Every morning that you wake up is a gift. Every moment of consciousness is a gift. Even the simple fact that you are capable of assigning meaning to your experiences, of creating beauty from ordinary circumstances, is a gift. Yet so many people move through their lives as though living were an obstacle to overcome rather than an experience to inhabit.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time waiting for life to begin.

We wait for the vacation, the wedding, the promotion, the dinner reservation…

We wait for Friday.

We wait for summer.

We wait for the next chapter.

In the meantime, entire portions of our lives are discarded as insignificant. They are treated as things to get through, things to rush through, things to complete before the real moments arrive. I think this is one of the greatest mistakes a person can make.

The key to romanticizing your life is not found in extraordinary experiences. It is not found in travel, grand gestures, or dramatic reinventions. It is found in the moments that you have already decided do not matter.

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Most people divide their lives into what I would call main moments and supporting moments. The main moments are the things we anticipate. They are the events circled on the calendar. They are the experiences we build up in our minds and look forward to for weeks or months. The supporting moments are everything else. Making breakfast. Taking a shower. Getting dressed. Reading before bed. Brewing coffee. Choosing a perfume. Watering plants. Folding linen napkins. Walking to the market.

The tragedy is that people treat these supporting moments as if they exist only to serve the main moments.

Consider something as simple as preparing for a dinner party. Most people view the evening itself as the event and everything that precedes it as an inconvenience. The shower, the skincare, the music playing in the background while they get dressed, the process of selecting jewelry, steaming a dress, pouring a glass of wine while doing their makeup…these things are rushed through because they are seen merely as preparation.

But what if that understanding is completely backward?

What if the preparation is not separate from the experience?

What if it is part of the experience?

In fact, I would go even further than that. I would argue that these so-called supporting moments are not supporting moments at all.

They are rituals.

And rituals deserve reverence.

A ritual is not simply a task repeated over time. A ritual is an action that has been elevated through attention. It is a deliberate act that acknowledges the significance of something. Religious traditions understand this intuitively. There is a reason ceremonies exist. There is a reason sacred objects exist. There is a reason people move carefully through ritualized spaces and ritualized actions. Ritual slows us down. It forces us to pay attention. It reminds us that certain moments deserve our respect.

The same principle applies to everyday life.

Getting ready for a dinner party should feel ceremonial. Making tea should feel ceremonial. Setting the table should feel ceremonial. Reading before bed should feel ceremonial. These moments are not obstacles standing between you and life. They are life.

The problem is that modern people have become obsessed with efficiency. We are constantly attempting to eliminate friction, reduce time, optimize routines, and compress experiences into the smallest amount of space possible. We want the fastest route, the quickest solution, the shortest process, the most convenient option.

In doing so, we accidentally remove much of what makes life meaningful.

We have become so concerned with arriving that we no longer appreciate preparation.

There is a reason afternoon tea feels romantic.

Objectively speaking, it is one of the least efficient ways imaginable to consume a beverage. It takes longer. It requires more preparation. There are additional objects involved. There is ceremony where none strictly needs to exist.

And yet that is precisely why it feels special.

The tea is not the point. The point is the ritual, anticipation, attention, and beauty.

Every ritual is ultimately an act of respect. It is a way of communicating that something matters enough to deserve your full attention. When you rush through getting ready for an evening out, you diminish the experience before it even begins. When you allow yourself time to enjoy the preparation, however, the experience becomes richer. The anticipation deepens. The significance grows. You begin participating in the beauty of the event long before you arrive.

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This is why I believe that one of the most important ingredients in a romantic life is time.

Time should be holy.

Not productive. Not optimized. Not conquered.

Holy.

Whenever people talk about romanticizing their lives, they often focus on aesthetics. They focus on candles, flowers, beautiful clothing, expensive hotels, and charming cafés. These things can certainly contribute to a beautiful life, but they are not the foundation of one.

The foundation is time. A person cannot romanticize their life while rushing through it. Beauty requires attention, and attention requires time.

The dreamlike quality that people often associate with a romantic life is impossible to achieve when every hour is scheduled to capacity. We have become convinced that getting the most out of life means fitting as many experiences as possible into a day. The result is that every experience becomes less memorable than the one before it. The mind becomes overwhelmed with stimuli. Details blur together. Moments lose their distinction.

Beauty lives in details, and details require space.

If you want your life to feel richer, slower, and more meaningful, the solution is often not to do more. It is to do less and experience it more fully.

Ritual is one of the ideas that eventually led to the creation of Solenne.

If beauty is cultivated through repetition, then the objects we return to every day matter. The first Solenne ritual is currently in development and will be released in limited quantities.

Join the waiting list to be among the first invited into the ritual.

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The advice is usually some variation of the same thing. Create a Pinterest board. Save outfits you like. Find a celebrity whose style you admire. Determine your color palette. Maybe take a personality test. Then, if all else fails, choose one of the many aesthetics currently being sold online and begin decorating yourself accordingly.

The problem is that none of these things actually answer the question.

An aesthetic is not something that can be purchased, assembled, or selected from a catalogue. It is not a costume, nor is it a trend. It is not a collection of objects that happen to belong to the same visual category. If it were, everybody would have a compelling aesthetic, and yet most people don’t. What people are usually searching for when they search for an aesthetic is not an aesthetic at all. What they are searching for is identity. They want to know who they are and, perhaps more importantly, how to express that person outwardly.

This is why so many people end up disappointed when they adopt an aesthetic they found online. The clothing is correct. The furniture is correct. The colors are correct. Everything appears to be in its proper place, and yet something still feels wrong. The aesthetic feels borrowed. It feels like a performance. It feels incomplete because it was built from appearances rather than meaning. People often mistake aesthetic for a visual formula when it is really the visible expression of a life.

