I’ve been a legal adult for almost fifteen years now.

Seeing it written out like that, instead of writing “I’m 32 going on 33”, made me laugh.

So basically I’m a teen in adult years.

Every year of these 15 years has been characterized by failure. Failures to launch and failures to finish. Failures to think and failures to feel. Failures to try and failures to practice. Failures to act and failures to stop. Failures to be real and failures to dream. Some negligible, some painful, a handful that I’m still nursing.

I remember my failures more than my successes.

Is this tendency shortening my lifespan? Tbd.

As of this writing, if someone were to ask me what I’ve “achieved” I’d say nothing and instead offer a long list of everything I lost in the process of trying to achieve something that could prove I was living a meaningful life, one that is equal parts of service and a damn good time.

I wear failure like I wear my own skin so that when the opposite happens it feels like an aberration in need of correction. Usually Life does the correcting for me and returns me to homeostasis…though I have been known to take matters into my own hands and help the process along.

In Julio Cortázar’s “Continuidad de los parques”, the man in his green velvet chair could die a thousand times and still read the same novel, excited to get to the good part only to be stabbed and then start reading all over again. The lovers in the story plotting his death are beside the point. So too is the man reading the novel beside the point. The point is the story, how it spirals and returns to the beginning, never losing form, tightly wound yet forever expansive. I feel the thread of my life unspooling itself like this the longer I spend figuring out life on Earth. A thread tightly wound in form yet unending in its iteration of failure. It’s frightening and humbling. There are no do-overs. Only trying and never succeeding but collecting memories all the same.

How to escape the cycle? Or is accepting this cycle the point?

I have no answers, only attempts and plenty of lessons from hopes dashed and dreams deferred until another trophy of failure is won, leading me to begin again.

At least this Sisyphus is well-moisturized.

Read Time: 7 mins

New to Venus? Welcome.

Dear Newsletter Hottie,

Did you know that moms are people too?! Clutches Pearls — I know. Shocking.

I’ve heard that moms have thoughts, feelings, dreams, and desires, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with their children. The nerve! How dare they!

Many moms had whole lives before becoming parents. Can you believe it?! Who would’ve thought…

You know what else is wild?

There are people who mother without ever having birthed the ones in their care.

Some people give birth but never take on the role of Mother™.

The capacity to give birth does not automatically result in the capacity to parent.

Not having birthed does not disqualify someone from having the wherewithal to protect, nurture, and sustain the wellbeing of children as they progress into adulthood.

🌀TRIPPPYYYY🌀

Maybe motherhood is not a binary experience?

What if there is no script, only individual trial, error, revision, and growth?! 🤯

Could it be that moms are neither exclusively saintly like Mary the mother of Jesus nor exclusively villainous like Jezebel the queen?

Radical.

Moms on Screen

Today we’ve got ten narratives driven by moms on screen. Characters considering questions of motherhood/parenthood; protagonists dealing with experiences shaped in-part by themes of mothering; and moms doing everything on screen except being confined to stereotypes of their cultural positioning.

Listed are eight of my faves (in no particular order except for #1, which is my #1) followed by two movies that I’m waiting to see in general release. Then, there’s your box of chocolates. Enjoy!

1. Volver (2006)

I remember first watching this on a DVD rented from my local library. There’s a lot of tomfoolery happening in the world right now so let’s have a moment of gratitude for the fact that local libraries continue to outlive Blockbuster (RIP except to the one still remaining in Bend, Oregon).

Pedro Almodóvar, Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, are all an iconic collaborative bunch. If you only watch one movie from this list make it this one.

Between being obsessed with the other TCM — Turner Classic Movies — since middle school, my first job fresh out of high school working as an assistant at a casting company, studying film production in undergrad where my magnum opus (LOL) was a short titled The Dyke Duo Detective Agency, and thinking initially that I wanted to go to film school for an MFA (long story) trust that I’ve seen many movies. Volver remains my #1 favorite drama of all-time. ALL TIME.

2. Two Women (1960)

Speaking of Turner Classic Movies, I watched Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women on TCM when I was too young to be watching anything on there except maybe some old school kiddie musicals. Certainly AN EDUCATION.

In many ways, this movie was the blueprint for aspects of Almodóvar’s Volver. Particularly when reading Penélope Cruz’s performance through the history of what Sofia Loren crafted on screen. Highly recommend watching both back-to-back as an at home double feature. If you binge watch tv then you have the stamina to do movies back-to-back. Upgrade yourself babe.

Revisiting both movies got me thinking: to be socialized as a girl under the assumption that I would one day “become a woman”, is to understand the perpetual threat of patriarchal violence that undergirds the world at every turn. Perhaps for some who enter motherhood, the experience sharpens this understanding because now it’s not just you, now it’s also your heart living a whole other life outside of you. Wherever your heart goes you see the violence illuminated in places once unseen. I imagine that such a perceptual shift changes a person on every level, from the neurobiological to the spiritual.

3. Daughter’s of the Dust (1991)

Lineage. Legacy. Memory as a linchpin of posterity. This movie is poetry in motion. Watch it on a slow weekend while sipping on your favorite warm beverage.

If not for Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust there may not have been Beyonce’s Lemonade (2016) as we know it. The latter visual album is in direct conversation with the film.

Bonus Share! This interview with writer/director Julie Dash is an internet gem. I’ve got a journal somewhere filled with notes on this video. She’s so generous in her detailing. Would love to meet her one day.

4. A Most Violent Year (2014)

JESSICA CHASTAIN. OSCAR ISAAC. Both in fabulous costuming. Both flexing their Juilliard degrees to the max.

Another star is the film’s claustrophobically choreographed cinematography. This movie is a master-class in how movement, lighting, frame, tonality, and juxtaposition all work together to tell a story. You could watch this movie on mute, no subtitles, and still be riveted. That’s actually one of my favorite ways to rewatch certain movies if I want to study them scene by scene. I love a movie where I can pause at any moment and feel like I’m looking at an analog photograph or even a painting. After all, we started calling them movies because there was time when films were actual reels of film — ie: MOVING PICTURES — unspooling at a fast enough rate to create the illusion of frame by frame movement. Literal movie magic. I still remember the click of celluloid projectors at my neighborhood Regal. It’s the reason I have a preference for sitting in the top row at the movies, smack in the middle below the projection window; though it’s all digital projection now, there’s no telltale click at the start/stop of a movie anymore. Sighs.

Anyways, director J.D. Chandor and cinematographer Bradford Young WENT IN. They make you feel the suffocating weight of New York City in 1981 through the screen. Incredible.

5. Juno (2007)

This movie came out almost twenty years ago which is crazy. I had just started high school. I guess this means Juno is now a classic and that makes me…vintage? According to Vogue, yes lmao.

Anyways, #TEAMVANESSA4LYFE! Ifkyk and if not, definitely watch. Trailer chosen for the notable pixelation because hehe vintage.

6. I Like it Like That (1994)

A CRIMNALLY UNDERATED MOVIE.

Writer/Director Darnell Martin deserved better!

The freneticism of the South Bronx is palpable through the screen. There’s colorful set design, engaging camera-cuts, performances that pull at your heart-strings, make you laugh, and roll your eyes all in one sitting.

If chaotic-good was a movie, it would be this one.

7. Saving Face (2004)

While Volver is my #1 fave drama Saving Face is my #1 fave rom-com.

Picture this: you’re a lesbian in the early aughts and a rising doctor dating a ballerina turned contemporary dancer. You’re keeping it all hush-hush cuz family culture until your single mom moves in with you after your grandparents kick her out when they learn she’s been hiding her pregnancy…OMG HUH?! 10/10 must watch.

Stream the whole thing over on archive.org where you can watch movies for free without an account. You’re welcome. :)

8. All About My Mother (1999)

Started with Pedro, must end with Pedro. I can’t make a movie list themed around moms and not include a movie literally titled All About My Mother.

Decided to go with a commentated trailer featuring A.O. Scott instead of a traditional trailer because I like how it unfolds as a mini-video essay. Plus, it made me nostalgic for another era of The New York Times. This current era is not cute.

Fun fact: A.O. Scott’s mom is the influential historian Joan Wallach Scott. The scope of her research is fascinating, encompassing both the francophone world and gender studies. She’s cooler than her kid.

Also, look at this movie poster!

Venus of the Mind is designed for aesthetes.

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On My Personal To Watch List

1. Love Letters (2026)

2. Montreal, My Beauty (2025/26)

All Roads Lead to Beauty

P.S. Your box of chocolates.

If this newsletter left you wanting more movie talk, I’ve got some brain food for you because sharing knowledge is a love language. Here are some tried and true texts I returned to while revisiting the above films and thinking through this newsletter. If you ever reach for one of these titles, or have engaged with them before, lmk! 💖

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks

Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 by Hilary Neroni

On Photography by Susan Sontag

Women and Film: a Sight and Sound Reader edited by Pam Cook and Philip Dodd

Greetings Gorgeous,

This iteration of Venus of the Mind as a weekly publication is complete. Time for a different patterning of creative output.

I initially started this publication as a way to integrate my love of aesthetic philosophy with my twelve year experience as a licensed esthetician and my humanities training as a PhD dropout (i.e. recovering academic) who still relishes the thrill of research. It has since evolved into a body of work that is adjacent to but also beyond all that. Here, the writing converges on matters earthly, cosmic, and queer.

To honor the newsletter’s evolution I’ve slowed down in order to publish with even greater intentionality and precision of curation. I remain grateful for your readership and value the earned space in your inbox. My hope is that every time you open a newsletter from Venus of the Mind it feels like you’re reading a thoughtfully crafted piece that enriches the landscape of your inner world. When guided by Venus, all roads lead to beauty.

As a reminder, subscriptions are now $5 a month or $30 a year. You receive every in-depth newsletter where all roads lead to beauty.

If you value independent writing that is interdisciplinary in scope and have been considering an upgrade this is the time. Subscribing now means you’ll be unaffected by future increases in subscription pricing.

Subscribe now

Readers can continue to explore here: venusofthemind.com. The newsletter is still hosted via substack but the website is HIGHKEY lovelier to read through than the app. If you have only read this newsletter through email or the app and never logged into the website before, your subscriber email is your login. Paid subscribers enjoy complete access to the newsletter archive and Beauty in the World Podcast.

Our book club! We’re meeting online this Thursday, April 30 at 12pm EST to talk about Easy Beauty: a Memoir by Cholé Cooper Jones. The book was a Pulitzer finalist and with good reason, it’s superbly crafted. All paid subscribers have been emailed directly with invitations and a zoom link. In July we’ll meet to explore Alicia Kennedy’s On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites. Then, in October, we’ll reconvene one more time this year to chat about Fariha Róisín’s Who is Wellness For? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who it Leaves Behind.

In the mood to read something where all roads lead to beauty?

Then stay tuned. The adventure continues.

Con amor y cariño,

Ivana Esther Martínez

P.S. Here’s my favorite essay from this completed iteration. 20 minute read, no paywall. For the frictionmaxxers who value sustained attention even while internet-ing. It’s the perfect read for lesbian visibility week; I love that this week falls within Taurus season, the very zodiac ruled by this newsletter’s planetary namesake. ⚢🌈How apt!

All Roads Lead to Beauty

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Read Time for Show Notes: 4 minutes

Podcast Episode Length: 63 minutes

New to Venus? Welcome.

Dear Listener,

I’m excited to welcome you to the first installment of Beauty in the World, an audio interview series from Venus of the Mind that spotlights culture workers, wellness workers, beauty practitioners, and other conscious creatives across different forms of labor. Each guest is highlighted for their focus on leaving the world better (more beautiful) than they found it.

Our first guest is Carrington Kernodle Epperson, multi-talented owner of Chanterelle Cafe in Central Virginia and writer of The Carrington Collection on Substack.

In this episode we chat mushrooms, metaphysics, motherhood, and more.

Free subscribers have access to a preview of the episode and are welcome to deepen their listening experience by elevating to a $5 monthly or $30 annual subscription.

Some interview highlights exclusive to paid subscribers include:

• The process of moving between private-public life as a dreamer, creative, mother, homemaker, and business owner.

• How to marry the energetics of spiritual knowing with directed effort in the material world.

• How to access a flow state for improved creativity.

• What it’s like to develop spirit-led gifts for the greater good while navigating the challenges those gifts bring.

• Sensing between the spiritual gifts we are given for the benefit of others vs. the gifts we have for ourselves.

• How values aligned parenting can sustain a creative life.

• The liberating power of love through personal transformation postpartum.

Press play and join us for an intimate convo that goes straight into the heart of Venus.

Connect With Carrington

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Chanterelle Cafe

Substack Newsletter

Time Stamps and Noteworthy Details

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Read Time: 8 mins

New to Venus? Welcome.

Milan on My Mind

Greetings Gorgeous,

I’ve been daydreaming about Milan for months now. Naturally, I made a playlist. With Salone del Mobile coming up the daydreaming has intensified.

These dreams began with three seeds. The first seed was planted in September of last year, when I visited LabSolue in Rome and learned about their Milan location within the Magna Pars Hotel.

