You all love being told what to buy. Vanity Project’s top four articles are all my Holy Grails lists—explicit guides to shop my favorite things, with coordinating lists chock-full of affiliate links. See also: SKIN, HAIR, and BODY. Or maybe you just enjoy a voyeuristic peek into someone else’s medicine cabinet (though I would never keep my makeup in the bathroom—too humid, no chair).

My constant struggle is that, while I love shopping for cosmetics more than most things in life, I have an ethical obligation to only recommend products I can truly stand behind—even the ones you can only find on obscure websites or Mexican farmacias with no affiliate links. Did you know that most media outlets and influencers these days won’t even consider sharing a product which doesn’t have a monetary kick-back? Not WSJ (true ascetics, they don’t even accept free products for testing)_, and not me. Cash poor, rich in integrity—like a real journalist!

So don’t be surprised to see mostly familiar products on this year’s reboot of the Holy Grails: MAKEUP spreadsheet. There are a few demotions and a few additions, but the real grail is the tea I discovered along the way.

What you are about to read is a mix of tinfoil hat theorem and Watergate-level beauty journalism, if you’re scandalized by luxury brands fumbling their makeup lines. Let’s just say… Byred’oh!

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I was away from New York recently, convalescing at the sea while undergoing self-prescribed age regression therapy—my host drove me to Aventura Mall to spend the afternoon rifling through drawers, selecting the choicest 10 for $40 panties at Miami’s premiere Victoria’s Secret establishment. Sometimes one must put their scruples aside to heal her inner preteen.

While walking the hallowed halls of USA Today’s Readers’ Choice: America’s Best Mall, we came upon an importer of fine foreign wares, a quaint little shop on the upper level called SUKOSHI. I’ve been known to dabble in the world of Asian cosmetics such as those which lined their walls. Myself a merchant of the finest Japanese makeup brushes in the Western Hemisphere [BUY KRAUM], I had to stop in to do a bit of market research.

I zigzagged my way through the aisles, swatching and smelling SUKOSHI’s impressively organized curation of the typical Korean and Japanese brands you’d find at most US Asian beauty retailers: CORSX, Canmake, Rom&nd, Clio. . . all well and good, but no need to make space in my carry-on for new purchases (now even scarcer with the addition of 30 fresh stretch-lace rhinestone thongs).

On the very last gondola, at the back of the shop, a hideous little compact caught my eye. Then another, and another. Those two shelves challenged everything I understood about beauty branding. Though painful, I couldn’t look away. Every product was purportedly from the same brand, but nothing matched! Nothing was pink! Surfaces were fabric, lip gloss was rectangle, up was down, and time stood still.

This type of intricate, varied packaging is simply not done for today’s consumer products. The voice of a phantom MBA sneered into my ear, “It’s not scalable!” If startup world has taught me anything, it’s that your brand’s visual identify should fit within the bounds of a single slide in a six-page Canva deck. If not, reign it in!

I seethed with envy. It’s something I’ve always admired about Asian brands: being closer to specialized production facilities, both geographically and culturally, must allow them greater freedom with materials and design.

What was inside the little packages further melted my brain. The formulas, the textures, the shades—all at once cute, cryptic, random, and creepy. Jelly blush in shade “Blood.” Hallucination Liquid Eyeshadow in shades “Demon” and “Old Doll.” Every brand needs a hero nude lipstick with a catchy name, so this one went with “Bencaogangmu.” Truly un-marketable by most standards…….I bought 10 things. Herein lies the magic to China’s GIRLCULT.

Firmly hooked on whatever the fuck they were selling, GIRLCULT seduced me into parts of the internet I had long feared and avoided. Without a real US d2c presence, I spent the subsequent days scouring the depths of TikTok Shop and their Amazon storefront for out-of-stock shades of several products (two .coms exist; I’m not sure if either is official, or if they are just profiting from Amazon affiliate links). At one point I even downloaded Shein!

Much like their branding and retail strategy, GIRLCULT’s origin story was an enigma. Google only took me so far. I learned it’s a popular Gen-Z Chinese brand, founded in Shanghai in 2018. Google’s clumsy AI translator-aggregator referred to it as “avant-garde,” and “dark-goth,” and misgendered one of its cofounders. I could tell that the base of the iceberg existed on Chinese internet—platforms like Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and others I may have never known existed if not for the siren call of GIRLCULT.

