I am usually a very dedicated Black Friday shopper. Once you’ve worked retail it’s hard to shop full price. Black Friday used to offer good value for many categories but now it’s a free for all of inconveniences and debatable deals.
I however grew up into an adult who budgeted carefully and “buy nothing” is a futile gesture when you only buy on sale. If you had any kind of specific taste it usually required some creativity to afford what you wanted even in the pre-inflationary world.
And here I am without my old budget pressures and I find there is just so little I want or need at the moment. I have the luxury of being able to buy nothing.
Classic only on sale Black Friday purchases like Uniqlo puffer coats or cosmetic sets are now no better priced today than any other day. I already purchased my specific serum’s & moisturizers and cashmere in other sales with similar savings.
Maybe I’ve finally become so prepared that moving off my typical re-ordering rhythm is just asking for trouble. I can get away with simplicity and repeat purchases.
Nothing on the market looks all that interesting. And I’m well stocked on underwear and socks. I guess I’m back to buy nothing day.
An offensive “joke” I learned from my favorite trainer when I was a powerlifter contains a simple truth.
You should only ask a former fatty for exercise and nutrition advice.
The reasoning is simple. The naturally slim and athletic never had to work for it and as such don’t understand the struggles of the average person.
As someone who has metabolic challenges I feel reasonably strongly this is correct. Struggle that leads to success has useful lessons that ease and natural talents doesn’t always pass along
It’s with this in mind that I sometimes hesitate to give cosmetic advice despite my professional experience. I had some teenage acne and an enormous struggle with eczema on my body. But everything from the neck up has been a breeze.
My face has been clean, clear and even at 40 largely wrinkle free. My hair grows down my back like a hippie. I can get past an optimal place with relatively little work.
I say this not to gas myself up, just that I don’t fully understand the struggle of problem skin or hair. So if you really struggle I’m not your girl.
And yet I get asked a lot about cosmetics as people presume I got my results from hard work. Thats only partly true. Some of it is just good genetics. I’ve got plenty of other genetic dings so I’ll take the good luck.
I do however maintain a very consistent routine and understand the inputs that lead to my desired outputs.
Getting yourself to a Pareto optimal place doesn’t require anything terribly elaborate or even expensive. Women’s magazines and Sephora may make it look impossible but heed the words of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde.
The rules of haircare are simple and finite. Any Cosmo girl would have known
There are basic rules for skin and haircare that you can follow diligently and at relatively low cost. If you give some basic inputs about your skin (is it dry or oily) and give me a budget I can get you 80% of the way there if you simply follow some basic steps everyday.
Marcia Kilgore of Bliss and Beautypie fame has a terrific memetic device I repeat to everyone.
ABC + SPF.
Vitamin A (retinol) plus Niacinamide (Vitamin B) and Vitamin C is all you need along with a sunscreen. The optimal order is a retinol moisturizer at night with a day moisturizer that contains B & C vitamins along with a SPF.
Now you can gussy that up a lot with dosing, adding in more acids if you have oily skin or ceramides and peptides (which I do as I have dry skin). I myself take a collagen and biotin supplement for some additional help. My expensive piss post offers some additional supplement options that are worth it if your nutrition isn’t perfect. Obviously you need to sleep and drink water.
Beyond a night cream with retinol and a day cream with SPF you can get more elaborate. There are manual processes for microdermabrasion, red light devices, Botox (I just started at 40 with about 15 units while the average is more like 70) as well massaging techniques and needling techniques. I think it’s overkill mostly especially if you don’t have good habits in the first place. Check your foundation before doing renovations.
If you just do the basics morning and night consistently (which can be fit in one or two products) you don’t shouldn’t to go hard until nailing the basics.
Unless looking good is a professional obligation it’s wasted time and money. Just do the basics. If you need product recommendations I can do that at any price point from drugstore to the luxury houses. It’s obviously a lot of fun if you are into it and I am so just hit me up.
The Sephora Savings event has begun for their loyalty program shoppers. And I’m so disappointed by their holiday merchandising. It’s their downmarket I’ve ever seen the brand while somehow also being incredibly expensive.
If you are not aware Sephora is a cosmetics retailer owned by luxury conglomerate LVMH with roughly 2700 stores globally across 34 countries.
I was first introduced to the retailer when I lived in France as a teenager. The father of my exchange family worked at a perfumer that supplied very high end houses.
Sephora had just began to expand to the United States. By the time I was in college they had locations in most major cities. It was the shopping destination of choice cosmetics purchasers who didn’t like the old school department store counters that didn’t allow browsing.