A second seed was planted last October when I subscribed to The Stanza while on a finance writing kick — the newsletter’s author is based out of Milan. I love how her adopted city is clearly a muse for how she approaches writing at the intersection of finance, design, fashion, and hospitality.

Then, in the nebulous time-line of scrolling at 1am on some long forgotten winter weeknight, while deep diving into the history of aperitivo I found my way to this enticing read from Italy Segreta, That’s Amaro: Milan’s Bitter History - Thanks to Amari & Bitters, Aperitivo Grew Up in Milan.

Milan, Milano, Milanese.

Don’t know when I’ll go but I’m officially ready for a uniquely curated visit and would love to take you with me. We’ll get into the research below, but first, indulge me for just a moment. How about we grab a drink at Camparino and enjoy the wild view from inside Galleria Vittorio Emanuele? I’ve been told we must do so at least once. That, with of course visits to Il Duomo di Milano (Milan Cathedral), The Last Supper, and Pinacoteca di Brera will be the top five most touristy things we do. Caravvagio’s Cena in Emmaus is housed at the pinacoteca, it simply cannot be missed. I’ll let you know now that while inside the cathedral I may be lowkey sad remembering this scene from Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers.

To make up for the touristy bits and being emo at the Duomo, I’ve included my top fives things to do that one can only know about if you live there or know someone who does.

A Negroni! What a vibe. On brand. Ok, andiamo!

The Vision

When prepping my travel mindset I like to create an approach that allows for getting as close as possible to the veil between tourist and local. While researching for a possible itinerary I kept listening to “Amo Milano.” In the song, Dargen D’Amico asserts with a touch of subversion and play that he loves Milano because mi deprime and nessuno tu saluta. Milan is a notoriously hard city to crack, even for those who are “from from” there. Nonetheless, striving for that edge of “catching the vibe of life here yet obviously not from here” within a short amount of time is part of what makes travel worthwhile.

Thanks to the Travel Noire archives of Milan-based writer Faith Katunga I’ve learned of the city’s vibrant Black-diasporic influence and have made note to explore that little acknowledged (yet impactful!) side of the city. In the same vein of exploring Milan beyond what is advertised, I loved spending time in the weeds of Milan’s international food scene thanks to the ladies over at Not Eating Italian in Italy. Great quote from their about page (emphasis mine), “This newsletter is for everyone: locals, transplants, and travelers, who know there is much more to Italy than delicious pasta and pizza.” Exactly!

Three books informed my travel research for this dream trip.

1. Al Dente: A History of Italian Food. Because why not study the sociocultural histories of a nation’s mythologies and realities around food? There’s eight entries in this text that are Milan related.

2. Lonely Planet’s LGBTQ+ Travel Guide: Interviews, Itineraries, & Inspiration from Insiders in 50 Proud Places Around the Globe. So many fun recommendations! Loved reading about the fascinating blend of North African immigrant history and Queer community history in Milan’s now popular Porta Venezia district. Fun fact not related to Italy: Richmond, VA is listed in this book and I can attest to it being a fruit forward city.

3. Italian Festival Food: Recipes and Traditions from Italy’s Regional Country Food Fairs. Lombardy doesn’t have a dedicated section in this book. Which is odd? But Piedmont and Trentino-Alto Adige both have dedicated sections. With Lombardy located between the two there’s been an ongoing culinary conversation across the three regions for ages now, so definitely worth reading. Helpful for planning a trip that features leaving Milan to go experience a sagra (local food festival) or two, or three, or all of them. Is sagra/sagre hopping a thing?

   1. This book is out of print but can be found via sites like Abe Books linked above. I have no idea where my copy came from, it’s just always been with me.

An additional title of interest but I haven’t gotten my hands on yet is, I Navigli del Milanese: La storia, i documenti, le testimonianze letterarie e le immagini più suggestive.

How to Pick a Home Base Hotel

Visiting a major city for leisure and discovery means that I’m planning around three things. 1) The Hotel. Does its story speak to me and is it owned by city locals? 2) How far can I get away from crowds without losing ease of access via walkability, public transport, or can a driver get to me easily? 3) Where do the everyday residents in a historic neighborhood of interest like to go and is my hotel of choice well positioned in relation to those places?

Notice the triangulation of focus. Point one leads up to point two which leads down over to point three and this third point is once again in conversation with point one.

Through this triangulation of focus I’ve dreamed up a plan that centers around our home base hotel being within crazy close walking proximity to the Navigli canal district. This district has DaVinci’s touch all over it - a central focus of his work while contributing to planning out Milan was attention to the city’s canal system. Crucial for transporting the marble used to build-out parts of Il Duomo di Milano over centuries. Today it’s known for specialty markets, the local artist and artisan scene, nightlife, and swanky canal views.

It’s important to be situated so one can walk around and watch how residents move in their city’s environment. This is easier to do on streets and in places that tourists have never heard of. I have no desire to end up sandwiched between Jack and Jill in some long line a few blocks down from Il Duomo for what an influencer called “the best risotto in Milan.” Please. Obviously the best risotto in Milan is made at the apartment of the new friend(s) we’re about to meet during our wanderings near and far from the ideal home base hotel.

To find this home base hotel I went into the archives of my favorite travel writers here on Substack, Condé Nast Traveler, and the Financial Times. I then cross-referenced with a few Italian language guides because I was curious to know what boutique hotels were on the radars of in-country travelers.

Check-in is officially at this beauty…

Read more

The Collective Tarot for April 2026

Notes on Reawakening: Weaving Desire into Reality

Read Time, 8 Minutes

BOOKISH BEAUTIES

Towards the end of April, our online book club for paid subscribers will gather to explore Chloé Cooper Jones’ Easy Beauty. Don’t forget to grab your copy. Specific date/time is forthcoming. Be on the lookout for an email with meeting details.

Dear Aesthete,

April is here; all of time bows to her at the threshold of spring and everything else.

I wanted to speak at length about
the happiness of my body and the
delight of my mind for it was
April, a night, a
full moon and-

but something in myself or maybe
from somewhere other said: not too
many words, please, in the
muddy shallows the

frogs are singing.

“April” by Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

Mary understood the mood. It’s APRIL. Not much to say when there is a whole lot more to feel. Speaking of Mary Oliver, have you seen this trailer yet?

Hearing Lucy Dacus and Helena Bonhman Carter read Mary Oliver is the medicine I never knew I needed. Shoutout to PBS. This one’s gonna be GEWD.

April is for Unfurling the Body

My three favorite words: farfalla, desahogarse, and proprioception.

Farfalla means butterfly in Italian. Going on four years of studying the language on/off, it’s my newest favorite word in the big picture of life so far; it’s been so since late 2023, I think it’s here to stay. For a moment I thought abbiocco would dethrone farfalla but no.

In Spanish, desahogarse/me has been my fave reflexive verb of choice since childhood. That word feels like it’s always been with me. Long before I knew what a reflexive verb was. Translated literally, it means to un-drown oneself. Call a friend not because you need to vent (what a blegh term, makes me want to keep everything bottled up) but because you need to un-drown yourself. Journal not to let it all out but to come back to shore, to breathe again.

In English, proprioception is a fun term. I learned it from a pole dance teacher! Simply put, it’s the body’s ability to sense itself in space. Your first person sense of your meat-suit moving through present time and space. It’s one of our many senses as humans. Did you know we have way more than five?!

I love how these words sound as I say them aloud and the way it feels to engage all my vocal muscles in making them happen. As I’ve just begun to build a personal reading curriculum around the somatic nervous system, words like butterfly, undrowning, and sensing my body in space have been top of mind. There’s something thematic running through all three words, though I can’t yet fully verbalize it. Something about transformation, breathe, a lightness of being, the body as a structure that intakes sensory data (ie. memory)…tbd.

For years, important teachers in my personal life from the spheres of pilates, yoga, pole dance, therapy, tarot, lunar living, and in my professional life of studying integrative esthetics, lymphatic drainage, manual sculpting, fascial release — they have all referenced the soma at one point or another. It’s taken me long enough but I’m finally turning my attention to somatics in earnest. Until recently I’ve been content to let the term remain abstract in theory but now I’d like to integrate a deeper understanding of my own somatic nervous system into day-to-day living and observe how that applied knowledge reveals itself to be relevant in other experiences down the road.

Starting with cursory/novice reading I came across a delightful interview: 15 Minutes with Nicolette De Saint-Amour on Gravity, Freudian Shortcomings and Somatic Practices. The article itself is less than a ten minute read. Highly recommend for anyone curious to start developing an embodied understanding of somatic movement in their own life.

De Saint-Amour is a lecturer of somatics at San Diego State University’s department of music and dance. She has been one of my favorite somatic practitioners to learn from casually/parasocially via her instagram shares. The linked interview is between her and Project Pilates founder Maëlle Thomas-Traoré. Two quotes from the above interview stood out — emphasis my own:

We’re always relating to gravity and what good posture is has become more clear to me. I think for many people, the idea of good posture is to maintain some kind of rigid form, but in essence, it's learning to be dynamic. I think this has really come through in terms of my sense of self awareness, my habits of use and also how I can also access a greater kind of quality of strength. That’s how I'm able to use myself in a way that feels more meaningful.

I would say Body and Mature Behavior, which was one of Feldenkrais' earliest texts. It's a letter to Sigmund Freud, saying, in a way, that his thoughts were a bit short. He only looked at the mind of a person, but he didn't consider the body. In order to change a person, you have to consider both.

I was intrigued and excited to read this because it all connects to our collective card for April which I channeled for us back around the new moon in Pisces. Way before happening upon this interview!

Let’s dig in.

April Showers Bring…

What is healing you this month from the scars of winter and the shock of early spring? Or better said — what will you allow to heal you? What will you allow to enliven you? Can your guard come down and a fresh start unfold? These are the inquiries our collective card is making. Lean in so you can hear better.

Read more

Dispatch, March 2026

How to Craft an Esthetics Career Minus the Burnout

Read Time: 5 mins

Good News

This publication now has a fresh domain!

venusofthemind.com

She’s an official place in the online space.

If you happen to notice any broken links while exploring the archives please let me know, I’ll update accordingly: ivanainthestudio@gmail.com

GLOBAL BEAUTY DIRECTORY UPDATE

Dr. Dana Leigh Lyons, DTCM is now offering remote diet and lifestyle consultations grounded in Yang Sheng Fa (the TCM art of nourishing life). She has been a licensed Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine since 2012. Her work helps people reconnect with simple whole foods and sustainable habits rooted in Chinese Medicine and ancestral eating—supporting shifts that help you crave what truly nourishes you.

She also has an amazing journey that took her from the U.S. to Canada, and now to Mae Rim, Thailand!

Head on over to the global beauty directory for her contact information located under Nutritional & Lifestyle Guidance. You’ll also find a special perk available to Venus of the Mind paid subscribers.

BOOKISH BEAUTIES

Towards the end of April, our online book club for paid subscribers will gather to explore Chloé Cooper Jones’ book Easy Beauty. Don’t forget to grab your copy. Specific date/time is forthcoming.

GRATITUDE

Thank you for the comments and direct messages regarding last Sunday’s monthly missive. It was my favorite newsletter to write so far and felt very aligned for Spring Equinox.

Tangentially, last Tuesday I reread “In the Paint” by Sasha Bonét. Writing for the Dec’25/Jan’26 print issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Bonet observes that “Painting provides us with a sense of belonging: a reminder that everything that makes us feel like islands in our suffering has been felt by another. That we are in fact more alike than we are different.” Yes.

So, You Want to be a Facialist?

Greetings Gorgeous,

For today’s dispatch, I am sharing advice as it relates to embodying Emperor energy within the esthetic trade, a vocation that requires grounded self-direction and initiative with vision. While born out of my particular experiences working at the intersection of beauty and wellness, such an approach also has broad application in other spaces beyond esthetics and bodywork

I am often asked how I do what I do and am also asked for advice on how to generate professional longevity in an industry with a high-turnover rate due in-part to burnout from the high-touch nature of this work. Here’s a fascinating review from Science Direct about burnout in the beauty industry on the trade-worker end.

Now that I’m locked-into full-time focus with my esthetic practice while studying for a new professional credential, and writing this paid newsletter for weekly publication — I’ve gotten questions around how I manage between these three jobs. I manage by studying (and trying to embody) the archetype of The Emperor.

We are currently moving through Aries season, the cardinal fire sign that kickstarts a new zodiacal year. In tarot, the Emperor archetype is linked to Aires. Numbered as the fourth leading personality within tarot’s major arcana, I associate this figure with channeled inner fire, precision of service, and self-possession.

Instead of binary thinking around “soft” skills v. “hard” skills — which often carry gendered expectations — I like to think about workplace skills as belonging to four categtegories: technical, tangible, intangible, and integrative. Channelled inner fire (think hearth or your spirit’s inner light), precision of service, and self-possession are all integrative skills. While they can’t be listed on a resume and often come from lived experience beyond professional history, these skills are paramount to success in creating a positive client experience while inside the facial treatment.

What do these integrative skills look like in practice? More on that below.

