Beauty
Makeup is not an apology
There is a difference between decorating something you like and correcting something you have been told is wrong. The products can be identical; the…
The archive
Journal
109 pieces on clothes, rooms, books, food and the ordinary business of taking up space.
Home
I built a home that does not ask me to shrink
Most rooms are designed with an assumed body in mind, and it is not mine. On chairs, doorways, mirrors, and making a space that…
Home
What my grandmother’s kitchen taught me about taking my time
She cooked by looking, never by timing. What a kitchen teaches about attention, repetition and the things that flatly refuse to be hurried, including…
Books
Why I still read when life gets loud
Reading is the first thing I drop when things get busy, and the thing whose absence I feel most. On protecting a quiet that…
Food
Food is not a moral test
We have built a vocabulary in which lunch can make you a good or bad person. On what that language does, and what it…
Beauty
I stopped saving my good perfume for occasions that never came
I found a four-year-old bottle at the back of a drawer, still nearly full and quietly ruined. On perfume, storage, and the strange habit…
Home
Softness is not laziness
Rest has been quietly recategorised as a moral failure, and comfort as something you earn. I would like to formally decline both of those…
Relationships
Love should not require you to become smaller
There is a difference between someone who is worried about you and someone who is embarrassed by you. They can use identical words. Telling…
Style
The mirror in the fitting room is not the final word
Three sizes of the same trousers, one afternoon, one body. What that taught me about lighting, sizing charts and the word flattering, and why…
Food
I refuse to turn every meal into a punishment
Somewhere between the commentary and the compensating, eating stopped being a pleasure and became an administrative task. On getting the table back.
Notes
Dear girl who thinks she takes up too much space
A letter to a girl who is being made to feel like a problem — and, if I am honest, to the one I…
Relationships
Boundaries are not rejection
I understood boundaries as a threat for years — something you issue when a relationship is nearly over. They are closer to the opposite.