I separated from my ex six years ago. My initial plan was to stay single for a year, do therapy and learn from my mistakes, but many years and dating attempts later, I’m still single. While my ex was emotionally available, it became apparent to me that I, just like many gay guys, was attracted to emotionally unavailable men.

This is a short story of immense pain that later on turns to realization. Sometimes our greatest realizations come from pain. — myselftotle “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” said the pigs in Animal Farm. These kinds of pigs, literally and metaphorically, are found everywhere. And if not everywhere, then I keep meeting them at least somewhere. I. We have been deluded to accept that we have gone past issues like racism or discrimination based

A while ago, I found myself talking to a girl from my college who attends a bunch of classes with me. She’s beautiful, kind, funny, popular, extremely intelligent and gets amazing grades, but for some unknown reason, we’d never really talked much before then. On that day, however, she looked so down that, moved by genuine concern, I asked her what was causing her such visible discomfort. She said she couldn’t keep up with her group of friends anymore because she felt less and

You might’ve noticed how seemingly everyone on the internet is wearing the same five or six trending items of clothing. Originality in day-to-day fashion is dying, and no one seems to be concerned about it. Fashion icons such as Kate Moss wore whatever aligned with their personal style (with a sprinkle of designer wear involved, of course). Today, the internet is littered with cheap alternatives and the promise that copying a celebrity’s style will somehow align you with thei

I discovered I was in a situationship approximately six months after I apparently entered one.

There was a time when self-care meant doing less. Taking a bath, cancelling plans, going for a walk, getting an early night. Somehow, it became another area of our lives to optimise. Sleep has a score. Steps have a target. Stress has a graph. Food has macros, workouts have zones, and even rest can be measured according to how efficiently our bodies have recovered from the day before. Wellness, once imagined as an escape from productivity culture, has quietly adopted its langu

On body odour, dating standards, and why basic hygiene suddenly became controversial.

One of my favourite quotes from a film that fascinated me when I was younger, Tuck Everlasting, says: “Don’t fear death, fear the unlived life.” This quote, although simple, has stayed with me for so many years. And although I couldn’t fully understand it before, I kept repeating it to myself. Lately, it has started to appear more frequently in my mind. I would think of it while taking a walk or while working, and it would come to me out of nowhere while preparing breakfast.

There’s something refreshing about a woman who knows exactly who she is and has no intention of making herself smaller for anyone else. Meet Aria Vega, the Colombian singer bringing the sounds, sensuality and unapologetic spirit of Barranquilla to the world. From her breakout track CHÉVERE to a Latin GRAMMY nomination and Paris Fashion Week, Aria is making waves while staying fiercely connected to her roots. Her world of Costeñita Core is all about Caribbean identity, maximal

Why is saying no to a drink still treated like a personality defect? Let's discuss the idiotic social expectation that getting drunk is the definition of having fun, the nights I've never quite understood, and why I'd rather wake up with my memories, my mornings, and my life intact. Forgive me for thinking there's more to a good time than losing control of yourself. And I promise I'm not the boring one….

The other night, I was sitting in bed, staring at my phone, wondering why I couldn't just call the person I fancy and say, “I don't want us to be weird with each other.” It was such a simple thing to do, and yet somehow it felt impossible. I could text him, wait for him to text me, reread our last conversation, ask my friends what they thought he meant, check whether he was online, and probably conduct a small-scale FBI investigation into the punctuation he used, but actually

Two months after The Atlantic announced ‘The End of Reading Is Here’, beauty and lifestyle influencer Alix Earle gushed to Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine that she had “never read a book”.

Someone once famously told me, shouting into the ether of an overcrowded room, “Politics is like LA for ugly people!” And as I sipped an eye-wateringly expensive gin and tonic, I started to ponder whether that might be changing within our current zeitgeist.

The tech bros have a crush on fashion, and like most people with crushes, they're trying, to say the least. However, putting Kylie Jenner in Meta AI glasses feels a bit like putting a supermodel next to fast cars in a beer commercial from the 80s. No shade to King Kylie, but her placement in this arena feels like superficial signalling of It Girl status, in exactly the same way an 80s beer commercial thought it could signal manhood by parking a supermodel next to a fast car.

