The Supplement Industry Is Coming for Your Vagina
Please put down the boric acid suppositories.
It is thriving season where I live. I am warm but not sweaty. The high temps are consistently above 65 degrees but not yet higher than 75. All of my plants are in the ground and my delusion that they will actually produce vegetables and flowers instead of being eaten by groundhogs and slugs has not been shattered. The mosquitos are not out in full force and I have only found one tick burrowed into my scalp so far. I have given my hot tools a little goodnight kiss and tucked them away in anticipation of letting my hair air dry all summer.
As a person who had straight hair for the first two decades of my life and suddenly developed waves after I graduated college, I feel like I’m still learning which products and techniques work best for my texture. TikTok, you might have heard, is an excellent resource for this—people with all sorts of hair have posted thousands of videos teaching anyone whose For You Page they land on how to do their own. But recently, I found a video of a woman sarcastically sharing her “1A hair routine” that sent me into a bit of a spiral.
This woman, who goes by @hannahhnotmontanaa, regularly posts videos about how she styles her curls to make them uniform and frizz-free. And, apparently, she often gets comments with people accusing her of “forcing” her hair to be curly, I guess because she uses gel and a diffuser?
“Is that what I’m doing?” I thought as I tested a new curl cream that honestly makes my hair look mid at best. Maybe the fact that I need to put effort into my waves means I’m actually not embracing my natural texture, but instead forcefully shoving it up the Andre Walker scale. I’m a fraud, and anyone who’s ever told me they love my curls has been deceived by my wicked scrunching ways. If I was a good, honest person, I would embrace how my hair looks when I air dry it with zero product: limp, puffy, mostly straight with a few random bends around my hairline and at the back of my head.
Or, perhaps, this is just what one might call “doing your hair.” It’s possible that the people rolling their eyes in @hanahhnotmontanaa’s comments are the 0.1% of humans whose hair dries into perfectly uniform ringlets or impeccably tousled beach waves without any assistance, but it’s more likely that they are disgruntled weirdos who refuse to let go of their disdain for any person who dares to be open about how much work goes into fitting societal beauty standards. As ever, women are expected to present a polished appearance, but not actually “waste time” on getting that appearance together.
Maybe my hair is still naturally closer to straight than curly, but I’ve figured out ways to make it wavy and I like how that looks. There is plenty of stuff to worry about that matters more than how much time others spend on their beauty routines. As we head into the final week before the official start of summer (Memorial Day weekend), my wish for you is that you find a warm-weather hairstyle that doesn’t require sweating under a blowdryer—unless that’s your thing.
Something Fishy
I feel perpetually exhausted by the supplement industry, and this new trend of supplements for your vagina is certainly not making things any better. This feature by Fiorella Valdesolo, which looks into a few of the more egregious examples of these modern-day snake oil salesmen, was inspired by a friend of Allure who tried one of the uber-trendy boric acid suppositories. Instead of the fresh feeling she was promised:
“My vagina felt like it was on fire. Every time I had to pee, it was like jumping into the Dead Sea with cuts all over your legs.”
Very cool stuff.
The Allure Readers’ Choice Awards
ICYMI, we launched our 2025 Readers’ Choice Awards this week! I find it fascinating to see which products resonate most with people who don’t have to test them for work. This year’s list of 70 winners includes plenty of familiar names, but we also saw some surprising upsets, with a few new launches kicking tried-and-true favorites off. For more insight on how this whole project comes together, check out my interview with Allure’s associate beauty director (and person I most frequently get mistaken for) Sarah Kinonen.
Dip Your Toes In
Our top story (by a landslide) last week was our roundup of summer pedicure color trends. I’m personally torn between Mint Mojito and Icy Lavender for my trip next week.
Pleasure Seeker
Writer Rachel Khona recently went on a sexual wellness retreat and wrote about her experience for Allure. I’ll let the lede speak for itself: “Sitting in a cozy converted Palm Springs garage, I watched transfixed as a 60-something woman is getting digitally penetrated on a massage table. As the thumping beat of moody instrumentals filled the air, I couldn’t help but think: Observing a happy ending in a room of full of 20 other women definitely wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card.”
In Other News
All the other beauty news items that lit up our team group chat this week.
Fresh off her solo Met Gala appearance, Savannah James is the latest person to launch a skin-care line.
Cannes Film Festival has banned nudity on the red carpet, though it’s unclear if they mean nudity in a Florence Pugh way or a Bianca Censori way.
A tale of two Gen Z-favorite brands: Touchland will be acquired for at least $700 million, while Drunk Elephant’s sales decline.
Ice Spice is launching a fragrance line with Revlon, with the first scent set to drop next year.
The Sports Illustrated covers are here and everyone looks drop-dead gorgeous. I really loved Lauren Chan’s follow up post about her experience.
This week, I can’t stop talking about…
Palm Meridian by Grace Flahive
Surprise, no beauty product rec this week! Instead, I need everyone to pre-order this book, Palm Meridian, which is one of my favorites of 2025 so far. It’s set in a retirement resort for queer women in Florida in 2067 on the last day of Hannah Cardin’s life. She’s opted for a medically assisted death after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis and decides to throw a party as a last hurrah.
She invites all the residents of the Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, but also Luke, her lifelong best friend and business partner, and Sophie, the love of her life, whom she hasn’t spoken to in 40 years. The chapters alternate between scenes at the party and scenes from Hannah’s past, which is our current day. It is equally heartwarming and heartbreaking and I hope the last years of my life are spent surrounded by characters as charming as the ones in this story. The book comes out on June 10, just in time for beach reading season.
I grew up being told I had curly hair (it was the 70s), but it is properly wavy (if your hair doesn't curl from the root, it's not curly. And even wavy hair can have natural ringlets, as I do).
I joined two wavy hair Facebook groups and most of the members are probably jumping in to Hannah's comments to say that she is forcing her hair to be curly. IMO, you do you. I stopped diffusing my hair during lockdown and never went back. I can't be bothered to do more than mousse and scrunch, but if these ladies are having fun finger twisting and cocktailing products, good for them. Their hair looks great!