Leandra Medine's Blog, page 2

You Look Moist: The Conscious Consumer who Swears by *Gasp* Coconut Oil

Welcome to You Look Moist, a column in which Repeller asks cool people with glowing visages how they achieved their supreme hydration (amongst other things). Today’s story features content creator and sustainable fashion enthusiast, Jazmine Rogers.

How would you describe your skin (including the best and most challenging things about it)?

Like me, my skin is a little sensitive. It doesn’t respond well to harsh or unnatural products, so I try to make sure I choose products with the simplest and cleanest ingredients. It’s always been a bit dewy, too, but I’ve learned to love and embrace that. I don’t break out much other than sometimes on my period or after eating too many oily foods, but nothing to complain about. I also noticed I get these weird, bug bite-like bumps when I touch my face too much. I have no idea why it does that, so if you’re a dermatologist reading this, help ya girl out. 

How would you describe your skincare approach in general? (high-maintenance? Low-maintenance? Worthy of canonization?)

If I want my skin to look like a cute baby’s bum, I need to treat it like one. I use just a few gentle and natural products. 

I’m passionate about investing my dollars into brands with an ethical and sustainable focus—so along with a clean and natural ingredient list, I’m also aware of sustainable packaging/sourcing, if it’s made by a company owned by a woman and/or person of color, and what environmental initiatives they have in place. I apply this mindset to both my skincare and makeup routines. 

Which skincare products are integral to your routine for achieving your ideal, glowing, well-moisturized complexion, and how/when do you use each of them?

I absolutely LOVE facial oils! They’ve been a gamechanger for me, in going from dull to dewy skin. I was hesitant to use them because I thought that they would make you more oily. However, I’ve found that they’ve been key to making my skin supple and glowing. The two oils I like to restock are Liner Beauty’s Boabab Facial Oil and Cocokind’s Watermelon Hemp Oil. Both bottles last forever because you only need a few drops at a time to be fully moisturized. 

And now that I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I also use an oil cleanser to clean my face. I’ll use a few drops of Cocokind’s Facial Cleansing Oil to wipe off my makeup with a reusable cotton pad, followed by another cleanser, like Pete Rivko’s Gentle Cleanser, to pick up any remaining dirt in my pores. I make sure to only use these cleansers at night to not overwhelm my skin. In the morning, I only use lukewarm water to rinse my face. After either cleansing session, I’ll use a rosewater toner, like Cocokind’s Rose Water Facial Toner, to prep my face for the facial oils I mentioned before.

Because I use gentle cleansers, I do make sure to exfoliate my face at least once a week for a deep clean. My favorite way to do this has been using the Youth to the People’s Yerba Mate Resurfacing Mask in the shower in between conditioning my hair and washing my body. Their formula is super refreshing, and I’m obsessed that they use sustainable micro bamboo beads to do the work. 

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Linear Beauty

Baobab Face Oil


$36.00 Shop Now







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Cocokind

Watermelon Hemp Oil


$14.00 Shop Now







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Cocokind

Facial Cleansing Oil


$14.00 Shop Now







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Peet Rivko

Gentle Cleanser


$28.00 Shop Now







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Cocokind

Rosewater Facial Toner


$17.00 Shop Now







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Youth To The People

Yerba Mate Resurfacing Energy Facial


$54.00 Shop Now

What about makeup products?

I’m NOT afraid of a good blush! Although my makeup routine looks pretty natural, I feel a heavy blush is key to my signature look. My favorite blushes are those I can spread with (clean) fingers, like Ilia Beauty’s Multi-Stick in A Fine Romance and RMS Beauty Lip2Cheek in Smile. I’ll put a few dabs of either one on each of my cheeks and then a little over my nose to create a slightly sunburned look.

Then I’ll accentuate the blush with a highlighter to complete the dewy look. The Ilia Beauty Illuminator in Stella by Startlight is hands down my favorite highlighter. It’s incredibly smooth, and just a few dabs instantly brightens my face. I’ll apply it along my cheeks and the inner corners of my eyes. 

But before I do all this, I love using a multipurpose, lightweight foundation to truly set the stage. Lately I’ve been obsessed with Ilia’s Super Serum Skin Tint SPF 40 in Kamari. With just a few drops, the foundation quickly melts into and matches my skin. It almost feels like the TikTok Beauty filter IRL. 

When it comes to my eyes, I like to use Ilia’s Limitless Lash Mascara for both my eyes and brows. I don’t mind using my mascara on my brows after applying it to my lashes since they’re the same color. It also helps create a feathery eyebrow that’s so light and fresh, but still a bit defined. I’ll use W3ll People Expressionist Eye Liner to create a thin line to really make my eyes pop.

And right now I can’t get enough of tinted lip glosses to bring the whole look together. I particularly love switching between W3ll People’s Bio Extreme Lipgloss in Berry and Ilia’s Balmy Lip Gloss Tinted Oil in Saint. They remind me of all the Lip Smackers I had as a kid, but now we’re keeping it mindful and natural.  

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ILIA

Multi-Stick


$34.00 Shop Now







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RMS

Lip2Cheek


$32.00 Shop Now







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ILIA

Illuminator


$34.00 Shop Now







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ILIA

Serum Skin Tint SPF 40


$46.00 Shop Now







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ILIA

Limitless Lash Mascara


$28.00 Shop Now







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W3LL PEOPLE

Expressionist Liquid Eyeliner


$16.00 Shop Now







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W3LL PEOPLE

Bio Extreme Lipgloss


$14.99 Shop Now







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ILIA

Balmy Gloss Tinted Lip Oil


$26.00 Shop Now

What’s the cheapest product you use regularly and love?

I know this mainly applies to my bodycare, but I LOVE using coconut oil. For only about $4-6, I have a full-body moisturizer, hair conditioner, and back-up makeup remover. Definitely good bang for your buck.

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Sprouts Farmers Market

Organic Refined Coconut Oil


$3.99 Shop Now

Is there anything you try to avoid, skincare- or makeup-wise?

I like to avoid brands that aren’t mindful of their impact on the planet and people. The entire skincare and makeup industry is extremely unregulated here in the States, and products are often filled with harmful ingredients that are unethically sourced and packaged without the end-of-use in mind. 

No brand is perfect, but I gravitate toward brands that try to be as transparent as possible with their ingredients, processes, and packaging. Conscious consumerism won’t fix all the environmental injustices we face today, but it can’t hurt to support brands that are trying to make a change.  

Any next-level tips, tricks, or services that you swear by to help you look “lit from within?”

Idc how annoying it is to hear, but regularly drinking water is a necessity for me to achieve healthy skin. Also paying attention to my diet. My skin looks best when I minimize my oily/processed foods intake and load up on fruits and veggies. 

I also used Cap Beauty’s Light Ray a little while ago, and my skin was POPPING when I had it, so now I’m thinking maybe I should restock…

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CAP Beauty

The Light Ray


$42.00 Shop Now

What’s your go-to product or trick for fixing a skin disaster?

My skin disasters usually look like a red, irritated breakout. When this happens, I’ll use the  Golde Clean Greens Mask to soothe my face. Depending on the breakout, I’ll use it on my entire face or just use it as a spot treatment and pretend I’m a li’l cow. I’ll repeat the treatment up to three days in a row and my skin is good as new!

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GOLDE

Clean Greens Face Mask


$34.00 Shop Now

Do you do anything differently skincare-wise when you travel?

I try to keep my routine the same to avoid my skin going into shock—but more often than not, my skin gets a bit dry and irritated on the road, so I make sure to have my rose toner on hand. I’ll also apply a little more facial oil and use the Golde Papaya Bright Face Mask to liven it up.

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GOLDE

Papaya Bright Face Mask


$34.00 Shop Now

What’s something you wish your teenage self knew about taking care of your skin?

That beauty isn’t always pain. STEER CLEARRRR of the Clearasil pads, you were only burning your face and creating more breakouts!

The post You Look Moist: The Conscious Consumer who Swears by *Gasp* Coconut Oil appeared first on Repeller.

Here’s an Excerpt From Repeller Book Club’s Pick ‘Bestiary

Last week, I announced the second pick of the Repeller Book Club, cue the symphonic, exultant air horns!! This time around, we’re reading Bestiary, the lyric and luminary debut novel by poet K-Ming Chang about mothers, daughters, myths, migration, and tiger tails. Today, we’re publishing a short excerpt to give you a taste of the moving and utterly unique writing—and to further encourage you to place your order. That way, you can join in our exciting adventure in book clubbery and read one of the most special books of the year alongside this community of literary bad boys/cowboys/librarians/Mamas & the Papas/florists/tennis coaches/terrestrials/extraterrestrials/thestrals/etc. that make up this book club!!

See you there & love you so much already,

– Sarah Panlibuton Barnes, Senior Editor, Book Club Host, and The Friend Your Mom Would Totally Love, at Repeller.

Chapter 1

Mother

Journey to the West (I)

Or: A Story of Warning for My Only Daughter 

Moral: Don’t Bury Anything.

