Read and Breathe

Deepika Padukone  GQ India (December 2018)

what a mood

The Limits  |  @wnq-typography

Thinking  |  @wnq-typography

mood 

This is me as hell.

which antoni are you today?

David Stone Martin

The Ordinary’s products come in unadorned dropper bottles that look like prototypes straight from the lab. Most contain just one ingredient —salicylic acid, ascorbyl glucoside, matrixyl—and customers are encouraged to devise their own regimens, concocting magic potions with a squirt from bottle A, a drop from bottle B. The Reddit forum Skincare Addiction contains hundreds of thousands of posts about “TO,” with people swapping tips about what order and in what amount to use each ingredient. The brand further foments this obsession on its Web site, which is stuffed with detailed descriptions of chemical compounds that often need deciphering from the online hoard. The Ordinary is the first modern beauty brand to earn acolytes by making them feel smart enough to know how to decode it; it turns skin optimization into a nerdy club, where the cost of initiation is about what you’d pay for a latte. In an industry full of obfuscation and profiteering, where it is difficult to tell snake oil from argan oil, this is a seductive idea. The lure of the Ordinary—which was introduced into Sephora’s online store, in December, and sold out entirely within a week—is that it makes customers feel as though they have somehow beaten the system, reaping the benefits of skin care without getting sucked into the beauty-industrial complex. The irony—which is surely not lost on Truaxe, who refers to the Ordinary as Deciem’s “gateway brand”—is that the low prices, more than any marketing campaign, seem to be persuading people to experiment with skin-care products that they didn’t previously know they wanted or needed. I now use at least eight of the Ordinary’s products in regular rotation. This has cut my skin-care budget in half. Do any of them actually slow sagging, or tighten pores, or decimate smile lines? The only way to find out is to keep using them.

Juansen Dizon, This Is How You Should Fall In Love With Yourself (via juansendizon)