Whether it’s real (Barbra), prosthetic (Bradley), or doctored (every third Instagram influencer), the nose is having a moment. Our beauty-and-wellness reporter sniffs around Hollywood

By Linda Wells

It’s the season of the schnoz, the beak, the triumphant, prominent, unignorable honker. We have Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro. Barbra Streisand’s nose starring in My Name Is Barbra with critics describing her face right there on page one (“an amiable anteater,” “a furious hamster,” “a seasick ferret”). There is Lady Gaga in profile, looking like something on an ancient Roman coin. And, to keep things topical, there’s Rudolph.

It is also the time of nose jobs, both surgical and non-; it is the age of contour makeup and before-and-afters. As podcasters are fond of saying, two things can be true at the same time. Rhinoplasties were up 37 percent in 2022 compared to pre-pandemic numbers from 2019. READ ON

First, Marcia Kilgore created Bliss. Then the serial entrepreneur moved on to FitFlops. Her latest game changer? The subscription service Beauty Pie. Our intrepid beauty-and-wellness columnist is along for the ride

By Linda Wells

Anyone who was alive in New York City in the 90s and had pores was either delivering them to a particular spa in SoHo, waiting to deliver them to a particular spa in SoHo, or bitching to anyone who’d listen about how they couldn’t deliver them even though they had a gift certificate that was about to expire and called the particular spa every day at eight, noon, and five.

Everyone went there unless they couldn’t. It was democratic in its appointment policy, which is not exactly how New York works. Hillary Clinton, to name just one, reportedly couldn’t get in. READ ON

Whether you’re the president or Taylor Swift, your mouth is a conversation topic—and we’re not talking about what comes out of it. But perfectly aligned, blindingly white teeth are no longer the gold standard, reports our beauty-and-wellness columnist

By Linda Wells

Julia Roberts, they’re coming for you. Tom Cruise, you’re up. Nice documentaries, Ryan Reynolds and David Beckham, but not nice enough. Football guy who takes Taylor Swift out to dinner? You too. The cosmetic dentists would like a word.

The teeth of America have never been whiter, straighter, or more even. They’re as luminous as a South Sea pearl. And, as it tends to happen, some of these teeth are too white, too straight, and too even. As luminous as a Chiclet. “They’re supposed to look like teeth,” says Dr. Michael Apa, the cosmetic dentist of Apa Aesthetic, the luxurious clinics in New York, Los Angeles, Dubai, and, soon, Miami. “You’re not supposed to notice them.” READ ON

What’s a beauty-lover to do when the hottest trend at the Paris shows was—wait for it—not even a single swipe of concealer? As pioneered by Pamela Anderson, the barefaced look is the one that everybody is talking about. Our beauty-and-wellness columnist ponders what it really means to strip down

By Linda Wells

You wouldn’t have known it to look at me, but for the 25 years that I attended the fashion shows in Paris, I was primped every morning at dawn by a hair-and-makeup team, or what’s referred to today as—eye roll—“glam.” I was not glam.

My employer, who footed this not insignificant bill, believed that the role of editor should be performed in a particular costume: full glam, designer clothes with the tags freshly snipped off, sky-high heels, and a car and driver. No argument from me, let me assure you. I loved greeting the hair-and-makeup team in my READ ON

Model, agent, and activist Bethann Hardison has had an indelible effect on the beauty and fashion industries. On the release of a new documentary, she sets the record straight with our beauty-and-wellness columnist

By Linda Wells

“She, to me, is Black history,” says Tyson Beckford.

“She was like the Statue of Liberty,” says Iman.

“She’s the godmother of fashion,” says Tracee Ellis Ross.

The “she” in question is not so sure about all the plaudits from these admirers, who sing her praises in the newly released documentary Invisible Beauty. Bethann Hardison, the model, agent, and activist, says she’s not a revolutionary. She makes no grand statements about altering perceptions or changing lives. She also doesn’t believe she possesses an especially outsize power. “I was just busy,” Hardison tells me. “I was just capable.” Or, as she says in the film she directed with Frédéric Tcheng, “if you’re going to go to the circus, get on the rides.” And what a ride! READ ON

What does it take to reimagine one of the most treasured fragrances of all time? The new Dior perfumer tackles the J’adore mystique head-on. Our beauty-and-wellness guru sniffs around