Real aesthetic is not created from the outside in. It is created from the inside out.

Your aesthetic is the visible result of everything that has influenced you throughout your life. It is the accumulation of your interests, your fears, your aspirations, your memories, your ideals, the places you love, the books you return to, the people you admire, the periods of history that fascinate you, and the questions that refuse to leave you alone. Long before aesthetic becomes visible, it exists as a collection of influences quietly shaping the way you see the world.

In other words, your aesthetic has a history.

This is why I believe one of the best ways to discover your own aesthetic is not by studying influencers, trends, or mood boards. It is by studying art. Art teaches us something that aesthetics content rarely does. It teaches us where beauty comes from.

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Artists understand something that many people forget. They understand that nothing appears without a cause. Every color, every shape, every gesture, every expression, every material choice, and every compositional decision is connected to something larger than itself. Nothing is wasted, and nothing is arbitrary. Even the smallest details often point toward a larger idea, influence, obsession, or belief that exists beneath the surface of the work.

The deeper I have studied art history, the more convinced I have become that aesthetic follows the same principle. Form follows meaning. Things look the way they do because of what they are attempting to express. Beauty does not emerge from nowhere. Beauty always comes from somewhere.

The easiest way to understand this is to look at artists. Not because artists are special, but because artists leave evidence behind. Their paintings become records of what they valued, feared, desired, admired, and believed. They reveal things about their creators that even the creators themselves may not fully understand. Art has a funny way of exposing us. Artists often believe they are creating paintings, but in reality they are creating self-portraits.

Not literal self-portraits, of course. Most of the time they are painting landscapes, lovers, strangers, saints, kings, flowers, rooms, or abstractions. Yet somehow they always end up revealing themselves anyway. Their obsessions, fears, desires, and worldviews inevitably find their way into the work. The painting becomes a reflection of the person who made it, whether they intended it to or not.

The same thing happens with aesthetic.

People often assume that aesthetic is something they choose, but aesthetic is really something they reveal. The reason certain colors appeal to you, the reason certain historical periods fascinate you, the reason certain interiors make you feel at home while others leave you cold, all of these preferences originate somewhere. They have roots. They are connected to experiences, influences, memories, and ideals that have been accumulating throughout your life.

If you want to understand your own aesthetic, you must first understand those roots. Before asking what aesthetic you should have, it is worth asking a different question entirely: what has been shaping your sense of beauty all along?

Take Gustav Klimt.

One of the most common descriptions of Klimt’s work is that it is decorative. People see the gold leaf, the elaborate patterns, the ornamentation, and the luxurious surfaces and assume that the beauty of his paintings comes from decoration alone.

This is a mistake.

Nothing in Klimt’s work is decorative in the shallow sense of the word. The gold did not appear because he wanted something beautiful to look at. The geometric patterns did not appear because he needed to fill empty space. The sensuality of his portraits was not accidental. Every decision was connected to something larger.

Klimt was deeply influenced by Byzantine mosaics. Their shimmering gold surfaces fascinated him, and their influence can be seen throughout his mature work. When he incorporated gold into his paintings, he was not simply decorating a canvas. He was referencing an artistic tradition that stretched back centuries.

Already, we can see how context begins to shape aesthetic. The gold means something. But perhaps even more interesting than the gold is the intellectual environment in which Klimt lived.

Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century was one of the most fascinating places in Europe. Artists, scientists, physicians, philosophers, and psychoanalysts were all grappling with a similar question: what lies beneath the surface of human behavior?

The unconscious was becoming a subject of intense fascination.

Sexuality was becoming a subject of intense fascination. Human desire was becoming a subject of intense fascination.

These ideas were in the air. They were being discussed in salons, universities, cafes, and private gatherings. Klimt absorbed them just as any artist absorbs the world around him.

Suddenly, his paintings begin to look different.

The expressions, gestures, and symbolic patterns become more significant.

Even the famous circles and rectangles that appear throughout works such as Adele Bloch-Bauer begin to carry meaning. Many art historians interpret these forms as symbolic representations of masculine and feminine forces, references to fertility, sexuality, and the psychological themes that occupied Viennese intellectual life at the time.

What fascinates me about Klimt is not simply that he painted beautiful things. It is that his beauty had a foundation. It emerged naturally from his influences, his interests, the conversations happening around him, and the ideas he could not stop thinking about.

That is what makes it convincing.

And I think this is where many people go wrong when searching for their own aesthetic. They begin with appearances when they should begin with ideas. They begin with outcomes when they should begin with influences.

They ask what they should wear before asking what they admire.

They ask what colors suit them before asking what moves them.

They ask what aesthetic they should adopt before asking who they are.

The artists never worked that way: the aesthetic came last, the philosophy came first.

If Klimt teaches us that beauty requires context, Francis Bacon teaches us something perhaps even more important. He teaches us that aesthetic is incapable of hiding who we are.

Bacon’s work is some of the most disturbing art ever created. His figures scream. Their faces dissolve. Their bodies twist, distort, and seem perpetually caught somewhere between formation and destruction. His paintings are often violent, claustrophobic, and deeply unsettling. They feel as though they exist in a world where flesh itself has become unstable. Yet despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, his work is extraordinarily convincing. Nobody has ever accused Francis Bacon of being superficial. Nobody has ever looked at one of his paintings and thought that he was simply following a trend. Every canvas feels authentic because every canvas feels inseparable from the life that produced it.

