sort of.

THE BEHOLDER is a podcast about beauty on your terms. The idea emerged from a simple question: What do I actually want from my beauty life? Like so many woman, I began asking myself this question when I hit 40. But really, this all started the day my mom died.

I’m Deenie Hartzog-Mislock, a Mississippi-born beauty editor, marketing copywriter, and narrative essayist with 20 years of experience at Vogue, Bon Appétit, and beyond. My mother was my North Star and, alongside my Lebanese aunts, laid the foundation for my obsession with beauty. Cold creams, oils, and exfoliators. Hair tools, handbags, and a great pair of shoes—this was our shared language.

Then in early 2024, my mother died abruptly, splitting my life in two: I was one person before her death, and someone else entirely once she was gone. After burying her, I was desperate to find a rhythm amid throat-catching grief, so I turned to something familiar: a beauty routine. The connection to my mother soothed me. The repetition buoyed me. The pursuit of an outward-facing aesthetic gave me something else to think about. My grief addiction wasn’t sex or drugs or booze. It was skin care.

As a beauty editor, I receive daily press emails about this new cream and that breakthrough treatment. As a marketing copywriter, I spend my days thinking of the best language to convince consumers to buy what we’re selling. As a narrative essay writer, I am consumed by storytelling, human nature, and the psychology of desire. As a grieving daughter, I just want people to live full, authentic lives before it’s too late.

In today’s performance economy, we’re being hit on all sides. Social media, FaceTime, and Zoom have forced us to stare back at ourselves more than any human should. We’re overinfluenced, overstimulated, and drowning in an oversaturated beauty market, me included—and I want talk about it: The good, bad, and ugly.

Through nuanced conversations that resist binary thinking, education without agenda, and honest explorations of ourselves and beauty culture at large, THE BEHOLDER is a judgement-free space where we can be complicated, even contradictory. Frivolous and profound. We are never one thing.

After my mom died, I became acutely aware that nothing matters, yet everything that matters matters immensely. I stopped giving a damn, especially as it pertains to my appearance. I’ll do whatever the hell I want—and you should, too.

Here we choose joy over judgement, curiosity over criticism, and we learn through conversation. THE BEHOLDER was born in memory of my mother, but is driven by the need to create a judgement-free space on the Internet where we’re allowed to be unapologetically human. It’s a place to educate, celebrate, and to be frank, give no fucks. Because the only opinion that matters is yours—and your life won’t last forever.