By Linda Wells

One day in 1985, a teenager was wandering along the Champs-Élysées when something caught his attention. There was a woman walking briskly in the distance, but he couldn’t see her well enough to know what about her was so captivating. He became aware of a trail of fragrance in her wake. The scent was Poison, one that defined the 80s with its audacity and potency. It had what perfumers call sillage, the quality of floating in the air, filling a room or, in this case, a boulevard with its mix of berries, sandalwood, musk, jasmine, and just about every note you could name. The 15-year-old was mesmerized. READ ON

On the East End of Long Island, pricey exercise classes aren’t providing any stress relief. Quite the opposite, in fact

By Linda Wells

I

f you’re looking for one more reason to hate the various Hamptons—a reason other than $29 guacamole, $100-a-pound lobster salad, and some party where Tom Brady may or may not have brushed up against Kim Kardashian—I invite you to sign up for a workout.

It will probably cost more than it should, the parking lot will be pulsing with Range Rovers and rage, and someone’s foot will kick remarkably close to your face. You will discover the particular revulsion of being sprayed with foreign sweat. And, if you’re lucky, an influencer will capture it all on Instagram Reels. Fun, right? READ ON

Longer, thicker, lusher—when it comes to hair these days, the overriding impulse is “more.” Why are women of all ages and persuasions going full-on Rapunzel? Our beauty-and-wellness columnist investigates

By Linda Wells

When Beyoncé emerges onstage during her “Renaissance” tour, she is a magnificence of hair. She’s also a magnificence of sequins, over-the-knee boots, vocal agility, swagger, and total command of plus or minus 70,000 screaming, weeping, hyperventilating fans. Plus hair.

Did you get scalped tickets to Taylor Swift’s “Eras” show? Did you catch Barbie, her 18 wigs, and her 30 or so hairpieces? How about the Musée des Arts Décoratifs exhibition “Des Cheveux et des Poils,” about hair on the head and body?

This is the Summer of Hair. And if you have an aversion to a labeled season, I READ ON

In 1991, Bobbi Brown founded one of the most successful cosmetics businesses in history. Now, at age 66, she just might do it again, with her line, Jones Road

By Linda Wells

When Bobbi Brown enters her new store in East Hampton for her newish beauty line, no one seems to notice. And when she starts chatting with a customer about eyeliners, the shopper looks puzzled by this especially knowledgeable 66-year-old in a black cardigan and white T-shirt. “Do you work here?” the shopper asks. Her friends practically leap on her, horrified at the faux pas.

You bet she works here!

You could excuse the eyeliner buyer’s cluelessness. Brown, Cartier Love bracelets on each arm, looks like any woman on the leafy streets of East Hampton, except she isn’t wearing a READ ON

Hotels are so rich with scent memories that, sometimes, a spritz is enough to really take you places. Isn’t it about time you tried puttin’ on the Ritz, too?

By Linda Wells

My favorite fragrance used to be Le Ritz Paris. It was a deep amber that hit you the minute you spun through the hotel’s revolving door. It felt warm and rich and, to my wholly American sensibilities, like the distillation of French luxury.

I’m not entirely sure if I really loved the fragrance or the place itself and its almost comical opulence: satin duvets and gold swan faucets, cocktails garnished with roses, sweet butter stamped with swirly R’s, gym equipment wrapped in peach terry cloth, and music piped underwater in the pool.

When I asked the general manager READ ON

The owner of RLT, a vintage boutique in West Hollywood, upholds Los Angeles’s reputation for used clothing, but adds sharp curation to the mix

By Chris Black

Some would consider Los Angeles the hub of vintage clothing in America. The shops dot every neighborhood, and every second Sunday of the month people fly in from all over the world to go to the Rose Bowl Flea Market, hoping to discover well-priced gems.

There are those who love the hunt, and others, like myself, who prefer a selection curated by someone with great taste, displayed in a chic and shoppable environment. There’s an art to finding the perfect pair of Levi’s—so why not leave it up to the experts?

This is where RLT, a boutique in West READ ON

Despite ghostwriting 12 books, recording a weekly podcast with half a million listeners, and raising two sons, Elise Loehnen—Gwyneth’s former right-hand woman at Goop—felt inadequate and incomplete

By Megan Agnew

E

lise Loehnen felt as if she was going to die. Every day her chest would become tight and her breathing shallow, not able to get enough air. She was in extreme panic — diagnosed as an anxiety disorder — and it was terrifying. In late 2019 she hyperventilated for an entire month. She often ended up in A&E.