Everything that shaped Bacon eventually found its way into his work. His difficult relationship with his father, his experiences of humiliation and rejection, his homosexuality, his fascination with violence, his attraction to risk, and his observations of post-war Europe all became part of the visual language he developed. Even his love of gambling found its way into his paintings. This may sound strange at first, but one of the things Bacon spoke about repeatedly was chance. He loved uncertainty. He loved accident. He loved the idea that a painting could become something other than what he originally intended. Rather than meticulously planning every detail, he often approached painting as a kind of encounter with unpredictability, allowing the process itself to determine where the work would go.

Once you know this, you begin to see it everywhere. His figures rarely feel still. They seem caught in motion, suspended in some fleeting and unstable moment. Faces blur, bodies stretch and distort, and forms appear to be simultaneously forming and disintegrating. Everything feels temporary. Everything feels uncertain. Everything feels as though it exists only briefly before disappearing. There is a remarkable sense of movement in his work, but it is not the graceful movement we might associate with dance or beauty. It is the movement of anxiety, pain, confusion, desire, and vulnerability. Bacon painted people the way life often feels: unstable, unpredictable, and difficult to comprehend.

This is one of the reasons I think his work remains so powerful. Bacon understood that there are certain experiences that resist language. Grief does this. Fear does this. Desire does this. There are moments in life when human feeling becomes so overwhelming that words seem inadequate. We struggle to describe what is happening inside of us because there simply are no words capable of containing it. Bacon painted those moments. He painted what it feels like to suffer. He painted what it feels like to be overwhelmed by existence. He painted what it feels like to be trapped inside a body and subject to all of the chaos that comes with being human.

Even his influences become visible if you look closely enough. Bacon admired Picasso enormously, and although their work differs dramatically, Picasso’s influence is impossible to ignore. Picasso’s willingness to distort reality in pursuit of something deeper gave Bacon permission to do the same. The abstraction, the fragmentation of form, the refusal to accept appearances at face value…all of these concerns can be traced back to artists who came before him. Once again, context explains everything. The aesthetic did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a life, from a series of influences, from particular experiences, and from ideas that Bacon could not stop returning to.

This is precisely why I think so many people struggle when attempting to develop a convincing aesthetic of their own. They focus entirely on appearances while ignoring the forces that create appearances in the first place. They copy hairstyles, clothing, interior design, social media aesthetics, and entire lifestyles, hoping that by assembling the correct collection of visual signals they will somehow arrive at a compelling identity. Yet something almost always feels wrong. The result resembles an aesthetic, but it rarely feels authentic. It feels borrowed. It feels imitated. It feels as though somebody began with appearances and worked backward, when every truly memorable aesthetic develops in the opposite direction.

Imagine trying to recreate Francis Bacon’s aesthetic without understanding anything about Francis Bacon. Imagine painting distorted figures because they look dramatic or interesting. Imagine copying his color palette because it feels emotional. Imagine reproducing his compositions because they appear unique. The result would almost certainly feel hollow. It might resemble Bacon’s work on the surface, but it would lack the thing that made his work worth looking at in the first place. It would lack the spirit behind it.

Spirit is what makes aesthetic convincing. The most memorable aesthetics are never assembled from trends, nor are they the result of somebody selecting a visual category and attempting to inhabit it. They emerge naturally from a way of seeing the world. They are the visible consequence of values, interests, fears, desires, memories, and ideas that already existed long before anybody considered what color to paint a wall or what style of clothing to wear.

That is what makes Francis Bacon such an important artist to study. Whether one loves his work or hates it, every painting feels honest. The aesthetic is inseparable from the man who created it. His worldview became visible. His life became visible. His obsessions became visible. In the end, the paintings reveal exactly who he was.

Great aesthetic should do the same. It should not conceal who you are. It should reveal you.

If Francis Bacon teaches us that aesthetic reveals the inner life, then Tamara de Lempicka teaches us that aesthetic can become the spirit of an entire era.

Few artists have become so synonymous with a particular moment in history. Lempicka painted during the Roaring Twenties, a period defined by glamour, excess, confidence, luxury, and transformation. Women’s roles were changing. Ideas about beauty were changing. Society itself seemed intoxicated with possibility. It was a world that felt simultaneously permanent and fleeting, as though everybody understood that they were living through something extraordinary but knew it could not last forever.

That feeling is everywhere in her work.

When people first encounter Lempicka’s paintings, they often focus on the luxury. They see expensive clothing, elegant women, polished surfaces, and a kind of self-assurance that seems almost larger than life. But what makes her work so memorable is not the luxury itself. It is the conviction behind it. Her subjects do not merely possess confidence; they embody it. They occupy space with certainty. They appear as though they have fully accepted who they are and have no intention of apologizing for it.

This quality did not emerge from nowhere.

Like every great artist, Lempicka was shaped by her influences. One of the most significant was the Italian Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino. His figures possessed a sculptural quality, a smoothness that made flesh resemble polished stone. That influence appears throughout Lempicka’s work. The skin of her subjects often feels almost marble-like. Their forms are idealized, exaggerated, and monumental. They are not representations of ordinary people so much as visions of an ideal.

What fascinates me about Lempicka is that she understood something many people still struggle to understand today. Beauty is not merely about appearance. Beauty is about conviction.

When we look at her paintings, we are not responding only to color, composition, or technical skill. We are responding to a vision of life. We are responding to confidence, ambition, glamour, independence, and self-possession. We are responding to an artist who knew exactly what she admired and who built an entire body of work around those ideals.

This brings us back to the question of aesthetic.

