Your Weekly Reads, Curated by Arabelle Sicardi

Feel free to tab them all and read when you should be doing other work today, that's what I do

On Culture:

• The Unlikely Odds of Making it Big on TikTok - a visual essay!

• Why Millenials are Facing More Anxiety Than Ever, as recommended by Amy O’Dell (who also has a great substack newsletter)

• I’m re-reading The Anxiety of Influencers, a not-new Harpers essay, mostly because I know there’s now hype houses in NYC (as informed by Tiktok) and I find it incredible timing considering the truly demonic astronomical housing costs in NYC right now. My old apartment went up $1500 ten days after I moved out. Hellish. I’d love to see data examining how influencer culture relates to housing costs. Hell, I’d even help write the story, I’m just not a data reporter.

• When Brands Got Horny, The Cut. I feel like I know so many ex-brand managers who burned out making brands horny. Those secret facebook groups of ‘survivors’ probably have the best stories….

• Tiktok Won.

On Climate:

• California landfills are filling up with toxic solar panels - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

• 2022 Fashion Transparency Index has dropped. Limited progress. And did you know only 15% of brands and retailers disclose how many products they produce annually? Seems like a worthy ask for consumers to make of brands.

Fiction and Writing:

• New ASTRA Magazine feature drops! Queen, Slave Woman, which is a story that begins as ‘a cautionary tale of a beauty queen in Mexico’s coastal city of Veracruz in the 1980s quickly turns into something else entirely.’

• 5 Queer Writers on Building Canon Everywhere, Esquire.

Beauty:

• Glossier at TJ Maxx! I am and have always been a TJ Maxxinista (read: no sarcasm here) but simply not for beauty products; the beauty products you typically find there are often discontinued or near expiration or grey market. So I am surprised it’s popping up there.

• L’Oreal North Asia is now carbon neutral. If you need an explainer on what exacctly that means, it means they offset the carbon emissions they’ve calculated for themselves. My take on the relationship between beauty brands and climate change is complex and always changing - but this is good news, plainly, and it would be really great to one day see (or be able to do) in-depth reporting on what conglomerates are doing about their climate footprints. Without it being totally spoonfed to journalists through their PR teams. There have been several embarrassing failures in climate change projects sponsored by beauty companies. Whenever I see a win it’s almost hard to believe it.

• I rounded up my favorite acne stickers after using them for literally ten years.

I’m having fun making little videos for IG and Tiktok right now, something I’ve neve really done before outside of ANCIENT Rookie Mag tutorials. It’s nice to get a little better at something every time you do it! I have no business plans surrounding it - honestly, most Tiktok creators seem to be truly terrible at marketing their platforms for survivable rates compared to other platforms, the rates are pathetic - so to only do something because its fun is keeping me occupied. Almost everything I’ve ever created has had some sort of monetary component to it, so it feels good to simply not acknowledge that at all for once.

Ok, talk to you later bub -

Arabelle