaves another person’s oil-soaked and in need of an immediate re-wash.

That said, there are some great products. The key with all of them is to take it way slower than you think you need to. Smooth a bit of the cream or oil between your hands and then barely touch your hair. I mean really: barely touch it. Move your hands to a different part of your head and barely touch the hair in that area. Barely touch different areas until you feel like there’s no product left, or if there’s still a little bit left, twist it very tentatively at your ends. Stand back and consider. If you need more, begin again.

n.

*Note that I have used leave-in conditioner, face oil, moisturizer, and even lip balm as styling cream. These substitutions have occurred on vacation, and for the record, they do work to zhuzh your hair, though the caution and the hovering action are even more critical.

The Makeup Touch-Up

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If you stick the phrase “French girl” in front of anything, it sells like hotcakes. Somehow, knowing this fact does nothing to lessen its power; do I want a French-girl sweater and a French-girl hamburger and a French-girl paperclip? I do, and I will pay more for items labeled as such.

My early-career years were spent at American ELLE, which at the time was extremely French—still owned by a French company. There were remarkably few French girls at ELLE; the French people there were almost 100% men. I pretended not to understand French, so I overheard a lot. Things like: “Do zey really need so much text on zeze pages? Zee women do not read!” (It should be noted that then as now, everyone was sexist, not just the French.)

Then as now, French girls were everywhere in popular culture: mysterious, uncompromising, chic, lots of smoky eyeliner. I encountered French girls IRL in Paris, where I went frequently for fashion shows, as well as for articles. As a group, French girls seemed to me to be more about pragmatism than romanticism. But they certainly lived in a romantic place.

I also went to Paris for beautiful vacations. But the most romantic moments I have had there occurred when I was alone.

The most romantic was the time I was assigned—in error—the Imperial Suite at the Ritz. (Overlooking the Place Vendome, it costs somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000 a night. Diana was staying there the night she died). I was there for one night; the next morning, I was to interview Salma Hayek. Her publicist had insisted that we do the interview at a suite in the Ritz, so the magazine I worked for had reserved one (not the Imperial, obvs). My superiors had said, well, you may as well stay there, since we’re paying for it.

I arrived, bedraggled, straight from the airport, at 6am. The concierge looked at me across the counter as you might expect: “You have … a reservation … here?” His face twisted, at first in confusion, then shock, then incredulity, unable to believe where the computer was telling him to put me. He looked back and forth at my passport, again at the screen. At last, being French, he shrugged, and took me upstairs.

All I can think is that someone at the Ritz had misunderstood and thought I was Salma Hayek—perhaps Salma plus her husband François-Henri Pinault—and upgraded. Seriously upgraded. I stepped into the ballroom-scale series of chambres that make up the Imperial in disbelief. The decoration was exquisite; flowers were everywhere; I was beside myself; eventually I sank into the bed. After several blurry hours of jet-lag reconstitution/disorientation, soaking in my surroundings and my impossible luck, I looked outside. It had started to snow. Paris in the snow? It was too romantic. I decided to take a walk.

I walked and walked along the Rue St Honore in the swirling snow, arriving eventually at the Astier de Villatte store. There is something ashen and burnt and dirt-floorish about the shop; it’s very Tale of Two Cities. It sells beautiful things Marie Antoinette would have killed for, yet, as you wind your way through the back rooms, it’s full-on Mme. Defarge. I bought two cups for my children, each with a tumbling man painted at the bottom. You only see the man as you finish your drink; they were perfect hot-chocolate cups and I had to have them. Over the intervening years and many hot chocolates later, one cup eventually broke, so I have one left. It remains one of my very favorite things in the world.

I walked back through the snow, and ordered room service: you can’t go out for dinner when you’ve got a room like that. I took a bath in one of the gigantic bathrooms.