What Klimt, Bacon, and Lempicka all demonstrate is that aesthetic is never created in isolation. Every great aesthetic has roots. It emerges from influences, experiences, values, interests, and ideas. The artists we admire did not begin by asking themselves what aesthetic they should have. They began by engaging deeply with the world around them. They paid attention to what fascinated them, what moved them, what frightened them, what inspired them, and what they believed to be worth pursuing.

The aesthetic came afterward.

This is why I believe so many people struggle to find their own aesthetic. They spend too much time studying appearances and not enough time studying themselves. They search for visual answers to questions that are ultimately philosophical. They ask what they should wear before asking what they value. They ask what style suits them before asking what kind of life they wish to create.

The truth is that your aesthetic is already forming, whether you realize it or not. Every book you return to, every city you dream about, every artist you admire, every object you keep, every piece of music you replay, and every ideal you refuse to abandon is quietly contributing to it. Your aesthetic is not something waiting to be discovered on a mood board. It is being shaped every day by the things you choose to pay attention to.

Perhaps this is why art is such a useful teacher. Art reminds us that beauty always comes from somewhere. It has a history. It has influences. It has a philosophy. The most beautiful things are never random. They are the visible expression of something deeper.

So if you want to find your aesthetic, stop looking for an aesthetic.

Look at art.

Look at history.

Look at what you love.

Look at what you cannot stop thinking about.

And then ask yourself a simpler question: if everything beautiful reveals what it values, what do the beautiful things in your life reveal about you?

Because living for beauty is not about surrounding yourself with beautiful things. It is about becoming the kind of person from whom beautiful things naturally emerge.

Why do we buy the things that we buy?

What do those things say about us?

How do they affect our behavior, our self-image, and our understanding of ourselves?

There has been much written about how we use objects to display personality, signal status, express religious or cultural affiliations, create a sense of home, and reaffirm who we would like to think we are. Nearly two hundred years ago, Hegel argued that human beings project themselves outward into the world. Our possessions become vessels for that projection. They become tools for self-knowledge and self-discovery. Through them, we locate ourselves in the world.

I think that’s true.

Our possessions say something about us.

Our environments affect us.

Even the most trivial and utilitarian object does.

I’ve written before about how beauty and ugliness affect us subconsciously, but I want to go deeper here.

I am a worshipper of beauty.

Much of my work is devoted to understanding how beauty and ugliness affect us, what happens when the material world is filled with one or the other, and why I believe we should rebel against the growing presence of ugliness in everyday life.

I spend a great deal of time trying to convince people that beauty is not a luxury. It is a value. It is something we must actively prioritize if we want to improve the quality of our lives.

Beauty used to be respected.

Now we’ve lost much of our reverence for it.

At the same time, we’ve also lost our connection with one another.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

More recently, I’ve started developing a theory about the beautiful and ugly objects we surround ourselves with.

I think objects are a lot like people.

In fact, I think the material world is filled with the ghosts of its creators.

Every object began with a human being.

Someone designed it.

Someone chose its materials.

Someone decided how much care should go into it.

Someone decided whether it would be beautiful or ugly, durable or disposable, meaningful or forgettable.

Their values, tendencies, priorities, and worldview become embedded in the object itself.

I don’t mean this as a poetic metaphor.

I mean it literally.

The fingerprints of the creator remain.

Once you begin looking at objects this way, it becomes easier to understand why I believe a loss of respect for beauty can become a loss of respect for people.

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If objects are like people, then our conduct toward objects begins to matter.

Consider the kinds of things that fill modern life.

Disposable.

Mass-produced.

Featureless.

Temporary.

When you look at such an object, why would you repair it?

Why would you care for it?

Why would you contemplate its design?

What is there to contemplate?

It’s just an object.

It was created to serve a function, and once that function has been fulfilled, it can be discarded and replaced.

If it disappeared tomorrow, you probably wouldn’t even notice.

That doesn’t sound like a particularly admirable attitude.

In fact, it sounds like a terrible attitude to have toward anything.

Imagine applying that same logic to another person.

What if friendships were judged solely by utility?

What if people existed only for their function?

What if relationships became entirely transactional?

What if someone became replaceable the moment they ceased being useful?

Many people will say I’m stretching the comparison too far.

Maybe.

But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as our environments have become increasingly disposable, many of our relationships have begun to feel disposable too.

We often talk about wealth, status, and materialism creating superficial people.

And that’s certainly true.

But I think there’s another problem that deserves more attention.

We no longer consider our things.

We are alienated from them.

Ugliness alienates us.

When something is ugly, we instinctively distance ourselves from it.

We stop looking at it.

We stop thinking about it.

We stop caring for it.

Objects flow into our lives cheaply, quickly, and in overwhelming quantities. They live among us like strangers.

We buy them because they’re affordable.

Or convenient.

Or trendy.

Then we forget about them.

And strangely enough, we seem to be doing something similar with people.

Relationships feel burdensome.

Commitment feels difficult.

Everything feels temporary.

Everyone feels replaceable.

Perhaps that is because we spend our lives surrounded by things that were never intended to last.

I’ve often wondered why we’re so willing to identify toxic people and remove them from our lives, yet we rarely apply the same standard to the objects around us.

Since antiquity, beauty and goodness have been deeply intertwined.

To encounter a beautiful object is, in some sense, to encounter a good friend.

To encounter an ugly object is to encounter something that drains your attention without giving anything back.

Perhaps a liar.

Perhaps a bore.

Perhaps a stranger whose presence leaves no impression whatsoever.

When I make videos encouraging people to get rid of ugly things, some assume I’m advocating materialism.

I’m not.

The point isn’t to accumulate more.

The point is to become more selective.

To become conscious.

To identify the things that degrade your environment and quietly diminish your daily experience.

