not everything is a recession indicator
on bare nails, models on GLP-1s, Nina Park, a beautiful spa in Tuscany and the myth of optimisation.
First of all, some house keeping: this letter will be monthly again. Life has been a lot this year - both good and challenging - that’s all I want to say for now. For my paying subscribers: I hope this monthly -- a little longer, a little more personal -- letter will be of enough value to you. If not, I’ll still love you. <3
Welcome!
In this edition:
lots of long reads to soak into during coffee in bed, for example
dieting + female bodies in the modelling industry
a beauty director moving into the art gallery space
my Seoul haul - a selection of favourite products that are now also available for you, outside of Korea
AI, meta glasses, the panopticon and the complicated feelings that come with living through technological acceleration
my disgust for the last season of Euphoria
throughout: articles+videos worth your time, sometimes with my thoughts attached, sometimes just the link
left: real me - - right: ai generated in a plane, based on 6 selfies. generated by the app SNOW a serious case of uncanny valley but also low key makes me want to book more laser treatments?? :( :(
Models too, are using GLP-1’s now, while size diversity is almost back at the all time low.
I stopped modelling about 8 years ago after practicing it mostly full-time for 15 years. during my time as a high fashion model, i’ve seen most of my colleagues having an anything but casual relationship with their bodies + diet. Me included, by the way.
Some models would resort to exclusively eating fruit, steamed vegetables and eggs. other models would be in the gym everyday for 3 hours and a model i knew well would mix seeds with hot water and just eat that everyday for breakfast. I’ve also lived with plenty of models who barely ate anything.
Within the industry, almost no one was believed to have an eating disorder, because in order to perform something disorderly, you need to be out of line.
The measurements that were - and are, still - required for models, are only achievable without a form of disordered eating for a very small, select group of models with an unnaturally small build.
But even for them, eating regular portions, getting all their daily macro’s + micro’s while staying “in shape” (a term that would make me think of beautiful marble sculptures if it wasn’t my biggest trigger word) would be a temporary act. exclusively reserved for the hormone levels of young teenagers.
One way a model agent for some of the netherlands’ most globally known models would make sure those hormone levels stayed in place, was to prevent the girls from using the contraceptive pill.
She told me this would widen hips (she’d go on and pointed to a girl on her roster who was, in her words, “pear shaped”, something that could’ve been prevented by having discovered her earlier, putting her on a highly restrictive diet at 13 and making sure she’d not be on the pill) and create “unnecessary female forms”. she had a direct line with a male gynaecologist who offered special, tiny copper IUD’s, made for smaller (read: young) bodies. she’d go on to tell me it was one of the first steps after signing the contract. almost all of her models would be between 12 and 15 years old when she’d discover them.
I have a thousand stories like this, about how disordered eating and disordered looking at female bodies is what the industry is built on. about the role of pedophilia and the euro-centric beauty standard. about the financial + emotional exploitation on top of it all.
Not only does - dare I say it - almost every model have an eating disorder (by official definition in the real world, as a consequence to having to fit in the sample size, which is a size for a child), most model agents, casting directors, photographers and stylists have a sickly, warped vision regarding female bodies. This is most often combined with zero self-reflection or sense of accountability.
This always makes me think of the Milgram Experiment (Yale University, 1961-1962). In this experiment, participants delivered increasingly severe electric shocks to another person when instructed by an authority figure, despite hearing cries of pain. About 65% of participants continued to the maximum voltage, demonstrating how obedience to authority can override personal moral judgment.
Perhaps, if you trade in female bodies, you need a certain detachment to them, or cognitive dissonance, in order to sleep at night.
The body of a model is therefore more object than subject. Rented for a day, but only when that body fits the mould of perfection.
A model is only recognised as having an eating disorder once she says so herself. doing that is a career risk, which means it rarely happens. When it does, the responsibility lands entirely on her - she wasn't strong enough, models need thick skin. The deeper irony is structural: professional ED treatment requires weight restoration, but returning to work requires losing it again. Recovery and career are, by design, incompatible.
Naturally I’m fascinated by the (illegal!) introduction of GLP-1’s to the modelling industry. Apparently “everyone is on it.” And I get it, models have been looking for an answer to the pressure for a very long time. So I don’t judge them. But I do feel sorry for them and I judge the other people working in the industry. And it makes me truly sad. While I don’t want to believe it, systemic change seems further away than ever today.
How Have GLP-1s Affected the Modeling Industry? Vogue Business.