It stopped snowing and the full, pinkish moon came out over the Place Vendome. It was so romantic, yet I called no one to let them know I was thinking of them. I lounged in an enormous terrycloth peignoir and sipped at my remaining Sancerre. Did I feel like a French girl? I did not. I felt like a tourist who had gotten exactly, exactly what she wanted.

The experts of now would doubtlessly discourage looking for happiness—or romance—in materialist fantasies like chic boutiques and cavernous luxury chambres. Community and human connection are what it’s all about, they would rightly say: not an expensive cup and a hotel room the size of a small palace. And they’re correct, except there is an undeniable, deep pleasure in being alone, and perhaps an even deeper one in experiencing the world overdelivering in ways you never expected. In being pleasantly surprised.

The French-Girl Uniform

To feel like a French girl, there is music, literature, art, movies, food and of course the language itself to inspire you, but the outfit, whatever you deem it should be be, is also powerful. Here is mine:

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People love new, though. We’re human: discovering a previously unknown thing just delights us. Trying to sell a fashion magazine without the word “new” on it, back in the day at least, was a fool’s errand. Beauty companies launch new products on relentless schedules for the same reasons.

Anything new in beauty has the potential of someday becoming a “hero”: ringer products that practically sell themselves, that people buy over and over with little encouragement. The justifiably-obsessed-over Rich Cream from Augustinus Bader is a great example of a hero; so is Vintner’s Daughter Active Botanical Serum, and Jones Road Miracle Balm. Heroes are rare. You can’t really know something’s going to be a hero until it swoops in and saves your whole business (heroes can do this). Beauty companies often try to “expand the franchise” with products in the same vein, to varying success (Weleda, for example, has a whole collection based on its brilliant Skin Food moisturizer, much of which is excellent, especially the lip balm, body butter, and body wash). Or Crown Affair, realizing how much people loved the scent of their famous moisturizing hair oil, made their gorgeous hair perfume in the same irresistible scent.

Then there are trends. People always ask me: what beauty trends are you seeing right now? But the truth is, if a famous makeup artist puts green eyeshadow on the models at Chanel or Celine—even with every outlet faithfully reporting the gesture as news—green eyeshadow is not suddenly selling out across the nation. It’s just not how beauty works: something being in “fashion” doesn’t mean it’s going to make you look better. Real trends are more general, like glass skin, or, after a big celebrity makes a change, a new hair color or style. They rarely trickle down to blockbuster sales of one particular product.

Essentially, the constant-launch strategy is an attempt to cast a wide enough net that you’ll be in on the trend should one appear, and of course, to potentially generate a hero or two in your mix of many, many skus. As a result, there are way too many beauty products, and much of the new is a version of AI slop. But the not-slop is pretty fantastic: I fall in love with alarming regularity. The following four recent discoveries are full of beauty and imagination; I’m burning through them quickly because I love them so much.

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She went on—at warp speed—to become the legend we all know. With Jones Road, she’s on her second jaw-droppingly successful beauty brand; with the just-out, must-read-it Still Bobbi: A Master Class in Resilience and Reinvention, she’s on her 10th bestselling book; over her career she’s contributed literally billions of dollars to our nation’s GDP; she’s a gorgeous, unstoppably energetic 68; she’s happily married with children and grandchildren. (As I’ve noted before, if instead of writing that Vogue article, I’d convinced Bobbi to hire me, I’d be writing this column from my yacht.)

In between negotiating a life that’s also included Obamas and Anna Wintour and Leonard Lauder and Gloria Steinem, Bobbi has always made time for me. In those moments, she’s given me fantastic advice (this is not unusual, as anyone who knows her will tell you—she’s got firm opinions, and if you ask for them, she’ll tell you).

She’s also made waaaaaay more than her share of incredible beauty products. Her latest—everything in the Jones Road line—are all the more incredible because she manages to make them without the toxic ingredients the beauty industry continues to insist on. Even more incredible, she rarely touches on the struggle and expense—and it is a struggle, I watched it over and over at goop—involved in making products without those ingredients. Her products have to shine on their own, period. And shine like supernovas they do.