They became a force in cosmetics and the higher end makeup, fragrance, skincare and haircare all competed for shelf space. And because you could browse unimpeded it became a kind of destination to trial new trends and brands.
But sometime in the last four years or so their merchandising seems to have fallen off. Stores are disorganized. Prices have risen while the line up increasingly feels like it’s catering to a more downmarket demographic.
Perhaps it was the pandemic as work from home and masking made items like lipstick less appealing. Maybe it was their expansion into partnership with lower end department stores like JC Penny’s and Kohls.
Personally I think the Biden stimulus plan plays a hand in their downfall. Cosmetics spends tend to come from disposable income though some women surely do have grooming budgets.
As more people had extra cash the appeal of the Sephora splurge became a social media phenomenon. And who spends the most time on social media? Gen Alpha and Zoomers.
Sephora went from a customer base of professional women who want to look polished to girls with TikTok accounts showing off their hauls.
The most upsetting trend by far is the Sephora Kids trend. Gen Alpha loves Sephora for the same reason adults do. You can browse and try stuff. They flock to colorful brands like Glow Recipe and Drunk Elephant. Even the New Yorker is on the case.
Gen Alpha has officially entered the beauty scene, spending more on skincare and makeup than any other age group – an impressive $4.7 billion in 2023
As I browsed the new collections, I saw all their specialty sets were packaged in fluffy teddy fabric bags in muppet bright colors.
$50+ dollars for dead muppets at Sephora
Not exactly an appealing look for anyone who might wish to carry the makeup bag to the office. And they are all twice as expensive as pre-pandemic sets.
I’m not going to spend $60 for a range of trashy splashy products packaged in the skin of dead puppets. I’m an adult and alas that’s just not what appeals to me.
But if you’ve got a 14 year old daughter that you like to spoil this is probably where she is spending it. Just please don’t let her use retinol. It’s not safe. Or better yet leave the makeup stores to adults.
The media does a very effective job of showing us what to expect of class in America. There are behaviors we praise and those that we denigrate.
For a nation that values upward mobility we can be very subtle about what it actually takes to be a success American. We’ve seen a lot of sitcom families over the years.
Now we have TikTok and Instagram influencers. What constitutes the good life and who we aspire to it comes from certain values and aspirations.
I remember questions about who teenagers admired most as a tween. I think Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton were the top choices in the 90s.
Which honestly seems better than Kylie Jenner right? And yet there is an arguement that this world we are in now is much gentler. Better even.
When I think of Albright I think of genocide. With Kylie I think of lipstick. And maybe that’s a gentler world. You can argue about values but valuing beauty over valuing war is an easy choice for most.
I’m getting nails done as I write and the woman doing my pedicure is (to my best guess) a Slavic maybe Balkan woman. And I’m sure Madeline Albright, her grandmother and mine would agree that this gentle exchange of cosmetic services is better than the wars that defined the Balkans when we were tweens.
We are mostly communicating in the simple English of cosmetics but body language does the rest for two women engaged in a grooming ritual that goes beyond simple transaction. The money I had was exchanged for a careful, artful and gentle service.
She’s fixing the work of about four bad pedicures I’ve picked up from the barely functional nail salons of Montana. She chuckles as I giggle when it tickles. There is some sort of Audrey Hepburn soundtrack at the very quiet spa. Crooners singing Blue Moon cross all cultures.
Maybe the upward mobility of class can run through Kylie Jenner and Madeleine Albright. As long as she agrees to avoid doing any more Pepsi commercials.
I was doing some packaging preparation for fall travel and was pleased to discover that I’d finally appeared to have built out a basics wardrobe that actually mixed and matched well. A decent capsule wardrobe I bought I’d never achieve had come together after literally a decade of failed promises from startups.
There was an era of direct to consumer startups that promised quality and simplicity. A startup would launch with few basic but upscale stock keeping units (or SKUs) that promised they would be all you needed to own at a fair price point. This was alluring proposition for many early entrepreneurs including myself.
The premise was simple. Why would you want to add unnecessary complexity to tee-shirts, glasses, or toiletries when you could get something good without worrying if you were paying a markup for branding or retail margins?
The DTC boom has been largely looked at as failure as a movement for both consumers and businesses. With the benefit of hindsight, many of the businesses relied heavily on growth that couldn’t be achieved without either expanding your retail presence in stores or without giving up on providing simple basics.