And please also read Allure’s’
Extreme Thinness Is the Opposite of “Longevity”
To keep postpone the lighter tone of this letter a bit longer, I want to talk about Season 3 of HBO’s Euphoria. A show that delivered two genuinely strong seasons from the start. Aside from the fact that Sam Levinson stole the whole aesthetic from Petra Collins, the show was highly enjoyable and refreshing.
But in this new season, it’s pretty clear that Sam Levinson is subjugating the female actors to a humiliation ritual. And this dirty, one dimensional pleasure of his flattens the whole season. I stopped watching mid-episode - more than once. “He truly hates women” is a sentence I’ve said in my head over a dozen of times, and we’re only at episode 5 now.
Somehow, I can’t fully retreat from watching every time a new episode comes out. As if a part of me is still hoping for a glimmer of hope and a good ending for the women portrayed.
Psychologists call this repetition compulsion - the unconscious drive to stay inside a painful dynamic, hoping this time it resolves differently. Trauma bonding. Intermittent reinforcement. Vocabulary we could use to describe what happens to Cassie, to Jules, maybe even a bit to Rue? - the women on screen. Sam Levinson has made a show so hostile to its female characters that watching it replicates the very experience it depicts.
The Guardian published an opinion piece about this season that I wholeheartedly agree with it: Tradwives, sugar babies and OnlyFans: Euphoria’s misogyny feels like the manosphere’s wet dream, The Guardian
Opinions about botox and other cosmetic in-office treatments differ a lot amongst women. This The Cut article got a lot of polarising comments on social media. I’ll let you make up your own mind.
The Things I Loved Aren’t There. Her Smile Is Different. - The Cut
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Every cool girl had a beauty brand for a while there - Rosie Huntington-Whitely’s Rose inc., Ariana Grande’s r.e.m. beauty, Addison Rae’s Item Beauty, take your pick.
It got crowded fast, and some brands - unlike ISAMAYA(!) - didn’t survive because they were nothing more than just a brand monetising a face.
I’m noticing a shift in what the cool girls are up to now. Renowned make-up artist and creative director Isamaya ffrench just opened a gallery in London. Jeanne damas (rouje) has said publicly that interiors are her next frontier.
The more credible end of fashion instagram is full of lamps, ceramics, and carefully sourced vintage chairs. The “object of the week” post has replaced the “what’s in my routine” post.
Art and interiors carry a kind of cultural capital that a beauty brand no longer does. you can’t fake a well-curated room the way you can slap your name on a peptide serum. Taste is harder to outsource than a formula. Aspirational living has migrated off the skin and into the space
Isamaya has partnered with Saatchi Yates in London to launch her new design gallery with an inaugural exhibition titled “Studio Iron” (April 30 – June 7, 2026). The curated show features dystopian, industrial art and furniture, highlighting her shift into design curation, art, and furniture.
Inside Studio Iron, Isamaya Ffrench’s new dystopian dreamworld, Dazed.
AI generated imagery feels cheap, tacky, uncreative. This seems to be the dominant discourse right now about AI in the creative industry and in my algorithm. Paper, Xerox, crayons and hand written graphic design has been making a huge come back. Open AI created a fully human-made Superbowl commercial, focused on “human craft” to celebrate human creativity, rather than using AI-generated video. At the same time, the latest developments make some AI videos and images undistinguishable from human ones. One of the last things that seems truly beyond AI is taste. But is that true?
Can AI Ever Crack Taste? - Vogue Business
In this brilliant substack article, Emily Segal talks about Tasteslop: Slop made out of things considered to be tasteful and tasteful things deployed in service of slop.
As a techno-optimist (I swear i’m not naive and I want to share my reasons more in depth about this soon), I’m excited to read Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine - a book by Thomas Dekeyser, a professor of human geography at the University of Southampton. In it, Dekeyser assembles a history and taxonomy of the refusal of technologies, even ones that humans had come to depend on in their daily lives.
Of course new technological developments can also be extremely worrisome.
as a young model I was filmed + photographed (sometimes with flash, followed by a shame red face because he’d been caught) on public transport more times than I can count, without consent, by men (obviously). sometimes as a powerplay, looking at me while doing it, sometimes secretly, with the footage probably ending up on some creepy website. it felt structurally identical to sexual abuse - the absence of consent, the feeling of confusion and powerlessness. I’d feel more and more uncomfortable in public, and in the end I got diagnosed with social anxiety disorder.
so when I read about men using meta’s smart glasses to film unsolicited approaches to women - later posted to tiktok and instagram for views, without the subject ever realising she was on camera - I didn’t feel surprised. this is what you get when neocapitalism, patriarchy and silicon valley have a baby. I’m just really hoping we get laws in place (globally!) against this. With everyone having an iPhone, we were already both the prisoner and the prison officer in the Panopticon. With Meta glasses, the panopticon is even more decentralised, but the men get to be more like prison officers than prisoners, while women are reduced in power once again.