I needed a native Chinese speaker, and importantly a beauty girly to help me go deeper. Enter: Yining Wang, a Vanity Project subscriber, “currently on a self-anointed sabbatical from the tech world, trying to figure out a Plan C.” She’s based between NYC and Montreal, but spent her childhood in China, and she kindly dedicated her time, energy, and thoughts to this article. Everyone in unison: THANK YOU YINING!

As I pored over Yining’s notes and emails, I learned that most interesting thing about GIRLCULT is its reflection of a proudly Chinese youth culture. It completely challenged my own cursory understanding of the market, which filtered through a painfully millennial, star-spangled lens.

I was always taught that USA’s greatest export is pop culture, and that our greatest invention, the Internet, fast-tracked all of our addictive stories, sports, songs, and celebrities straight into the veins of The Global Youth. O beautiful for spacious American monoculture! It was supposed to be the thing that saved us—all of us—from the backwards religious fanatics in the Middle East and those shadowy, sinister communists in the further East. As you know, we don’t have misogynist religious nut jobs or Big Brother government agencies here in God’s Country.

Throughout my career there was always this promise, especially by my Chinese-American colleagues, that the Chinese consumer is desperate for American brands. The strong counterfeit and grey markets of Western brands in China are cited as evidence of this. If only we were clever enough to properly invest in China—especially mainland China—as a legitimate market, we’d be met with open wallets.

(In Western online beauty discourse, though, there’s a sinophobic smear against China, lead by PETA-types who will boycott any Western brand which enters the Chinese market, claiming that they had to perform animal testing to do so. I don’t have time to get into this today, just know that this is not true and China’s use of animals in cosmetic testing is wildly mischaracterized and misunderstood.)

In trademark conversations I am often told to pay special attention to China, that there’s a whole industry of Chinese trademark hawks who will swoop in and snatch up American IP before you can even dream of international shipping. Such is the power of American ideas!

All of which is to say, I was fascinated to learn about 新中式 or the “New Chinese” movement in Chinese marketing, and GIRLCULT’s youth-focused version of it, which cofounder Suo Zhi calls 潮流式新中式 or “trendified New Chinese.”

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Coming soon is a particularly interesting piece about a beautiful Asian cult—no, NOT Shen Yun—which I’ve been researching with the help of one of your fellow Vanity Project readers for the past month. While I put the finishing touches on this spectacular deep dive, this week’s letter is a classic Q&A, with questions submitted from my Instagram clientele.

Do you listen to any podcasts?

Constantly. I have two pairs of Air Pods so what when one loses charge, I have another on deck. This keeps me from ever having to be alone with my thoughts. Would you like to know which podcasts?

• Sexy Unique Podcast aka “SUP” and all of the pods in the SUP universe. It was created and is hosted by Lara Marie Schoenhals, who you may recognize as the author of NYT bestseller White Girl Problems, but who I only know as Lars, Mother God of the lollers. She’s had a rotating door of guest hosts over the years, but writer Carey O’Donnell has been her cohost for a while now, and I can’t imagine the pod without him. Excellent film, TV, and pop culture takes with a twisted sense of humor. I have them to thank for turning me on to the world of Todd Haynes, and if all goes according to plan, LA residents could soon be thanking Lara for her petition to cancel food service at the Alamo Draft House’s reopening of the beloved Arclight cinemas in order to preserve the “pristine moviegoing experience offered by these hallowed theaters.” I pay for this on Patreon.

• TrueAnon. Hosted by Marxists Brace Belden (an SF punk and unionist who volunteered for a Kurdish militant group during the Syrian Civil War) and writer Liz Franczak, and produced by Yung Chomsky. It’s satirical and funny, but well-researched, thoughtful, and they have incredibly well-placed sources all over the world. It began as the three went down an Epstein rabbit hole after his arrest in 2019, and I discovered it after my own extremely traumatic experience with

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Remember when I said (two newsletters ago) that my friend and I became obsessed with “smoker’s nails” for some new Kraum photos? Google “William Silano” hand photographs and see what I mean.

I can’t stop thinking about them.