Not because they’re expensive.

Not because they’re unfashionable.

But because they contribute nothing beautiful to your life.

If objects are like people, then beautiful objects are among the finest people we can choose to spend time with.

They are manifestations of someone’s highest ideals.

Every beautiful object is a small monument to human aspiration.

This is why museums feel sacred.

They are temples.

The greatest efforts of painters, sculptors, architects, craftsmen, and visionaries are gathered together in a single space.

When you walk through those galleries, the artists are looking back at you through their work.

They are extending a hand across time.

They are saying, “This is what I believed was worth creating.”

Beauty is deeply personal because, in many ways, beauty is a reflection of ourselves.

We create and collect things in the image of our ideals.

And perhaps poor taste develops when we lose faith in those ideals altogether.

Roger Scruton once suggested that people have stopped believing in beauty because they have stopped believing in ideals.

I think he was right.

A society that excuses ugliness is often a society that has lost hope.

A society that prefers the disposable begins to see itself as disposable too.

Beauty does something different.

Beauty creates belonging.

Earlier I said that ugly objects alienate us.

They remain physically present while feeling emotionally absent.

Like strangers living in our homes.

Beauty does the opposite.

Beauty makes room for us.

It reminds us that we belong here.

A beautiful room feels welcoming.

A beautiful painting feels companionable.

A beautiful object feels less like a possession and more like a friend.

A world that makes room for beauty makes room for you.

That may be the greatest gift beauty offers.

Human life is difficult.

It is chaotic.

It is often painful.

Beauty does not remove suffering, but it gives us somewhere to rest from it.

It transforms sorrow into music.

Loss into poetry.

Longing into art.

It lifts us, if only briefly, above the conditions of ordinary life.

That is why I become frustrated when beauty is discussed only in terms of appearance or unattainable standards.

People spend so much time talking about what beauty excludes that they forget what beauty provides.

Beauty provides hope.

Beauty provides comfort.

Beauty provides meaning.

And perhaps most importantly, beauty provides companionship.

If we began treating objects a little more like people, I suspect we would consume less.

You cannot genuinely care for hundreds of things.

Just as you cannot maintain hundreds of close friendships.

The fewer meaningful things you own, the more attention each one can receive.

The more gratitude you can feel toward them.

The more influence they can have on your life.

Everything started with a person.

Every object you encounter contains traces of someone else’s vision of the world.

You interact with those people every day, whether you realize it or not.

The question is not simply what objects you want in your life.

The question is which people you want influencing you.

Perhaps that is what living for beauty really means: choosing, day after day, to live among things that remind you of the highest version of yourself.

A person and their personality can be a work of art, but here’s the thing:
It is false that the most interesting people are just born that way. Sure, there are people that are truly exceptional and they have always existed that way. But I believe in the self made woman. I, myself, am a self made woman. It took a long time to get here.

A self made woman is someone who expands and evolves endlessly. I believe that through hard work you can be whoever you choose to be and do whatever it is you want to do. Life is far more malleable than people pretend it is. Most people simply stop shaping themselves.

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That being said, life is not so effortless for us self made women. Not in the beginning at least. There is such a thing as learned elegance where you can seemingly hide all of that work and make it appear like you were born with it. Sprezzatura.

Sprezzatura: the art of making highly curated, complex actions or styles appear effortless and natural.

However, you do have to learn. You do have to work for it. You want to be a one of one, not a one of a million.

A singularly individualistic person.

AKA: the only woman like you in the universe. This, my lovelies, takes effort. Effort exerted over a long period of time.

The beautiful thing is that this effort is self serving. It is one of the few disciplines where the work itself becomes pleasurable because you are building yourself into your own ideal. Your eye sharpens, your taste refines, your mind expands, and soon your life begins to reflect your interior world more and more.

This is why private cultivation matters so much. You have to put in the time privately, and learn how to integrate publicly.

A woman who really knows her craft understands that everything has to look like you didn’t try. It has to look like you just are. This is why you must practice and curate every day, so when you step out into the world, you already are.

Anyone that gets to observe your presence is lucky that they get to experience it.

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Ugliness, like any other pathogen, finds its way into our lives and slowly takes us over from the inside out. A sick society can be felt, much like sickness is felt in our own bodies. However, disease oftentimes doesn’t cause alarm until it becomes visual. Once it does make its way to the surface, it’s usually already in full swing. In a human being, this is represented by a bump a rash or legion. Out in the world, a disease takes the form of a structure. It can be a sky scraper, a work of art, a bridge and like disease within our bodies, a person can observe a building and recognize that it is foreign and invasive… that there is something wrong. I believe that ugliness is a disease, and I think it has pervaded our world. I think it has done this in many ways but for now, I’m going to limit myself to writing about the environment and architecture.

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On the most basic level, science will tell you that we respond to physical ugliness with revulsion because we instinctively believe that ugliness is an identifier of disease. Of course these studies are mostly referring to humans and animals physical attributes, I would take it one step further and say that ugliness can be an identifier of disease of the mind. Our architecture, and surroundings today reflect a sick society. Of course in a viscous cycle, the ugly surroundings that we create in turn cause us to conduct ourselves differently… for the worse. What starts out as one architect with an awful idea, an ugly idea, and maybe it’s a cost-efficient idea, maybe it’s an idea that can be executed quickly. Maybe it solves a whole variety of different functional issues, and therefore this person does not think that this idea is a bad idea, and they actually think they’re coming from a good place. This idea becomes manifested in a building. You could call it a pathogen buried in concrete. And so the years go by, and each person who passes by this building takes a little piece of that building with them, a little piece of that that hideous idea with them. That idea spreads because those people are affected by that building. Slowly but surely, the idea spreads to other people, and then you start to see a whole array of those ugly buildings, and what was once latent is now a full-blown infection.

