sort of.

The Beholder is a beauty and wellness podcast about living this one life to its fullest. I’ve been obsessed with skin care rituals as early as childhood, when my Lebanese aunts introduced me to cold creams and body oils. When my grandmother let me play with her army of lipsticks and spritz her Chanel No. 5. Each time my mom asked me why I wasn’t wearing my “lips” (lipstick) or “ears” (earrings) when I left the house. Hair tools, handbags, and a great pair of shoes—this was our shared family language.

I went on to develop my own sense of self and style in New York City, working as a copywriter at Bloomingdales.com, Bon Appétit, and Vogue, and publishing essays and editorials in The New York Times, Refinery29, Slate, Glamour.com, and more. Now, as a beauty editor for The Quality Edit, I get to do something I love—all my life I wanted to be a beauty editor—except I don’t always love what I’m seeing. Beauty culture can be divisive and judgemental. There’s a gross lack of nuance and equality in it, and it got me thinking about how to create a space where we can simply…be ourselves, whatever that means to each of us.

When I hit 40, I began thinking: Forget what everyone else thinks, what do I actually want from my beauty life? Free of shame and stigma, how do I make myself feel beautiful, inside and out?

Then my mom died. Abruptly. Traumatically.

The ground fell out from beneath me. I acutely understood that life is short and nothing matters except what matters to me. Left with a newborn and a three-year-old, staring down the barrel of early parenthood without my North Star to help, I turned to the one ritual that could bring me back to my mom: my beauty routine. The connection to my mother soothed me. The repetition buoyed me. My grief addiction wasn’t sex or drugs or booze. It was skin care.

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. Here we choose joy over judgement, curiosity over criticism, and we learn through conversation. Here we help people make mindful choices. 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.