Ba doesn’t know where he buried the gold. Ma chases him around and beats him with her soup ladle. You’ve never been to a funeral, but this is what it looks like: four of us in the backyard, digging where our shadows have died. A shovel for Ba, a soup ladle for Ma, a spoon for me and Jie to share. We dig with what we don’t want—piss buckets, a stolen plunger, the hands we pray with. We even use the spatulas gifted to us by the church ladies, after their days-long debate about whether Orientals even used spatulas. It was decided that we didn’t but that we should. Hence our collection of spatulas, different sizes and metals and colors. Ma mistook them for flyswatters. She used them to spank us, selecting a spatula based on the severity of our crime. Be glad I use only my two hands on you.

I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.

You’ve never been to this year, so let me live it for you: 1980 lasts as long as it rains. It rains the Arkansas way, riddling the ground like gunfire. Years after this story, you’re born in an opposite city, a place where the only reliable rain is your piss. You ask why your grandfather once buried his gold and forgot about it, and I say his skull is full of snakes instead of brains. He’s all sold out of memories. One time, he pees all over the yard and we follow his piss-streams through the soil. Pray they convene at the gold’s gravesite. The gold in his bladder will guide us toward its buried kin. But his piss-river runs straight into the house and floods it with fermented sunlight.

When the church wives come to give us dishes of sugar cubes and a jar of piss-dark honey, my ma tells them that Orientals don’t sweeten tea. Don’t sweeten anything. We prefer salt and sour and bitter, the active ingredients in blood and semen and bile. Flavors from the body.

Ba says he’ll find the gold soon. Ma beats him again, this time with a pair of high heels (also a gift from the church wives). Ba says the birds will tell him where he buried it all. Ma throws a flowerpot at his head (seeds via the church wives). Ba dances the shovel too deep and hits water. Except it isn’t water, it’s a sewage line, and the landlord tells us to pay for the damage. The rest of the month, we wade the river of everyone’s shit, still convinced Ba can remember, still convinced memory is contagious. If we stand close enough to him, we’ll catch what he lost.

The gold was what Ba brought from the mainland to the island. That’s how soldiers bribed the sea that wanted to steal their bodies. He paid his passage with one gold bar the width of his pinky and swallowed the rest, the gold bleached silver by the acidity of his belly.

In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: in gold we trust. That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.

After twenty years of gambling on the island, Ba lost all the gold and tried to win it back and back and back again. When they met, Ma already had three children and one dead husband who returned weekly in the form of milk-bright rain. The local men said she was ruined from the waist down but still eligible from the waist up. She wore a heavy skirt that tarped her like a nun. Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba.

I’m the second of the new ones. We’re the two she kept, brought here, and beat.

When Ma married him, he was twenty years older. Take the number of years you’ve lived outside of my body and plant them like seeds, growing twice as many: that’s the thicket of years between your grandmother and grandfather. Except Ma doesn’t measure her life in years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan Creole in the indigo fields where she was born blue-assed and fish-eyed, Japanese during the war, Mandarin in the Nationalist-eaten city. Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar. Once, Ba asked her to teach him to write the Tayal alphabet she learned from the missionaries. But she said his hands were not meant to write: They were welded for war, good only for gripping guns and his own dick. Jie thought this was funny, but I didn’t laugh. I have those hands. When you were born, I saw too much of your grandfather in you: rhyming hairlines and fishhook fingers, the kind that snag on my hair, my shadow, the sky. You made a moon-sized fist at every man, even your own brother, who tried to bury you in a pot of soil and grow you back as a tree. You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born.

Decades ago in Yilan, Ba shat out his last bar of gold, along with a sash of seawater and silt. He buried it here, in this yard we never owned and that you were born far from. Ma liked Arkansas because it sounded like Ark, as in Noah’s. All of Ma’s words are from the Bible. Most are single-syllable: Job, Ark, Lot, Wife, Smite.

The only way we’ll find the gold is if we shoot Ba’s skull open, extract the memory of where he buried it. Ma tried it once. She pointed the shotgun at Ba’s head and stomped the floorboards while saying Bang, believing the memory would evacuate from his head. Instead, Ba wet himself and Jie had to mop the floor with a dress. Apparently Ba needs a war to motivate him. Ba won’t unbury anything unless there’s a boat to be bought and married. We have a week to hire a war to come to our house. Or else, Ma says, the gold will stay buried and we’ll have fed all we own to the trees that grow moss like pubic hair.

Jie suggests we hang Ba by his feet, upside down, so that all his memories flee upstream and pool in his skull. We’d have to unscrew his head somehow. I tell her it doesn’t work that way, but Jie’s been taking anatomy lessons at the high school ten miles away, meaning she knows how to diagram a body, meaning she’s drawn me a penis with veins and everything, shown me a hole or two it could go in. She pulls down her pants so I can see. I ask her to show me where all my holes lead to, and she says if I dig into the dark between my legs, I’ll find a baby waiting to be plucked like a turnip. (Don’t worry, I didn’t scavenge for you. You were conceived the carnivore way.)

Ma shaves soft wood from our birch tree and skunk-sprays the strips with perfume to make incense, burning it in bunches. The smoke keeps mosquitos from marrying all our blood.

We pray to god and Guanyin, in that order. Pray for Ba’s gold to fall as rain or grow a hundred limbs and shudder out of the soil like metallic shrubbery.

We consider other strategies: If we borrow a bulldozer, we can flip the whole yard like a penny. But we need our money for that, and our money is buried like a body.

Excerpted from Bestiary by K-Ming Chang. Copyright © 2020 by K-Ming Chang. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Graphic by Lorenza Centi.

The post Here’s an Excerpt From Repeller Book Club’s Pick ‘Bestiary appeared first on Repeller.

3 Black Trans and Non-Binary People on Violence, BLM, and the Future

What each of us now fear most—violence, illness, bankruptcy, loss—may be the most revealing indicator of how we’re each suffering. Our privilege, meanwhile, is revealed in where we find peace: the peace of responding to issues of social justice as a matter of moral decision-making rather than reacting out of imminent personal necessity. The peace of treatment for, or safety from, disease. The peace of being safe in a body, or even on a familiar block, in a familiar neighborhood, with familiar people. 

In August, three Black trans women were attacked by two men as they waited for an Uber in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Bystanders heckled them, rather than helping. Between the initial arrest, release, and the final charges brought against their attackers, murdered and missing trans women have continued to trend on Twitter. 

I spoke to Aurora Lloyd, a D.C. singer and songwriter who works with True Colors United and A Way Home America; Khai St. Lawrence, a wardrobe stylist in West Hollywood; and Kameron Davis, from New Orleans—three Black trans women who reacted to the violent story with their own accounts of safety and passing, allyship and acknowledgement. 

For Black trans women in particular, we have to protect ourselves from bigots on the street and bigotry in our own community.

Thanks so much for doing this, everyone. We know about terms like “intersectionality.” What is it like to be at the intersection of your race, gender, and trans identity? 

Kameron

Kameron: I’m a proud transgender woman, but the first thing you will see from down the street is the color of my skin. For Black trans women in particular, we have to protect ourselves from bigots on the street and bigotry in our own community. Many Black families are deeply rooted in Christianity, with strict taboos on homosexuality, which makes the concept of transitioning from one “gender” to the next so hard to accept and understand.

Part of transitioning that I believe isn’t spoken about enough is the change to our place in the social hierarchy of the world. Being assigned male at birth, we were born into privileges that our cisgender counterparts do not have in society: more power, more respect, a higher “value,” a higher glass ceiling. Transitioning to female flips that on its head. Now we have to deal with the objectification, the constant critique of every move we make, condescending men who find us inferior and less intelligent because we’re women. 

Aurora: “Intersectionality” is such an interesting word because it plays on the concept of dealing with multiple levels of impact. But I always wonder, whenever someone feels they are experiencing some level of intersectionality, which area of their identity is impacted first, or most?  When I was a young boy, before understanding anything about the world, race was most prevalent to me. As I grew into my trans womanhood, my gender became the most prevalent. 

Khai: Personally, I identify as gender nonbinary, so I express my gender identity in different ways, at different times, in a much more fluid sense. While that term is very misunderstood by those outside of it, I feel very much a part of the trans community, as I present and express myself as female very often. However, I acknowledge that there are still instances when I present male, in ways that many of my trans sisters do not, and often cannot. So, for me, the intersectionality that you mention is key, and I recognize that there is a privilege in my being able to present, or perform, masculinity when I choose.

How do each of you feel about the Hollywood attack on those three trans women? 

Kameron: I’m actually Instagram-friendly with one of the girls who was attacked in West Hollywood. The footage was brutal, but hearing the story was horrifying. Three trans women were attacked, tormented, and chased, and one was knocked physically unconscious. A group of men laughed and recorded [the incident]. “Innocent” bystanders stood by and watched. Among all of the bystanders, no one responded to their screams for help. 

The attacker being released is hardly a surprise. If people on the street don’t care for trans lives and safety, how can we expect the police force or state attorneys to care?

Khai: It was particularly jarring for me because I often frequent that area for work. In Los Angeles, there’s a false sense of safety because it’s a pretty open-minded place—but being on the wrong street at the wrong time can leave you in great danger. West Hollywood, which is often referred to as a “gay mecca,” is only 10 minutes away. Ten minutes can cost a person their life.

Living in the Deep South as both Black and trans is terrifying, point blank.