Tabac Poseur

The internet is full of culture critiques right now on the comeback of cigarettes, which, at 36, is the first thing that’s ever made me feel old. I may seem unflappably cool and self-assured, but I, too, was once an impressionable young worm. The Mount Rushmore of every 80’s baby was Elmo, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Joe Camel. I learned that cigarettes are cool before I learned to talk! It’s not really something I’ve grown out of, unfortunately.

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Let’s retrace our steps: Kraum launched November of last year with a set of five Micro Brushes. It needed to …

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I’ve been thinking about you, a lot.

My “perfectionist” tendencies are getting in the way of my prolificity as a writer. The quotation…

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I opened a last-minute pop-up here in NYC. An incredibly generous and glamorous friend (if you don’t have one already I highly suggest getting at least one), offered her magical apartmen…

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Here it is, the latest Ask Me Anniething, where I take questions from Instagram and answer them on Substack in hopes of converting my audience and saving a few lives along the way. Of course, I cannot be held liable if the opposite happens, as this is for entertainment purposes only.

The best thing a 25 yr old who has lost a sense of purpose can do/read?

I have to assume that this purposeless person feels that age is indicative of a “should” in terms of life milestones. Existence isn’t a choice. The idea that you have to justify your existence with “purpose” is something to question. As a way to cleanse yourself, explore nihilism—existentially speaking, not morally. Explore absurdity. If you’re into reading, I’m very into Kafka at the moment, and I find him quite absurd. I suggest Metamorphosis, where a young man turns into a cockroach and can no longer support his family.

If you’re asking this because you’ve come to some sort of conclusion about your own place in the world by comparison to others, with confidence I can say that very few people have a sense of purpose, and age, while it can exacerbate the depressive feelings you’re experiencing, has little to do with finding it. I have gotten to know a lot of different types of people throughout my life quite intimately, and have learned about what brings success and purpose. With the exception of one successful and purposeful person who I’m close with, the same five people who are the most successful, who are the most established—“famous” by most definitions—are also the loneliest. I know they bring a lot of pain to the lives of the people they are closest to. We don’t give ourselves credit for causing the least harm.

I suggest Simone De Beauvoir. It seems like young writers are the most popular at the moment, but when I read a lot of the contemporary bestsellers hyped by Kendall Jenner or whichever influencers’ summer reading lists, I feel the lack of experience and find them dull. A Very Easy Death and A Woman Destroyed give insight into the brain and emotions of an older woman. Same with Eve Babitz. If you think being lost and purposeless is a bad thing, Eve will make it seem fun.

Advice for beauty copy writers?

This goes for any sort of writer—before you write anything, be able to answer the who, what, where, when, why. Who are you talking to? What are you trying to get them to do or think? Where did they come from and where are they going after? When will they read this? Why should they care?

Also, I did a three part series on copywriting with an emphasis on naming here, and here, and here.

Favorite non surgical procedure?

Botox in my traps. I develop muscle easily, hold tension in my shoulders, and love having a long swan neck. Botox doesn’t get enough credit for being an anti-stress tool.

Is the pod ever coming back diva?

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When I turned 30, I started getting ads to freeze my eggs. Everyone knows that any pregnancy after 35 is “geriatric.” Or it felt like everyone but me knew that, and they all suddenly needed to talk about it—even if it was just to complain about the adjective. Whichever way, it’s irrelevant to me. How can I be geriatric anything when I am getting younger every year?

Sometimes I wonder if I have the female version of Peter Pan syndrome, which Liz Goldwyn and friends call “Peter Panettes.” She said they roam the boho lands of Tulum and Ibiza and Bali. I know the type she’s referring to, and I know I’m not that because I work, I don’t listen to EDM, and I don’t own a single body chain or drop-crotch pants.

I must have the type of Peter Pan that men seem to get—the ones who put off “life” and all of its associated responsibilities until later (or run from it if they fell into it early on), but can do it on concrete, amongst the masses who are Pan-negative. I don’t fear getting older, I fear committing to something permanent. Somehow it feels that marriage and kids and paying property taxes bring you closer to death than fulfillment. Same thing with getting a parrot or a tortoise or tattoo. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but I haven’t met anyone who’s been able to that.

Julia Roberts is to blame. I was Julia Roberts-pilled during my most formative years—her IMDB serving as a guide to life: run away from commitment, dabble in the manic pixie dream girl space, try your hand at photography, have toxic relationships with your best hetero cis male friend, taste fame and become a narcissist, be an accomplice to criminals, intimidate and wear the wrong clothes to work, prefer men who already have kids, be a whore. Just kidding.