More than 70 civil liberties and advocacy groups have written to Mark Zuckerberg urging him to scrap plans for facial recognition in the glasses - technology that would let a stranger identify you, find your workplace, find your home, in real time, without ever saying a word to you. the ACLU and others warn it would effectively strip people of the ability to move through public spaces anonymously.
On optimisation of the self
my thoughts:
“Everyone must be getting face-lifts, Hall suddenly realized. Good face-lifts. Potentially new face-lifts. And she wanted one.” Hall is an Upper East Sider with three kids under 14, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, NYC, and a house in Newport. Her husband works in tech. - I enjoyed reading this piece on face-lift singularity.
The Forever-35 Face. Deep inside the uncanny world of the surgically ageless. The Cut.
The following article combines 2 terms I thought I didn’t ever want to hear again - recession indicator + looksmaxxing -. (Oh Looksmaxxing! You mean the thing that women have been doing for years without anyone caring? Not forced, not nudged, but patriarchy’s secret third thing. Frankly it bores me to hear about the overstated empathy for those poor, poor men who suddenly have to think about basic hygiene + how they look.)
still, it was a great read:
Online, Clavicular appears statuesque, monotone, and glacial. But in person, the illusion frays almost immediately. You notice the anxious darting of his eyes, then the makeup: thick, chalky concealer layered over skin that looks irritated, acne ridden and painful underneath it. His content team trails him carrying bright portable lights, but he doesn’t speak to them like a boss or even a collaborator. He speaks to them like an insecure thirteen-year-old midway through a panic attack: rapid little bursts about how the angle is wrong, how his skin looks bad, how he’s not even talking to the right people.
Last year, my algorithm suddenly convinced me on the magic of injecting peptides. Not GLP-1, but other peptides like BPC-157, TB-500 or Epithalon. Some would be the “longevity miracle” or “the gut health optimiser”, other would be marketed as the “fountain of youth”. The science seemed real, and so did the experts. I only felt the first nudge of a red flag popping up when a peptide clinic in Amsterdam was unreachable and closed down soon after. With a more critical eye, and a search on Pubmed, it suddenly seemed glaringly clear: (non GLP-1) peptide injections are a dodgy business. But then why are there businesses in the US popping up, selling it to healthy people?
Why Are People Injecting Themselves with Peptides? - The New Yorker
Is Pilates political?
Wise women have been talking about the signature style of celebrity make-up artist Nina Park for months now. Here’s how to actually achieve this look. Here’s a picture of how I tried to channel the her vibe (although I didn’t use a guide or video, so might have been paraphrasing a bit):
This is what I used for this look + the simple skincare underneath
And here’s a video explaining how to do Nina Park inspired make-up, with a subtle wing:
Bare nails are back-back - or maybe they never left, depending on who you were following.
Before it got declared a trend a few months ago, I must say I’d already started dreading my 3-week gel appointment, and apparently I wasn’t alone. We can call this a recession indicator but honestly, what doesn’t get called a recession indicator these days?
I’d rather frame it differently: the girls are building cyberdecks, are vibecoding and growing their own herb gardens. - Following decentering men discourse online, I would even go so far as to say that maybe more of us have sworn off men completely and are dating women now? - And as you know, a long set and actually using your hands don’t always go well together.
There’s also the UV lamp case to make: every gel cure session exposes the backs of your hands to UVA radiation, which penetrates deep into the dermis and is directly linked to photoaging and DNA damage. SPF before your appointment or UV-protective gloves are easy fixes, but the times I’ve forgotten these safety measures far outweigh the times I haven’t. And I’ve been observing the consequences.
Then there’s also the fact that fashion’s quietest arbiters of taste - The Row, but also: fashion models, have always defaulted to short, bare, and clean. It’s not a new idea. It might just become the mainstream one again.
I still love a beautiful gel set! but it’s been genuinely nice not to have to relearn how to type every three weeks because the shape changed.
My plan now is to go to a slavic nail salon and just get a perfect manicure now and then. No nail polish involved, just some nail strengthening drops.
Monthly dream destination
every month I’ll share a beautiful spa.