Ugliness affects us. It affects us like a plague does. It behaves like a plague. I say that because once it’s understood in this way, it’s very easy to identify the stages of its progression and therefore figure out when it’s time to intervene, when it’s time to take action. By taking action, I mean bringing beauty back into our lives and prioritizing beauty. Beauty in a world which is plagued by ugliness is the cure, one that we can all afford, too. A little bit of beauty, or a lot, even a conversation about why we need beauty is enough to begin the work of the cure. There are many studies on human behavior in relation to ugliness and beauty, particularly when it comes to environment.

We have Roger Ulrich’s 1984 study, where patients recovering from surgery recover more quickly when they’re placed in front of a window with a scenic natural view. There is also Maslow’s study in 1956, where the ugliness or beauty of a room changes the way that a subject perceives energy and well-being in pictures of others, in headshots of people. Interestingly enough, this research only began around the 1950s onward, and Maslow said this himself in the introduction of the study I just mentioned, that the impact of surroundings and aesthetics on people had little to no research. It seems to me that people, for a long time, just intrinsically knew that beauty was a necessity. It didn’t matter if it was architecture in cities, or if it was a church, or if it was in their own home. A lot of beauty was tied to religion, but beauty’s also been a very clever and very useful political tool.

However, we live in a very different world now, don’t we? Our cities are larger, religious ties are weakening. Even politically, I think that people are confused and they seem to feel aimless. And of course, industry takes precedence over most things. It seems that we had forgotten that beauty was necessary to our general well-being, as if it was kind of hidden behind functionality and instant gratification. And while yes, there are other factors that are the cause of that, having disorder around you all the time, or boring buildings, ugly buildings, ugly environments, certainly contribute to a mental illness, mental dissonance. It isn’t to say that modern design does not have its pros: It definitely does. However, a lot of it can be quite minimalist and elegant, and that is often misunderstood and abused by the masses whenever it’s mass produced. Eventually, it’s defaced by laziness and selection of more widely appealing design, which favors less creative solutions and less tedious solutions to problems.

Now, it’s not even that these buildings are all hideous. The problem with most of them is that they are awfully boring. Beauty has always been something that stimulates us. Beauty is life affirming, thrilling, incomprehensible. It takes many forms. That’s why it inspires us to be better people. It inspires us to get out of bed. It surprises us. It gives us hope for a better world. Of course, boring doesn’t do that for you. Boring is a flat line, monotony, predictability, loss of interest, loss of hope. It is for this reason that I believe that boring surroundings within the category of ugly cause us great harm. Boring is a strain of dangerous disease. Boring is often called harmless, so it’s left unchecked, like many diseases. Boring, a cousin of ugliness, represents apathy, lack of drive, and eventually a kind of spiritual or metaphorical death, sometimes a literal death. There’s nothing harmless about that.

The Cut did a nice little article on the effect that boring buildings have on us. This article was talking about the massive Whole Foods that opened up on East Houston Street in Lower Manhattan, and how it negatively affected people who had to witness that and walk by it every day. They linked being surrounded by a growing number of boring buildings to higher stress levels and even a rise in ADHD. They talked about how boring surroundings lack the elements of turmoil and confusion that humans actually desire, because those are components of complexity and thrill; we even desire this from our architecture. All in all, it seems that variety is the healthiest mode of experience. Developer chic buildings do not have this. They are nonetheless boring, and they are boring as a byproduct of many things, like zoning requirements, building codes, cheap materials, cheap materials which are lightweight and can be shipped easily, design that is tried-and-true, generic, uncomplicated, which can be copied and pasted in just about any area with no intervention.

The Bauhaus and modernism in post-war Europe changed the game, possibly irreversibly. This modernism, (which sought to make living, goods, interior design, architecture more affordable) used new materials, which made it easier to mass-produce, mass-manufacture things, so that the average person could rebuild their life and change. It would change their outlook on life. But unfortunately, it is that sentiment that went so wrong. I think we can all agree on this, that even though the modernists had good intentions, they didn’t age well, and their designs are to blame for a lot of the problems that we face today. We are approaching a very dark, very ugly world due to their empathy. It isn’t to say that modern design was not good design at some point. It definitely was.

Now, when I say less creative, when I say the word disease, what building comes to mind when you walk down the street? Which building pisses you off more rationally maybe than others? What does it look like? What is it called? That’s something that I think maybe a lot of people don’t know. They don’t know what the name of that style is. And there are a few names for it, but one that’s quite popular is developer chic.

We’re talking about those housing complexes that seem to have popped up all over, which have notoriously made it difficult to tell which city you’re in because they’re all the same. Developer chic is used to describe this really awful trend in architecture. It’s a term that was coined by Kate Wagner. This breed of building is an unprecedented, malignant invasion on all that we hold dear.

So these buildings look the way they do and have a negative effect on us due to the fact that they are a result of urban planning, whose priorities are a reaction to housing issues, financial problems, and growing populations. So each construction’s only goal is really to house people, to do it cheaply, efficiently, quickly, which inevitably sounds like a band-aid fix to a much larger problem. And when buildings with this criteria become more and more prominent, they start to communicate something verging on nihilistic. If developers in the face of a humanistic problem continue to produce buildings that make us feel depressed and stressed, which are made cheaply and designed to be temporary, buildings which clearly have no appeal to our desire for beauty, what can that possibly say about the direction of our world, of where we’re going? We, as a society, will start to adopt the sentiment which these buildings communicate. What is that sentiment? It can be said as:

“Why even bother”

“Just whatever, I guess that’ll do”

“That’s fine”

Is that the sentiment? That’s what you want your buildings to look like? That’s what you want your buildings to communicate? Because that’s what they’re doing. This is what they scream at us all the time. It’s because of this that I even hate to call developer chic an aesthetic. It’s as close as you can get to non-aesthetic, because although these buildings are made for people, they do not feel like spaces intended for people. They lack the aesthetic hallmarks, the appeal to our senses, to our human walk of life, to beauty.