Aging. The promises of how I would regret tanning and smoking and staying up all night still have not come to fruition. I tell myself it’s karmic reparations for having suffered oily, thick, acneic skin and chubby cheeks as a teenager. Now I get to reap the benefits of all that buccal fat and extra collagen.

As a pseudo-scientific study, I had new portraits taken recently by my dear friend, the photographer known as Anariam. She has taken several portraits of me over the years, starting back in 2015 when we worked together on Glossier’s Phase 2 launch. Now, over a decade later, I have basically 1-1 comparison images for how I have aged. I can assure everyone here that we’ve been way too worried about our 30s. In fact, there are photos of me from an interview I did back in 2014 where I can see on my face and body the impact of unaddressed stress, lack of sleep, lack of sunshine, bad hair color, and a diet consisting only of wonton soup and Smile To-Go banana bread. I look much “younger” now than at 24.

Having studied thousands of un-retouched images of myself and models over the years, the oft-overlooked most youthful traits are: a few zits, white eyes, white teeth, and hydrated skin—all of which are easy to address on your own, two of them instantly. (Curled lashes gets an honorable mention for its instant lifting effect, I just don’t like to do mine.)

I seriously can’t believe there’s so much discourse, right here on our precious Substack, of women getting face lifts at 37. I’m convinced that the concept of “aging” is propaganda and that time is a flat circle. (If you disagree, I invite you to revisit an aughties Harper’s Bazaar “Fabulous At Any Age” spread and tell me how relevant the outfits are to your current decade of life.) Cell damage can happen at any time!! Genetics and lifestyle are the culprits you should blame for skin damage. If you disagree, I invite you to check out the story of Karolina Olsson, the woman who hit her head and slept for 32 years while only appearing to age 11.

I don’t even think you gain wisdom with age—if anything, the more I’ve learned, the more I realize how much I don’t understand. Each time I try to be earnest about preparing for the future, what do they say? God laughs? Thus has been my entrée in the world of NAD+.

If you read my piece on Tesla’s Acne Treatment (hardly any of you did, thanks), you’ll remember that I got my first shot of the hottest biohack of the moment a few weeks ago while in LA. NAD+ is a peptide that our bodies naturally produce, but which declines with age. So, it’s thought that if we simply inject ourselves with more, it will not only slow the aging process, but reverse it. My friend, the famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, is a proponent, and the administrator of that fateful first injection.

Fast forward to a week ago, I received an unsolicited Amazon package with two different types of syringes, isopropyl alcohol wipes, and a wrench. Ominous, terrifying. Then my friend, the famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, texted me to say that I had a vial of NAD+ on the way, so I could continue with my juvenile backslide—me, the girl with a vasovagal reaction to needles.

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Earlier this week, Bella Hadid and her mother, Yolanda, posted several images to their Instagrams of Bella convalescing. She’s pictured with IV ports in her neck, with the tubes aff…

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I’ll start this letter with an obligatory thank you to God, chance, karma, and my luckiest stars that I have a pretty agreeable body to occupy during my time here on earth. I see the memes about hot girls having IBS, and I hear about the absolute hell of PCOS, and MS, and ALS, obesity, heart disease, and allergies, plaque psoriasis, and lactose intolerance…even having huge tits sounds like a nightmare.

I realize I could be smitten by fate’s cold hand at any given moment, so while it’s not perfect, I’m quite pleased with my body. Most days I even find it pretty hot. Not My Body hot (too hot, apparently! I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy!), but my body hot. That’s not to say I don’t have my complaints:

1. I have a bad knee which never fully healed after a catastrophic event (arthritic). My kneecap dislocated while doing a fouetté turn in ballet class, and the backside shattered in the process. The good thing is that I got to stop going to ballet class. I find choreographed movements torturous and performing them humiliating, as I lack the required short-term and muscle memory. I am thankful, though, to have had good posture literally beaten into me from an early age. A decade of ballet training was the perfect foundation for the sport I am meant to play: pilates. Good posture is the #1 key to looking hot and feeling beautiful.

2. Sensitive skin. Every time I see someone with scarless, smooth, even-toned body skin I wonder what problems they do suffer from to compensate for this.

