XO, Obscura - August 2025

Dear Readers,

Approaching the end of a very full summer, I have found myself dwelling on beauty, vanity, and the space scrutiny monopolizes in our minds. Maybe it was the Love Island craze earlier this summer, where we publicly picked apart 21 to 27-year-olds as a nation. Maybe it’s the seeming resurgence of skinny culture, where I fear the near future may not hold space for body neutrality nor positivity in common contexts. Maybe it was Kris Jenner’s dramatic facelift reveal alongside Pamela Anderson’s public commitment to embracing natural aging. making public appearances makeup-free. Or maybe it’s because Ozempic and other weight loss drugs have infiltrated every pocket of my social circles. How can it feel like we should be on the brink of new levels of social progress, to be slowly shifting back to the early 2000s? I keep thinking – we only get so much time. We spend irreplaceable moments thinking about being smaller and prettier, twisting this way and that in the mirror. How the fuck do we stop?

Jane Birkin’s original Birkin Bag sold for 10 million dollars last month. As a future vintage bag mother, I was clocked in for the event. Watching the livestream, I got to looking up a bit about Jane Birkin and her life. An actress, singer, designer, and most notably, a fashion icon, who designed the first Birkin Bag alongside Jean-Louis Dumas in 1984. She was an objectively beautiful woman. Candidly, she had to be to rise to fame in the 60s as a movie star. Tucked amongst her accolades was a memory that smacked me between the eyes. At 18, Birkin was married and slept with an eyeliner under her pillow, a weapon and a shield to hide her ‘tiny piggy eyes’ in case her husband awoke in the night. Birkin reminisced, reflecting on the immense pressure she felt to be a fashion tableau at all times and the insecurities that subsequently followed her throughout her career.  In 2025, I cannot imagine having been married at 18 years old to someone in their 30s (I’d still feel like a child bride at 28). But most pressingly, I can’t imagine being so young and presented with such a treacherous first priority – to be as beautiful as possible, at all times. 

This month’s editorial shoot delves into vanity, beauty, and the constant scrutiny we violently inflict upon ourselves and others. How often do we hound the image in the mirror and act as a judgmental reflection of what needs to change in those around us? Where does the constant pressure to alter ourselves originate from – and how could it ever be possible to achieve an exponential growth of our beauty? Humans have always found and created beauty, fully knowing that our vanity will not last forever. We all grow older each year, skin becomes thinner, collagen slows in production, wrinkles form, bones weaken, and things sag. It is our common ending. The obsession to stay young and beautiful is a thief of the true beauty and life all around us. What is more beautiful than being barefaced in pajamas on a porch with your closest friends, sharing a bottle of wine or passing around a joint? 

I had a moment a few months ago where I was looking around at each of my friends and observing their faces in close detail. And what stood out to me was the luminosity of their smiles, the comfort in knowing a face for decades, and seeing how we’ve matured and grown in comfort within ourselves. The quickness to call out our greatest gifts and talents to one another – is this not beauty? When the sun catches in my sister’s brown eyes and I see specks of amber – is this not beauty? Holding hands and singing “Pink Pony Club”, a little tipsy – is this not beauty?

Beauty has always been all around us, and one of my favorite parts of being human is our collective, archaic dedication to its immortalization. Whether it’s ancient art preserved in museums, the craft of developing photographs, sewing garments, writing poetry, building cathedrals, or perfecting dance – art is beauty incarnate. We have reduced such grandeur to fit a harrowingly narrow and specific beauty standard that we can never be truly happy or fulfilled reaching for. Because we can never be vibrant enough within such rigidity. 

And within such a society, we will spend our lives justifying contributing to a system and cycle that harms people who aren’t classically beautiful (or white, but that’s a different essay), while it positively uplifts those lucky enough to orbit and benefit within it. As long as we allow ourselves to be told exactly what beauty is, we will bow to a culture of vanity, and like a hamster on a wheel, we will chase after beauty with no longevity or destination. One day, we will all wake up, look in the mirror, and see a face we don’t recognize. And what a gift. I hope to gain wrinkles and loose skin like metals – as reminders of a life well lived. Maybe beauty is less a picked-apart vision of our bodies and more a feeling that comes from the genuine joy of experiencing life, the earth, and the people that surround us.

So, dear readers, I think there is hope yet. I wish this editorial and articles for this month help us collectively heal a little, bit by bit. And maybe there’s room for our concept of beauty to expand and grow, or be uprooted, crushed, and regrown entirely. Every year older feels like a blessed jump into unashamed comfort in my skin. That’s something a younger version of myself wouldn’t be able to conceptualize. Jane Birkin herself said that at 28, she finally felt like herself in her body. And at the end of an iconic, whirlwind life she shared with Elle, “What I look like doesn’t matter as much…To have a good sense of humour and to be really curious about something, that’s fine for me now.”

XO, 

Obscura

Yesenia Follingstad, Editor in Chief

Photo Credits:

Creative Director: Yesenia Follingstad

Photographer: Hugh Kirsch

Models: Ore Ojewuyi and @gabis.place

Styling, Makeup, Clothing: Yesenia Follingstad

Hair: Ore Ojewuyi and @gabis.place