“Taking Semaglutide Made Me Hate My Favorite Perfumes”
And a proposed ban on preservatives in cosmetics.
Does everyone else feel like the beauty world has gone quiet this week? The product launches are kinda slow, r/BeautyGuruChatter is relatively silent, and even Coachella, usually inescapable, has barely made an appearance in my feed (save for Tyla’s neon rose nails and Lisa’s literal claws).
It could be all the uncertainty around tariffs and a possible looming recession. It could be that other news is burying any attempts to celebrate frivolity. Maybe it’s normal for there to be a pre-summer slump, especially with weather (at least in the Northeast) that is stubbornly keeping one snowy foot in the wintertime.
Comedian Jo Firestone has a delightfully simple Substack called “Jo Firestone’s Passionate Newsletter” where, twice a month, she writes a few sentences about little things in her world that brought her joy (most recently: Fresca, warm chapstick in the pocket, and eating an orange over the sink) and shares “passions” from readers too. Reading it takes less than five minutes, but is a blissful, cozy five minutes that encourages me to find little pockets of mundane happiness in my own life.
In the midst of all this malaise, I’d love to take a page from Jo’s book and ask you, dear reader: What are some of your current little beauty-related pleasures? Share them in the comments, or send me a message—and then take a browse through what happened in Allure world this week.
What the Smell?
I remain fascinated with the emerging side effects of taking GLP-1s, and writer Kara Nesvig has become our de facto reporter on them all. Last year, she wrote about how the drug appears to be changing patients’ skin—not the usual sagging or excess you might see with any type of weight loss that had already been widely covered, but the actual quality and structure of the tissue underneath the skin’s surface. This week, she’s back with another odd side effect, one that she’s experienced herself: Since she started injecting herself with a semaglutide last October, she hates the way her once-favorite perfumes smelled. “Suddenly, anything that smelled remotely sweet or edible made me want to hurl,” she writes, noting that even writing about them makes her a bit queasy. Since this isn’t a reported side effect of any of these drugs, the story is her attempt to figure out what happened to her.
Regulation Recap
Another day, well-intentioned bill about cosmetic ingredient safety that doesn’t quite hit the mark. New York State Assembly Bill A2054 aka the “Beauty Justice Act” aims to regulate specific ingredients—like parabens and formaldehyde—and prohibit the sale of cosmetic products that contain them. It’s an attempt to address the very real fact that some of these ingredients have been linked to everything from allergies to cancer. However, as cosmetic chemist Kelly Dobos pointed out to Allure, most of the ingredients on the list aren’t currently being used in personal care products anymore anyways. One exception is “carbon black,” a color additive used in your blackest black mascaras. The ingredient already has fairly strict regulations—according to Dobos, every lot of any product made with the stuff has to be sent to an FDA lab for testing—but eliminating it altogether would, of course, mean expensive reformulation for many brands.
Bringing Curly Back
Writer Liz Krieger had been happily getting keratin treatments to smooth her naturally curly hair for 15 years when, after trying a different brand of keratin, something went terribly awry. “My hair resembled that of a cartoon witch: thin, brittle, overly straight, and falling out in alarming amounts,” she writes. She took that as something of a sign from the universe that it was time to go back to her natural texture; this story outlines exactly how managed to do so.
Not Beauty
OK, there was one interesting launch this week: SZA announced her much-anticipated beauty brand, Not Beauty. It consists of three lip glosses that, according to the press release, she created because she “needed something that lasted as long as my show.” I have not tested the glosses, so I can neither confirm nor deny this longwear claim, but the business model is something I’ve never seen before. The $23 glosses will only be sold at pop-up shops at the US locations of her Grand National tour, which starts this weekend and runs through June. The pop-ups will be open to all fans, not just ticket holders. A very interesting type of concert merch, IMO. (Justin Vernon of Bon Iver has also recently experimented with what artist merch looks like, collaborating with approximately ten million bars, restaurants, and shops to offer special Sable, F’able-themed products when his new album dropped last Friday. I think I’m into it.) I reached out to the Not Beauty PR team asking about any plans to sell the products online or in retailers after the tour is over, but so far no response.
Making a Stink
I adored last week’s episode of the Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) podcast, for which host Jamie Loftus interviewed Dr. Ally Louks aka the woman who went viral after guys who pay for their blue checkmarks on the site formerly known as Twitter decided her PhD thesis on the politics of smell in literature was too woke (read: too intimidating and scary) for their tender little hearts to take. She handled the death threats (seriously, death threats!) with grace, and is hoping her first foray into viral fame will bring more attention to the work she wants to do around scent. On the podcast, Dr. Louks speaks with Loftus about the experience, but also about why smell has for so long been the most undervalued of human’s five senses and how marginalized communities stand to lose the most from that devaluation, especially with the yet-to-be-totally-understood side effects that pollution and long COVID have on our sense of smell. Someone give this woman a book deal, because I need to read more about this ASAP.
Run Club
I became a runner in the spring of 2020, when gyms were closed and I needed a repetitive, mundane activity to clear my constantly spiraling brain. It’s not something I talk about often because I find people who speak breathlessly about how any type of workout “saved them” kinda obnoxious at best and utterly toxic at worst. But, yeah, much to my annoyance, running nearly every day has changed my life in a lot of positive ways (including helping with some of the symptoms of my chronic illness, which I wrote about three years ago). It’s officially a habit for me now, but the two things that made it easier to stick with at the beginning were 1) getting a dog who needs 5+ miles of movement a day and 2) joining a virtual running club with some friends.
This is a longwinded way for me to say: If you’ve been wanting to start running or running more, you should check out SELF’s Learn to Love Running program, which officially kicks off on April 27. (SELF and Allure are sister publications; we have the same editor-in-chief and a lot of people on our creative teams work across both titles.) It’s a beginner-friendly workout plan that’s not designed with a specific distance or speed in mind, but just with the goal to encourage you to run even just a little bit more. There’s also an Instagram Broadcast Channel and Facebook group, so you can connect with other people on the journey.
If you buy one thing this week, make it…
Stila Stay All Day Chroma-Flash Liquid Eyeliner
I will continue my longstanding trend of not attending any of the big music festivals this year (brave, I know) but I can’t resist festival-coded makeup (the fun, colorful kind, not the cultural appropriation kind). Stila recently came out with some multichrome liners that are simply stunning—like, I can’t stop looking at myself in the mirror and smiling. The emerald-sapphire-violet shade Peacock is my favorite.
And, finally, here’s a dog with beautiful highlights.
You cannot tell me that dog isn't wearing extensions. xo