If you’re enjoying Venus of the Mind, make sure to tap the heart after reading through.

Leaving a heart supports discoverability and allows fellow lovers of beauty and culture to join our magical corner of the internet.

How to Show Up: The Foundational Energetics of Esthetic Work

Trade School ✅

Apprenticeship Hours ✅

State Board Exams ✅

Licensed ✅

Hired & Onboarded ✅

Alone in the treatment room…now what?

Before checking-in with your first client, remember that you are a skincare specialist who is there to serve — not toil. There is a difference. Work in the spirit of service is enacted with skilled agency, discernment, and positive self-regard. Work in the spirit of toil is done aimlessly, with porous boundaries, and low self-regard.

I mean serve as in what Merriam-Webster defines as: to be worthy of reliance or trust; to furnish or supply with something needed or desired; to answer the needs of; to contribute or conduce; to provide services that benefit or help.

I also mean serve as in, serving face and moving with grace. If your skin isn’t giving “they know what they’re doing” who will take your recommendations? If your hands aren’t giving “safe and considerate” who will let you touch their face again? Whether you’re clocked-in at the treatment room or clocked-out for drinks with your esthie bestie, life is a ballroom and we are all here to SERVE.

Speaking of life, outside of this trade you need to cultivate an existence that you are proud of. Pride in who you are beyond the treatment room is the key to being rooted and confident inside the treatment room.

If you care for yourself, this job will reward you.

If you forget yourself, this job will deplete you.

Move accordingly.

Related Reading

Got questions for the second dispatch out in May?

Email: ivanainthestudio@gmail.com

See ya next Sunday Newsletter Hotties! Our collective tarot card for April is up next.

Thank you for being here. I love writing to you.

Stay hydrated, be present, and glow like only you can do.

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Missive: Every Client is a Muse

Loving Faces and Seeing God

Read Time: 6 Mins

And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

_Reverend Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

The Painter

Once upon a time I had a crush on a painter. She taught me how to see faces, beginning with my own. Regrettably, I’ve yet to figure out how to translate what I see via pencil onto paper; I’m certainly nowhere near brush to canvas yet. If I hadn’t met her, this painter with a penchant for oil and gouache, I may have never returned to the trade of esthetics. After all, I thought I’d left the industry for good back in 2018.

She introduced me to John Berger’s writing and we both encountered Sally Mann’s photography together. Between shared turns developing in the darkroom she would talk me through her perceptions of light and shadow. I would talk her through my perceptions of written versus spoken syntax. I like to think that just as she taught me to see better, maybe I taught her to hear better. She lived in lines, shapes, and colors. I lived in sound, language, and history. Time shared with her was like weaving two worlds together and telling a newer better story.

It snuck up on me, the fact that I loved her. Much like Adam in Eden, when I’d realized what I’d done — accidentally fallen in love with her — I was afraid. But later, perhaps like Lilith in Eden, I became curious. If loving her felt like birthing a brand new Earth (sometimes painful, always perfect) what would it feel like to reflect that love back onto myself? What could my life be like if I learned to see myself as I saw her? If looking at her felt like seeing God, was a piece of the Divine reflected in me too?

Saint Peter

Doménikos Theotokópoulos painted The Repentant Saint Peter over four centuries ago. Duncan Phillips acquired the work in 1922. It took my breath away in 2026.

On January 4 of this year, I went to The Phillips Collection intent on seeing something else entirely when there was Saint Peter, waiting in the main lobby. El Greco iterated several paintings of this moment in Saint Peter’s arc so that while I’ve always admired printed reproductions, I’d never clocked that there was this version just a car-ride away from me in D.C. The way that I stayed with that painting for what felt like hours but never enough. It must’ve looked like I was planning a heist. I shed some tears from the surprise.

In person it’s mesmerizing the way light falls all around Peter but also seems to be coming through him. El Greco summons a feature of light and a sentiment of anguish, suffusing the two throughout Peter’s skin and clothes. Gaze long enough and you can hear the clasp of Peter’s keys as he shuffles around in prayer, pleading, promising. Never again will he deny his friend who is also his God. His body is strained. The tension in his neck exaggerated by the telltale elongated Greco-stylized proportions that are characteristic of the artist.

Draped in a golden yellow plus a vibrant blue — a notoriously difficult pigment to acquire at the time — reminiscent of the blue often reserved for the Virgin Mary, El Greco has wrapped Peter in colors that narrate his bold cowardice and his future redemption/ascension. God is out of frame yet heard loud and clear because the light speaks of eternity. Notice how it mainly pours down from the top left but also seems to flicker across all four corners of the painting, flashing through swaths of darkness. Holiness bursts out of the shadows, evoking an eerie solemnity. Heaven can only exist if hell too is a place. Here is Peter longing for one while remembering the other.

That chilly January day in D.C. I looked at Peter and I saw myself. Remembering all the parts of me I’d denied because it felt safer in the moment, only to later feel like I couldn’t breathe. Grateful that I no longer lived like that, elated to be free.

God is Everywhere

Alice Walker references Van Gogh in her essay, “Saving the Life that is Your Own: The Importance of Models in an Artist’s Life.” She opens her piece noting how the painter once lamented in a letter while interned away that he was languishing due to a shortage of models.

People need people. Figurative artists understand this. What good is a refined studio practice and a distinct painterly vision without a living model to map memory from? I believe it’s the same for facialists. All the knowledge of anatomy and physiology; an understanding of ingredient chemistry; advanced techniques of tissue manipulation. What good is any of that without a face to care for? Both professions demand a devotion to attention before arriving at the desired result. One summons light to canvas. The other summons light to skin.

In doing bodywork, my labor is at the intersection of science, beauty, and soul. Perhaps it was inevitable for me to embody the profession this way. The naturalist in me, melded into the aesthete, folded into the pastor’s kid.

Life is both long and short, enduring and ephemeral. I do not know how long I will continue to labor in the treatment room. There are so many more worlds of creativity to explore beyond esthetics. It’s the eternal challenge of an active mind. I’ve only just started my own business but I’m already thinking about its next iteration.

For now, I stay. Because between the glimmers and shadows that make each person unique, every client brings a piece of God with them.

Every client is a muse.

Beauty. Culture. Magic.

Welcome

Read Time: 3 mins

Dear Aesthete,

What a time to be alive.

We’re living in some wild plotline where a massive technocratic push towards generative ai is part of a larger global pattern that devalues human labor. All while simultaneously seeking to extract as much as possible from humans. Extraction of our time, our attention, our energy, our communities, our natural resources, our bodies, and our spirit.

My approach to labor is rooted in what Silvia Federici termed as “re-enchanting the world.” This newsletter is an expression of that approach; my creative response to Silvia’s call and to similar directives from other intellectual foremothers.

I initially started this publication as a way to integrate my love of aesthetic philosophy with my twelve year experience as a licensed esthetician and my humanities training as a PhD dropout (i.e. recovering academic) who still relishes the thrill of research. It has since evolved into a body of work that is adjacent to but also beyond all that. Here, the writing converges on matters earthly, cosmic, and queer.

My hope is that every time you open a letter from Venus of the Mind it feels like you’re reading a thoughtfully crafted piece that enriches the landscape of your inner world. When guided by Venus, all roads lead to beauty.

New to Venus?

Start With These Crowd Favorites

💖

This newsletter is devoted to beauty in the world.

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Venus of the Mind-Core

Earthly. Cosmic. Queer.

Top left. My view (unedited!) walking up to la Chiesa di San Pietro in Porto Venere, Italy. This church was built atop a pagan temple believed to have once belonged to the cult of Venus (Venere). It’s one of my favorite places on Earth. The energy inside this church/temple is unmatched.

Bottom left. My view of a September 2025 exhibit at Chiostro del Bramante in Rome. The color palette is everything and I’m forever stoked that I caught the breeze flowing through the curtain. Classic quotidian magic on display. Again, unedited!

Special appearance. My spiritual totem, the pomegranate.

Top center. Audre Lorde being iconic.

Top right. Internet meme giving strong Hermit from the tarot vibes — or, how it feels to ideate, research, write, and edit this newsletter.

Bottom right. The Black Iris (1926) by Georgia O’Keefe. My beloved stationary set (purchased ages ago from the Phillips Collection gift shop) includes several cards with this print. For the above collage, I didn’t like any of the options coming up online so I just snapped a picture of one stationary print with the right lighting to get the crispness I wanted, then zoomed in just a tad for added detailing.

Center. Sailor Moon doing her thing — or, how it feels to hit publish and send this newsletter to you.

Note that the gorgeous pomegranate and fig designs at the beginning and end of this newsletter — digital bookends — were commission by me and designed by Idris Agüero.

Thank you for being here. Keep glowing like only you can do.

The Skincare Primer, March 2026

Read Time: 5 mins

Give Glycerin Her Flowers

As a licensed esthetician who specializes in facials (ie: a facialist) I often wonder who was the marketing team that put hyaluronic acid on the map. Only a room of geniuses could take a mid ingredient and make it a mainstream darling that everyone recognizes in everyday skincare speak. How’d they do that?! Can they do the same for the more deserving formulation workhorse that is GLYCERIN?

✨💎GLYCERIN💎✨ — an industry OG and unsung hero. When it comes to long lasting humectation, while everyone is scanning for hyaluronic acid in their moisturizing selections what they should be scanning for is glycerin within the top five featured ingredients. This humectant has a lower molecular weight which means it gets deeper into the skin. Where hyaluronic acid has a moderate efficacy in barrier support, glycerin has a stronger efficacy at fortifying the skins’s the barrier with continued use over time.

She’s an efficacious baddie! Glycerin will protect, soothe, moisturize, enhance, and restore. Homegirl will not evaporate in the blink of an eye — unlike hyaluronic acid which attracts water but cannot lock it in. In other words, hyaluronic acid will ghost you, glycerin will hold you down.

Of course, it’s important to not get caught up in the singular ingredient mindset. When looking for products featuring a particular power-player, it’s helpful to understand the ingredient’s relationship to other factors within a product formulation and how that relationship is relevant or not to your particular skincare needs.

Below, for anyone who has skin, I’ve included entry level reads, audio, and video resources from some of my favorite skincare professionals. All to deepen your understanding of glycerin and allow you to have a more informed shopping experience aligned with your skin’s actual needs instead of going with trendy product recommendations.

If you’re enjoying Venus of the Mind, make sure to tap the heart after reading through.

Leaving a heart supports discoverability and allows fellow lovers of beauty and culture to join our magical little corner of the internet.

Accessible Resources to Inform Your Skincare Shopping

Watch

Watch Time: 17 Minutes

Featuring Who: Dr. Shereen Idriss, MD — Board-Certified Dermatologist, Medical Director and Founder of Idriss Dermatology in New York City.

Expert Level Needed to Follow: ZERO.

Choice Quote: “Glycerin is an humectant, a water loving whore.”

Read

Glycerin in Skin Care: What It is & is It Safe

Read Time: Less than five minutes.

Written By: Bryan Barron, Director of Global Research and Clinical Development at Paula’s Choice. Reviewed by Dr. Debra Jaliman, MD — Board-Certified Dermatologist. Within the write-up there are additional citations for deeper learning.

Expert Level Needed to Follow: Half a brain out of five brains.

Choice Quote: “Glycerin is a skin-replenishing and skin-restoring ingredient, meaning it is a substance found naturally in skin, helping to establish normal balance and hydration. It’s one of the many substances in skin that helps maintain a healthy look and feel, defending against dryness and working to maintain skin’s moisture level. Essentially, glycerin is a master at hydration, and works best when combined with other replenishing and emollient ingredients.”

Note: I’m not endorsing their products and in fact have never recommended a Paula’s Choice product to any clients. I just happen to find value in their open access ingredient dictionary.

Listen

Esthetician on the Edge: The Middle Child of Ingredients (Apple Podcasts. Spotify.)

This one is my personal fave of the all the shared resources. Such a great listen that elucidates the connection between glycerin and how our skin functions. Fun fact for the beauties in the weeds, Esthetician on the Edge runs a fun meme account, produces fabulous educational content, and she has a delightful southern (from the U.S.) accent. All that, but she’s anonymous in these internet streets! Iconic.

Listen Time: 23 minutes.

Expert Level Needed to Follow: One brain out of five brains plus curiosity. 🧠🤓

Choice Quote: “I heard a quote the other day, and I think it’s applicable to this and life — We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom.”

Spring Equinox is next weekend and with it arrives the monthly missive next Sunday morning at 8am EST! Until then newsletter hotties, thank you so much for being here.💖

Inside the Culture List for March 2026 (Read Time: 6 mins)

- A Note of Gratitude

- Newsletter Recommendations to Celebrate One Year on Substack

A Note of Gratitude

Greetings Venusian Lovelies!

The Earth is counting down to March Equinox. Can you all feel it?

March 21 will bring spring to the Northern Hemisphere and autumn to the Southern Hemisphere. During March equinox nature lives through equal parts daylight and darkness as the Sun appears to sit directly above the equator and the cardinal sign of Aries ushers in spring.

