Time Bomb encapsulates everything I have learned over the years and wished I could find in a capsule collection. It’s the absolute best skincare and body products I could envisage – and I am fussy. I am now able to indulge my love of beauty products and call it research.
Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.
The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one’s soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive – you are leaking.
Sometimes, though only in my most unguarded moments, I can still think of Annette Winters as my first love. At fifteen, she was tall, slender, very dark: an intelligent, sly girl possessed of what I think of now, though I didn’t think of then, as a kind of debatable beauty.
If you walk into any magazine store, I guarantee that nine out of 10 covers will feature white, blonde, blue-eyed, slim women because that’s still the ideal of beauty. When a black or Asian figure shows up in a fashion magazine, she’s the exception, not the rule.
I had seen the ballet of ‘Swan Lake’ as a child but it was as an adult, when I saw a production featuring Erik Bruhn, that I first noticed how significant a part the ever-present threat of violence played. This juxtaposition of great beauty and grace with a backdrop of pure evil stayed with me for years.
It’s great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.
Something in the human psyche confuses beauty with the right to be loved. The briefest glance at human folly reveals that good looks and worthiness operate independently. Yet countless socializing forces, from Aunt Clara to the latest perfume ad, reinforce beliefs like ‘If I were pretty enough, I would be loved.’
Tuscany is so full of history and beauty – you meet wonders of art and architecture on almost every corner. But I love the region’s homier aspects: the special sweetness of the tomatoes, the soft mozzarella, the heady scents of basil and garlic everywhere.
I do take very good care of myself, and I’m always in love. And by that I mean I have an appetite for life. I’m in love with beauty and things and people and love and being in love, and those things I think, on the inside, show on the outside.
National Parks are a part of the American experience. They evoke memories of childhood vacations and pride in the beauty of our national landscapes. They are also reminders that if these parks are to remain beautiful and accessible, we have a responsibility as a nation to maintain and protect them.
Not to sound corny, but intelligence is big. Everything fades, and everything can be modified. But intelligence is something you can’t fake. I’m not even talking about whether you can read a thesaurus backwards. But there is a beauty in common sense.
We are presented with a unique situation in the black community in that we have embraced the beauty of hip hop, the real rawness of it, the real fun of it, but we also have to address the damage it has done. We have to look at what it’s done to our black girls, especially when it comes to domestic violence.
My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.
The beauty of any conspiracy theory is that because it can’t be proved, that just makes it more ‘real.’ It’s not a question of believing or not believing, really; it’s more a question of just accepting a series of probabilities that lead to an undeniable conclusion.
The beauty of Maine is such that you can’t really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I’ve moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.
My interest as an artist is to illuminate the lives of black folks. I definitely am focused on films that illustrate all that we are and all our nuance and all our complicated beauty and mess, and when you’re telling those stories, you gotta have black actors.
I was a mixed black girl existing in a westernized Hawaiian culture where petite Asian women were the ideal, in a white culture where black women were furthest from the standard of beauty, in an American culture where trans women of color were invisible.
The privilege I’ve had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works… but what I’ve discovered about myself and what I can offer in the space of an exhibition – to talk about beauty, to talk about power, to talk about ourselves, and to talk and speak to each other.
While traveling around the world, I’ve had the opportunity to work with every living beauty icon. I’ve learned to appreciate idiosyncrasy. The fact is, there is really no such thing as ‘normal’ – everybody’s different, and that is the essence of their beauty.
I think, growing up in a small town – I grew up in a lot of different places. I grew up in a city environment, a more suburban environment, a more rural environment. That’s the beauty of New Jersey is you get a lot of different types of living.
My mother is a big believer in being responsible for your own happiness. She always talked about finding joy in small moments and insisted that we stop and take in the beauty of an ordinary day. When I stop the car to make my kids really see a sunset, I hear my mother’s voice and smile.
You could be an 18-year-old girl in Tokyo wondering how you could ever break into fashion or beauty, so you follow your favourite designer or editor, see what their day comprises, where they go, who they meet, how they do it… If I were setting up my own label today, I would definitely do it through Instagram.
I think the idea of the social construction of beauty – this idea that beauty is simply whatever culture or society says it is – is on the run. Of course, beauty does arise in a cultural context. No one ever denies that. But there’s also a natural response people have to it.
The idea of beauty today is a bloody mess. It’s really awful. You look in the fashion magazines and see all of these retouched people. Some guys called retouchers go on the computer and take away everything that you are and then call it photography. I think it’s such an insult.