Beauty is known to have a profound personal impact on us. Beauty is not just subjective, but what we know to be beautiful is also an intimate statement about ourselves, who we are individually. It’s well known that when someone looks in the mirror and does not find themselves to be beautiful, a disconnect forms called dissociation. This dissociation causes us to lose ownership over our appearance. We look at that form in the mirror and we don’t identify with it. If we see ugly buildings all the time, if we are surrounded by more and more ugliness, we will stop identifying with these surroundings, which leads to a notorious sensation of isolation, which modern architecture is guilty of producing. So today, many of us look around and we do not see ourselves anywhere. We feel adrift, looking for a place to call home in places which are designated as housing, places that are supposed to be designed for us to feel at home. But why does that happen? These buildings are so obviously not built based on our desires, on our need for beauty and variety and thrill. So why do they look this way? Why do they look so ugly? The possible reason is because those who built them do not in fact consider us in them at all.

What I’m driving at is that we need beauty now more than ever. We don’t need the kind of beauty that isolates people, which is the other end of this spectrum, but we need a little more of it in the middle to balance things out. The more ugly buildings and ugly surroundings I witness, the more worried I get about those who have to live in them. People that don’t even know anything about architecture, that have no idea what looking at this kind of thing can do to them on a daily basis. I worry about what will change them. How much longer will they live before they come down with a case of the blues where they’re just so diseased enough to even ask what the point of it all is? I hear this in conversation with people all the time already, and with young people.

A society that rejects beauty because it’s too much effort is doomed. And with all of the diseases over the centuries that have taken the lives of billions of people, trillions of people, due to the lack of no known cure, I sure hope we can lift up our head to realize that the cure is right there in front of us, ready to be taken. Beauty is waiting for us. We need only reach for it.

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Nothing outside of you defines your value. There is no handbag, no brand, no man, no external symbol that creates your worth. Your value begins with you.

And when you truly understand that, something else becomes obvious: we take care of what we value. That means caring for your beauty, both inside and out.

Dress beautifully. Stay fit. Take care of your hair and skin. Learn how to present yourself well. But the exterior is only one part of the equation. Work on your inner world as well. Be curious. Be intelligent. Be kind. Be interesting. When your inner life becomes rich and thoughtful, that beauty naturally spills outward. It becomes visible in the way you speak, the way you move through the world, and the way you carry yourself.

Fashion is often misunderstood as simply a status symbol. Luxury brands and high-end clothing signal wealth or exclusivity in many cultures. But the deeper truth is that fashion is a tool. It is a way of expressing confidence, elegance, and self-respect.

Clothing doesn’t create the woman. The woman gives meaning to the clothing.

A friend once said something to me that I have never forgotten:

“Sometimes we’re digging deep within ourselves, and sometimes we just want to talk about our handbags.”

There is wisdom in that.

Life is not meant to be lived only in deep introspection, nor only in material pleasure. Both have their place. Some days we focus on our growth, our character, and our ideas. Other days we simply enjoy beauty.

A beautiful handbag.

A perfect dress.

A fresh manicure.

There is nothing wrong with investing in joy or adorning yourself with beautiful things. After all, your body is the one thing you will live in for your entire life. So how could it ever be a waste to decorate it? To celebrate it?

The real work is falling in love with the process of creating the woman you always wanted to become. Because the truth is this: along the way, you will lose parts of yourself. Old habits will fall away. Old identities will dissolve. But what replaces them will be far better. Transformation always feels like a kind of death before it feels like a rebirth. But it is worth it a trillion times over to go through the death and rebirth in become who you are meant to be.

And perhaps that is the real luxury: the freedom to consciously shape who you become.

As Dana Thomas once wrote:

“Not everyone reads poetry or listens to music, but every single person in the world gets up in the morning and puts something on. Whether you like it or not, that’s a statement about who you are.”

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It was the journal prompt question that had me stumped on a windy Tuesday morning. I had been staring at the blank page for 30 minutes, unable to answer. I didn’t know.

I’ve always carried a quiet sense of being different, not in a way that made me feel unloved, but in a way that made me feel like I was meant for something else. That difference led me on a lifelong path of self-discovery, creating my own happiness, rituals, and sense of home. This quest for meaning led me to study not only religions like Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism but also various areas of culture: art, ballet, classic literature, fashion, and history. I’ve sought to understand the beauty and complexity of the world in an effort to better understand myself. Whether it was striving for excellence in whatever I sought out to do or becoming the ultimate, well-rounded woman, I have always pushed myself, worked harder, and sought to stand out…believing that effort and discipline would make me special.

I’ve realized that my drive to excel and refine myself stems from a deep desire to create meaning in a world that often feels like it has none.

In a universe where everything means nothing, I’ve worked to make nothing mean everything.

And through it all, beauty became my language, my armor, and my sanctuary. It was and is a way to express who I am, find my place in the world, and create the identity I always longed for. For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived for beauty and truth. To me, beauty means maintaining myself well, surrounding myself with things that inspire and uplift me, and creating a life that feels as harmonious as a grand garden with fountains and perfectly trimmed hedges. Truth, on the other hand, has been my constant search for understanding: of the world, of people, of myself.