Personally, this coming equinox is particularly special because Venus of the Mind will turn one! Spring Equinox of last year I wrote the following first newsletter:

On this Spring Equinox I have remembered myself once more. There is value in choosing to do labor that centers the wellbeing of others. Especially now, when just across the Potomac hatred is wielded as a blunt tool of statecraft. It is a gift of the Spirit to engage in labor that celebrates each individual’s light. Especially now, when just across the Potomac ignorance and conformity are valued over enlightenment and plurality. I clock in and I get to watch face after face bloom.

From, “On Beauty & Being Here.”

One year later (and three years total since returning to the beauty industry) I am happy to report I not only feel the same as written in the above quote but am now even more dedicated to my work than before. Given that I believe our bodies house our souls, for me working in esthetics is more than working with skincare and skin health. All of that is at the surface of what estheticians do. The deeper energetics of working in esthetics is that in caring for someone’s body one is also caring for a vessel housing that which comes from God. Beyond the bare minimum of holding a master esthetician license, I feel a responsibility to keep learning, keep growing, and keep refining my technique as an expression of reverence for the holy creation that I get to work with. Lofty? Yes. Does every esthetician feel the same? Definitely not. While I know other facialists who share similar sentiments I know many more who don’t and that’s fine. Plus, I have never met a waxer, laser tech, or brow specialist that feels the same. In fact, they most definitely are better off having a level of determined irreverence in order to efficiently rip out or burn hair off while managing to make the experience sort of enjoyable LMAO. Does any of this have to be that deep? Nope. But I like depth, it’s how I choose to give my life meaning, so that’s how I approach my work.

Writing here since last spring and steadily growing this newsletter has given me the confidence to step even deeper into an ethos that prioritizes intimacy of experience, client centered service, and quality of care with integrity.

I am so grateful to every reader who has opened an email, read through the various newsletters, hearted, commented, and also messaged me 1:1 with feedback regarding this newsletter’s evolution. I love knowing how something lands for readers and it’s always heartening to know one isn’t just writing into the void!

In particular, and most importantly, paid subscribers are the reason I have been able to continue building out this newsletter as an expression of my creative practice.

THANK YOU to paid subscribers for supporting an ethos of care and creativity that values beauty with soul.

12 Newsletter Recommendations to Celebrate 12 Months on Substack

Tengo ganas de comerme el mundo entero is a sentence regularly riddled throughout my journal entries from middle school into present day. “Comerse el mundo” is an idiomatic expression in Spanish, translated literally it means “eat the world.” Interpreted for essence, this expression denotes a desire to take it all in — the idiom suggests an ambition that demands no crumbs be left in the feast that is life. It is a phrase that encapsulates Patti Smith’s energy in the following one minute clip from a 1976 interview while touring the album Radio Ethiopia.

I also love how Calle 13 embodies the energy of this idiom when Residente and iLe sing, “cocíname las ganas que mis sueños tienen hambre.” Loose translation: cook me up the drive/will, my dreams are hungry.

One of my favorite things about being on Substack this past year has been reading works by individuals who write with a voraciousness for their respective worlds. Through their writing one can tell that the calling within them to live vibrantly is a strong one and I love that about their work. To celebrate year one of writing Venus of the Mind below is a list of 12 newsletters from six publications that have brought me pleasure as a reader, inspiration as a writer, and have informed my own evolving approach to life as I continue to comerme el mundo a mi manera.

Publications are listed alphabetically. Beyond the six listed there are many more I subscribe to and thoroughly enjoy. However for the sake of reading time I focused on six writers that I keep coming back to. Some of their works I have printed out and annotated for continued reference because re-reading is fun! It’s like going back for seconds except you never get tired and the food tastes better each time. Re-reading the good stuff is one way of arriving at an eighth heaven à la Patti Smith.

1. Afri-Tectural Digest by Kemide Lawson

Two Favorites from the Archives

• The Architecture of Black Girl Magic: How I created a family home, Cottage Noir, inspired by my two daughters. Read.

• What Makes A Black Home?: The answer is more complex, and more powerful, than it first appears. Read.

2. From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy

This newsletter is now hosted on Beehiiv and keeps being a top-tier publication.

Two Favorites from the Archives

• On Ambition: An admission; or, all the lies I’ve told myself. Read.

• On Seasons: Experiencing the disappearance of time. Read.

3. Local Style by Gabriela R. Proietti

Two Favorites from the Archives

• The Naples Guide Even the Neapolitans Would Follow: Eating, caffeinating, and swimming the Neapolitan way. Read.

• Has the ‘Made in Italy’ Fashion Label Lost Its Heritage and Prestige?: The evolution of Made in Italy, from heritage to exploitation. Plus, the artisans and designers who keep the spirit alive. Read.

4. Perfect Hunger by Dr. Dana Leigh Lyons, DTCM

DTCM means Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Two Favorites from the Archives

• The 10-year test, revisited: A post-it from five years ago fell out of my journal. Read.

• What if constraints are what free us?: A case for discipline sourced from devotion. Read.

5. So there’s this place… by Monica Mendal

Two Favorites from the Archives

• Travel Better: My Thoughts on Solo Travel...and why you’ll *probably* love it. Read.

• Travel Better: The Importance of Surrendering. How a trip to Puglia taught me to let go in my first year as a travel writer. Read.

6. The Stanza by Nadine Choe

Two Favorites from the Archives

• The tension between scale and discretion. Read.

• Playfulness is an important quality of a life well lived. Read.

Here’s to another year of newslettering!

Thank you for reading Venus of the Mind. I love writing to you.💖

Inside the Collective Reading for March 2026

- A Dance With Time

- Our Collective Card to Usher in Spring

A Dance With Time

Dear Aesthete,

My Walter Mercado gown is on so let’s dive right in.

What a year it has been — and the first quarter of the Gregorian cycle isn’t even over. This is where the collective card for March finds us, taking stock and sobering up. Yes, we have a ways to go but there is already plenty worth celebrating because we are still alive and taking it all in.

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, sensing spring can feel a bit like dancing in a roulette of uncertainty. Thanks to the climate crisis, every year the dance is a little off. The paces are not as predictable, transitions are no longer clearly delineated, the tempo keeps switching up and the flow of winter into spring is never exactly how it used to be. Still, the cold eventually dissipates. The light of the Sun lingers longer. Calls for snow turn to calls for rain. Trees offer up glimpses of their blooms. Meanwhile, we keep up and dance; finding our collective rhythm once again.

Our Collective Card to Usher in Spring

Read more

Inside the Monthly Missive for February 2026

- A Question of Care and Justice

- Beauty as Possibility

- Up Next

A Question of Care and Justice

It feels cliche to quote MLK in February or any time of the year at this point. Enemy of the state while alive to a paragon of respectability politics while dead. Such revisionism requires a cultural flattening that has reduced his radicalism into the specter of a forever “dream.” Yet here I am, writing about Arabelle Sicardi’s The House of Beauty while Dr. King’s final book echos in my mind.

The stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing” - oriented society to a “person” - oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.

_Martin Luther King Jr. Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?

In our house, the socio-political impact of beauty as industry is often obfuscated. Cross-culturally, contemporary aesthetic practices are largely gendered which renders interest in anything cosmetic as unserious, frivolous, unworthy of intellectual attention. In The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry, Sicardi pierces the veil and untangles the obfuscating illusion. Crafted with deep love for beauty’s potential to heal, yet clear-eyed about its equal capacity to harm, Sicardi’s reporting shows how the ways we choose to care for our bodies and express ourselves in the world, all exist within complex lineages of industrial extraction, market competition, geopolitical power grabs, and intersectional resilience. At the heart of this book is the very question posed by Dr. King in 1967 — our shared home is the world house and our home is on fire; how did we get here, where do we go now, chaos orchestrated by the few or community created by the many?

We’re in a network of connectivity with each other and the planet we live on. The brands we use and the ways they conduct business ought to reflect the fact that we all make each other possible. And the fact that we make each other possible means that we can help change each other too.

Beauty standards across regions have long been intertwined with colonial powers, and it’s those very colonial powers that protect the profits and interests of corporate institutions rather than the land we live on.

_Arabelle Sicardi The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry

Beauty as Possibility

Zoom out.

The United States is celebrating 250 years on stolen land.

Presently, ICE concentration camps litter the country; a new one was just proposed right here in Virginia. Federally sanctioned killers and kidnappers continue terrorizing in Minnesota. American Imperialism is now in Venezuela and a certain Estée Lauder heir is frothing at the mouth with anticipation for Greenland to be overtaken soon. There is never any public funding for healthcare, education, or art but there is always public funding for violence. Last year’s “big beautiful bill” increased national spending on military contracts. There was no contention over defense spending but plenty of arguing over SNAP benefits. Let the children starve while we focus on readiness for the wars we instigate abroad and the terror we generate at home. If the ways in which we apportion money denotes our collective values, then death as industry is America’s #1 priority.

Through longstanding arms deals with Israel, American taxpayer dollars funded genocide in Palestine. This current administration forsakes Ukraine and ignores Sudan but has decided to play empty “peace” games in Iran. In this timeline, capital moves freely across borders while human bodies are legislated into criminality despite freedom of movement being central to our species since time immemorial. Billionaires are welfare queens with endless tax breaks in any country of their choosing along with free access to our collective energy grids while we foot the bill in our income taxes and utility payments. The Covid-19 pandemic is not over but wearing a mask is considered excessive and vaccinations are discouraged. It is not a stretch to say we are at the end of a world. Slouching towards Bethlehem yet again.

Zoom in.

Breakfast: café con leche y una tostada. Wash the body. Brush, floss, and rinse the teeth. Shampoo, condition, comb and style the hair. Moisturize the skin. Pick a perfume. Put on an outfit where every piece is well-loved, thrifted, or inherited because true style is born from sustainability. Answer the emails, submit the projects, attend the meetings, schedule the appointments. Run the errands. Enjoy lunch at a spot where the locally sourced food always hits and the owners are still donating to aid for Palestinian refugees. Continue shunning every single beauty brand implicated in the Epstein files, it’s quite easy to do so. Re-up on Dieux skincare and Tanaïs fragrance during the window in which both brands are donating a portion of sales to organized aid plus legal council in Minnesota. Walk the dog. Marvel at the moon.

It’s evening, homemaker mode activated. Text the homies who are on the way back safely from a day of direct action, let them know that dinner is ready. Welcome everyone in to eat well. Barriga llena y corazón contento. Stay up late together, laughing into the night. Live while others die. Say I love you while others never get to say it again.

Zooming out and in, I remember the Prophet Isaiah’s vision, received as he witnessed the end of his own world (emphasis my own).

I will bring them to My secret mount and let them rejoice in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices shall be welcome on My altar; for My House shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.

_ Isaiah 56.7 (Nevi’im) JPS Tanakh Translation

Humans are frightful, always have been. Inconsiderate, greedy, bellicose, cruel.

Humans are glorious always have been. Thoughtful, generous, compassionate, kind.

These qualities cannot be spritzed onto a wrist or massaged into a face. Aesthetic injectors do not stock them. Cosmetic chemists have yet to find the formula. They are qualities both inherited and chosen, innate and cultivated. We can learn to be cruel and yet choose to be kind. In that paradox of free will, somewhere between reaching for glory while facing our horrors, that’s the space where beauty is found.

The House of Beauty invites readers to wade into that space. Through their crystalline writing Arabelle Sicardi holds up a mirror; they ask if we’re brave enough to look and then remind us that collectively, we can rebuild the world in any image we choose.

Up Next

The House of Beauty was our beauty book club read for January 2026. We were lucky to be joined by Arabelle during our meeting. Their generosity of thought throughout our conversation was delightful and enlivening.

In April, our Venus of the Mind book club for paid subscribers will gather online to explore Cholé Cooper Jone’s Easy Beauty. Per the publisher, this Pulitzer nominated memoir “weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability.” We’re in for another richly layered conversation. Don’t miss out!

Upgrade your subscription below during the Valentine’s sale through February 28. Then, opt-out of the Bezo-verse by ordering Easy Beauty from bookshop.org where you can select a local bookstore to receive some of the revenue from your purchase. Alternatively, request a copy from your local library. A third space created by public funds dedicated to shared knowledge and the preservation of literacy?! Run don’t walk! Use it or lose it! If they don’t yet have Easy Beauty many libraries have an online portal where you can request new additions to their catalogs. Talk to your librarians and find out.💖

Read Easy Beauty

Dear Aesthete, thank you for being here.

Remember, stay hydrated, be present, and glow like only you can do.✨

Share

Inside the Product Primer for February 2026

- Good News

- Aloe Vera 101

- A Product Review: Aloe Hyaluronic Moisture Boost by Monastery

- Will Aloe be Your Valentine?

GOOD NEWS

The beauty directory for paid subscribers is now live!

It features where to go for acupuncture (and adjacent TCM modalities), baths, facials, fragrance, full-body treatments, hair (cuts for all textures, color, silk presses, extensions etc.) injectables, mani-pedis, massage, and specialty boutique shopping. All vetted by a licensed and working beauty professional.