At the time Loehnen, 43, was working as chief content officer at the most well-known wellness brand in the world, Goop, as Gwyneth Paltrow’s right-hand woman. Working out of its beige, light-filled office in Santa Monica, the company sold vaginal “jade eggs READ ON

From her family’s historic leather-goods studio, in Buenos Aires, Clara Aynié is designing bags for the next generation

By Michael Rips

In Buenos Aires, near a brothel where a man was stabbed to death while a young Jorge Luis Borges watched from behind a steel gate, a leather-goods purveyor named Don Gines Aynié set up his shop in 1919.

He had recently left northern Spain and France, where he made saddles for Hermès. In his new home, he picked a neighborhood known for its violence. But on the opposite side of the street was a racetrack and polo field which would soon fill his shop with horsemen, gauchos, and aristocrats.

Aynié Saddlery, which remains in the Aynié family (and across the street from the same racetrack and polo field), continues to produce some of the world’s finest saddles and leather goods. READ ON

Baby got back? There’s yet another area of the body that requires your attention, and professional intervention. Meet the entrepreneurs and surgeons who are focusing exclusively on improving your posterior

By Linda Wells

You could be forgiven for thinking that this is the year of the butt. The particular body part is bigger and bouncier and rounder and more exposed than ever. Wander down any beach or scroll through Instagram, and you will be confronted with nearly bare butts whether you like it or not. Oh, look! There’s Kate Hudson’s! Yikes, is that Jason Momoa in a loincloth? Hey, Sharon Stone! Nice ass!

The actual year of the butt was 2014, not because the calendar said so but because popular culture coalesced around the territory. That’s when Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” Jennifer Lopez’s “Booty,” Kim Kardashian’s READ ON

Want to explore the canals of Venice and the olive groves of Greece? This all-expense-paid trip also includes the world’s most exclusive Birkin. Christine Nagel explains how she got the job

By Linda Wells

Have you been languishing? Does quiet quitting seem too strenuous? Do you suffer from burnout, boredom, malaise? It’s not you; it’s your work.

Imagine a job that takes you to the Greek islands, where it’s your duty to stand in an olive grove waiting for the wind to sift through the grasses. Take your time; you’re on the clock. Maybe you’d prefer to leave behind the Excel sheets, Google Docs, and Slack threads to wander through a private garden in Venice, breathing in the co-mingling of jasmine, salt air, and wet stone. Someone’s got to do it. Picture yourself, colorful scarf tossed around your neck, traveling up the Nile, searching for an under-ripe mango or a whiff of cardamom to increase your productivity. READ ON

The founders of SoulCycle revolutionized the group workout. Now they’re taking on group therapy. Our brave beauty-and-wellness columnist dares to open up in front of an audience

By Linda Wells

The other night at dinner, I was explaining the concept of active listening to my friends Brooke and Dan. “Oh, you mean when you—” Dan started, and before he could complete the sentence, I jumped in with “Yes! Exactly! When you listen without interrupting or offering advice.”

That, I might add, is not active listening.

Apparently, I had learned nothing after one session at Peoplehood, the new in-person and online group-chatting concept in New York City. It’s like therapy without the therapist, A.A. without the drinking problem, church without religion, or spinning without bikes. It was cooked up by the founders of READ ON

The Toronto-based perfumer discusses Universal Flowering, her cult-favorite brand of small-batch scents that transform over time

By Marlowe Granados

As much as the world sterilizes, optimizes, or flattens the many joys in life, fragrance has stayed remarkably intact. It is one of the few things that threads us together with the natural world and human tradition, with many materials recognizable to what was used centuries past, from the burning incense of Ottoman mosques to the fragrant oils popular in the thermal baths of ancient Rome. Even now, perfume still hovers in the realm of the uncanny or sublime. Luca Turin, a biophysicist turned expert nose, called the study of smell as coming “face-to-face with the enduring strangeness of raw sensation.” READ ON

Getting gorgeous is not always pretty. But, please, apply the smelly masks, fishy creams, and messy waxes in private. Your sex life will thank you!