My favorites are below, followed by advice that, over the years, did change my life.

My 3 (extremely well-loved) Jones Road favorites

Back at Lucky magazine, we always wanted to do a column called “Good to the Last Drop” about the products we used so much that they were empty. But photographs of used beauty products are impossibly un-Conde, so the column never ran. These photographs are very good-to-the-last-drop, and I hope rather than simply repelling you, that fact attests to Jones Road’s excellence. Each of these three items faces new competition every day in my mailbox, yet they’re as used as used gets because they rule, compared with anything out there clean or conventional.

1. Hot-pink lip and cheek stick

2. Mascara

3. Miracle Balm

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My Favorite Advice from Bobbi Brown

Bobbi is supremely self-possessed. One of my most fervent wishes is to channel even a zillionth of the comfort she so clearly enjoys in her own skin. Not to mention the trust she has in her gut; she urges everyone, above all, not just to trust their instincts, but to act on them. In fact if I had to guess at the Bobbi secret sauce, along with the confidence, it’s her ability to move quickly and decisively from feeling to action. I wish all of the above for myself and and for you; in the meanwhile, here are the things she’s told me over the years that I love the most:

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Sometimes you just have to fold up your cards and go to bed. People get sick, they break bones, their hearts break. My great-grandmother, reportedly in good health at the time, went to bed one day and didn’t get out for ten years. I have a friend whose I’m-not-available phone message says, patiently, “I can’t get away from my bed just now, but if you leave a message…”

We go to bed to repair ourselves. (Staying in bed for 10 years is rarely restorative, but an average taking-to-your-bed usually is.) Sometimes what’s wrong can be fixed, and sometimes it can’t, but in either case, the moment someone is accepting visitors, it’s time to visit. Bring your presence most of all, but also gossip from the world outside (edited so as not to send people into despair), and also, a present. For the latter, consider the restorative power a beauty item at least as seriously as you do food and flowers.

The message of a beauty item is: I heartily endorse (can we say that every once in a while in place of “support”?) your efforts to repair and take care of yourself. So I am giving you something to take care of yourself with.

List: 5 Excellent Items to Cheer Someone Stuck In Bed

1. Soap from the everything-is-always-beautiful Flamingo Estate. One gorgeous bar of the tomato-leaf scented soap brick can sit, opened, by your patient’s bed, looking and smelling of both the natural world and unbridled luxury (the site accurately describes the scent as “drunk on sunshine and giddy with lycopene”, which I think deserves the #goals hashtag more than anything ever written). Your patient will want to save the exquisite box it comes in, too. Or get the assortment box of soap bricks—the Flamingo Estate boxes really feel like gifts—which will send pretty much anyone into a happy delirium.

   

2. Thick, rich, enchantingly-scented foot or body cream. Especially good if you know the person well enough to massage their feet. Massaging someone’s feet says, “I am devoted to you” like few other gestures. I read a story about a homeless health center where the doctors and nurses washed the feet of each person as they arrived. Just the reversal of the usual positions—doctor or nurse kneeling before the patient as opposed to looking down upon them—flipped the dynamics in a way that powerfully engendered trust. A foot massage is also a brilliant replacement for conversation if someone is too ill or tired to talk.

   Just as I’m not such an eye-cream believer—whatever face treatment I’m using, I use it under my eyes, too—I’m not such a foot-specific-cream believer. I love body butters or balms just as much as foot-specific creams.

   

   

   

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I am terrible at tennis. Beneath the badness is a simmering belief that if I simply had been taught tennis as a child, I would be fantastic at it—a doubtlessly amusing delusion to those who play tennis with me. I base it on these facts: my mother and I have remarkably similar bodies; she was taught tennis as a child and became a good tennis player (she evolved into a swimmer/backcountry hiker, and has stayed with that). Further, my three cousins were taught tennis as children, and they all went on to become champions.