This is a living list, new locations are added as they’re experienced, provided that the experience was top tier. At the moment, starting out with the D.C./Maryland/Virginia area, there’s locations as far east as Italy and then out further to Pakistan. As west as Montana and then southwest to Texas. As north as Massachusetts, then down to North Carolina, and as south as Puerto Rico.

Happy Relaxing!✌🏾

Aloe Vera 101

What is it about aloe? Applying its gel feels like a safe and loving caress. When used in my practice, it’s as though I can hear a client’s skin sighing while soothed by aloe.

Aloe vera (Latin, Aloe barbadensis), is a succulent plant originating from the Arabian Peninsula before making its way around the world over centuries and via trade routes. It is one plant out of hundreds within the genus called Aloe. When aloe vera’s leaves are cut open, they release a clear and gel-like substance popular in various traditional healing practices for its soothing properties, wound healing, and hydrating benefits.

As a contemporary cosmetic ingredient, aloe vera extract is quite versatile, being chemically composed primarily of water and notable for its content of polysaccharides plus phytosterols.

Polysaccharides: They are one of the main types of carbohydrates found in nature and serve as an essential source of energy for living organisms.

_Journal of Nutrition

In topical skincare, plant polysaccharides help maintain hydration levels, aid in wound healing and tissue regeneration, as well as potentially slow UV/free-radical damage and oxidative stress. Here is a comprehensive review of their benefits from Science Direct.

Phytosterols: Naturally occurring cholesterol-like molecules found in all plant foods. _Paula’s Choice Ingredient Dictionary

Given their fatty composition phytosterols work in skincare to lock-in moisture and prevent water loss. This supports the skin’s natural protective barrier — also known as the acid mantle.

Structured primarily of water plus polysaccharides and phytosterols, in cosmetic formulations aloe vera extract can be used either as a solvent, base ingredient, soothing agent, humectant, or in a combination of these functions.

Note: there are many other chemical structures within Aloe vera extract but for the purposes of the following product review, water, polysaccharides, and phytosterols are the most relevant.

Monastery’s Aloe Hyaluronic Moisture Boost

The Point

This serum is a 10 out 10.

The Story

It was while gallivanting in Rome last September that I realized I was ready to start my own studio practice, after having returned to esthetics three years ago and worked exclusively for a larger beauty/wellness brand full-time.

As soon as I returned to Northern Virginia, I began to research and test products for Ivana Martínez Studio. It was especially important for me to integrate products that were values aligned in their production practices. Caring for the Earth and caring for our skin go hand-in-hand.

My research led me to Monastery. I loved reading about founder Athena Hewett’s considered and artful approach to ingredient sourcing plus small-batch formulations. As a plus, I appreciated that the product line is informed by Athena’s 20+ year career as a CIDESCO certified esthetician working out of San Francisco. The brand’s Aloe Hyaluronic Moisture Boost was the first product I invested in as part of curating my facial studio’s backbar. It’s been six months, and I remain besotted with this particular serum.

Product Notes

1. Duration: Monastery products are sensorially pleasing to use and nourishing for the skin but what I love even more is that they formulate and package in a manner that encourages less consumption. I purchased their serum at the end of September and only listed it in my product logs as due for re-purchase on Tuesday, January 7th. Depending on how my skin was feeling per my monthly cycle and the day’s climate, on average I used this serum anywhere from three times a week to twice daily. While studying lymphatic drainage in Colorado last November I was obsessively applying it under a moisturizer followed by an occlusive to survive Denver’s dryness. I was sure I’d use up the serum by the end of November but like a Mary Poppins purse, the bottle just kept on going.

2. What It’s Good For: With two different weights of hyaluronic acid suspended in a base of aloe vera, this product works well as a hydrating and prepping serum that also balances out oil production while soothing inflammation thanks to the inclusion of sage, lavender, and clary sage. The entire ingredient list also means that this is a lightweight antioxidant serum with a beautifully aromatic quality.

3. Who It’s Ideal For: This serum is good for all skin-types. However, due to the sage, lavender, and clary sage within the product, in my practice I typically find myself recommending it most to my combination/oily and heavily acne-prone clients. The brand’s website recommends 1-2 pumps and that amount may be enough for oiler skin-types. My skin tends towards dryness year-around, so I found that 3-4 pumps is what I’ve needed for my face and neck.

4. How to Use: Apply 1-4 pumps, depending on skin type. Do so after cleansing and before moisturizing. If you use a hydrating essence, apply this after your essence, then go in with a moisturizer. Daytime, always follow-up with an SPF. Nighttime, due to the essential oil compounds (like terpenes) in this serum, if you skin-cycle I recommend using aloe boost on a recovery night, not on an active night where you have just exfoliated or are using a high strength retinoid. If you’re not actively skin-cycling this serum can be used nightly after cleansing and under your moisturizer.

Will Aloe Be Your Valentine?

I purchase from them regularly enough that Monastery kindly sent me a 20% off discount link to share — totally unrelated to this newsletter, I did not reach out them, it was simply serendipity! The email they sent said to share the link with friends but what I read was share with the newsletter hotties.💖

The referral discount (linked after the paywall) can be applied to the Aloe Hyaluronic Moisture Boost or to any Monastery product of your choosing. Good through Monday, March 2nd.

Read more

Inside the Collective Tarot Reading for February 2026

~ Naming My Teachers

~ What Makes a Reader?

~ Notes on Scope

~ Our Collective Card for February

~ The Messages Within Our Card: Interpretations and Journal Prompts

~ Accessing the Energies of Our Card in Everyday Life

What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, or looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins.

In Search of Out Mother’s Gardens: “The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life”, by Alice Walker

Naming My Teachers

All knowledge exists in an ever-expanding web of lineages. Often, those lineages are cross-cultural. Especially when mystic practices are involved.

Before I give us a reading, I must first name my tarot teachers. Some I’ve interacted with directly, one on one. Others I’ve only learned from through their various creative projects and study materials. All have been guiding me for some time now, one for almost seven years.

Sarah Faith Gottesdiener

Rashunda Tramble

Mary K. Greer

Theresa Reed

Nairy Fstukh

Shannon Knight

Carrington Epperson

Wil — with one L. My first tarot friend who set me on the path. ❣️

What Makes a Reader?

When it comes to interpreting the tarot, I’m of the opinion that solid readers are those who know what it’s like to be cracked open by grief and who are practiced in rebirthing themselves after loss. Loss of identity, loss of loved ones, loss of home, etc. The tarot tells a story of a paradise lost, found, and lost again, all on the way to an enlightenment that lands us right back at the sacred zero — an abyss of possibility.

How can one speak to the full spectrum of the arcana without being able to hold the conflict of all the card’s shadows just as much as their light?

Grief is joy’s teacher.

Joy is grief’s mirror.

I also believe that if you enjoy looking at the moon, star-gazing, admiring plant life, bird watching, returning to the same poem, spending hours with select pieces of art, or even taking kids seriously and hearing what they have to say, then you may also enjoy exploring the tarot. Meditating on a card’s imagery is the same as close reading a select literary passage or actively listening to a loved one tell you about their latest obsession for the umpteenth time. There are layers of meaning in a card’s image waiting to be revealed through determined and studied attention.

Notes on Scope

What This Reading Practice Is Not

1. This reading is not prescriptive.

2. This reading is not about if you should text your ex. That is not my ministry.

3. This reading is not a substitution for your intuition.

What This Reading Practice Is

1. This reading is an invitation to play.

2. This reading is about flirting with the unseen. Maybe the Universe will wink back.

3. This reading is an opportunity to explore something ancient that’s always been with us.

With our scope set, let’s see what was revealed.

Our Collective Card for February 2026

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The Culture List for February 2026

~ Musings on Love

~ Reading recommendations for lovers

~ A special playlist for clear-eyed romantics

~ A sprinkle of magic

~ P.S. a Valentine’s Gift

What arrives after the crush fades?

What happens when the honeymoon goes sideways?

What is left when the false god of all consuming coupledom is shattered?

Love as a collaborative discipline.

Love as a practice in co-creative discovery.

Love as a life giving action that renews each day, rising with the Sun.

This reading list is dedicated to those who believe the same.

A Reading List for True Believers

1. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a biomythography by Audre Lorde

   1. Part memoir, part myth, an elegy to love lost, a paean to love found.

   2. Every time I read this, I can feel Audre in the room with me. It’s like she wrote it as a perpetual self-conjuring of the warmest kind.

   3. Three Choice Quotes

      1. “I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was pure hell. There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons, the riders on the loneliest outposts of the kingdom of Dahomey. We, young and Black and fine and gay, sweated out our first heartbreaks with no school nor office chums to share that confidence over lunch hour. Just as there were no rings to make tangible the reason for our happy secret smiles, there were no names nor reason given or shared for the tears that messed up the lab reports or the library bills.”

      2. “We had come together like elements erupting into an electric storm, exchanging energy, sharing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted, passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves the better for the exchange. I never saw Afrekete again, but her print remains upon my life with the resonance and power of an emotional tattoo.”

      3. “Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me — so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting.”

2. Queer Power Couples: On Love and Possibility written by Hannah Murphy Winter & Photographed by Billie Winter

   1. If you’re located in the DMV-area, contact Friends to Lovers Bookstore and get your copy from this queer-woman owned romance bookstore. That’s where I got my copy, as a Pride 2025 gift to myself.

   2. Three Choice Quotes

      1. “A queer power couple, as we saw it, is at the intersection of three things: They’re out, they’ve coupled, and they’re able to influence mainstream culture. We realized perhaps the reason this book hasn’t been made yet was because, up until the last ten years, that intersection was pretty empty. And we had to recognize that the emptiness of that intersection was intentional: the result of decades of erasure and losing a generation of elders to the AIDS crisis, and not being able to see queer people grow up and age. And that was why everyone in this book talked about sifting for scraps - searching for allusions to queerness in popular culture to find proof that we’re not alone.”

      2. “There is an abundance of queer excellence. And the more that excellence exists in the public eye, the more maps or torches or possible selves we have. ‘If you’re out there being you,’ Jim [Obergefell] says, ‘unapologetically you - you’re a role model to someone.’”

      3. “I’ve learned from her how to hold myself accountable to the work — treating the art like a nine-to-five — which I wasn’t very good at, at all. In the East Village, I was getting stoned all day. Things are a lot better in that way now. She’s really softened me up too. I feel like my heart, it’s just so mushy now. Which is unfortunate because I have no defenses anymore. I cry all the time now. But I had to open up if I wanted to win her, basically. And I did the work, you know? I started going to therapy, and I’ve done a lot of the work on myself. But as a result, I’m a better person. And that means I’m, you know, a little more weepy and vulnerable now.” - Musician Mackenzie Scott (AKA: Torres) on her relationship with painter Jenna Gribbon.

3. The Book of Ecclesiastes

   1. Found as book four of the five megillot within the Tanakh. I’m especially partial to the Tanakh translations produced by the Jewish Publication Society as they work with respected biblical scholars and with rabbis from across spectrums of observation from Reform, to Conservative, and Orthodox. I’ve linked to their translations above.

   2. Fun fact: Many iterations-of-Ivana-ago, I spent four years deep in study for a conversion to Orthodox Judaism within a variant of the Sephardic tradition. That conversion never happened. Partly because towards the end I began to suspect (correctly) that I was a lesbian. What a plot twist.

   3. Second fun fact: Before my unfinished conversion to Judaism, I identified as an atheist for a few years and prior to identifying as an atheist, I’d been raised as the eldest daughter of a pastor. Double plot twist.

   4. Third fun fact: I was a nauseatingly boring teenager. My form of requisite adolescent “rebellion” looked like skipping Sunday service and spending the afternoon inside a Books-A-Million across the street; where I treated the store as my own personal library and the booksellers kindly let me do so. My favorite book to leaf through which I eventually read cover to cover? Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, because evolution went against creationism and to Little Ivana that was just so edgy.

   5. Three choice quotes from Ecclesiastes.

      1. “Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved by God. Let your clothes always be freshly washed, and your head never lack ointment. Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeting days of life that have been granted to you under the sun — all your fleeting days. For that alone is what you can get out of life and out of the means you acquire under the sun. What is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going.” (9.7-10)

      2. “I have further observed under the sun that the race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the valiant; nor is bread won by the wise, nor wealth by the intelligent, nor favor by the learned. For the time of mischance comes to all. And a man cannot. even know his time. As fishes are enmeshed in a fatal net, and as birds are trapped in a snare, so men are caught at the time of calamity; when it comes upon them without warning.” (9.11-2)

      3. “How sweet is the light, what a delight for the eyes to behold the sun! Even if a man lives many years, let him enjoy himself in all of them, remembering how many the days of darkness are going to be. The only future is nothingness!” (11.7-8)

4. Deep Soulful Gospel House: Liner Notes on a Black Sapphic Romance by Amber J. Phillips of the newsletter, Toxic Femininity.

   1. THE BEST KIND OF TRUE STORY

   2. Three Choice Quotes

      1. “She managed to still be present in the same poised power stance I had grown to always experience her in during these run ins. By this time, I had become frustrated with seeing her and not speaking. So I decided to completely ignore her when I knew without a doubt that we saw each other. That would surely smother the spark that I was growing inside of myself for her.”