By Linda Wells

Beauty secrets used to be secret. You blocked out the evening, bolted the doors, silenced all notifications, and got busy. Maybe you stippled your face with Mario Badescu Drying Lotion, coated your bikini line with hot wax, glopped on a hair mask, and spent the evening in athleisure watching Love Is Blind, hoping the show’s title was a statement of fact. The next day, you’d wake up feeling fresh and ready for company. No one knew what happened in those quiet hours, and that was exactly by design.

There are an untold number of beauty treatments and procedures that READ ON

What happens when the key ingredient of a blockbuster fragrance becomes scarce? For Thierry Wasser, the head perfumer of Guerlain, reworking recipes is a primary job responsibility. Along with reading Proust and traipsing through fields, naturally

By Linda Wells

When you were 13 years old, you may have ripped scent strips out of a magazine and rubbed them onto your wrists. Maybe you wandered through a mall every Saturday, spraying your neck with testers until your head throbbed. Did you douse yourself with Love’s Baby Soft? Bath & Body Works Cucumber Melon? The Body Shop White Musk? Axe (please, no)?

If you answered yes to any of the above, you clearly were not destined for a career in perfumery.

When Thierry Wasser was 13, long before he became a master perfumer, he found his identity in a bottle READ ON

What do the contents of your stomach have to do with the appearance of your skin? Plenty, it turns out. When it comes to the fascinating eco-system of the gut microbiome, our science-loving beauty columnist can’t help but talk dirty

By Linda Wells

Dahlia Devkota does not exfoliate. She does not apply acid peels or retinols. She does not coat her face with sunscreen on a blazing summer day. She prefers no chemical interference between her skin and the wild, filthy, chaotic world. As she sits across from me on a Saturday morning, she looks as dewy and fresh as a well-rested, not-hungover 29-year-old. “As I’ve aged, I’ve done less to my skin, but still I have the best skin of my life.” She’s 48. I’m sold.

What she’s selling is a collection of skin-care products that aim to help support the skin’s microbiome. You know, germs. Bugs. It’s the hottest territory in skin-care today, and among the most confusing. READ ON

Aging: It’s all relative, right? For those who are trudging into 2023 feeling like the past few years have weighed heavily on their faces, help is here, without a single trip to the plastic surgeon. It will, however, require a bus ride …

By Linda Wells

“Anti-age” is a vilified term, and rightfully so. It cruelly mocks anyone (me) who has failed, despite superhuman diligence, to stop time. While we’re at it, let’s toss “aging gracefully,” “I earned every wrinkle,” “the face you deserve,” “mature skin,” “gray,” and “death” onto the funeral pyre.

I am pro-aging and anti–looking it. I’m also anti–risking my life and anti–weird scar behind my ears. I am, most likely, aging disgracefully.

But there’s no reason to despair. Some physicists even argue that time is an illusion and may not exist in physical reality, according to a study in Nature. This comes to us from the theory of loop quantum gravity. Trying to understand it, though, carries the risk of accelerated aging. READ ON

As a designer, author, and curator, Betony Vernon elevates the fine art of seduction

By David Downton

Who is Betony Vernon? What is she? For one thing, she is tall. Juno-esque. “Titian-tressed,” as the movie magazines used to say back when they were promoting Technicolor.

More importantly she has, for 30 years, been a tireless advocate for sexual well-being and, whisper it, pleasure. Her Sado-Chic jewelry (made in Italy using gold and sterling silver), collaborations with Missoni and Jean Paul Gaultier, exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Musée d’Art Moderne—have blazed her on a boundary-defying trail as a 21st-century love goddess. Her life and work form a dizzying Venn diagram of art and fashion, design and desire. READ ON

Carita, the original Maison de Beauté, has had some work done, but its aura remains undiminished

By Lindsey Tramuta

On December 15, 1952, a crowd of 3,000 well-heeled socialites and paparazzi gathered in front of 11 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris to celebrate a momentous occasion for Maria and Rosy Carita—the opening of their multi-level Maison de Beauté.

Over three floors, the Carita sisters had brought together stylists, colorists, hairdressers, makeup artists, manicurist-pedicurists, and masseurs. The Duchess of Windsor, among the sisters’ earliest and most loyal clients, cut the ribbon on their new venture, and assured the house’s reputation as the ne plus ultra in Parisian beauty.

The Spanish-born sisters had opened their first salon in a READ ON