Have you experienced violence as a result of being a trans woman of color? Have you been afraid in situations because of your identity?

Khai

Khai: I have, thankfully, not been the target of physical violence, but the threat is very real. Just last month, I helped a friend move from Hollywood to West L.A. When I Ubered back to my car in Hollywood, my driver dropped me at the wrong spot. It was about 4 a.m., and I decided to walk to where my car was parked. In the 15 minutes I walked alone through Hollywood, I was approached by several men in cars cat-calling me or asking me to “join them.” When I refused, I could feel one of the cars following me down the street. My mind was racing before I heard him speed away: What can I defend myself with? Could he overpower or kill me? 

Kameron: I’ve also luckily never been a victim of violence, but I agree, the threat is there. Living in the Deep South as both Black and trans is terrifying, point blank. I carry a knife and pepper spray and have tasers within reach at all times. It’s a near constant stream of anxiety.

Aurora: I have actually experienced violence. When I first moved to D.C., I was raped and robbed. I was new to the area and thought I could take the bus home because it ran until 3 a.m. This was before Ubers, and my attacker was a college student, like me, who [said he would] direct me to the nearest taxi home. Instead he led me to a park, where he began to come onto me. When I disclosed who I was and told him he had the wrong idea about me, he said it was “going to happen anyway.” Then he hit me and forced me down on the grass. After it was over, he ran off with my things and left me there. It was one of the worst nights of my life. 

I walked the streets of D.C. alone, crying for help. Cars drove past me. When I made it to a main road, a taxi driver saw me and offered to take me home but, as I was directing him, I felt his hand on my leg. I told myself as soon as I saw an area I was familiar with, I would get out and run, and that’s what I did. 

I am afraid every day of my life. I am afraid every time I have to step into a room where I don’t know anyone. My bedroom is the only place I feel 100% safe. I pretend to be confident, and sometimes even aggressive, because I’m like a creature in the wild doing everything in my power to avoid and scare off a predator.

Thank you for being so open with your experience, Aurora, and for trusting us with it. I am so, so sorry that happened to you. 

Thank you for listening and being open to hearing it. 

Black Lives Matter is an amazing movement for Black people, but for Black trans people, our existence is largely invalidated.

How much do you think Black Lives Matter has shed light on these issues? 

Khai: Black Lives Matter, in my opinion, shed a light on issues of violence against cisgendered Black people, but it never felt like it was big enough to encompass issues that face trans people.  I remember seeing the video of Iyanna Dior, not long after George Floyd’s death. Seeing that happen in the same place, less than two months after, sent a very clear message that “Black lives matter” doesn’t apply to trans people. 

Aurora

Aurora: I agree. Black Lives Matter is such a problematic group because though it was founded by queer-identifying Black women, as the movement grew, its core foundations got lost.

Kameron: Yes. Black Lives Matter is an amazing movement for Black people, but for Black trans people, our existence is largely invalidated. It’s not a competition, but for every Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, we have a Brayla Stone, a Merci Mack, a Shakie Peters, a Draya McCarty, a Tatiana Hall, a Bree Black. Trans women have been lynched in public. They have been pulled by cars down dirt roads with nooses around their throats. There are stories that need to be told that just don’t get the same attention. 

Plus, if you don’t fit the mold of what cisgendered people find to be “passable”—”masculine,” or “feminine”—you may not have the same value to outsiders looking at you. But a human doesn’t have to look a certain way to deserve to live.

How can people show up as allies for trans women of color?

Kameron: Do more than tweet support. Donate to our GoFundMes. Volunteer at shelters. If you know a Black trans woman, something as simple as a compliment and a smile goes a lot farther than you could imagine.

I also have to implore everyone to vote. If you’ve seen the way our country is going and you’re scared, please vote. There are numerous problems with both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but not voting at all, because it makes you “feel better,” endangers people who aren’t as privileged as you. 

Vote for the LGBTQ+ community, the BIPOC community, people both rightfully and wrongfully incarcerated who have lost their right to vote. Vote for people whose voting process is sabotaged or altered by the postal services not delivering ballots. Times are scary, but never give up hope. You cannot get to the rainbows without flying through the clouds.

The post 3 Black Trans and Non-Binary People on Violence, BLM, and the Future appeared first on Repeller.

This Week’s Best Buys: Fuzzy Fleeces, Fisherman Vests and Checkerboard Print Galore

I stumble across so many treasures on the internet while finding market for other stories. Here’s where I’ll share them with you, alternating weekly between vintage/second-hand and contemporary finds. Sign up here for our Shopping Newsletter, with eight additional finds every Friday.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my style has become increasingly practical over the last few months. In the past I’ve been notorious for underdressing for the sake of my outfit, but now, as it gets colder, I’m thinking about how to be sensible—layering for the weather and all that—while still having fun with statement-making pieces. Below, you’ll find a mix of major statement pieces (hello there, checkered fleece and bow-tie face mask), plus some smart staples.

1. I Have a Thing for Check



Fleece: Rowing Blazers; Bloomers: Handmade by MRG; Loafers: Belgian shoes

This incredible harlequin fleece from Rowing Blazers just launched this week—I’d probably pair it with a simple base layer (or wear it around the house in bloomers, as I did here). It has pockets and a full-front dual zipper, which is something you don’t always find, but when you do, it’s truly the best feature. I plan on wearing mine season after season, ’til I’m the grandest old dame doing après-ski drinks at Courcheval.

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Rowing Blazers

Harlequin Deep-PIle Sherpa Fleece


$365.00 Shop Now








2. Sets are My Fall Dressing Hack

I absolutely LOVE this soft waffle-knit sweater set from Free People. The fact that this knit henley comes with matching pants (they’re actually sold together) is a huge deal, in my book. Sets are my favorite as of late, and these are the perfect base layer for those fun accessories and statement pieces I was talking about—like our good friend, the Rowing Blazers fleece above.

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Free People

Hailee Sweater Set


$128.00 Shop Now








3. On a Note of Practicality

View this post on Instagram

So busses AND parks AND my skin all peak in London

A post shared by Elizabeth Cardinal Tamkin (@elizcardinal) on Oct 14, 2019 at 1:58am PDT

Whenever we’re talking about easy dressing hacks, I always bring up vests. Take this pocketed trench-style one or this military one, both on sale and similar to the vest above, which I wore every day on a trip to London last fall. Vests add another layer and are easy to style. These have extra pockets (Kit Kat storage!), and both would honestly look really cool with the aforementioned fleece and knit set. See what I’m doing here?

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GREI.

Karate Vest


$163.00 Shop Now







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Monitaly

Military Vest Type-C


$148.00 Shop Now









4. Circling Back on the Checkered Train

Studio One Eighty Nine makes this black-and-white bucket hat, which I want for fall because it’s not heavy but still shades your eyes from the sun. Instead of a plain old canvas hat, this one is attention-getting yet still very practical. (If not black and white, perhaps consider this dyed yellow one?)

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Studio One Eighty Nine

Crossroads Cotton Hand Batik Bucket Hat


$95.00 Shop Now







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Studio One Eighty Nine

Ayumi Cotton Hand Batik Bucket Hat


$95.00 Shop Now









5. Or Try This Patchwork Hat

Friends Fornever makes incredible, one-of-a-kind pieces, including our second! take! on the bucket hat this week! (I’ve had it favorited for quite some time.) This just recently came back in stock, too—it’s an easy way to add a little pizzazz.

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Friends Fornever

Patchwork Boro Style Bucket


$60.00 Shop Now








6. Statement Face Masks

View this post on Instagram

At home fashion week with @collinastrada virtual presentation “change is cute”

Buckle Your Mary Janes! Book Club’s Back and We’re A-Going Cloud Watching

Do you feel that chill in the air? Are your social feeds completely overloaded with tone-deaf images of thin white women in oversized sweaters clutching mugs of tea in both hands with an open book in front of them? Is every food brand adding cinnamon and nutmeg to stuff that was honestly just fine before? That’s right, y’all, it is officially autumnal on the internet, which means archetypal “cozy” imagery is mashed up with the onslaught of terrifying news and profound existential dread producing an uncanny, I might even say maddening effect as we live our lives in the virtual realm. If you share in my experience of internet-induced anxiety right now, perhaps you would like to join me for the second installment of Repeller’s Book Club, in which we will read a bomb-ass novel over the course of six-ish weeks, with activities and themes to contemplate and cool readers to talk to about non-pumpkin spice-related topics, culminating in a virtual meetup in which me and the author play games, you get to ask your q’s and get some A’s, and other stuff I haven’t dreamed up yet but am currently percolating!

If you’re convinced, step one is to get the book! This month we’re reading Bestiary by K-Ming Chang. 

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K-Ming Chang

Bestiary


$24.84 Shop Now

In Chang’s debut novel, three generations of women, Grandmother, Mother, and Daughter, live at the center of a multigenerational, transnational story of family, memory, and desire. The novel itself is mostly narrated by Daughter, and is, in the most reductive sense, about her family, which immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan and now carves a life out of the margins in California. The novel weaves myths from Taiwan into the narrative of her family’s past, and into her lived experience in the present. We learn early on that in this novel, no single life is an island, and all bodies are permeable. Daughter lives in her own body as one presence among the many competing forces, including Hu Gu Po, a tiger spirit that wants to live inside a woman’s body. Daughter’s evolving sense of self is tied to the hopeful, gorgeous queer love story that begins when a girl named Ben spits a plum pit at Daughter’s feet, and a new thirst, for intimacy, for revelation, emerges in her body. 