3. Not totally its fault, but prescription stimulants make some people sweat excessively during exercise. I almost lost a front tooth once slipping around during hot yoga. You won’t find any “all natural” deodorants made with baking soda and happy thoughts on this list. Give me aluminum and give me death, allegedly.

4. Fucked up feet. I spent a decade of my hot young life getting things with my feet under control after swim team infected my bare feet with all sorts of chlorine-resistant diseases. I undid much of this when I gave my COVID boyfriend a pedicure and didn’t properly disinfect my tools. I pearl clutch whenever I see you people going barefoot in public saunas or locker rooms. Irresponsible. I don’t even get pedicures for fear of the abrasive scrubbing possibly exposing someone else to a dormant foot virus. I cannot have this on my conscience. We need more of a community mindset when it comes to foot health because you people are sick.

5. My tattoo. As one of the several things we have in common, Michael Jordan and I, regrettably, have the same single tattoo. I just had to know what it was like, and used a fake ID, so I got it in an inconspicuous area. Besides the artist and myself, only one other person has ever seen it……..

If you’re new here, the drill with my Holy Grails lists is that I put all of my favorite products in a spreadsheet with a description and links. This is because I get asked for product recommendations constantly, but in the twelve years I’ve been writing about beauty on the internet, I rarely switch things up, so this is most efficient for everyone involved.

Currently, there’s HAIR, SKIN (face), and MAKEUP, but the BODY category is a wild one. Retailers use it as a catchall for anything in the bathroom that doesn’t make sense in the first three categories. I won’t be discussing candles or shower filters (a scam) today, but let’s get into my theories and personal best practices on all things inside the mouth and below the neck.

36 soaps, fragrances, lotions, and more await you below, along with some mildly controversial opinions on UV exposure, dieting, and everyone’s obsession with locking their feet in tennis shoes.

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Forgive me for what I’m about to say; I’ve just returned from Los Angeles where I left half by brain in the medical waste container at WeHo’s hottest lobotomist. I’ve researched today’s topic as much as my feeble brain and American Airlines’s pitiful wifi would allow, while simultaneously digesting the plot of Interstellar. All of my electrical engineer subscribers, of whom I’m sure there are many, should expect some errors.

Thanks for asking, LA was a transformative trip in more ways than one. The genuine reasons are profound and private, but I can tell you that I did get my first ever NAD+ injection in my right ass cheek at midnight under the glow of a waxing gibbous moon. So if I’m acting brand new, now you know.

I hinted at this in my last pseudoscientific article on dopamine sickness, and now feel ready to share my most recent anti-acne discovery: violet ray. No, this isn’t the same thing as those LED masks which have been flooding the market. Violet ray is a form of electrotherapy—high voltage, high frequency, and low current emitted through a glass electrode bulb attached to a grip mechanism which plugs into the wall. Ignorantly put: it instantly microwaves away your zits.

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I’ve been medicated, psychoanalyzed, therapized, hypnotized, ketamized, and electrotized, but nothing beats hands-on experience for practical cures. Break up. Block him. Be free. I suppose if you don’t have a lot of it, you must seek it from those who do. (Though I would be remiss not to acknowledge the oddly specific directives given by my Soviet-era Russian psychiatrist, like “don’t start a podcast, there are too many.”)

Yet, the heart wants what it wants! If humans were practical beings, Labubus wouldn’t exist. What’s up with this? What is the source of this drive to ruin in the name of “love”—to assign meaning to things which are at best a waste of time and resources, at worst excruciatingly painful?

To find reason in this life, some look to God. We pray that he won’t let the plane go down in rough turbulence. I tend to find more comfort in a science-backed approach—turbulence is just waves of air, and this buoyant metal vessel is meant to ride those waves. A plane hasn’t crashed due to turbulence in decades. Take one of Dmitry’s Klonopins and watch a movie you’d never pay for. May I suggest The Smile 2?

This isn’t to say that I don’t believe in the magic intangibles of life, of God, of love and peace and happiness. A pessimist is already dead in my book. Carl Sagan says it best when describing the relationship between transcendence and science:

“‘Spirit' comes from the Latin word 'to breathe'. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word 'spiritual' that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. . . Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.”

