Arabelle's Best of 2022

Did I intentionally avoid sending this out during the Black Friday email deluge? Yes!

Hello friend. We’re almost at the end of the year! Well, we are, but I’m really going to stretch out the next few weeks because I didn’t finish everything I wanted to do this year and I’m holding out the idea I’ll suddenly get my shit together enough to achieve what I haven’t for the past 11 months. Please be delusional with me.

That in mind, I did read around 200 books this year. Would I say most of them were good? No, but they were finished, and fun, and both things are more than I can say about my own, so they’ve won.

Here are my favorite 10 books I read this year. Friend’s books, yes, but also just really addictive YA fantasy, soul-crushing memoir, and a sleek, precise book of poems. If you need any last minute gift ideas for friends, I would push any of these books - and I have given several of them to my own buds for the holidays, too.

Here are the six beauty products I used again and again this year. I’ve pared down my skincare routine to mostly focus on skin barrier repair and exfoliate maybe twice a week and my skin is doing great. Getting back on Deliverance made a big difference, as did profusely spraying La Roche Posay’s now Tiktok-viral Cicaplast B5 Spray. I love the entire Cicaplast line and it’s slowly taking over my entire skincare routine. I am by no means a brand evangelist so that’s saying a lot.

And here is my favorite story I wrote this year - a print feature for Allure’s final print edition, on the cultural significance and history of blondes. I’m glad I got to write about how Marilyn Monroe is really the white woman’s Joyce Bryant, only a few weeks before the incredible musician Miss Bryant passed on. Here’s the beginning of the article:

Pigeon dung. Horse urine. Mud. Peroxide and ammonia. Soap flakes, bleach, lemon juice. Gold dust and dye made of saffron, the most expensive spice in the world. All of these have something in common: humanity's relentless obsession with blonde. People across time and civilizations have subjected their hair fibers to all of the above in pursuit of becoming more blonde. There is something about what it means to have golden hair, to have the kind of beauty that poets have written epics about, the kind that soldiers kept grainy photographs of in foxholes, that makes coating your hair with pigeon dung seem rational. Blonde is a dream to hold on to. Blonde is glamour, sex. When you think of a "blonde bombshell," you think not only of the woman herself but of the frenzy of desire that surrounds her. You think, first, of Marilyn Monroe. 

Read the rest online at ALLURE or on newstands, now. And after, this obituary on Bryant at Essence.

I also got to interview Anna Sui for SSENSE this year, which was fun, and that interview is also in their print magazine on newstands now.

I was going to do a roundup of my favorite beauty stories of the year - but to be honest, this year has felt 10,000 years long and the thought is overwhelming. The backlash of celebrity beauty brands was a long time coming, though. And I’ll be keeping an eye on the Sephora class-action lawsuit surrounding their “clean beauty” claims. The Tom Ford sale to Estee Lauder ($3 billion!) was a long time coming and I’m very curious to see how the brand will change if Tom exits the brand end of 2023. Lots of lawsuits and scares around recalls and health this year….

Right now, I want to focus on the next few weeks leading up to the new year - and my 30th birthday in January - as a time of rebalancing, reflection, and dedication to what I want the next phase of my life to be. My life, not just my career. I am wrapping up revisions on my beauty book, struggling with it but trying to just show up, I am working and falling in love on an entirely different idea, and trying to love both products generously. And I’m about to go on a three-week trip around Morocco, coming back home around my 30th birthday, shortly before the revisions are due. A lot of movement to deal with! So I’m trying to build out time to just daydream about it all and where I want that movement to land me.

A few years ago, I was so much more ambitious, so much hungrier. I think I will have to be ambitious in ways I’m not used to being in 2023, which is fine - I don’t want to do the same things all the time. I don’t want to get bored of my life. I want to surprise myself in good ways! I learned how to drive this year, I learned how to scuba dive, I swam in the ocean with whales and watched them emerge from the deep beneath me, I did new things to me that had nothing to do with work, or documentation, or deliverables. And I sleep better at night because of it. I want to have more experiences that help me sleep at night. That, mostly, is what I want out of 2023. And I will try to write pieces about beauty that help me do that, too. Where is the joy, and the curiosity, and thrill of surprise and catharsis? I want to center that. So I will. And I hope you stick around for another year of these monthly missives - thank you for supporting me every day.

I would like to hear from you about what got you through this year. What stories do you keep returning to? What are you excited about for 2023? Let us commiserate. Personally, I bought myself a few lego kits to do…..having a grand time making flowers out of legos in the evenings while I watch arthouse movies. What have you been up to?

Much love,

Arabelle