These are the bones of the novel. However, the story’s breath and blood is made of Chang’s totally unique language. Chang offers us language at its most ecstatic, its most lyric, the whole world of the novel populated by impossible images and sensations that feel like the kind of truth I need right now, a truth that exceeds the literal without sacrificing its integrity. Right now, I crave the kind of truth that is not concerned with rendering the things of this world as they are right now, but instead is concerned with shaping beasts and heroes and heroic beasts out of the shadows that form in the silences of our lives—the silences of traumatic history, of queer desire, of diaspora and immigration and the particular form of violence and intimacy that passes from one generation of women who survived the unspeakable to the next generation of women who must live with the gravity of their history. 

K-Ming Chang

Bestiary has been described as magical realism, a style in which the fantastical lives within a world recognizable to those of us stranded in the drab, predictable landscape of reality. I’ve always thought that this description misses the mark when it attempts to describe novels like Bestiary, in which the supernatural elements do not feel like they’re pulled from the thin air of artistic license or a fable-weighted imagination. Magical realism as it appears in this novel, and in the great examples of the style, is not a simple injection of fantasy into real life, but instead is the transformation of erased, abject, forgotten things into characters and phenomena that refuse to be buried, that insist on their place in the world.

I chose this novel for us because, right now, I crave stories that do not try to confine the wilderness of our lived experience to tight linear arcs. I crave stories that are expansive, ferocious, elegantly feral. I want to read stories that do not attempt to tame the world, but instead lead us further out into whatever lies beyond this. 

You can order the book from Bookshop.org and get started on this month’s Book Club expedition right now. If you can’t afford a book right now, keep an eye on our Instagram—we’ve got something special coming for you. 

If you’ve been here before (the virtual Repeller Book Club secret tree-fort clubhouse), then you know that this is not just any book club. I don’t care if you finish the book on time you’re not expected to show up to the meetup with a concise analysis of the major themes in the book and questions about the protagonists motivations. We’re here to connect, to reflect, to shift our perspective, and to expand our lives creatively. This mission (obviously) requires grand whimsy, mysteries, activities, and experiments. So here is this month’s experiment to get you out of the daily drudge and into a sweet moment of wonder.

Experiment #1: Cloud Watching

Do you remember laying in the grass or on a blacktop or on a park bench as a kid and watching the clouds form themselves into animals and monsters and faces as they moved across the sky? When is the last time you went cloud watching? Can you even remember?

Well, the next time someone asks you that, you will have an answer. Go outside—the beginnings of autumn are ideal for cloud watching. Find somewhere to recline where you can see the sky.

Next, set a timer for ten minutes. For these ten minutes (longer if you are an advanced daydreamer) do nothing but watch the clouds move and the creatures emerge. This is the start of your own bestiary. Let your mind wander and freely associate the billows and streaks into creatures or scenes. You don’t have to be able to explain why that nimbus cloud definitely looks like a shrimp or that cirrus is the Nile. 

When the timer goes off, or when you see a cloud creature that is too good to miss, take a picture. Post that picture on social media with a description of what you see and tag Repeller and use our #RepellerBookClub hashtag. At which point, you will receive instructions for the next experiment.

Graphic by Lorenza Centi.

The post Buckle Your Mary Janes! Book Club’s Back and We’re A-Going Cloud Watching appeared first on Repeller.

My Research Is In: The Perfect Lip Balm Exists and It Costs $9.50

The funny thing about lip balm is that I didn’t realize it was an imperative until I was in middle school. In the same way that I was too old when I realized you had to actually towel yourself off with the towel instead of drip drying with it wrapped around your body. (Sorry, mom.)

But after understanding that crusty crust lips were not actually a status quo humanity must simply accept, I was taken in by lip balm. It started with Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers, evolved to Maybelline Kissing Koolers, and then Burts Bee’s, of course. 

When this article from Harling first emerged, I was looking for a new balm to call “The One” and I’m happy to say that my tube of Bite Beauty Agave Lip Mask has almost run dry. And that’s not even the balm she crowned queen! So, without further ado, since ‘tis the season to prepare for the chap—peruse below and tell me which one we may have missed out on in the comments.

I was sitting next to Austin on his couch a few weekends ago when I caught myself staring intently at his lips, which looked perfectly pink, pillowy and even slightly glossy despite the fact that it was 35 degrees outside and the radiator was clanking audibly as it pumped dry heat into his apartment. Their appearance was utterly illogical, and the longer I looked at them, the more hyper-aware I became of my own lips, which in stark contrast felt like two raisins rubbing up against each other with enough friction to roast a mini marshmallow.

“What?” he finally asked.

“Your mouth!” I said. “How does it look so…pretty?”

He laughed before revealing the secret to his impeccably moisturized pout: a tiny sample-sized tube of lip balm that he received in an airline goody bag on a recent overnight work trip. Lip balm! A revelation.

I’ve never really been a lip balm person — by which I mean someone who has a go-to product for moisturized lips on hand at all times and applies it religiously. I’ll do an occasional swipe of Chapstick here and there, which helps temporarily, but I haven’t invested time in finding a good lip balm and using it with appropriate vigor. As proved by my boyfriend’s transformed pout, the cure for raisin lips was seemingly simple, but as a journalist dedicated to my craft, I decided to make it complicated: What if I tested a bunch of different lip balms to find not just a good one but the best one? Self-challenge accepted.

To narrow down the process of deciding which ones to test, I hightailed it over to the Lip Balm & Treatment section on Sephora’s website, sorted by “Bestselling” and chose five colorless lip balms based on the average number of stars they received from reviewers (nothing below a 4.3) and based on the number of reviews they received in total (all of them had at least 100 reviews, and a couple had upwards of 4,000). Scroll down for thee unveiling of my personal findings.

1. Dior Addict Lip Sugar Scrub

The bumpy tip of this solid, lipstick-shaped, notably pricey balm felt like a cat’s tongue upon application — textured but in a gentle, pleasing way (feel: 4) — and it tasted like straight-up sugar (taste: 5) So gentle I’m not sure it actually exfoliated my lips, but it felt super nice so I can’t complain. I put it on first thing in the morning before leaving for work and I’m delighted to report it wasn’t overly sticky or goopy — a classic lip balm pitfall that doesn’t mix well with long hair, windchill and a winter commute. The effect was very subtle in the sense that it didn’t make me look like I was wearing lip balm, even immediately after I applied. They just looked not dry, which you’d never notice unless you were keeping tabs on what my lips usually look like (look: 2). I had to reapply after eating lunch, but other than that my lips remained moist for most of the day (effectiveness: 4).

Final score: 15/20

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Dior

Lip Sugar Scrub


$34.00 Shop Now

2. Kopari Coconut Lip Glossy

I love the taste of coconut, so I thoroughly enjoyed swiping Kopari Coconut Lip Glossy — which is formulated with actual coconut oil — on my lips in the morning (5). The texture was so slippery it almost felt like I had dipper my finger into a pot of melted coconut oil and dabbed it onto my mouth (5). It also made my lips look nice and juicy (5). But all good things come to an end, and unfortunately the effects of Kopari Coconut Lip Glossy came to an end very shortly after I applied (1). Even though I loved the taste and texture, it evaporated too quickly to offer a truly satisfying moisturizing effect, and almost left my lips feeling a little dry after.

Final score: 16/20

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Kopari

Coconut Lip Glossy


$13.00 Shop Now

 

3. Bite Beauty Agave Lip Mask

This stuff felt more like a paste than a balm — which I wasn’t mad about (4). I get the same pleasure out of applying a thick lip product to parched lips that I do putting on a heavy moisturizer and watching my winter skin soak it right up. Also, to its credit, despite the thicker texture, it wasn’t overwhelming or messy — and a little went a long way, instantly coating my lips in a subtle sheen (5). It’s billed as an “intensive nightly recovery lip mask” but I first tried it during the day. It tasted exactly like Vanilla Soylent, which I knew because Haley let me try a sip of her Vanilla Soylent earlier that morning (4). I wasn’t wild about the beverage, but I loved the balm, and it lasted a really long time — a fact I registered as I pulled up to JFK after sitting in two hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic (I was flying to Florida for a quick weekend trip), almost forgetting to get my suitcase from the trunk because I was so struck by how soft my lips were when I absentmindedly smacked them together (5). Lip balm! A revelation.

Final score: 18/20

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Bite Beauty

Agave+ Intensive Vegan Lip Mask


$26.00 Shop Now

4. Laneige Lip Sleeping Mask

I put this one on right before bed (I figured I should given that “sleeping” was in its name). It didn’t really taste like anything (3), was super shiny and almost wet-feeling, which was interesting but not in a particularly bad way (3). Apparently it’s formulated with technology that forms a protective layer over your lips — neat! I could definitely notice a difference the next day when I woke up and could immediately identify the outline of my mouth when I looked into the mirror (as opposed to most winter mornings when it tends to blend in) (4). I don’t tend to love lip products that come in pots because I hate when my fingers have to get involved for reasons relating to both germs and stickiness, but other than that this is a great balm (4).