Back to your shitty situationship. For my next trick, I’m going to attempt to bridge the gap between your, mine, and our tendencies to buck all practical advice and reason in the name of love, or something like it:

It’s dopamine, and we’re addicted.

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I was outbid on two exquisite pieces of art, which I’d been eyeing for weeks on an auction website. I’d diluted myself into believing that I alone was…

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When I first moved to New York, I made $40k a year, and lived in a four bedroom apartment with three VICE reporters and one bartender.

Danny (not his real name), was a cameraman, but truly an international spy. I’m pretty sure he’s been to North Korea with a camera hidden in the button of his shirt. I remember him going deep undercover on assignment in China, and to underworld trade shows in really scary places like Louisiana and East Texas, documenting how easy it is to buy unregistered guns and monkeys. I believe he was even part of the crew who spent time with John McAfee on his compound before his “suicide.”

There was not a single personal care product in that apartment before I moved in, except for the shared bar of shower soap and multiple nearly-empty community toothpaste tubes. (Yes, I shared single bathroom with four men.)

Imagine my surprise when I came home one day to find Wella brand bottles of cream developer on the kitchen table. They were next to a box with too much tape and a foreign postal label I didn’t recognize. “They’re Danny’s,” and someone had accidentally opened his mail, was the only explanation I got until Danny himself finally came home from some clandestine locale. I wanted to convince him to let me be the one to, presumably, bleach his hair for the next assignment. I love to bleach :)

Come to find out, there was no disguise, unless you count the Wella bottles themselves, which, long story short, contained drugs. Danny ordered them on the Dark Web, on Silk Road.

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Frida Kahlo used Revlon brow pencil in shade “Ebony.” Interesting, no? I thought she was au naturel in that department. She also used a powder blush called “Clear Red” (a perfect name), and pink nail polish and a coral lipstick. Photos of the blush show its fuzzy round applicator completely stained in the pigment, but I wonder how she actually applied it. Surely she used her paint brushes to blend it into her signature saturated cloud bursts on her cheeks. She was known for her polished, but never overdone beauty looks—an apparent pioneer of no-makeup makeup.

Too, I wonder what other products and shades she used on her cheeks. You can see in her self portraits, and in the famous color carbo photos by Nickolas Muray (her hot photographer boyfriend), that she sometimes had an apricot, or a sheer Bordeaux flush.

I dressed as her once, and feel that this is the most intimate way to get to know another person. The ordeal lasted several months, starting when I joined two-hundred other tourists inside her home, now a museum, in Mexico City. It’s where she died, and also where she says she was born (annoyingly, historians are always pointing out that she might have made a few things up about herself). I love that about her. Imagine living your entire life at your parents’ house, with everyone taking care of you, expressing every single weird thought and impulse, and taking over most of the place so you can make your things and invent new ways to wear clothes and do your hair. She deserved this life more than anyone, for all the tragedy she endured.

In family photos—her dad was also a photographer—you can see that her relatives indulged her costumes from an early age. You can also see that Frida was likely not the only eccentric in the family. When she was bedridden, her mother installed a mirror above her bed so she could continue to paint self-portraits. All of this was on display in her home, now the museum, La Casa Azul. I understand her on a cellular level, in ways I can’t even get into right now.

Crucially, I know what it took for Frida to create saturated, yet natural cheeks, deceptively enhanced unibrow (though I, too, once have an impressive unibrow), and the braided sculptures she created with her long wavy hair.

Knowing her as I do, I am convinced she did not just use the handful of products photographed as part of a relatively recent exhibition of her personal belongings. Though, as the story goes, Diego Rivera, her on-again-off-again husband and noted asshole (love doesn’t cure narcissism), had her clothing and supplies and products locked in a bathroom when she died in 1954. This bathroom was only opened again in 2004, when all of these things were rediscovered and photographed and exhibited as defining objects of her life.

I share this list with you today in hopes of avoiding any miscommunication in a future exhibition of my life. I do indeed see the possibility of the exact same thing happening to me when I die—an old man locking all of my stuff up until my museum is complete, probably choosing all of the wrong things to keep, not even knowing if I liked them enough to recommend. So let this be my definitive, official list of cosmetics which have played an important part in my life. I revoke any rights to display. Bury me with them.

Link to list below the paywall, plus access to Holy Grails: SKIN, and Holy Grails: HAIR.

Love you.

💋 Annie

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