As the zero percent interest rate era boomed, brands released constant new and novel SKUs to chase growth in every vertical from sneakers to lipstick. The goal of better prices and simpler products failed under the weight of driving growth at scale. Darlings became pariahs and founders sold to roll up private equity firms.
ZIRP ended as post pandemic era inflation demanded higher interest rates. We all complained bitterly about cost and quality of consumer goods in the aftermath.
And yet maybe we judged things too harshly. A chaotic decade of changing macroeconomic conditions were not easy to navigate. The growth required by venture and private equity were always going to conflict with a simple ethos of shopping.
But here I am with exactly what I wanted from my shopping choices at the start. I’ve got my quality basics merchandised in a simple way from brands I purchased from directly. In other news, the Everlane Barrel Pants are excellent.
The dream has many forms. Sometimes it’s a permanent move, often it’s about rushing for some type of upcoming unexpected travel like a flight change or worse an “evacuation emergency” like a fire or natural disaster.
My subconscious likes to chew on packing up crucial items and leaving. I moved a lot as a child. My father also valued traveling while my mother and siblings did not.
I assume some of these nightmares are a related to those experiences. Instability is a classic reaction formation process for a child seeking safety. And I’m now as an adult finding that safety to be in reach.
I have whole systems for managing the types of unexpected problems that crop up in modern travel like my three bag cascade. I’ve taken this activity that has had a negative valence for me and turned it into positive experiences.
As I run out the clock on the last vestiges of my Covid infection (two fucking weeks give me a break), I’ve had the pleasure of being extremely online.
There has been a bit of a kerfuffle on the costs of being “a well kept cosmopolitan woman” with varying levels of push back that are functionally regurgitating the plot of The Devil Wears Prada.
Breakdown of the costs of a “well-maintained” attractive woman in a large U.S. city: hair: $400/every 2-3 months at least facials: $200-300/mnth fitness: $200-400/mnth cosmetics: $100-300/mnth nails: $100+/mnth brows: $15-40/mnth waxing/laser: $100-$150/mnth med spas: $1k/every 3 mnths at least And doesn’t even include clothes or shoes!
Expressions of feminine presentation through grooming is what the academics like to call “contested space” but you can probably get the gist of how it through it by skimming Veblen, Baudrillard and old issues of Cosmopolitan.
Needless to say, most women are not $10,000 Instagram models, professional girlfriends, trophy wives or professionals in glamour industries. This spend is extreme and for people who life off their image.
I’ve been a peon in the image business and I’ve been a girlboss and it’s a bit exhausting if you are not young, naturally beautifully or able to afford the upkeep. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. I’ve watched many rounds of influencer burnout. I am blessed with good skin, good hair, the knowledge of my professional background and cosmetology school, and I have money to spend on myself.
Hair: $80 2x a year Facials: $0 Fitness: $0 on gym or classes but we do have a barn squat rack & a mortgage Cosmetics: $100-200 a month it’s my hobby & former profession Nails: $50 for pedicures 6x Brows: $0 Waxing: $90 4x year Med Spa: Botox $220 every 120 days
I am myself in the middle ground of expensive personal presentation. I like everything about cosmetics from makeup to haircare. I posted my own breakdown above and it’s about $250 a month.
I don’t dye or heat style my hair, I am not heathy enough to be a gym rat (I wish I was), I get pedicures because it’s hard to do my own with my spinal problems but don’t get my nails done, I wax downstairs for personal preferences, I love skincare and at 40 it seemed time to get a light dose of Botox seasonally.
Which is in my book quite a bit of money to spend on appearances. It’s the opulence I allow myself on the other side of some financial success and I justify it by saying it’s worthwhile to keep up on my old industry.
My husband says it’s mostly an excuse to buy makeup I’ll never wear and he is naturally quite right. It’s a hobby like any other. I’m glad I can justify it for work though.
Social media comparisons for lifestyles that are simply beyond most people’s reach shouldn’t be considered aspirational. My spending should level not considered aspirational on this either if I’m candid. I could easily get away with less and look good.
The good news is that for bargain hunters who want to combat hoe-flation costs in their life is that we’ve never had better access to quality grooming. We have cheap actives brands like the Inky List and the Ordinary, access to the best Korean biochemists, and excellent buyers clubs.
I have come to enjoy the logistics of self presentation. I used to resent the extent of the labor that could go into cosmetics & fashion when I worked in the industry. Now I can enjoy having put in the long hours to have acquired my skills.