A funk isn't a mood. It's the distance between you and yourself, and every piece of self-care advice you've ever ignored is a way of closing it. I love my birthday, I really do. I tell people I don't care about it, which is a lie I've told for years with total commitment. I love a second margarita at Ellie's bar in East London without a flicker of guilt. I love buying a new dress to wear on the night and maybe twice more, except my birthday is in September, so its second outi

Over the last couple of months, I've been lucky enough to intern as an editorial copy editor for this magazine. What an honour. I have worked with countless confident, inspirational women who write with awe-inspiring intelligence and emotional literacy. The pride the Roe girls have as women in today's society is incredible. With full transparency, I sometimes pinch myself that I get to be part of such a community. With that said, I like to consider myself like them, but most

I spent years chasing the next version of my life. Then I started wondering what would happen if I finally stopped. For as long as I can remember, there has always been something I wanted. Sometimes it was something material, sometimes something emotional: a thing, a person, an opportunity, a dream or a version of myself that I thought would finally make me happy. I could spend months, sometimes years, working towards something and imagining how different I would feel once I

Let's call him Owen. He was eight years old, and he couldn't read. At first, he hid it well. The moment I assigned an activity that involved any kind of literacy, he acted out. Throwing his computer mouse, arguing. Twice, he took off running and made me chase him around the building. While the other kids worked on their assignments, he sat in time-out. Free to doze off, daydream, anything but read. This was the summer after my junior year of film school. I was a counse

Every time my thumb hovers over the “post” button, I hesitate. Then comes the familiar, grating internal interrogation. Who do you think you are? And yet, eventually, I pluck up the courage to hit post anyway. Lately, this has been happening to me over and over again. Whether it's on Instagram, TikTok or, more recently, Substack, I can't help but feel a little embarrassed to put myself out there. At the start of 2026, I decided I was going to be more proactive about chasing m

After more than 20 years in France and a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris, Mexican chefs Kike Casarrubias and Mon Estrada are opening Papalote in Barcelona, bringing Mexican memory, French technique and Mediterranean influence into the next chapter of their story. A restaurant can be a new address. For Kike Casarrubias and Mon Estrada, Papalote is something more complicated: a new chapter in a story that began in Mexico, developed in France, and is now arriving in Barc

We've spent so long being told that female suffering is intrinsic that we've begun to buy into the lie ourselves. It's time to take back the responsibility of advocating for ourselves. Fifteen hours into what was supposed to be a magical family holiday in Kauai, I found myself in a narrow bed with a scratchy blanket in the island's only emergency room. I waited for the combination of morphine and Dilaudid to kick in while I vomited into a hospital-issued bag that my mum said

When good taste becomes too easy to replicate, looking strange might be the ultimate status symbol. Margiela Tabis look like hooves. Chanel sent models down the runway in sandals designed to make them appear barefoot. Moschino turned an apple into a handbag. Miu Miu made the kind of fleece you might expect to see on a tech employee grabbing coffee before work into a luxury object. None of these products is conventionally beautiful, and that is increasingly the point.

Yasmin Suteja has spent the last decade being both the person in the image and the person making the image. Now she is questioning the machine that decides what we see, what we want, how we see ourselves, and even whether our choices are really ours. There is something pretty surreal about interviewing someone you have been told is your double, literally... Yasmin's mother had already decided we were alike before we met. By the time we sat down together for the interview,

As I sit in my childhood room, reading Pretty Little Liars, I envy a time that I barely know. I yearn for the days when, if you wanted a shirt, you had to wait until you could go to the mall to buy it, when your phone was used for calls and short text messages. Or when you waited until Sunday evening for the new episode of your favourite show. I miss when my life wasn't so consumed by a world that isn't even real. When I doomscroll on my phone at 3 pm, I wonder: if I were nin

I see so many successful, beautiful women building businesses, creating ecosystems for other women, growing communities, achieving wealth and becoming an inspiration to women around the world. Outspoken women who stand firmly and unapologetically in who they are. Women with so much inner power that you cannot miss them or ignore their message. Women you admire not only for what they have achieved, but for who they are and the path they took to get there. And yet, somehow, the

I recently got laid off from my architecture job because of budget cuts, and, to be honest, I gave my blood, sweat and tears to land that position. Five years of studying, two internships, volunteering, and hundreds of applications that led to hundreds of rejections. I should also admit that I applied to the same studio twice before finally landing the position. After the initial shock and a little reflection, I had a wave of realisation: the economy is fucked, so I might as