      2. “My final straw was her art. I heard her play. Few things are more risky than witnessing a hint of a romantic crush be in their artist practice. If it’s bad, the lushful purr silences itself and I’m freed from the grip of sapphic limerence. But if it’s good, god forbid great, all of sudden I’m fully locked in and must see the storyline through.”

      3. “There comes a point where you must get active around finding out if a crush is actually viable. And I was at that point. I alerted my trusted friends to help me gather second opinions, oppositional research, and backstory.”

5. true lovers are sent from hell by Nairy Fstukh of the newsletter, soft moon rising.

   1. When I first experienced Nairy’s writing, I was reminded of this one time where I wasn’t paying attention to my selected psilocybin capsules and accidentally macro-dosed instead of micro-dosing. During that unplanned trip, God casually spoke to me on a Thursday afternoon as I tried my best to get through some household chores. In other words, this linked essay, and everything from soft moon rising, is POTENT. Only for those who relish learning from their shadows and kiki-ing with the Universe.

   2. Three Choice Quotes

      1. “Venus in place of Pluto can be a defensive posturing against erotic love and its tendency to highlight ugly qualities. Where Venus desires what’s most pleasurable, Pluto reflects what’s most hidden and painful—the places we’ve contracted our identity and capacity for intimacy as a result of big and small traumas. The parts of us that haven’t seen the light are ugly, messy and undignified before they are anything else.”

      2. “Confusing Venus with Eros creates heartbreak. We do this by finding value in someone’s affection for us only when they distract us from the messiness of healing and becoming our most vital selves. Should they reroute us to our darkness, we imagine them to be the devil. And, well, it’s true.”

      3. “Some folks have built entire personalities on feeling unworthy.”

6. Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H.

   1. Lamya H. is a queer Muslim immigrant writer and community organizer who’s written a memoir that reads like a poetic offering of love to all the intersecting experiences, people, and places that made her. Lamya’s commitment to communing with humanity and with the divine is so deeply woven into the text that reading this book feels like reading a collection of psalms.

   2. April through December, I facilitate an in person Sapphic Sunday Book Club at Friends to Lovers Bookstore, this was our August read last summer. I’ll forever stay thinking about Lamya’s memoir and I’m already re-reading it again.

   3. Three Choice Quotes

      1. “God knows that sometimes you need to destroy the cycles you’re caught in, that sometimes you need to wipe the slate clean and start over. So God sends Nuh a flood. Opens the gates to the heavens and lets it rain, and dear God, does it rain. The streams swell. The valleys flood. Water pours from the sky and doesn’t let up until the world is covered.”

      2. “At first our calls are all business, strictly our time to talk about the Quran. But as the weeks turn into months, our conversations expand. Something begins to shift in our friendship; we share more about our lives than we ever have before. Between discussing verses, she talks to me about difficult things: her parents aging, friend breakups, sex. It’s hard for me to share the difficult things in my life, but I try too: I turn my travails into funny stories so I can slip in the tragic amid the comic…We were always friends, but through reading the Quran together, we become family.”

      3. “I hope that my story helps you to see that we can turn toward our differences instead of away from them, that our differences can actually help us to build community, love more deeply, and live in a way that feels true. I hope that on these pages, you will see and come to love how messy faith can be, and how that messiness makes space for us to grapple with the contradictions that make us human. Messiness is — at its best — generative, it allows us to ask ourselves the truest, most important questions about what it means to be alive.”

7. 100 Black Voices: The Schomburg Centennial Reading List

   1. I consider the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to be an intellectual Mecca of the Black diaspora. Named after Harlem Renaissance thought leader and Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the center is currently celebrating 100 years of preserving, celebrating, and protecting Black intellectual heritage for the public. That it stands today, 100 years into successive political regimes dedicated to our erasure (since at least 1526 onward), is a testament to the enduring power of cultural stewardship. Such stewardship is a labor of love done with hope in a future that the stewards don’t get see but can sense is possible.

      1. About the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

      2. Forward: Spotlighting the Women of the Schomburg Center

   2. 100 Black Voices features 100 books from the center’s collection that were — per the center’s website — “personally selected by some of today’s most celebrated Black writers, artists, and luminaries.” Linked within the list are 20 titles immediately available for online reading, as well as books in other various accessible formats, and more information available about the Shomburg Centennial.

   3. Zami: A New Spelling of my Name is listed. :) Along with other personal favorites like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation.

Looking to be regaled with a lovey-dovey story?

Then let me take you to Italy. ⬇️

Thinking about how to hold space for a love of beauty in dire times?

I wrote this for you. ⬇️

A Playlist for the Homies Rising in Love

We’ve got some range here ¡mi gente! Ana Tijoux to Lauryn Hill, Wynonna to Flying Lotus, Mercedes Sosa to Mahmood, Chely Wright to iLe and more. Plus some la-dee-da bee-boo-bop instrumentals.

It’s giving AN ADVENTURE.

Listening is another form of reading.

The first time you listen, pretend it’s a burned CD meant to tell a story.

Play it in order! Afterwards, shuffle all you want.

Enjoy it here.

🌀✨🌹

Theresa Reed’s Tarot for Kids Deck features my favorite interpretation of The Lovers card and its teacher card, The Devil. Reinterpreted here as the more accessible archetypes of The Best Friends and The Bully.

Per esoteric scholar Mary K. Greer, these two cards #6 and #15 respectively in the major arcana, represent the intersecting principles of relatedness and choice.

The center picture above was fancily arranged with my own Tarot for Kids deck. The pictures on either end were taken from a general internet search because my own specific cards of The Best Friends and The Bully are missing from my deck!

These are two of my favorite cards and I often pull them (on purpose, not shuffled) for individual study, so I wasn’t too surprised to find they weren’t with the rest, but I can’t ADHD remember where they are. A true tarot mystery. They’ll most likely reappear when I’m not looking for them and in that moment I’ll gasp out loud to myself half serious half silly, “¡AY no me lo creo! A message from the Universe?!”

Dear Aesthete,

For us true believers, wouldn’t you say that everyday has the potential to be Valentine’s day?

I say yes.

💖,

Your Gallivanting Facialist

P.S. One More Valentine

In the Works…

See you next Sunday!

Let’s meet on a bridge “between starshine and clay.”✌🏾

Published occasionally…or maybe never again. TBD! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is the only issue being sent out to all subscribers.

Other newsletters housed under this vertical as Venus of the VINE will go directly to paid subscribers. No previews will be sent out to free subscribers.

If you’re a paid subscriber and would prefer not to receive wine writing, you can opt-out from Venus of the VINE via “manage your subscription” while still receiving the regularly scheduled monthly newsletters from Venus of the Mind.

Greetings Gorgeous,

Venus of the VINE is a tentative experimental newsletter section on wine and whatever else is deemed as relevant to pairing with wine. The possibilities are endless.

Like a finsta but on Substack.

The core mood is as follows…

Here, I go full rookie mode into playing around with writing about wine as a way to further my learning about it. NOVICE FUN.

Of course I’ll be staying on brand as an esthetician and drinking loads of water to curb the dehydration. ;)

Aside from this introduction, Venus of the VINE is only available to paid subscribers who are interested in joining along for the fun.

It is not a part of the regular monthly + solstice/equinox publishing schedule.

I will only be sharing whenever I’m graced by the muse of baby oenophiles.

¡Salud!🍷

Inside Today’s Missive for January 2026

Healthy Lymph is Pretty Skin: On the Semiotics of Skin

1. Manifest Beauty. The Cecily Braden Spa & Wellness Academy in Lakewood, Colorado.

2. The skin we’re in. Connecting the nervous system with skin and the neuroscience of touch.

3. A mini journey into manual lymphatic drainage. Foundational info and resources for further learning.

4. The body as a conduit.

5. Last Looks

- A peak into new tools, products, and happenings over at Ivana Martínez Studio.

- A reading list themed around small-business ownership and notes on lessons from the beauty industry patterns of 2025.

OF NOTE: Your favorite facialist was recently featured in The Carrington Collection! It was a pleasure being interviewed by Carrington Epperson for her lifestyle publication. We had a delightful chat about the intersection of ethics and esthetics. I will be incredibly meta and quote myself from the interview because it’s the perfect introduction for today’s newsletter:

What are your predictions concerning the future of skincare?

- when it comes to the future of skincare as it pertains to markets, I have no idea. I am not in the business of beauty industry forecasting. I am in the business of skin whispering.

In my personal practice as a working facialist, I see the future of skincare as ancient. What will matter long term is what has mattered since the beginning of our species but long before we even put language to it: lymphatic flow, a balanced skin microbiome, and approaching the skin first and foremost as an organ of protection that is in constant communication with our nervous system (central and bilateral); regulating everything we experience across the spectrum of pleasure to pain and safety to fear.

Every person is a distinct universe housed within a marvel of evolution. I believe skincare offerings should honor that marvelousness. In my little sliver of the world out here in Northern Virginia, inside Ivana Martínez Studio what will always be relevant is tailored and timeless skincare.

Read the entire interview here: The Intersection of Ethics & Esthetics

Healthy Lymph is Pretty Skin: On the Semiotics of Skin

Manifest Beauty

I live most of my days around the Potomac River, between Northern Virginia and D.C. In this life I’ve gone further east than west. A few weeks ago a longtime client and I were chuckling over the fact that I was once in Jerusalem for a wedding but until recently I have never crossed over the Mississippi, “Has been to the the Dead Sea but never L.A.” my client - originally a Cali girl - observed teasingly.

This past November I finally went west of the Mississippi. I flew out to Denver, Colorado not to manifest a mythical destiny but to expand my expertise, returning from the suburb of Lakewood with an internationally accredited certification from the Cecily Braden Academy as a specialist in manual lymphatic drainage (MLD) of the face and neck.

I spent all last summer and a good chunk of last autumn studying for this week-long intensive followed by an hours long exam. The exam consisted of two parts: 1) a hand-written short answer portion covering history, theory, anatomy, physiology, and case study observations; no multiple choice. 2) a hands-on practical where we performed the classic MLD sequence under observation. Three students performed the full sequence on three other students as models and then we switched places.

My Lyft driver got lost on my first day so when I walked in class had already started but I nonetheless was greeted by glowing and smiling faces inside our classroom. The estheticians in last fall’s cohort were all so kind and intellectually generous. Everyday I was inspired to be around other like-minded practitioners who care about integrative and wholistic practices within their treatment rooms. Each esthetician had a unique story and path into esthetics which made for lively conversations plus valuable shared insights.

The Skin We’re In

Ashley Jo Press, a luminary in the world of wholistic esthetics, was my teacher for this intensive. I am lucky to have always had stand-out teachers at every life season and this certification was no exception.

On our first day she opened the lecture by noting that “the skin is the nervous system turned inside out.” I would return to this comment later during one of our first Q&A portions because I intuited there was more to explore and I wanted to go deeper. Even without explaining, what Ashley said made sense. Everything from blushing, to goosebumps, nervous sweating and other reactions indicate this as a common sense observation and yet, I’d never heard it articulated in such a succinctly evocative manner. What was the actual physiological connection?

Ashley went on to explain that in-utero, our skin and nervous system develop from the same fetal tissue known as the ectoderm, one of three primary embryonic tissues. INSANE. But also, MAKES SENSE. My brain lit up like a winning casino machine as suddenly other related connections from my early days of beauty school over a decade ago were foregrounded once again.

Back in my hotel room, during a study time tangent I revisited one of my favorite video playlists on the neuroscience of touch and how it connects to communicative processes. In a screen-driven world, tactility is diminished but this sense remains at the core of being alive and processing our experiences of aliveness.

From that train of thought, I made my way over to an article published by Penn State’s extension blog, Touch - Why We Need It, and found myself considering just how important consensual familial affection, safety affirming touch, and loving expressions are for longterm wellbeing. Care for the babies! Hug your kids! Hold hands with your friends! Cuddle with your pets! Wash your body with intention while reminding yourself that you are loved by you!

A Mini Journey into Manual Lymphatic Drainage (MLD)

It was back in 2012 that I first learned about the lymphatic system, how to support it, and its massive importance to immune function, metabolic function, and just about every other major process our cells undergo in their life cycle. It was also over a decade ago in beauty school where I studied with teachers who took traditional Chinese medicine and Indian Ayurvedic medicine seriously. From my trade school teachers who had studied other health traditions, I was gifted some introductory knowledge about interstitial fluid and would later revisit those gifts while studying with Ashley Jo in Colorado.

Interstitial fluid exists throughout the most granular spaces of the mammalian body, filling up the spaces within and between our organ tissues, spaces that many Western scientists long believed to be empty. Now they know better and have begun to language what other ancient health traditions have long observed: interstitial fluid acts like an organ itself and may very well be one. Today, in the West it’s called the interstitium and is being studied as a newly identified (possible) organ. I highly recommending listening to this fascinating podcast episode from NPR’s radio lab for more on the interstitium. This context is important because lymphatic fluid originates from within the interstitium.