I have the genetic material, is my theory. I started playing tennis during the pandemic, on a court so cracked and pitted that it was always free, despite its almost-unreal beauty: surrounded by a thick grove of towering maples with exquisite pale-peeling bark, eagles and hawks circling in the blue above. Its beauty is only rivaled—in my mind, anyway—by the courts at Sea Ranch in Northern California, where I went last year and took many pictures.

After five years of enthusiastic practice, my latent natural ability has yet to really surface. But I have improved.

Cuteness

Tennis is of course very chic. The outfits are, for the most part, very cute. (Except for the volumetric-statement-tennis-outfits of now. If it needs to be removed in order for the player to play, it’s a parade float, not an outfit.)

I love a tracksuit, because I imprinted on Olga Korbut in the 1972 Olympics, and will continue, like a baby monkey, running after her until my last breath. This pair is my favorite; Adidas is the most Olga/CCCP-adjacent brand, in my book. Note that on and off the tennis court, an Adidas tracksuit-pant is 1 billion times cooler and sharper that any sweatpant.

The thing with tennis is the cute tennis skirts, though. Being not so great at tennis, I felt it was presumptuous to wear a skirt. Like a bike racer in all his skintight gear and zillion-dollar bike who turns out to need training wheels.

Katia, my German art-director friend, practically spit out her coffee when I explained this problem. “What’s the point of playing tennis if you aren’t going to do a full look?” She was appalled—and genuinely confused. “Why would you bother, if you’re not going to wear the hot skirt?”

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The reality is that Gwyneth was in it. Every day, every decision. There wasn’t anything on goop—no product, nor any article—that she hadn’t actively said yes to. When things went wrong, she was there trying to figure it out, and when things went right, she was there jumping up and down and screaming like the rest of us.

I learned a lot from her. The most important is one I’m still working on (and will be forever working on): People will love you and people will hate you. Accept it, and keep moving.

This is a critical concept for the ladies, because the culture insists that people liking us is the end goal of our existence. It further insists that if we engineer ourselves correctly, people will not only like us but treat us well: the most cursory look at even the most banal Epstein file would quickly cure even the seriously deluded of that notion.

Accepting that people will love you and hate you and that there’s nothing you can do about it allows a freedom and an honesty in moving through life that I still only experience in glancing bits. It’s hard to accept, hard to believe, and hard to act on. But watching Gwyneth react (or not) to the ever-undulating gasps of the internet made a lasting, very helpful impression on my highly-resistant brain.

She’d say “vagina” and the world would kvell and boil and snipe. She’d keep moving; she didn’t dwell on people’s reactions. Invariably, even the most negative boiling added up to more traffic and higher sales on goop; especially instructive was the fact that we’d get precisely the same result when the boiling was positive. People love you and they hate you and really, it’s their ugly or beautiful thing.

I still persist in thinking that if I were prettier, or smarter, or funnier, or kinder, or less intimidating (the one that tortures me the most) or even just less irritating, that people wouldn’t hurt me. But having worked with Gwyneth—not to mention with my brilliant direct boss at goop, Elise Loehnen, who wrote the FANTASTIC On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good on this very topic—I think it less.

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I love snow. I grew up in relatively seasonless Northern California. It snowed once, in sixth grade, just as the teacher had gotten to the “what is actual sex” portion of our monthlong sex-education unit. Though moments before we had sat in total silence, rapt as the teacher uttered the words “penis” and “vagina” aloud before everyone, the second the first flakes wafted past the window, the room erupted in shouting and emptied instantly as we all ran outside.

I will never get over the beauty and glamour and wonder of snow; as a kid, I lived for The Snowy Day, White Snow Bright Snow, and The Tomten and the Fox (get any of these for any child you know and I promise they will be thrilled, even if they’re sick of snow); I hated when spring came to Narnia. As an adult, I reread Snow Country and exalt.