Final score: 14/20

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Laneige

Lip Sleeping Mask


$22.00 Shop Now

 

5. Kiehl’s Lip Balm #1

This lip balm was love at first smack. Even though it didn’t have any discernible taste (3) and I’m a freak for sweet lip treats, it had the perfect consistency (not too sticky but also not so subtle that I’m denied the satisfaction of walking around with lips that resemble the inside of a pomegranate) (5), and it seems to last for hours (5). I kept taking selfies whenever I went outside because I was obsessed with how my mouth looked like it was July even though it was early March and still bitterly cold (5). Have I mentioned this balm costs $9.50? Rhetorical question, but feel free to answer with your desired degree of enthusiasm.

Final score: 18/20

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Kiehl’s

Lip Balm #1


$10.00 Shop Now

In conclusion, the Bite Beauty Agave Mask and Kiehl’s Lip Balm #1 are tied for my top contender. I actually probably liked the Kiehl’s one best of all because of how it made my lips look (a priority criterion for my lip balm preferences, I’ve learned), but would highly recommend the Bite one for anyone who prioritizes delicious taste when it comes to lip products. Any other beloved lip balms out there I should try? If recent temperatures are any indication, we still have a long way to go before I’m licensed to go without.

Photos via Harling Ross.

The post My Research Is In: The Perfect Lip Balm Exists and It Costs $9.50 appeared first on Repeller.

What is $1200 Dollars Worth Right Now? 3 Americans On Getting Their Stimulus Checks

Among the social faux paus I’ve committed in the past decade —ranging from walking into my lobby barefoot to letting the doors of an empty elevator close on my coworkers to admiring apartments through their open windows on the Upper West Side—the most nerve-racking has undoubtedly been looking at the receipts left behind in ATMs. Every time I’ve done it has been remarkable. As a college student, I’d expect to see what I would have in my own bank account: a few hundred dollars at best, a negative balance at worst. I was shocked when I saw that another student had a little over $10,000 in his checking account. I didn’t know another 19-year-old who had that much money. As an adult, I am familiar with the gut punch of realizing, all at once, that the challenges I faced were not necessarily universal.

Each of these moments means something new against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. I can’t imagine dashing into my lobby without shoes. The shutting door of a half-empty elevator is now good etiquette. We are invited into one another’s homes via Zoom. And stimulus payments have peeled open all of our wallets—and here we are, out in the open, barely decent.

Stuck between financial and moral obligations and self preservation, a teacher in Florida wrote his obituary. Many neighborhood businesses have been permanently shuttered, while large corporations have been bailed out, once again. The staggered stimulus payments that Americans were given to keep us afloat, during a pandemic that promises to barrel through the winter and into 2021, reveal a particular sourness in our national ethos. When contextualized by the amount of stimulus relief citizens of countries like New Zealand received and the very little so many of us are surviving on in the first place, $1200 is particularly ingracious. 

Here, three stories about stimulus checks that were not enough to numb the pain of the pandemic.

A nurse and mother of 3 on stretching a stimulus check while 37 weeks pregnant 

Moriah Gaddis Thompson, General Surgery Clinic Nurse in Camp Lejeune, Jacksonville, NC. 

I was pregnant with my third child when I began working as a general surgery clinic nurse. I’d planned to work until I went into labor because I didn’t have much leave time saved, but I was sent home by my midwife to quarantine at 37 weeks to try to limit my risk of being exposed to COVID-19. 

In my position, I was not on the frontline for care of sick patients, so my risk of being exposed to the virus was much smaller than that of a nurse working in the E.R. or family medicine, for example, where symptomatic patients visit. I was very anxious, nonetheless. I felt like my hospital was slow to respond to the pandemic in a preventative manner. We did not begin taking temperatures, social distancing, or requiring face masks until April. There was such limited information about how the virus affects pregnant women. It consumed me a bit. What if my husband was positive and could not be with me during the birth of our child? What if I was positive and separated from my newborn for two weeks? What if our bonding was compromised? What if I couldn’t breastfeed?” 

I asked myself these questions every day that I was still at work. I was torn, though. I felt somewhat obligated to work since my department was lower risk, and there were so many people unable to work. I felt grateful to have the job that I have, but I also struggled with fear and anxiety. 

When I returned after my son was born, it was so hard. Money was definitely a motivating factor. I have private student loans that are not on hold right now. I have three kids at home—three college funds I am trying to grow. I have car notes and bills. So, I “pulled up my big girl panties” and headed back in, which was also complicated.

According to everything I’ve heard, my area was not hit as hard as other places, but our army base is not reporting numbers to the local health department for “national security” purposes, so I never really felt like I knew how many cases there actually were. Because of that, in part, I knew I did not want my two school-aged children to return to school, and I’ve signed them up for virtual learning at home.  

To call parenting during the pandemic a challenge seems to lack the depth to describe how I really feel.

The stimulus check was a surprise to me. I’d heard about it but I was mostly consumed with baby prep and COVID fears. My company is excluded from the CARES Act and did not compensate me for the three weeks that I was at home prior to my maternity leave, so when I saw the amount pending I was immediately grateful. Because I’m in charge of keeping up with our finances, I also knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. I was around 34 or 35 weeks pregnant, and we had been working on cutting down our debt as we got closer to my maternity leave. We took the better portion and paid down my debt, and with the rest bought a crib and mattress, and sushi for dinner! 

A small business owner on closing shop and navigating new expenses

Eric Perez, Barber in Oneonta, NY 

When the pandemic started, my barbershop was shut down because we were deemed non-essential. It was tough because my income is directly combined with my effort and time at work. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. Within a week, I’d gotten myself a job working overnights at Walmart because, at that point, I didn’t qualify for unemployment because I was self-employed. Then the CARES Act was passed, and I would’ve qualified for unemployment had I stayed at home—but since I went out and found a job, I didn’t. I took solace in the fact that I was still providing for my family, even though it felt like I would’ve been rewarded had I stayed home. 

My homelife with my children changed. We were being really careful because my youngest is high risk. He has asthma and I was scared I would bring the virus home to him. My wife was working from home, but it seemed like more was expected from her being home than being in the office. The stress was evident even in small conversations. 

I’ve talked to a lot of people at the barbershop and I’ve found that so many people rely on social media for their news. The area I live in has a high population of people who still wave Confederate flags and voted for Trump. For the most part, they are people I can try to have conversations with but I always have the feeling that we are at odds or there is tension there. It’s evident that the information they’re giving me is from social media and our president is guiding their thought processes.

It scares me that the implications made in memes are taken as the truth. 

At the height of the pandemic, I still was concerned about going back to the barbershop, but I did it for the money. I blew through my savings because as gracious as Walmart was in employing local people, even though they didn’t need us, there were unforeseen bills that came up. We had to pay more for food and electricity, because we were home more. We paid for technology to appropriately teach my children, who were learning virtually. But we also paid our rent every month on time, and it’s something we can look back on and say we did. 

We spent our stimulus check on getting ahead on our bills a bit. It gave us some breathing room. It allowed me to quit my job at Walmart with enough time to prepare to go back to the barbershop and minimize my exposure for my family, but I would’ve just had to work two more weeks to earn what I received from the government.

A New York native on moving home and saving for a rainy day

Ghislaine Leon, Digital Media Manager in Harlem, NY

By the time the pandemic hit, I was looking for a new job. I was exhausted from paying New York City rent prices and not getting the bare minimum from landlords, like hot water in my kitchen. I had the option of waiting out the pandemic alone in my Bronx apartment or saving half of my monthly costs by going back home to Harlem. If the world was going to end, I figured I might as well be with my family.

I returned to a neighborhood that has two strong communities. There are families who’ve been on the block for more than 30 years, who think of our area as “the hood,” and there are neighbors who gentrified Broadway and think of our area as a “Henry Hudson dream.” The pandemic pushed true New Yorkers to be more of ourselves and pushed some of our visitors out. For the first time in my life, Broadway became like what my uncle described in the ’80s: a street pharmacy. 

One night I stepped out at 10:30 p.m., and I had not even walked a full block before someone walked by me saying, “I got that gas, that gas.” 

For most of my life, I’ve been offered weed on the street, but this is different. The fact that people need money brought back drugs that community board members have worked to remove. I had the Citizen app and I had to delete it. The number of notifications I got about local crime reinforced the feelings I had that night. 

Another night, I was waiting for pizza when a fire broke out in a building nearby. A young Dominican man intentionally lit his apartment on fire, causing the entire building to evacuate. I was heartbroken at the sight of young children leaving the scene through their fire escapes in their pajamas. Guys on the block beat the young man up before the cops arrived to arrest him. 

As an Afro-Latina, this affects me personally. Black and brown communities have been hit hardest, so disparities have been in my face at all times. There’s no escaping it. At one point when NYC COVID-19 cases were high, I saw an ambulance every other night in my neighborhood. It was usually an elderly person. 

It has been hard to face my feelings about the world—about racial injustices, about the way the pandemic has affected my community—while holding it together as a professional.  