I learned early on that people don’t always want to hear the truth, especially when it comes to change. But I couldn’t settle for surface-level living or accept what was average or bare minimum. I often watched as others followed societal norms I couldn’t bring myself to accept: people pleasing, following the masses, and being content with what society says is the “American dream.” Instead, I created my own path, one that’s guided by intention and a commitment to uncovering what truly matters.

Life often feels like a game. A game where we’re always chasing the next level, convinced that happiness is just on the other side of achieving something new. When you’re on the outside looking in, it’s easy to believe that once you get “there,” everything will fall into place. Once I get the designer dress, I’ll feel worthy. Once I take my dream vacation, I’ll finally feel fulfilled.

But the truth is, everyone is playing their own game. And no matter what level they start at, they face their own unique challenges. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting at level one with nothing or at level thirty with every opportunity handed to you. Life will always demand growth, strategy, and perseverance to move forward.

The person dreaming of their first designer dress imagines it will solve their problems, while someone at level ten is overwhelmed by a closet overflowing with haute couture. The person longing for their first trip to Paris dreams of how transformative it will be, while someone at level five is dreading yet another plane ride to the same destination.

When you’re in something, you’re desperate to move forward.

When it’s gone, you ache to go back.

You would treat things differently if you knew it’d be the last time you got that experience. Most of us never know, until it’s over, that it’s the end. We live frivolously and complain about mundane things. Until one day, it’s all gone and everything has changed.

The secret is this:

Happiness isn’t about the level you’re on. It’s about how you approach the game. True peace and contentment don’t come from what you acquire or achieve but from the rituals, meaning, beauty and joy you create for yourself along the way. You will never be happy all the time. No one is “happy” all of the time, but you can find an unshakable sense of peace and confidence if you learn how to shape your life in a way that aligns with who you are and what you value.

This is where beauty becomes more than a look or a trend…it becomes a ritual, a compass, and a stabilizer. Beauty allows you to ground yourself in care and presentation that give you clarity, confidence, and self-trust. The way you treat your body, your space, and your image shapes the way you think and feel. Beauty becomes a form of mental discipline, a way to center your thoughts, elevate your energy, and create a life that feels both inspired and intentional.

Think about the most elegant women you know. They make it look effortless because, for them, it is effortless. They aren’t trying to look like something; they’re simply being who they’ve chosen to become. When you develop your relationship with beauty (whatever that looks like for you), it stops being a performance and becomes your nature. It’s one less thing you have to question, and that frees you to live with greater depth, freedom, and awareness.

Beauty has been more than an aesthetic to me; it’s been a way of crafting my identity, of aligning myself with the life I was meant to live. Through beauty, I’ve been able to navigate the world on my terms, using how I carry myself as both a shield and a key. I have been able protect myself from the harshness of some realities as well as unlock doors that might have otherwise remained closed.

But how did I get here? And how will you get where you want to go?

Stop for a moment. Pour yourself a cup of tea, light a candle, and settle into this space.

Let’s explore what it means to craft a life of elegance, truth, and purpose through beauty…together.

The rest of this writing is for patrons & founding members.

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Hello lovelies.

I’m writing again.

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In a world that values efficiency over elegance and speed over depth, choosing to live for beauty is an act of defiance. It is a statement. A commitment. A way of life.

When I tell others that my life purpose is to live for beauty, to live for art, for those things to take precedence over all the others which may challenge it, it’s often met with a lingering second of hesitation. Perhaps they think that I’m vain, or maybe they’re waiting for me to add something. I experience this liminal space of confusion and doubt because beauty and art are lofty things. They are ideas that are undoubtedly present among us, but hard to bring to earth because they did not originate here. So in order to find some kind of solid ground, I have to ask myself, all too frequently, why beauty? Why art? And what does it mean to live for those things? I mean, what does that mean in life, from waking to sleeping? What does beauty consist of?

From waking to sleeping, living for beauty can manifest in endless ways:

• It’s the way you dress, the elegance of your posture, the way you move through a space.

• It’s the scent of your fragrance lingering in a room, the soft hum of music accompanying your morning routine.

• It’s the care you take in choosing what you surround yourself with…the fabrics, the textures, the lighting in your home.

• It’s in your words, your gestures, the way you engage with the world: graceful, intentional, poetic.

Beauty, in its highest form, is not simply aesthetic; it is a way of being. It is refinement, it is taste, it is discernment. It is recognizing what is fleeting and ephemeral yet treating it with reverence.

To live for beauty is to resist mediocrity, to refuse dullness, to elevate everything…whether it’s a conversation, a meal, or a fleeting moment of sunlight catching in a glass of sparking water. It’s choosing softness in a world that can be harsh, choosing elegance in a world that values efficiency, choosing to create something beautiful even in the face of imperfection.

So, why beauty? Why art? Because they are the only things that elevate life beyond mere survival. To live for beauty means to recognize that beauty is the substance of life, not an accessory to it. It means treating beauty not as an indulgence, but as an ethos, a discipline, a guiding principle. Beauty is not passive. It is created, cultivated, chosen every day.

It’s Inspiration. That’s as dedicated as inspiration gets. My life is dedicated to this. My life is dedicated to figuring it out. And I don’t know if I could ever find anything else in this world that could convince me to dedicate my life. I could not care less about reality. Because I’m more concerned with what that beauty thing is all about. That’s what I think a good use of my time is.

This work is a living exploration of what the arts teach us about beauty, womanhood, discipline, and becoming.

-D

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