When I was first in beauty school, mainstream Western science still considered it woo-woo-pseudoscience to claim that non-invasive manipulation of superficial lymphatic fluid could be supportive to whole body health. It was wacky to suggest activating the superficial lymph nodes through intentional and focused touch could unlock a host of positive whole body health results. Results like analgesic benefits, reduced inflammation, improved cognitive function, soothed vibrant skin, and better sleep. There were longtime exceptions to this resistance of course, like the Wittlinger Lymphedema Clinic in Austria which partners with the Dr. Vodder school.

I remember an esthetics teacher back then commenting about how many of her clients reported greater mental clarity in their day-to-day post facial. One client even started seeing her for weekly facials when she noticed that her persistent brain fog - a residual symptom of a previous traumatic brain injury - seemed to improve after every facial. What was my teacher doing in that facial? Vodder method manual lymphatic drainage of the superficial lymph nodes in the face and neck.

What’s the status of superficial lymphatic drainage in Western perspectives today?

Woo-Woo for the win!

See some emerging research below, specifically regarding brain health and lymphatics.

• Increased CSF drainage by non-invasive manipulation of cervical lymphatics

  • A 2025 open access paper detailing the results of new research showing the connective pathways between cervical-spine lymph nodes, our brains, and a burgeoning understanding of how non-invasive stimulation of these pathways can support longterm brain health and stave off age-related neurological disorders.

  • What’s wild is that wholistic beauty practitioners have intuited this very connection for decades because of lived practical experience with client feedback.

• The TLDR summary of the above paper: Facial Stimulation Clears Brain Waste and Boosts Aging Minds

• Unraveling the Secrets of ‘Chemo Brain’

  • “A new study by Jennifer Munson and Monet Roberts suggests memory problems and inability to concentrate following chemotherapy could result from poor lymphatic-system drainage in response to the cancer drugs.”

  • An easy and fascinating four minute read that illustrates just how vital our lymphatic system is.

Despite learning about the lymphatic system back in 2012, my true interest in lymphatic health was first peaked in the summer of 2023 while completing an esthetic oncology certification through Oncology Spa Solutions. We had to learn the placements of all lymphatic pathways since working with someone who’s had lymph nodes removed (especially common having had a mastectomy or lumpectomy) impacts whether or not we massage someone’s skin in a particular area, direction, and the kind of pressure used. This attention to lymphatics stayed with me and further deepening my understanding felt like the next right step in my evolution as a facialist.

Following up my esthetic oncology certification with studies at the Cecily Braden Academy after having first learned about lymphatics as a reluctant teen in beauty school - a full-circle intellectual homecoming.

The Body as a Conduit

In Colorado, during lunch one class day, I was struck by the following quote (middle picture above) that I saw printed on cards placed in the academy’s lobby:

Fast Fashion x Fast Beauty. The definition of fast skincare (fashion) is quickly producing inexpensive skincare (clothing) to meet rapidly changing trends. This approach prioritizes speed and cost efficiency, enabling retailers to bring new products (styles) to market in a matter of weeks rather than months.

In many ways, the professional practice of manual lymphatic drainage works antithetically to the demands of instant-gratification in our current world. Amidst an overculture obsessed with the speed of mass-produced experiences, Vodder method MLD is an oppositional service that requires slowness in order to deliver its benefits.

Rooted in esthetic craft and attention to physiological processes, the movements of Vodder method MLD are methodical, rhythmic, gentle, precise and intentionally patterned to stimulate the vagus nerve, a key pathway that regulates involuntary functions like breath, heart rate, and digestion.

Every facet of the Vodder method is directed towards calming the nervous system which is when optimal lymphatic flow can occur; progressive aesthetic results are prioritized over trendy superficial fixes. This methodology values the depth of each client’s unique physiological experience in the moment, which sets the stage for continued compounded benefits over the course of days after a session.

In class, during the practical portion of each day, we were always instructed to move our hands at the rate of the skin’s underlying tissue structure which varies from person to person - every face is unique. From this instruction, I began to conceptualize of MLD as a conversation with the body’s loose connective tissue. A peaceful conversation that brings extrinsic harmony to the face while nurturing a sense of vitality from within.

I also began to think of an MLD-focused facial as an experiential journey that gently leads to a process of softening into the self. This perspective arose from both giving and receiving the treatment everyday as part of training. Throughout the week it was exciting to note changes in my own body. Longtime personal pain points across my forehead and down along my upper trapezius were alleviated. I started my cycle the second day of class but for the first time in my life I experienced zero menstrual cramps. By the final day of class, even while still acclimating to a new altitude and the absurdly dry Colorado air, my skin looked brighter despite no new products being introduced. It should also be noted that Vodder method MLD is done on dry skin, so again, no new products were introduced to my skin during service, just intentionally light touch with technical precision along lymph-node pathways.

Inspired by our lectures and class conversations, in my notes from that certification week I wrote to myself that aging was a privilege, a process to work with and not against. In my notes I also reminded myself and marveled once again at how the body is a conduit of inherited, embodied, and studied knowledge. Knowledge that can only be accessed in states of calm, away from the noise of digital chatter, interpersonal expectations, and self-inflicted pressure.

With this all of this understanding, it’s my responsibility as someone’s facialist to facilitate a space of sanctuary. I do not know what they lived before arriving. I do not know what they will live after leaving. All I know is that during our time together, there’s the potential for them to feel safe inside their bodies as they tap into their built-in parasympathetic system for resting and digesting which supports longterm wellbeing.

What an honor to usher clients into a space that’s been attuned to unlocking their intrinsic potentiality. A little bit of pretty girl magic rooted in ancient methodologies, extolled by naturopathic practitioners, and now recognized by conventional science.

Curious to learn more about esthetics as a profession?

Esthetics 101 ⬇️

Last Looks

Pictured above, all the wholesale goodies I got to choose from at the Cecily Braden Academy, for my private studio practice. Facialist perks! So many wonderful tools to prep the superficial loose connective tissue for optimal lymphatic drainage as well as products that nourish, protect, and heal the skin.

As soon as I returned from Colorado I began integrating everything I learned into offerings both at my employer’s location and at Ivana Martínez Studio. In just three months, the feedback from clients in both spaces has been resoundingly encouraging. It has been deeply satisfying to see the short-term results plus compounded benefits of continued MLD-centric treatments overtime with clients and I’m delighted that my studio's waitlist continues to grow in response to solid word-of-mouth.

Many estheticians are generalists when it comes to lymphatic drainage but only a handful of us are facialists who specialize in the classic Dr. Vodder method of manual lymphatic drainage. While still new to this, I’m proud to now belong in the latter group as the lineage of Vodder method trained wellness practitioners is a special one.

This January marks three years of my return to esthetics after having initially left the industry in 2018 to do college and experience other kinds of labor beyond the beauty space. Now, as I lay the transitional foundation for pivoting into my business full-time, I’ve been contemplating the kind of mind-set needed to engage ethically with the world as a business owner.

Listed below are some of the titles that have left their mark on me as I continue to refine my studio’s ethos. Along with personal notes regarding several business analyses that have shaped my outlook on some major takeaways from the beauty industry patterns of last year. Plus, what I’ve been working on privately in studio.

Read more

Our book club will meet Tuesday, January 20, 3:30pm to 4:20pm EST via Zoom. We are currently reading The House of Beauty: Lessons From the Image Industry and are so lucky to be welcoming author Arabelle Sicardi who will join us live (online) in conversation about their book.

¡Feliz Día de los Reyes mi gente! 🥂Happy Three Kings Day!

Inside Today’s Beauty & Culture List

An Esthetician Recommends

Some goodies to enhance your hibernation season. From brain-care to skincare.

1. Recommendations for a vibrant mind.

2. Recommendations to free your hands from infinite scrolling.

3. Multipurpose recommendations to keep your skin soothed, smooth, and supple this winter, including an ideal product for windburn recovery.

Brain-care as in Books, Long-form Reads, Quality Listening, and Quality Viewing

Books

• A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce by Massimo Montanari

  • Quick, cute, delightful. Impossible to read without a smile on your face the whole time.

• The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell by Luca Turin

  • I’m obsessed with how Luca Turin explains everything ever. The science writing is so accessible that I’ve now hoodwinked myself into believing I could be a chemist for a major perfume house just from comfortably reading this one book.

• Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form by Rizvana Bradley

  • Hefty, mighty, trippy, will make your mind feel swole. Like a glute-pump but it’s a brain-pump. This award winning text was gifted to me by one of my spiritual sisters and I reach for it yearly around this time.

Long-form Reads

• Exploring the World of Margiela, the Hermès Years, by Susannah Frankel for AnOther

  • Three choice quotes

    • “Margiela preferred his work to speak for itself. He and the loyal inner circle of creatives with which he surrounded himself guarded his anonymity fiercely.”

    • “ - way ahead of his time, he was intent on the gradual building of a discreetly beautiful wardrobe for discerning women, of all ages, shapes and sizes, assuming, of course, that their budgets allowed. Pierre-Alexis prefers the adjective “costly” to “expensive”, he says with a smile.”

    • “Such nostalgia is rose-tinted. Critics were not universally enamoured with Margiela’s shows for Hermès when they were originally shown. Then, as all too often now, they were anticipating the shock of the new and, in fact, that shock was there but only those willing to look closely identified that. At Hermès, The Margiela Years it can be seen in all its glory. It is extraordinary not least for the fact that any one piece could be taken off a mannequin and worn today without looking even remotely dated.”

• Med Spa Nation: Why America’s Med Spa Boom is Raising Big Safety and Oversight Questions by Deanna Pai for Allure

  • Three choice quotes

    • “Like McDonald’s, people keep going to med spas despite what a lot of health care professionals say—fast filler, like fast food, isn't generally recommended by doctors.”

    • “ - the reality is that the majority of people who visit med spas do so without harm. One small survey published in the journal Dermatologic Surgery in 2023 found there was not a statistically significant difference between the rates of complications at med spas and doctors’ offices, though there was a numerically greater rate at med spas: 16.4% of med spa patients had at least one issue versus 11% of doctors’ office patients. These numbers get a little more interesting on a granular level: Minimally invasive skin-tightening procedures had a 77% complication rate at med spas compared to zero at doctors' offices.”

    • “America appears to be unfazed, for the most part, by any heightened risk that could come with visiting a med spa. As the standard of beauty shifted—lips got poutier, furrowed foreheads became taboo—med spas brought the look within reach. The public has had little interest in looking this gift horse in the mouth, and regulators have done little to control this whole new category of business that has managed to de-medicalize medical procedures in just a few years.”

• Who Was the Foodie? What it would mean to take taste seriously again, by Alicia Kennedy for The Yale Review

  • Three choice quotes

    • “This narrowing of attention—pleasure without context—marks a stark departure from the origins of foodie culture itself. The idea of a food lover used to carry a different meaning.”

    • “Here was a foodie framework insisting that pleasure and politics were inseparable—that you couldn’t celebrate the dish without understanding the system that produced it.”

    • “There’s a fundamental tension at the heart of foodie culture: everyone must eat, making food more universal than music or theater—yet class inequities shape how we do it, turning appetite into a marker of status. This is precisely why the term matters.”

• Your Favorite Jumbo’s Clown Room Dancer’s Favorite Meal by Lauren Bethke for L.A. Taco

  • At the very top of my travel bucket list now, after reading: 1) Go audition at Jumbo’s. 2) Do a food tour through L.A. visiting every spot mentioned in this write-up.

  • Three choice quotes

    • “I grabbed a bar seat—yes, the same bar where David Lynch once nursed a drink and scribbled out Blue Velvet.”

    • “One by one, the dancers sat with me. Sometimes mid-conversation, they’d hop up, glide onto the stage for their number, and return to continue debating taco trucks, sushi counters, and perfect bowls of pasta. At one point, the table next to me tapped me and said, “What are you writing about?” My eyes widened to see that the group was comprised of no other than Padma Lakshmi and Chef Melissa King.”

    • “The best gift you can give Valentina? Show up at Jumbo’s and drop some cash.”

Quality Listening

• Ian Schrager interviewed by Nadine Choe of The Stanza Podcast

  • Nadine Choe is a sharp interviewer who crafts a conversation that unfolds as a masterclass in creativity with hotelier maverick Ian Schrager.

  • I love how Schrager’s approach to business shows that intuition is a boon to entrepreneurship.

• Sonal Khullar interviewed by Katy Hessel of the Great Women Artists Podcast

  • I had the pleasure of briefly meeting Katy Hessel when she was in D.C. promoting her first book, The History of Art Without Men, and she is every bit as enthusiastically engaging in person as she is when hosting her podcast.

  • In this episode, Hessel and Dr. Khullar - a professor of South Asian studies at the University of Pennsylvania - have a rich and delightful conversation about global art icon Amrita Shel-Gill who once said “I can only paint in India, Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque and the rest. But India belongs only to me.” A Baddie™.

Quality Viewing

• Wong Kar Wai’s collection on the Criterion Channel.

  • Start with In the Mood for Love. SWOON.

