Try listening to this song with one headphone: super disorienting, it’s totally unclear what’s going on harmonically. The piece makes much more sense with the full soundscape– we can go ahead and call ‘both headphones’ a music best practice– but it’s funny-shaped no matter how you slice it. This is the crux of Sampha: where his charm is largely located in his untrained voice, his ‘outsider’ status, that rawness can begin to grate if it’s repeatedly laid over sounds of traditional beauty. So layering that blunt timbre over something rich and diagonal like this makes it all much more interesting, and keeps him sitting just outside the box. Plastic 100°C may not be new, but it *is* a great thought starter– and perfect listening for a March snow storm. (Is everyone at home with hot chocolate? Say yes.)
If Glossier is a shining light in skin care, The Ordinary is its dark underbelly. I’ve heard enough sideways rumblings on the internet to understand that it’s an ‘it’ brand for fanatics, owned by a bigger skin care company named Deciem, and if you know about this stuff you’re supposed to like it. When I stumbled upon their NYC store last week, that’s all I knew, and being in the room taught me nothing more. At first.
Normally when you walk into a retail space, you’re bombarded by information and offers of help. Not so at Deciem: just bottles of science-sounding acids and oils lining a white wall in minimalist packaging. Granactive Retinoid 5% in Squalene… Vitamin C Suspension 23% + HA Spheres… Marine Hyaluronics (???). I wheeled around looking for a staff person who might tell me what these things were for (cleaning a counter? decomposing a body?) and found no one who wasn’t swamped ringing up women with little white boxes.
So I turned to the woman next to me and said, ‘do you know what we’re supposed to, um, do with these?,’ fully expecting her to be like ‘oh, you exfoliate,’ and leave it at that. But then she entered full salesperson mode and walked me product-by-product through the full Ordinary offering. ‘What do you do for skin care now? These are amazing prices, might as well drop the $6– you can return things for a year! Watch out for that one though, it can cause chemical burns.’ She was knowledgable to the point where you’d think The Ordinary must employ plainclothes salespeople to make the brand affinity look organic. But nope, my guardian skin angel checked out and left.
And that’s when the magic of The Ordinary revealed itself: it’s only for people who know. Only if you care enough to spend hours– HOURS– researching the benefits of Merula oil on reddit do you qualify to shop here. Oh, and you have to show up at the store and stock up when you do because lots of things are sold out online (so I’m told).
So three cheers for the power of women on the internet– where else can a brand say literally NOTHING about itself and still soar.
Someone just took the time to write a whole article about how nice everybody is in the Men’s Fashion Advice subreddit. Apparently it’s just dudes asking if something looks ok, mostly met with resounding affirmation. You know how the New York Times now has an ‘actually good news’ section? This is like that.
Enough to have followed the home-made Halo Top recipe already? Here— in case you get ambitious.