I’ve put a lot of thought into how best to pack a bag. Handbags are a sort of Boy Scout style training for young women in that “be prepared” has come to mean having all the tools of the trade of femininity neatly stowed away in a stylish purse.
I’ve written extensively about my mixed feelings on packing & travel in the past, so it’s nice to have enjoyed that struggle and be able to now aside if I so desire. Packing a bag well has become a thing in which I am expert and that’s a lovely feeling.
The pleasure of negotiating the logistics of appearance can be a game to me now in a way that simply wasn’t when I was younger and struggling. Now when I don’t need to be perceived in a positive way to survive, I can enjoy the problem of optimizing for a giant game of “what am I saying without words” and more importantly “to whom?”
I’ve come to enjoy packing as the self soothing experience in a rapidly changing world. I can control some aspect of what I show to the world. It becomes a design problem. The three bag cascade is now a savvy way to manage airline chaos. The labels on my packing cubes become a pleasurable prayer ritual as I not so neatly write in cursive “black sleeve tee-shirt.”
I like the challenge of imagining the multiple social, professional, cultural and geographic flows I might navigate. Will I be able to manage the many different ways in which I might encounter other humans while they also live through the same set of fears & uncertainties of 2024? It can be terrifying (personal safety is a factor) and yet it’s absolutely a skills issue to navigate these things.
And so I ask “do technical fabric wrap dresses send the right message” or would I be better suited in cotton or silk if I’m in a desert? How about adding in semi-tropical humidity as a potential variable?
Every decision in how I pack a bag can represent a small marker in my perception by others as we manage this ridiculous system we inhabit together. It is a social game and everyone is playing. You might enjoy learning some of the rules too.
I deliberately insulate from algorithmic visual content. It makes you miserable for one. But more importantly, it deadens your aesthetic palette from overexposure.
If you want to develop and sustain personal taste and style, do yourself a favor and do it deliberately without the subtle nudging enforcement of refinement culture.
I do however avidly follow the propagation of different fashions as a personal interest. I like to see where a runaway trend goes as virality and social contagion set in. The New York Post’s entire culture section is dedicated to moral panics but it occasionally hits on real sources of social anxiety.
I still have anxiety about weight from living through the TMZ era of body shaming. So I’m sympathetic to what it must feel like to younger women facing the relentless scrutiny of living online. They rightly perceive appearances to be a part of how value is calculated in wider society and are afraid of losing it.
I’m convinced some portion of the extremely online Gen Z are living entirely out of the slipstream of historical culture. They consume artifacts from other people’s youth culture but live in a what amounts to a “long now” in which the future seems unstable. We rebooted 2003 as a micro trend but the apocalypse is almost here.
The nostalgia machine gives Gen Z an ever present history but very little present to hold onto for grounding in physical reality. Their ahistorical vibes approach seems to overweight the need for youth.
Sean Monahan of K-Hole normcore fame posted a mapping of the aesthetics of the decade that I thought spoke well to the strange relationship digital aesthetics have to time. I’m posting a diagram here from his post here.
If Gen Z is aging like milk it’s probably not because they are actually aging quickly. Though I’m sure the stress isn’t doing them any favors. I think dit’s what Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day points out here. The glamified hyper-media full face contour is an ageless one. It’s inspired by the past and stuck in the past. It’s got nothing to do with their actual age.
Packing is one of my least favorite activities and yet is one of my most refined life skills. I’ve got a number of systems including the 3 bag cascade and the 54321 method.
I’ve got a Notion document that has a list of all the various medicines, supplements, and other necessities for keeping me healthy & functional on the road. I also maintain a packing list in my daily note book by hand to double check. Then I lay it all out on a towel and double check against both lists. Each separate bag & cascade of needs goes through this process.
Skincare for my transcontinental flight that I keep in a pocket in my backpack.
Because you can’t rely on checked bags arriving at the same time as you (or sometimes at all) I separate out what I need for the first 3 days in my Aer backpack, the first week in my carryon roller bag from Muji, and the remainder of the trip in a checked bag. That’s the three bag cascade system.
Being detail oriented is crucial to the packing coming together. I go so far as to label my packing cubes so I know what pajamas to grab for the overnight versus the more formal clothing which can be safely checked. A separate set of casual outfits goes in the carry on so no matter what happens I’m comfortable and have what I need.
Labeled packing cubes Aer backpack & Muji roller for carry onToiletries for first few days Checked bag cosmetics How I organize my packing for all types of travel