I haven’t spent my stimulus check yet. It’s sitting in my savings account until I invest it. I want to double it. The stimulus check was enough to cover half of one month’s cost of living. It was definitely not enough to live on through September and it’s shaken me up. I have to remember to fend for myself and make money work for me.

Graphic by Lorenza Centi.

The post What is $1200 Dollars Worth Right Now? 3 Americans On Getting Their Stimulus Checks appeared first on Repeller.

True Life: I Ran into My Ex… Over Zoom

I thought the one benefit of quarantine was that I wouldn’t have to see the people I hate.

Five months into the pandemic I was asked to do a comedy show over Zoom. Despite having worked as a stand-up comedian pre-pandemic, up until this point I had politely declined any live streaming shows. It didn’t feel right to tell jokes into my empty apartment for an audience on mute.

Missing the high of the stage, I agreed to do a particular show: a comedy dance show.  I am never short of dance moves, even when audience members are in short supply. The walls of my apartment had been known to request blindfolds.

I immediately started planning my dance numbers. One of my favorite drag queens, Lady Red Couture, had recently passed away, so I planned a dance number to her song “Extra Value Meal” and choreographed a performance with many fast food-related gags—including, but not limited to, eating two Big Macs while hula hooping.

A couple of days before the show, I was tagged in a promotional post on Instagram. I looked at the line-up to size up my competition. And that’s when I saw the judges included one I was unfortunately too familiar with: Greg. Crap.

Greg, my former crush, the one who consumed my world and lived rent-free in my mind for years, would be one of the judges. Our relationship was pivotal, and was the reason for several big changes in my life. The first time I was ever on a plane was to visit this man. It felt like a movie and it felt very adult. 

We hooked up once, resulting in an apology for “giving me the wrong impression.” This conversation took place on a bridge. At the time, I had been watching a lot of Sex and the City, so naturally I thought it was true love.

I spent the better part of a year chasing him in-between states and exchanging near-daily text messages and inside jokes. The last time I had talked to Greg, he had accused me of having “some unhealthy delusions about our relationship.”

 I would have preferred “you’re crazy”—it’s more to the point. 

Greg strung me along for a year before giving me the kindness of breaking my heart. But more importantly, he made something snap inside me. A big component of my unrequited love was that he didn’t think I was funny, and, therefore, not qualified to be a real girlfriend.

In my post-heartbreak rage, I submitted a writing packet, which led not only to my first job in comedy but many jobs that I have strung into a career. I had spent the last four years working my ass off to prove to him that I was just as good a comedian as he was.

After months of COVID, when I didn’t even get to see my best friends in the world, this man was going to be (virtually) in my living room. And he was going to have to tell everyone his opinions on me pulling Whoppers out of my bra to disco music.

Should I drop out? No. Maybe he would drop out? I crossed my fingers. He didn’t. Crap.

This wouldn’t be your average embarrassing run-in at the DMV or a random party. He would be in my living room. He would see everything. My crappy David Bowie poster and that, despite two job promotions, I hadn’t redecorated or switched apartments since I was 24.

I cringed at the thought of the “me” who had loved him. The girl who drank an entire bottle of 7-11 strawberry Boons Farm and texted him from a friend’s phone that he should love me because “Elizabeth is perfect she is a big fan of Lady Gaga.” 

It seemed like a super-compelling argument at the time.

After two days of fretting, Taylor Swift songs on repeat, wardrobe changes, and exhausting all my friends, the show came.

We saw each other in those tiny Brady Bunch-esque Zoom boxes before the show streamed on Twitch. It turned out it wasn’t that different than seeing each other at a party. We didn’t speak directly to one another, but engaged with those around us.

As I sat in my apartment, while also in a virtual room he was in, I felt okay. I was grateful to have the moment between us, as scary as it had seemed. It felt nice. And after months of being away from other people, it was amazing to be experiencing regular human emotions again. Even if it was about someone I hoped to never see again.

I danced. He scored me. A perfect ten. And made a very awkward comment about my silhouette looking lovely in sequins, which made me feel like I won the break-up.

He gave me the kindness of treating me like a contestant he was rooting for, of scoring me more than fairly, which frankly I deserved after the airplane credit card debt and my broken heart.

Maybe, just maybe, he understood who I was now. I was no longer the girl in love who jumped for him at a moment’s notice, I was his peer. There wasn’t a confession that he was still madly in love with me. There wasn’t the regret in his eyes I would have liked. But there was the professional confirmation I needed from him all along. Finally.

I was crowned the winner, and I got the confirmation I wanted all along:

I am very funny. And I’m a hell of a dancer. 

The post True Life: I Ran into My Ex… Over Zoom appeared first on Repeller.

Fall Sweater Roundup: The Best Cozy Knits for Chilly Nips

Every summer I miss the hug of knitwear: I long for the sweet embrace of a good sweater wrapping its softness around me. The feeling of walking outside when there is just a little chill in the air with the perfect cardigan on is a profound delight. 

As we edge into fall, I’ve begun to unpack my sweaters, pulling them out from the depths of the drawer under my bed (and in some other nooks and crannies in my apartment, if I’m being honest). I gravitate toward specific styles for their comfort, ease, and style: Cardigans are great for zero-effort layering; cable knits are classic and easy to style; collared sweaters look instantly put-together; and ribbed sweaters feel so good on your skin. 

Here, my favorite styles, with specific options for each because it’s fall and we all need a soft, knitted hug.

1. The Chunky Cotton Cardigan



Sweater: Alex Mill; Necklace: Gimaguas; Earrings: Lizzie Fortunato; Scarf in hair: Si Silks

This slightly oversized sweater can double as a jacket in the early fall because of its thickness and insulation (it’s 100% cotton)—thanks to its fit, it’s easy to layer sweaters or tees underneath. Bonus: I love a crewneck cardigan, because they look great with a collared shirt beneath them. Alex Mill offers this style year after year, making it a classic worth investing in.

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Alex Mill

Nico Chunky Cardigan


$125.00 Shop Now








2. The Recycled Cashmere Henley

Madewell launched its Recycled Cashmere collection today, featuring 13 knitwear pieces made from 70% globally sourced certified recycled cashmere. I specifically plan to pair this knit henley in mossy green or bright lavender with the coordinating knit trousers, layered under a blazer or jacket (brownie points if the blazer or jacket is an equally great color).

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Madewell

Recycled Cashmere Henley


$158.00 Shop Now







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Madewell

Recycled Cashmere Henley


$158.00 Shop Now







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Madewell

Recycled Cashmere Henley


$158.00 Shop Now









3. A Tie-Front that Doubles as a Shirt



Sweater: Madewell; Necklace: Tuleste — similar here

This tie-front cardigan is a great option for both everyday and for dressing up—I’ll be grabbing one of these myself, unless it sells out (again). I like it worn with nothing underneath, as a warmer option than a T-shirt.

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Madewell

Tie-Front Cardigan


$59.99 Shop Now








4. The Luxurious Statement Cardigan

I’ve referenced the brand Maxhosa Africa several times recently, mainly for its incredible knitwear patterns and timeless prints (don’t sleep on the socks, either!). Their cardigan collection—with options for both men and women—is extensive; go for a women’s cardigan for a snugger fit or to the men’s section for an oversized, baggy look. 

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Maxhosa Africa

Jacquard Medium Weight Knit Cardigan


$288.00 Shop Now







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Maxhosa Africa

Jacquard Medium Weight Knit Cardigan


$262.00 Shop Now









5. The Checkerboard



Sweater: Kule; Heart Pendant Necklace: NOTTE Jewelry; Beaded Necklace: NOTTE Jewelry

I first saw this sweater at a press preview at Kule’s showroom—Kule’s founder and designer, Nikki, brought it out immediately, knowing I would adore it. I love checker and I love red, so naturally this sweater is extremely enticing to me. It’s a lightweight cotton blend, meaning it’s very comfortable (kind of like a sweater/sweatshirt hybrid) and easy to wear, layered or not. Some other checkered sweaters: this hand-knit one for under $100 and this black and red one from the ’90s for $38, both on Etsy.

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Kule

Check Mate Sweater


$318.00 Shop Now








6. The Lightweight Silk/Cashmere Blend Crewneck



Sweater: NAADAM; Collar: Vintage; Pearl Necklace: Wolf Circus; Dolphin Pendant Necklace: NOTTE Jewelry

NAADAM is beloved for its knitwear—like their infamous $75 cashmere sweater. I also love their oversized cashmere crewneck for colder days (or when the heat hasn’t yet kicked in). Add to the list its new, lightweight crewneck with a pocket, which I styled here with a detachable collar. It’s a perfect layering sweater, and because it’s NAADAM, you know you’ll have it for years.

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NAADAM

Lightweight Crewneck with Pocket


$125.00 Shop Now








7. The Waffle Turtleneck

This 100%-cotton sweater by Selva Negra is L.A-made., machine washable, and the perfect oversized shape. Look at that waffle texture! And that bright turmeric (or, fall foliage, or, autumnal root vegetable) color! It’s the kind of sweater you’d wear to a multi-course candlelit dinner at home with a pair of stretchy pants and your hair up in a voluminous scrunchie. Wow, I just wrote weeknight pasta-dinner erotic fanfic. This sweater is truly inspirational.