Much of the eastern half of the country is currently enveloped in an epic snow, and much of the western half is experiencing an epic dry-air drought. It’s been over a week since we got 15-odd inches of snow here, and not one inch has melted. The Hudson is almost frozen over. Most people are tired of it, and though I am not—not at all—my skin, like theirs, is so dry as to be itchy, uncomfortable, and decidedly un-supple.

Brace yourself, as this post is a full-on list—skip it entirely if moisturizing is not what you’re jonesing for at the moment.

The Dry-Skin Chronicles

I have strategies for face, and for body, and some that apply to both:

• A humidifier—or, apparently close-to-as-effective, a large bowl of water—in your bedroom really helps not just your nasal passageways, but your skin.

• Taking this fish oil keeps my skin more moisturized overall, I’m (very anecdotally) convinced.

• Wash less. (Obviously, wash your hands and whatever else needs to be washed.)

• Remember that when your skin is wet, it’s significantly more porous. So if you want moisturizer to sink in, it’ll sink in further if your skin is damp. Similarly, if your skin is damp and you’re exposing it to detergents (soap, etc), it’s going to get drier.

Strategies for Face

Face oil

People have been putting oil on their faces probably since there were people. It feels good and it’s great for your skin (depending on the oil, obviously). I find moisturizer—where oil is emulsified with water—to be less reliably fabulous than face oil. I like that face oil sinks right in—the best ones are the opposite of pore-clogging. And I trust face oil’s many-more-thousands-of-years track record. I just like it. Anyway.

I pat face oil on a few minutes after my morning vitamin C, then reapply when my skin starts to flag. This flagging is often around 4pm, a time I used to think I needed to refresh my makeup. It turns out that lightly patting face oil over your existing makeup (not over your eye makeup, obvs) revives your skin much more effectively than a new layer of makeup. Try it: pat (don’t rub) in the oil, wait a minute or two, and look in the mirror.

When it’s 2 degrees for days on end, I apply face oil more frequently—whenever my skin needs it. It’s hard to overdo. Face oil makes you feel better and look better—and, if you go with any of these three must-try all-time most-beloved face oils, you smell a scent so gorgeous that you feel more gorgeous.

Balm

Balm is like face oil, but more. It’s like comfort food for dry skin. It might be too much moisture for some people’s taste, but it is exactly what I want when my skin is super-dry. I have even been known to layer balm over face oil.

Moisturizer

Of course, I also love moisturizer, though I love fewer moisturizers than I do face oils. Many moisturizers, for me, aren’t that moisturizing. Others pill, which really bums me out. Still others add in exfoliating ingredients in order to make antiaging claims—these super-bum me out. If I want an exfoliant, there are plenty of great ones (more on this later). The moisturizers I love, though, I love. I use them alone, or over face oil to seal it in.

Serum: Meh.

I try to love serum, and I think I’d love serum more if I were more in my oily-skin years. Many people love hyaluronic acid serums, for example, and I’ve applied them assiduously and regularly, and have to say I see no difference. There is one serum I like, however, but it is not primarily for moisturizing:

Cleanser

Skip cleansing in the mornings if your skin is dry, period. Your skin isn’t actually dirty in the mornings, and any sort of washing dries out your skin. Easy fix. The other thing is to switch to an oil or balm cleanser for the evenings.

Face Wipes

When it’s freezing, the prospect of washing my face is deeply unappealing: who wants to be cold and wet? Most face wipes are made with so many preservatives and gnarly chemicals designed to keep them wet as to be a total “never” for me. There is one delightfully un-preservative, un-wet, ultra-moisturizing miracle wipe, however:

Toner: Hard no.

I have tried to love or even like toner for my entire career. Even the ones that look or smell nice are a waste of money and time, in my opinion.

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OK. So. I am going to try out the paywall—a moment I have been terrified of, but here goes. For all my moisturizing strategies for body, please subscribe (or message me and I’ll comp you) and continue reading.

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