my new skincare routine is unstoppable

seriously this vitamin C + peptides + retinoids combo is the best I've ever tried

No, I don’t look like Christy Turlington yet.

I keep almost writing long, serious posts about confidence and aging, about courage in these challenging times, about the limiting contingencies we place on our lives and our life’s possibility as the years pass by. My drafts folder is a Substack graveyard. I keep starting these essays and then stopping because (uncharacteristically for a woman who loves few things more than work!) I just don’t wanna. This kind of semi-thoughtful content is just not feeling right, I can’t force myself to string together dialed-in words when all I want to do is check out.

Maybe like you, I’m simultaneously sad and mad and fucking annoyed and I want to run and I want to fight and I want to somehow make things right. But it all feels too chaotic evil/maniacally wild to do much except, I don’t know, 5 (Please, Can Any of You Elected Doofuses Stop This Shit Now) Calls when it’s already been explained to me by 700 podcasts that no, in fact, they can’t. So I’ve been focussing on controllable things like showing up for my friends and being an extremely present mom and waking up at 5am every morning to write my stupid novel and escaping into books and indulging in naps and baths and perhaps most banal: Taking really good care of my face.

Seriously, I’m interviewing so many dermatologists each week for my day job (and writing about the products that saved my face) and learning so much about skincare that, truly, in this dark time, my skin has never looked brighter. If this were a women’s mag, we’d call it “Easy, Perfect Skin For the Apocalypse” or maybe “Glowy Skin To Make Even the Most Fascist Heads Turn” but since it’s just us:

All the Shit I’m Currently Putting On My Face That’s Working