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Selva Negra

Oversized Pique Turtleneck Bente Sweater


Shop Now








8. Vintage Fisherman



Sweater: Vintage; Crochet Bandana: Fancy Nancy; Earring: Timeless Pearly

The fisherman style is my favorite classic sweater, and I pull out mine anytime I want to be warm but with an easy-classic look. It’s chunky but not too bulky—and another perfect option for layering things underneath it. The one I own is pretty soft, but I recommend adding a T-shirt or turtleneck underneath it, to reduce any scratchiness. I like mine oversized, and I wear it with a pair of leggings or skinny trousers + loafers for an easy fall ensemble, no jacket required. Check to see where the sweater is from, too. if it’s from Scotland or Ireland, you are wearing legitimate heritage on your body (that being said, this vintage RL one with the pockets is pretty cool).

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Wall Street Fashion

80s Scottish Fisherman Sweater


$108.00 Shop Now







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Kirily Vintage

80s Kauri Kraft Fisherman Sweater


$79.99 Shop Now







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Tiger Lilly Vintage Co

80s Irish Wool Sweater


$55.00 Shop Now







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Polo Ralph Lauren

Wool Fisherman Sweater


$75.00 Shop Now









9. The Sweater Vest

For the feeling of a hug but without the full kaboodle, I love a sweater vest. Two options: Wear it like a crew neck (with either a tight tee or nothing underneath), or with a collared shirt or tee. Both of the below are from Ganni, but you can find a slew of vintage options on Etsy or eBay at very low prices.

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Ganni

Cable Knit Cotton-Blend Vest


$295.00 Shop Now







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Ganni

Button-Detailed Cotton-Blend Sweater Vest


$235.00 Shop Now









10. The Alpaca Polo



Sweater: Eleven Six; Chain Necklace: Machete; Yin Yang Pendant Necklace: NOTTE Jewelry; Yin Yang Earring: NOTTE Jewelry

I included the brand Eleven Six in our Labor Day/Early-Fall sales story—their sweaters are great to prep for fall with. Now that we’re here, I come to you again with this brand of luxury sweaters sustainably-made in Peru. They’re incredibly soft—the exact sartorial hug you want—with original cuts and shapes. I specifically love the Tatum sweater for its polo collar, ribbing, and shape.  

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Eleven Six

Alpaca Collared Tatum Sweater


$298.00 Shop Now








11. The ’70s-Style Polo Sweater



Sweater: Tory Sport; Chain Necklace: Vintage; Locket Necklace: Missoma

This fitted sweater by Tory Sport reminds me of one my mom had in high school. It’s slightly form-fitted, bright and cheery with an air of preppiness to it. I imagine it paired with a mini-skirt or wide-leg trousers—something with some volume to it. It’s 100% merino wool, but trust me, very soft. I found some similar vintage options actually from the ’70s for you, too.

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Tory Sport

Merino Ribbed Polo Sweater


$258.00 Shop Now







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Shy Sagittarius

70s Polo Sweater


$34.50 Shop Now







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eBay

70s Polo Sweater


$79.99 Shop Now







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Candy Flip Shop

70s Polo Sweater


$29.25 Shop Now









12. The Cool Deconstructed Statement

I recommend Andersson Bell for its original cuts and designs. The knitwear styles are art pieces: two-toned, cutout, deconstructed, multi-material. I love the color differentiation between the arms of this “Mollyna” style, and the detachable sleeves of this one. I recommend these if you want to hit a recently re-opened modern art museum looking like a part of an exhibition. This is a very good strategy for keeping other museum visitors six feet away from you at a safe, look-but-don’t-touch, distance.

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Andersson Bell

Mollyna Cutout Two-Tone Cable Knit Sweater


$345.00 Shop Now







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Andersson Bell

Blue Rib Detachable Sleeve Turtleneck


$280.00 Shop Now

What do you look for in a sweater? Do you have a favorite? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll do some internet weaving for you.

The post Fall Sweater Roundup: The Best Cozy Knits for Chilly Nips appeared first on Repeller.

What it Takes to Keep Something Alive: 5 Plant Parents on Raising their Botanical Brood

Misting the plants that live on the ledge of my bathroom window is my most sacred ritual. They live above my toilet, but they seem happy. That might be due to my absolute desperation to keep them alive, more than any actual plant care. I chant: We’re fine-we’re fine-we’re fine to them when things seem absolutely dire, and if I catch my own eyes in the mirror and chant a little longer, then that is between me, Stevie Nicks (aloe), Chicken (a menagerie of succulents), and Sappho (a snake plant).

I don’t get out much these days, but the green makes me remember that yes, I am alive, and we are alive, and we can continue on despite it all. 

For me, growing up in the tree-shrouded foothills of rural eastern Oklahoma, plants were never far from my periphery. My mother was a green-thumbed gardener, meticulous. My grandfather could scatter seeds to the wind with his eyes closed and produce something beautiful. My favorite smell is still wild honeysuckle. Plants are our oldest teachers, our connection to life outside of ourselves, and they should be honored accordingly. But how? How do we nurture this relationship now, when the anxiety is suffocating, when we’re locked away from each other, and the loneliness is almost palpable in the air? 

In my quest for answers, I interviewed five people who have let plants take over their homes, who now live in lush mini-conservatories filled to the brim with plants (and sometimes frogs, fungi, and cats.) From our conversations, I learned more about what it takes to stay and keep something alive, and the healing relationships I think we should all cultivate. 

Courtney (@_cspaige)

How did you become the green witch goddess that you are now? When did this journey begin for you? 

Honestly, childhood! I come from a long line of plant mamas. I grew up with plants with my mom and my grandmother. As far as myself, about six years ago, when I got the space and the lighting for them. That’s when I told myself, Okay, it’s time for my own plants. I felt like I was missing something. They complete the space as far as I’m concerned. 

That makes a lot of sense to me. Especially with the deep familial connection you have there. Not having plants would be like missing a piece of home. 

Definitely. Originally I’m from upstate New York, always around nature, and being in the city it can be a bit sterile sometimes. Plants are my way of reminding myself of home and bringing some of that to the urban area. 

Did your mom and grandmother keep indoor plants? Or were they outside gardeners? 

My grandmother was mainly an outside gardener—she had a really big backyard. I grew up helping her in the garden and watching that journey of planting the tomatoes and seeing them grow and then being able to pick them and then helping her cook. Those are really treasured memories for me. My mom was an inside plant owner, though we did have a lot of plants in our backyard that we ended up taking when we moved. I have a lot of connections with plants in my childhood. 

How do you care for all those plants? Is it meditative or routine for you? Do you sing to them?

I will say that we’re a ’90s hip-hop and R&B household! I keep the music on basically all the time. So I don’t sing specifically to them, but they also don’t have a choice in listening. As far as their care, I do have a calendar reminder because—well, life is so busy. I try to keep my personal life and my work as organized as possible. I usually break it up into two separate days, just because there are so many of them, and certain plants require less water than others. Just so I don’t kill them. As a plant parent, you go through trial and error with what works and what doesn’t work—and the types of plants you can maintain and take care of, and which ones you haven’t figured out. I try to stick with ones that I haven’t killed off. I try to keep it as organized as possible—if I don’t, I’ll forget.

So we’ve talked a little through why you’ve done it historically, but why do you do it right now? Especially in this frankly scary present moment. 

I’ll be perfectly honest. I’ve purchased around ten to 15 plants since the pandemic began. I moved into my apartment in February, and I definitely paid attention to making my space as comfortable as possible. I didn’t know how long I would be at home. I worked remotely for three months. I just felt like it was so important to do the things that really matter to me, the things that bring me joy during these scary and unknown times. 

Do they have names? 

Okay, I’m not really a namer, but I do have one called Courtney. I figured out if you pick one and call it by your name, you’re literally nurturing yourself.

I think that’s incredible. 

Agatha (@ plant.ma , @plantingforprogress)

What is your plant goddess origin story? When did this journey begin for you? 

Plants have always been close to my heart, but the zero-to-100 transformation of having 160 plants in my apartment happened two or three years ago. I’m originally from Los Angeles, and my family is still there, but when I moved to the East Coast, having plants in my apartment, starting with succulents, was just to have something green close to me. Then it transformed into something therapeutic.

Did your parents have plants? 

I actually had a pretty unique childhood. I was born in the Philippines, and my parents were frequent travelers. I grew up with plants around me, both with the garden outside and house plants inside. I accidentally killed one of my mom’s Monstera deliciosas when I was a kid, and looking back at that from my adulthood, I’m like, Oh, no, what a beautiful plant—how could I have done that? Plants have been something that has connected me to my family, too, especially in the era of covid. There was a period of time where my grandma and I had a text thread that was just plant pictures!

It seems like a real matrilineal tradition for you. I think that’s really beautiful. 

For sure. It’s kind of a no-brainer when it comes to spreading the joy. My plants grow and propagate, so why not send them elsewhere to friends and loved ones? Even if I wasn’t in a one-bedroom apartment I think I would want to share. 

How do you actually care for all those plants? 

Before I had as many plants as I do now, I used to make a day of it, but now there are way too many for that. Now I tackle them by groups of similar care and so on. For example, a lot of Hoya plants that are indigenous to Southeast Asia are really hardy and by the window, but they don’t get as much water as others do. By grouping them, I learn more about them and make sure all of them are getting the care that they need. Also: I’m a great multitasker, so I could be repotting plants while on a call. Paying attention, obviously, but also doing something with my hands. 

