Beauty

"You look great,” my friend beamed at me as she opened her apartment door a few months ago. “Have you had Botox?” Of course I hadn’t. I’d had something that’s almost certainly far rarer — especially as a parent — in this age of ubiquitous beauty-on-demand services: eight solid hours of sleep, followed by a strong cup of coffee, followed by a ten-minute power walk through a New York City downpour replete with gale-force winds blowing in off the Hudson. Take that, injectable dermal fillers. Botox, it seems, is everywhere. Many of my acquaintances, even those barely old enough to remember Tamagotchis or Princess Diana’s funeral or that AOL dial-up tone, casually drop into conversation how overdue they are for an appointment with Doctor So-And-So.

Everybody wants to be beautiful, but very few people are. Think across the entirety of history. Empress Sisi, Cleopatra, Ginger Rogers, Jane Birkin. You could probably count the number of actually beautiful people on ten fingers. A lot of people are good-looking or fine. But beautiful is rare. Along with everything else that Generation Z feels entitled to — success, feeling heard, holding people responsible for their ancestral guilt — they also insist that we recognize their beauty (whether they have it or not). Their Instagrams are filled with beautifully taken photos, with beautifully poured lattes, on a beautifully curated grid. It doesn’t matter if they look like Shrek because it’s all done so damn beautifully.

For your perusal, I have spent a good chunk of my day surveying the moms in my life. My grandmother, my mother, my friends navigating the first throes of child-rearing. What would they delight in finding under the tree this year? “Sleep,” the new moms say. Well, I can’t help much with that. But I can recommend a bunch of excellent products. Delight the mothers in your life with a couple of items from this list (and if she’s really sleep-deprived, I’m telling you, buy the Lush pillow spray). Dyson Airwrap Styler Quite simply the item at the top of the wish list for every woman I surveyed while researching this gift guide. No extreme heat, beautiful salon-style hair in minutes.

The Dalai Lama said that if his successor were female, she’d have to be pretty. The internet freaked out. The Lama, the reincarnated head of the Buddhist religion and the household deity of the Hollywood left, was doubling down on remarks made in a 2015 interview with the BBC: ‘“If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive,” he says while laughing.’ The Lama, who was wearing his usual outfit of a loose orange robe with a red blanket casually thrown over one shoulder, was roundly critiqued at the time for these unfashionable remarks. Every woman on the internet crossed her digital arms and uttered exclamations of disgust.

My face is important. Your face is important, too. All our faces are important. That’s why I’d like to take some time to tell you about my beauty regime. As the youngest ever female congresswoman, I’m delighted that I live in an era where women can be both into mascara and Martin Luther King, serums and Shakespeare. You know what I call that? Freedom. I double cleanse, systematically. This means washing my face twice, to remove all the impurities. There’s nothing wrong with impurities, but do I want them on my face? No. Do you want them on your face? No. Scrub scrub scrub, with your muslin cloth. I aim for that sort of ‘I just owned Trump’ kind of a glow.