• Desert Hearts directed by Donna Deitch, also on the Criterion Channel.

  • DOUBLE-TRIPLE FOREVER SWOON.

• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes directed by Howard Hawks on - you guessed it - Criterion.

  • I watched this on Christmas day with found family who’d come over (💖) and, THE LAUGHS WE LAUGHED. So good. Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe have phenomenal comedic chemistry while serving stunning looks.

Deprogram Your Hands from Infinite Scrolling

• YouHaul or YouGhost

  • Call your fruity friends over, open the wine, and have a good o’belly laughing level time with this conversation game. 1000/10.

• Intro Gua Sha Tool - Stainless Steel from Lanshin

  • Gua Sha yourself to the gods!

  • I’m always sending my gua-sha loving clients links from Sandra Lanshin’s YouTube channel and her specialized on-demand learning platform as well.

  • Several of the skincare products I recommend below pair nicely with an at-home gua sha ritual.

• Earth Woman Tarot Deck

  • I stumbled upon this deck while in Rome after having struck Libreria Aseq - an esoterica bookshop - off my list of places to explore because I didn’t think I’d have enough time to find it along with everything else I wanted to get to. Then, while doing a 1:1 food tour with Saghar Sarteh (book her the next time you’re in Rome) we turned a corner and there was the shop just waiting for me! Totally unplanned on Saghar’s part as I’d never mentioned the shop.

  • I’ve had several decks and this is the loveliest of them all. The deck’s explainer features interpretations in English, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese all in one compact booklet.

  • Use this deck to channel your guides, explore tarot as a secular tool of self-inquiry, or FAFO with a bit of magic.

Looking for the last beauty & culture list?

Over here ⬇️

Would you like to be enchanted?

Right this way ⬇️

Your Vetted Winter Skin Survival Kit

Every purchase listed below was self-funded as part of newsletter testing.

As a general practice, I research, review, and test for at least one month and up to three months before recommending anything to in-person clients. I’m taking the same thorough approach to skincare recommendations for readers with a membership to Venus of the Mind.

Nothing listed is an affiliate link. Nothing listed is sponsored. All are now official mainstays in my beauty cabinet. All products are vegan.

For reference - I have skin that is easily sensitized (eczema-prone), with a tendency towards dryness and hyperpigmentation. However, with the exception of one noted product not ideal for combination-to-oily/acne-prone skin, all other listed face and body products are suitable for all skin types.

• Monastery Attar Floral Repair Concentrate

  • Creates an elegant layer of protection over the skin before stepping out into the cold. Perfect if you’re in the market for a nourishing face-specific occlusive that will lock-in your humectants layered underneath and sink in seamlessly without leaving a goopy film like many occlusives do.

  • I’m currently in a season of experimenting with a couple esthetician founded brands as I play around with my own backbar set-up. This is one of those brands.

  • For all skin types.

  • Good for facial gua sha.

  • Tested since December 2025.

  • Yes, all of Monastery is vegan.

    • Fun fact: their squalene, found in this sumptuous body oil, is sourced from olives in Puglia, Italy!

• Monastery Lab Edition 008 Universal Balm

  • To soothe dry hands or chapped lips. I especially love massaging this into my cuticles, using this as a sealant over my lips after going in with a thin layer of moisturizer, and also to spot treat small eczema patches.

  • For all skin types.

  • Tested since September 2025.

• Violette_FR Boum-Boum Milk 3-in-1 Skincare Spray

  • What I first turned to while recovering in desperation from windburn and now I can never go back. I felt a difference in my skin immediately; as though every pore had sighed in relief. I then saw a difference in the quality of my affected areas over the course of one night’s sleep. That first night, after misting, I followed with my go-to eczema emergency specific moisturizer, and a thin layer of Monastery’s Attar Floral Repair Concentrate. Woke-up looking over halfway healed from just one application.

    • Also, this spray generously misted underneath Monastery’s Attar = a DIVINE base for facial gua sha. While I haven’t done facial gua-sha with this combo just yet because of my current windburn induced eczema situation, I can just tell that it would work so beautifully. When I first layered the two together over my face I squealed “OK GLIDE!” which meant that if I’d done that exact product combo on a client it would have been gua-sha time!

    • I last wrote about skincare in Letter from Puerto Rico where I detailed managing a heat rash. Now it’s windburn…I promise, my skin has good days and I’m not always managing a skin-emergency.

  • A moment for being granular and maybe pedantic but this is important!

    • This spray is marketed as a 3-in-1 serum-toner-moisturizer. When it comes to formulation, it is certainly a serum/toner. I say that it 100% soothes (which was important to me as my skin was reeling from windburn) and primes perfectly for optimal absorption of a moisturizer layered overtop. But it is not a classic moisturizer so it should not be used as a replacement for one. This would be better described as a serum-toner-primer with soothing anti-inflammatory and moisturizing properties.

  • Would not recommend for skin that is acne prone with a tendency towards heavy oil production.

  • Tested since December 2025.

  • Yes, all of Violette_FR is vegan.

• Aypa Bio Rescue Face Oil

  • The perfect booster oil to winterize your go-to moisturizer.

  • For all skin types. Yes, even combination to oily.

  • Good for facial gua sha.

  • Tested since November 2025.

  • Yes, all of Aypa is vegan.

• Dieux Skin Baptism Fragrance Free Gentle Gel Facial Cleanser

  • While reaching for a gel cleanser in the Mid-Atlantic winter may be controversial, I’ve been alternating between this and my usual oil cleansers because throughout these winter days I’ve been slugging every time I step out. Constant occlusion can be comedogenic (as in potentiates breakouts) so proper cleansing helps mitigate that. This cleanser will get everything off in one thorough go without stripping the skin. Remember: emulsify cleansers on your skin for a minimum of 60 seconds to ideally 90 seconds before rinsing off.

  • For all skin types.

  • Tested since November 2025.

  • Yes, all of Dieux is vegan.

• Soft Services Carea Cream Daily Softening Body Lotion

  • I LOVE A YEAR ROUND TRAVEL ADAPTABLE BODY PRODUCT. This is one such body product. Works in all four Virginia seasons, works in the cold Colorado desert, works during an autumn vacation and then a summer vacation in different regions of Italy. I should have packed this for Puerto Rico and maybe I wouldn’t have gotten a heat rash.

  • Especially good for dry or bumpy body skin but can be used by all skin types. Also an excellent option for anyone managing keratosis pilaris.

  • NOTE: by body, I mean all surface area below the chest, not including your face. The face includes chest, neck, ears, and chin to forehead.

  • This product is well past my one to three month testing range. I’ve been using it on/off for years. I can’t remember when I started, it’s basically a part of me now.

  • Yes, all of Soft Services is vegan.

Happy Hibernating Newsletter Hotties! 🩵❄️✨

Our book club for paid subscribers meets Tuesday, Jan 20, 3:30pm to 4:20pm EST via Zoom. We’re exploring The House of Beauty: Lessons From the Image Industry & are so lucky to be welcoming author Arabelle Sicardi who will join us online in conversation about their book.

Inside today’s Winter Solstice publication: the quarterly newsletter for all subscribers.

The Alchemy of Memory

1. Scent - LabSolue Perfume Laboratory in Rome, Italy.

2. Essence - Novice experimentation with fragrance in Fairfax, Virginia.

3. Solstice - Experiencing winter as a sensory portal.

4. Postscript - The official sound of my holiday and all quarterly newsletters in one place.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

_Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Scent

One of my favorite autumn/winter activities is time travel.

The new moon in Scorpio through Winter solstice is when I am most prone to revisiting all that was. I remember everything. I return to my past and sit with her a little longer. It goes without saying, then, that this November into December my amygdala has been getting lots of mileage back and forth across the ether.

In other life seasons, photography, literature, music, or movies have been my preferred methods of transport. This year, fragrance has been my vehicle of choice and it’s proven to be a deliciously volatile accelerant through time.

Lately, I’ve been returning to September of this year. Specifically to LabSolue Perfume Laboratory’s Rome location. This perfumery operates as both a B2B and B2C entity which I think influenced the mind-shifting olfactive experience I had when visiting for the first time this past summer.

I’ve always been scent-oriented and come from a family of “sniffers.” My parents, my sisters, myself, we’re always pausing to smell in the kitchen while cooking, pausing to complement each other or our friends on how good their curls smell, pausing to pick outfits for the day that will only be complete after the appropriate complementary fragrance has been selected. Whenever I take my canine child out, we meander together because I want to smell the forest behind our house just as much as he does. Yet, despite all of this personal context, I’d never spent a considerable amount of time thinking critically about scent until visiting LabSolue and now I can’t stop.

In Rome, as we sniffed around the shop together, the lab guides walked me through the company’s matrix of sourcing, creating, and supplying their fragrances. They honored my request to talk to me in Italian as I was in the country for the purposes of immersion and whenever we hit a bump in communication they would clarify in English before switching back over to Italian. The in-shop experience was so engaging that I went back a second time the following day. My limbic system wanted more, who was I to deny it?

My favorite version of me exists back there, in Italy. She’s gazing out the window of a Trenitalia railway car somewhere between Sarzana and Rome. Ivana alone, bumbling around in a third language, a foreigner blissfully divorced from all cultural context, belonging nowhere, bound to no-one, with only five contacts in the whole country.

Perhaps because I have always felt like a stranger in the U.S. my “home” country, to spend time in an actual “foreign” country as a stranger comes naturally. When I returned to Italy for a third time this past September my foreign-ness fit like a tailor-made glove. Moving around as an outsider felt good and I loved who I became away from the familiarity of home: an Ivana who was braver, more observant, determined and kinetic, yet simultaneously leisurely.

Every time I adorn myself in Ambra Grigia, I call that version of me into the now. Transposing her out of my past and into my present. Transmuting myself into her future. Bit by bit until we inhabit the same corporeality.

Self alchemy, the only way to craft the life I want most. A process born out of equal parts necessity and desire.

Essence

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

_Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Essence and spirit are often treated as synonyms but I consider essence to be the quality of a spirit. The spirit distilled. Whether talking about adding essences to a drink that uses spirits, or parsing through an overwhelming array of essences versus toners, rejecting gender essentialism, or leafing through esoterica, essence deserves its own consideration.

This December, as part of my private solstice celebration week, I took myself to DIY Scent Studio for the studio’s 2.5 hour Perfume Intro and Creation Class. This Virginia studio also offers open perfumery hours. While in class, I eavesdropped on a patron who was making his way through new materials the owner had sourced upon his request as he’d booked time to come in and blend some personalized Christmas gifts. How cool!

Before even touching the perfume organ, Sherry - one of the studio’s co-owners - took me through a historical overview of perfumery from what is known about ancient ritualistic practices using scent up through what is now understood about how human olfactory sensation works. She also offered some insights into the craft and chemistry of perfumery rooted in her own knowledge as a business person, student, and perfumer.

As Sherry spoke, she made a point to remind me of the Latin word perfume, meaning “through smoke.” This definition made its way to the forefront of my mind when it came time to conceptualize my own perfume blend as I imagined myself in a temple working with incense, crafting a series of sensorial offerings to a god named Life.

Offering is the name of my first blend. It’s playful yet weighty and warm opening with notes of bitter orange and anise that mellow out into sugar, then fig, before drying down to a base of caramel, tobacco, and cocoa. I loved it from the jump.

Reception is the name of my second blend and I approached its creation with the goal of blending a “light and distinctive” fragrance, but the result was something else entirely: an opening of black pepper layered over a middle note of cannabis before drying down into a base of smoke spice, rain, and wood incense. Sharp, severe, spicy, messy and unforgettable, all before softening into a curious whisper - kind of like life.

I am undecided about this latter fragrance much like how I am undecided about which adventures I want to craft for myself next in 2026. With Reception, the longer it lingers on my skin I am both enticed and repelled by what I created. Though not my original intention, perhaps the polarity means I succeeded? Unlike an offering which is one-directional in its orientation of service, isn’t the essence of a reception about the push-pull of give and take? When humans believed in gods, giving offerings was tradition but there was always uncertainty in whether or not the gods received said offerings with acceptance. Nonetheless, even with their reception in limbo, the offerings had to be made because the gods demanded it. Just as Life makes its demands.

Solstice

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

_Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Winter Solstice delineates the transition from autumn to winter as the longest period of darkness within a 24-hour cycle. Every day after that, the light lingers a little longer until we wake up in spring.

Spring Equinox will bloom into Summer Solstice giving us the longest day of light in the year until bit by bit summer melts into Autumn Equinox and fall descends us into Winter Solstice once again.

The longest night gives way to the longest light with all the threads of our lives weaving themselves through seasonal portals along these cycles.

Where to next? Only way to find out is to sense through winter’s darkness. I’ll be sniffing my way through, smelling every proverbial rose, learning along the way how to embrace each thorn with my soft animal body.

P.S.

Ella Fitzgerald is the official voice/sound of my holiday. Her medley of We Three Kings + Little Town of Bethlehem is stellar.

This year’s previous quarterly essays can be found below.

Autumn Equinox 2025

Summer Solstice 2025

Spring Equinox 2025