Tell me more about why you’re doing it now. Especially within the frame of the Planting for Progress Project. 

At the beginning of quarantine, I was having a really hard time, like so many people were. After finding myself furloughed from work, I wasn’t able to donate to the social movements and causes that I really wanted to. It was at that time that I started propagating some of my rarer plants and auctioning them for donations. It got a good amount of traction, and in the last few months, we’ve been able to raise about $5000. We’ve donated to BLM, the ACLU, and have done a few things with the Audre Lorde Project, the Innocence Project, and the Foresight Project. So my love for plants became not just therapeutic for me, but a way to give back. 

I think that pretty well answers my next question of what your plants mean to you. They’re a lifeline. 

Oh, absolutely. I don’t know what I would do without them. They’ve not only helped me personally, but they’ve helped me create a larger community, something that felt impossible in the current climate. 

Eric (@botany_spears) 

How did you become the great plant whisperer you are now? When did the transformation begin? 

I grew up upstate, in a rural area, so I was used to being surrounded by plants and nature from a young age. We had a big garden and flower beds and the forest was basically my backyard, so when I moved to the city ten years ago I was surprised that no one had that. And if they did have space, it was rocks, poison soil, and maybe some garbage the last tenants left behind. I started by getting the kind of plant everyone has in their apartment that they treat as their baby, and then I got one more, and now I decade later I have something like 120. 

Wow. 

It grew slowly, but it was something that was always in my realm of interest. I also work as a photographer, which means I spend a lot of time at home, and the plants are a way for me not to feel like I’m stuck in a big white box. 

Did your parents garden at all? Or did you step into it on your own? 

My mom had her flower beds that were her prized possessions. My family is Armenian, and my grandmother grew grapevines that we then made into stuffed grape leaves, so that was always a big event and showcased that you could grow something and eat it, too. I learned the value of plants in general just by what my family found important. 

How do you care for your 120 plant children? Do you sing to them? 

I don’t sing to them, but I do talk to them a lot! If I get a particularly stressful email or something, I will leave my office and come vent to them, mostly in hopes that somebody in the ethos will hear me and something will change. It feels like having friends around, as corny as that sounds, and it’s reassuring to have that kind of company. As far as their physical care, everyone has this idea that having a lot of plants is harder than having one plant, and from my experience, everything likes bright and direct light, everything wants water once a week, and if you notice something is off, adjust one of those things accordingly, and that’s it. I’m not more or less talented than anyone else—certainly not a botanist. 

Why do you do it, besides your familial connection, especially right now? 

I’m a Virgo. I love controlling the situation. I love having only myself to blame when something goes wrong. It’s really nice to have something to hold onto, in this time where every time you open your phone some new and fresh horror awaits. Plants offer me an escape. I take care of them, and they offer new growth. I wish that that was the norm: We take care of each other and offer each other new growth. 

We’ve touched on it a bit, but what do your plants mean to you? What do you think you mean to them? 

My plants are a stamp collection that have become a deep emotional connection. My friend gave me a cutting of a plant one year for my birthday, but that plant had been in her family for over 100 years. It’s this thing that has a heritage older than I am. It’s hard not to have reverence for. I hope I can take care of these things with the preciousness and the respect that they deserve. 

Which is your favorite? I promise I won’t tell. 

My most common, oldest plant I have. It’s called a Scindapsus exotica, and she’s not the one I brag about, but she’s the one who has seen the road with me, and that is something I deeply love her for. We have history. Like the friend who has embarrassing pictures of you that they can never show anyone.

Missleidy (@missleidytheplantlady) 

How and when did your plant journey/botanical glow up begin?

It started about a year and a half ago. Before that, I was living in an apartment with one dingy window and nothing else. When I moved and had the light, I went to the plant shop across the street and decided that if I was going to be working on myself mentally, and getting myself to a better place in general, I needed to make my environment reflect that. I thought back to what brought me so much joy as a kid, and that was being with my grandmother and grandfather in the garden. I was already doing drag by that point, so I knew that I wanted a plant that was a diva. I wanted people to look at her twice. A month after that, I had 40 plants in the window. It became an opportunity for my love of drag and my love of plants to intersect and bloom—that’s how MissLeidy the Plant Lady was born. 

Tell me more about when you were a kid with your grandmother and grandfather in the garden. 

They basically raised me. My grandmother was and still is my idol. They’re such an inspiration to me—they immigrated from Cuba in 1979 with absolutely no money and then helped the rest of my family come to the United States. Everyone had a place to stay and something to eat. Once I got into a conversation with my aunt and during it, she said, “We grew up really poor.” And I was like, “Are you serious? Did we grow up in the same house?” I was almost convinced I had grown up rich because my grandparents filled me up with so much love, community, and family that there was no room to miss anything else. My grandfather was a jack-of-all-trades. One of his hobbies was breeding rare tropical birds. In our backyard, we had everything from albino peacocks to turkeys to parrots. 

So you basically grew up in the Secret Garden? 

Yes! When I was a kid I had this idea if I planted enough trees I could make Vegas a rainforest. Every time we went to the store I would ask to buy a tree or plants for the garden beds in the front. Plants have always been in our lifestyle and our bloodline. 

Onto your plants specifically, how do you care for all of them? Is it a routine for you? 

It is a routine for me. It became a way to help strengthen my sobriety and deal with depression. Anytime I take a living thing into my home, I become responsible for it. So even if I feel terrible in the mornings I have something to work towards. I want to give the plants (and poison dart frogs) the optimal conditions to thrive since I’m taking them out of their environments and putting them into mine. I chose to bring this thing into my home, so I have to get out of bed. By incorporating this into my life, I get to see new growth in the plants, which in turn stimulates new growth in me. 

Why do you do it? Why do you do it right now in the terrifying times we find ourselves in? 

It all goes back to mental health for me. If I didn’t have the outlet of plants, I’m not sure I would have been able to handle everything that has happened. 

What do you think you mean to them (your plants)? 

I’m the drag queen Mother Nature up in this bitch. I do enjoy all of this so much. It is serious, but it’s also fun for me, and I think that is important. They’re showgirls at the end of the day. 

Cartreze (@blackboyplantjoy)

How and when did you bloom into the green-thumbed plant collector you are now?

I’ve been interested in plants since I was a child, but with my day-to-day theater job, there just wasn’t enough time to collect and care for the plants I wanted. With the pandemic, even in the chaos, I’ve had the time at home needed to start diving deep, and I mean really deep, into all things plants. I went from having ten plants to my current count of 80. 

That’s a lot of plants. Did the jump from ten to 80 happen in the last six months?

It is a lot of plants. And yes, 100%. If things were different, I’d be traveling right now, but instead I can help them grow and love them as they deserve.

Who helped your love of plants along as a kid? 

My great-grandmother Gladys. She used to have as many plants, if not more, as I do now. She had lots of prayer plants, pothos, and other run-of-the-mill house plants. The kind that I imagine every grandmother or abuela has in their house. She also used to do ceramics, and so she would paint individual pots for all of her plants. I’ve actually picked up on that ritual because I paint my terracotta pots. I have so many family members tell me that we are especially connected, and that’s so special to me. 

Miss Gladys sounds like quite the woman. How do you care for your 80 plant children? 

A lot of stress, anxiety, and chaotic energy! But there is a routine. I water them once a week, on Sunday, or on Thursday as needed. The first thing I do after waking up is check on them. I like to see what’s growing, what’s not growing, and what might need a little more love. So it’s check plants, make coffee, and watch Wendy Williams. 

Do you talk to them? 

Oh my God, I talk to them like they are my really close friends. I say things like, “OK, girl, you’re not gonna grow today? That’s fine. I see you. If you really want to act up I’ll get you more water.”

So along with Miss Gladys and the freeing up of your schedule, why do you do it? 

I did not expect that caring for these plants would bring me as much joy as it does, but it does. At the beginning I thought it would be a couple more house plants and that’s it. I do it because caring for my plants is actually a form of self-care. Tending to them, watering them, and helping them grow, as stressful as it is for me some days because there are so many, the act of caring for them is so helpful. It relieves some of the anxiety of the world as it is right now. Helping them helps me. And also: why not now? This is the best possible time for me to become a crazy plant parent, and rather appropriate, I think. 

What is the first plant that you purchased? Was it just one or did you get a pair? 

I got a few so they wouldn’t be lonely. A pink polka-dot plant, a prayer plant, a cactus I named Keisha, and four others. Out of the seven, only three are still here—rest in peace, Keisha. But they did their job and they served a purpose. 

Your connection to them is almost spiritual, isn’t it? 

It is. As corny as it sounds it’s very spiritual, very connective to me. There’s a deep love and respect there, and I cherish that. It’s so bizarre because I never thought I would be able to hold so much feeling inside of myself for them? But I do. They have personalities, and lives, and I never thought I would be that person, but here we are, honey.

Photography: Ryan Razon
Photography Assistant: Will Pippin

The post What it Takes to Keep Something Alive: 5 Plant Parents on Raising their Botanical Brood appeared first on Repeller.