This is not for anyone who uses, has used, or plans to use the term “hot-girl summer.” Go away, hot girls. Go to Ibiza, go to Mykonos, hop onto Dan Bilzerian’s yacht, have fun with Leo, send us a postcard. Bye.
There is a fresh alternative to the string-bikinied, under-boobed, fully waxed, spray-tanned, acrylic-nailed, high-heeled, tequila-shot summer.
This is the Anti–Victoria’s Secret Angels summer. It is deliberately frumpy. It is Elon Musk pasty. It is sometimes even hairy in all the places. It wears a bucket hat, an oversize linen shirt, or perhaps even a nightgown, and socks with sandals. Whenever the heat wave breaks, it tops the look with a grandpa cardigan. Its fashion muse is Nancy Meyers movies and Coastal-grandmother TikTok.
Want proof? Chanel makes so-called dad sandals beloved by millennials. Manolo Blahnik, of the Sex and the City Manolo Blahniks, re-interpreted Birkenstocks by adding jeweled buckles to their clunky girth. Hermès has a pair that look like orthopedic Tevas. Jenni Kayne is doing a brisk business in cardigans that could fit a family of four.
To go with those dad sandals is the least sexy, best pedicure around, one that involves no nail art whatsoever and turns your soles into velvety baby feet. It takes place in what looks like a dentist’s office, where there are no glasses of sparkling rosé or French jazz playlists. The medical pedicure at Medi Pedi in New York City is ideal for unloved feet. It tackles things you don’t see on Instagram, things such as fungi and calluses and ingrown nails. So gross.
“People would never treat their face the way they treat their feet,” says Marcela Correa, the owner of Medi Pedi.
Correa starts by sterilizing the client’s shoes with UV-light inserts. “Shoes cause more fungus than anything else, and 60 percent of the people who come in here have foot fungus,” she says. With a soft drill, she smooths each toenail and callus and then saws a wide file over the soles, slathers them with a urea cream, dabs oil on the cuticles, and issues a few ultimatums: Don’t walk barefoot on a wood floor (it dries out the feet), don’t walk around in socks (they remove moisture from the feet), and for the love of God, don’t use a pumice stone (bacteria collects and thrives in the stone’s tiny holes and spreads that disgustingness willy-nilly). In sum: don’t be gross. Correa does not apply polish, but leaves nails so shiny and healthy that colored enamel feels like a cheat.
What’s the opposite of Cardi B? That’s what we’re talking about. Not diamond-studded talons that double as weapons, but something a dermatologist would love. “Clean, healthy, glossy, dialed down” is how Dr. Dana Stern describes her favorite nail look. This makes sense because she’s a dermatologist specializing in nail health, and she’s seen her fair share of acrylic- and gel-manicure fiascoes. Her Nail Renewal System, a three-step kit, re-surfaces nails, making them shiny and new without a speck of polish. “It’s like a facial for the nails,” she says.
Taking that idea to extravagance, Paloma Beauty, the stylish nail-and-facial salons in Houston, offers manicures with a Jo Malone vitamin E scrub, Augustinus Bader face oil on the cuticles, and Augustinus Bader body cream, from nail technicians trained by massage therapists. Fancy!
This is the Anti–Victoria’s Secret Angels summer.
Unpolished nails are just the thing with un-spray-tanned skin. The orange tint of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan circa 2003 is dead. R.I.P. “Throw it in the trash because it’s not like that anymore,” says Jules Von Hep, the founder of Isle of Paradise, a line of self-tanners that don’t look like self-tanners.
Rather than change skin color dramatically, luridly, freakishly, these formulas make the skin glow, evening its tone and ridding it of the ashy, gray dullness that comes from sitting in front of a screen for two-plus years. “There’s no orange, no streaks, no stink,” says Von Hep. “It’s a vacation mimicker.... It’s almost like a skin finisher.”
Suntanned skin feels like a relic of another age, when “laying out” was a grammatically incorrect activity, accompanied by a can of Diet Coke and a pack of Marlboro Lights. Good-bye, laying out. Christina Grasso, a content creator (let’s not use the word “influencer,” O.K.?) who used to be a lifeguard, is now a member of the population that chooses to leave their skin untouched by the sun or by the DHA (dihydroxyacetone) in self-tanners. Her reasoning: besides wanting to “look young forever,” she says, it’s also “a rejection of the male gaze and what is conventionally pretty and hence boring [to me]. I find pallor to be kind of poetic and mysterious,” she adds.
Say bon voyage to cheek-baring thong bikinis and belly chains. This is the summer of low- to no-maintenance beauty, of baggy, unpainted, poetic looks that really aren’t looks at all. Please feel free to blanket your body in S.P.F. 50 swim togs and paddle out to sea, far from the super-yachts, far from Love Island. We’re not judging.
To hear Linda Wells reveal more about her story, listen to her on Air Mail’s Morning Meeting podcast.
Linda Wells spent 25 years as Allure magazine’s founding editor, served as Revlon’s chief creative officer, and currently consults and sits on the boards of several beauty and apparel companies
