June Newsletter
Hi! Welcome to the Luxury Puff Newsletter.
I hope this space will be another piece of the ecosystem you all are helping me build in the studio. You can expect a mix of more practical beauty and personal care tips and advice and tidbits of more philosophical and beautiful things in a broad sense that I hope will spark curiosity or inspiration. Take what you want and leave the rest. Please share any links, thoughts, or impressions you may have via email.
I will also use this newsletter for studio housekeeping and updates.
Summer Makeup Tip
Everyone looks good in orange blush. It’s such an enlivening, juicy, sun-kissed tone. A flattering orange blush shade exists for everyone. Add a little to the eyelid for a breezy, monochromatic look. Here are some favourites. $28. $13.5. $40. $37.
No-Buy way to get the look: A smidge of eyeshadow, lipstick, or undereye colour corrector can work too. For these more pigmented cream formulas, warm up a little on the back of your hand, and use your fingertips or a sponge to apply judiciously. Apply cream formulas before any powder. Use your foundation brush or sponge to blend; the little remainder of foundation on the brush will keep the edges softly blended. If a shade already looks good on you as a lipstick- it will probably work as a blush (let this guide you when purchasing a new blush as well).
Nerd Alert
You can still get adequate vitamin D when wearing sunscreen. :)
Let’s get philosophical:
To get personal for a moment, I’ve been falling into intermittent clouds of despair lately. These are dark times with multiple overlapping crises. I often feel conflicted about how I am spending my time and if it’s valuable and helpful, and if I am aligning myself fully with integrity. Am I using the power and privilege I have acquired to influence the world towards justice and care? These questions include my choices as a bodywork/esthetics practitioner. A significant catalyst for opening Luxury Puff Studio was to have more control over my practice and make decisions with more core values at the centre.
At its worst, the beauty industry is a capitalistic, ecologically disastrous, manipulative, eurocentric, cis-hetero patriarchal force that chews up grief and despair and whispers in your ear that the only way out is to consume.
Conversely, I have also fallen into moments of dissociation, denial, and self-absorption and used beauty rituals in unhelpful (to me!) ways. I’ve seen how the language of transformation has been co-opted to encourage complacency and hyper-individualism.
I have loved beauty rituals for as long as I can recall. At their best, they are a daily way to enjoy our nervous system ruled existence. To smell, feel, and touch novel and sensual pleasures. They help us express ourselves, communicate with each other, and connect with plants. They can be an integrated way culture is shared and passed down. They are often holistically entwined with health and wellbeing.
Sometimes beauty can be a radical act of expression, but often it’s not that serious; sometimes, it is a silly and enjoyable part of living, the cream in the coffee of life!
As a practitioner, I want to point my compass toward the joyful and restorative and away from the perceived deficits that ask us to consume more and more. Oriented towards a soft and hopeful compliment to the hard work of building a better future, beauty (in the broadest sense) can be a confirmation that life is worth living and worth fighting for.
I want to share two different (slightly denser, more academic texts) that have got me thinking and reflecting on these questions this week.
The first is this excellent radio interview with Rebecca Solnit on George Orwell, Roses, Beauty, and Anti-Authoritarianism. More on Solnit here. (More specifically about gardening- this piece explores the role of mindful and pleasurable pursuits that I think apply well to the daily rituals of caring for oneself.)
“If roses represent pleasure, leisure, self-determination, interior life, and the unquantifiable, the struggle for them is sometimes not only against owners and bosses seeking to crush their workers but against other factions of the left who disparage the necessity of these things. The left has never been short on people arguing that it is callous and immoral to enjoy oneself while others suffer, and somewhere others will always be suffering. It’s a puritanical position, implying that what one has to offer them is one’s own austerity or joylessness, rather than some practical contribution toward their liberation.
Underlying all this is a utilitarian ideology in which pleasures and beauties are counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, decadent, indulgent, and the desire for them should be weeded out and scorned. Would-be revolutionaries often argue that only the quantifiable matters, and that human beings should be rational creatures content with what should matter and fit into how things should be, rather than what does matter and how things are. The roses in “bread and roses” constituted an argument not only for something more, but for something more nuanced and elusive… It was an argument that what makes our lives worth living is to some degree incalculable and unpredictable, and varies from person to person. In that sense, roses also mean subjectivity, liberty, and self-determination. [...]That pleasure does not necessarily seduce us from the task at hand, but can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty. The beauty that is meaning, order, calm.”
The second is this chapter from bell hooks’ Art on My Mind: Visual Politics.
“Beauty can be and is present in our lives irrespective of our class status. Learning to see and appreciate the presence of beauty is an act of resistance in a culture of domination that recognizes the production of a pervasive feeling of lack, both material and spiritual, as a useful colonizing strategy. Individuals who feel constant lack will consume more, will submit more readily…
We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy Interrogating these issues will enable feminist thinkers to share certain strategies of resistance that will illuminate the ways we can create a balanced, harmonious life where we know the joy of collective, progressive struggle, where the presence of beauty uplifts and renews the spirit.”
Finally
A song to do your skincare routine to.
Thank you for reading. See you in the studio soon.
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