As women, we are taught from a young age that beauty is all that matters, and that age is the enemy of beauty. Who didn't love fairy tales like Snow White, when we were innocent of the subliminal societal conditioning behind “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?” We're seeing this reflected in our current beauty standards, where what was once considered tacky and dangerous is now desirable and fashionable. The media's reaction to changes in celebrities

I am a social being through and through. I like talking to people, getting to know them, getting to know what they do. Over the last three years, I have noticed a pattern. A pattern that holds true across our lives, is multifaceted and is becoming more and more real to me year after year… Have we lost our feelings about everything because it's not cool anymore? I joined a dating app almost two weeks ago. Back on it, yeah, didn't want to, but I did it. The vibes instantly felt

Today's image of a charming prince is so dismantled that women are fantasising about being Samantha Jones instead of Carrie Bradshaw. We can definitely say that a large percentage of women have returned to the dream of being a Pilates mum, but at the same time, women have grown so tired of dealing with men that many would prefer to get just one thing from them and then say bye-bye! We know women's vision of life changed as soon as they could become independent. But the real q

There is a specific, quiet kind of exhaustion that comes with sitting in a dark room, staring at a phone screen that hasn't changed in twenty minutes. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no emergency. It was just five words in a blue chat bubble, but somehow it felt like an unsolved riddle. I read it over and over, trying to break the code. Do they mean this? Do they mean that? How do I reply without looking like I care too much, or too distant?

Historically speaking, faces had character. Whether it’s a simple mole near the mouth, natural wrinkles, scars, or even naturally colored teeth. But something happened between the rise of Instagram and the popularity of plastic surgery, where we slowly and surely lost the meaning of real beauty, and this equally affects both women and men. We didn’t lose our original faces overnight; we lost the reference point. Just as you forget a language, you stop speaking. Children today

Vanilla has escaped the kitchen. It lingers in perfume aisles, where bottles promise notes of crème brûlée, pistachio gelato, and toasted marshmallow. It drifts through candles scented like brown butter and Italian espresso. Lip gloss tastes faintly of birthday cake. Hand cream smells like oat milk lattes. Beauty brands borrow dessert language to market serums, body washes, and hair products. Somewhere along the way, food stopped belonging exclusively to the table.

He seemed so sure of himself, of who he was in the world. As he drove me home in his Ford Mustang, my date started sharing little anecdotes about his life. When he mentioned being close to his mother, I responded, “That makes sense.” He asked, “What's that supposed to mean?” I responded, “You just seem comfortable with yourself.” It was true, not just his ease with himself, but also with who he was in the world. Something of an epiphany dawned on me that night: I was jeal

Last week, I went on a trip. And somewhere between photographing the places I was visiting and watching everyone else do the same, I realized how exhausted I had become from being constantly visible online. The more I stepped away from social media, the less I wanted to return to it. What surprised me was that leaving it behind did not feel like simply putting down an app. It felt like stepping outside of a culture. With some distance, I began to notice how deeply the interne

The topic of sexual energy is broadly misunderstood and has been covered in shame for way too long. A woman’s form of pleasure comes from an immense capability of connecting and operating from the idea of the 'divine.' When I talk about sexual energy, I do not specifically connect it to sex or the physical pleasure that you create for yourself or with someone else. It is definitely not associated with vulgarity or the traditional terms that surround acts of arousal, flutters,

If your first thought was New York City: Congratulations! You are right. I don’t remember the first time I fell in love with New York. I know it wasn’t the first time I visited, because by then I already knew many names on this little island. Maybe I was seven when I first heard of Manhattan, watching Home Alone and deciding that Christmas was supposed to happen here. Maybe I was fifteen, watching How I Met Your Mother. Or twenty-three, watching Friends. Twenty-five, watc

Just like any other member of Gen Z, thanks to a social media diet of BetterHelp ads and trigger warnings, I am pretty fluent in therapy speak. So the other night, while watching a Netflix documentary on Ozempic, I found myself thinking about how the return of 2000s fashion, coinciding with a renewed obsession with skinniness, felt like too much of a coincidence, especially given how much skinniness dominated that era the first time around.

For a long time, Molly Burnett understood filmmaking through a fairly traditional lens. As an actor, it was: Get the audition. Get the role. Build the career. She grew up watching Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and Halle Berry and imagining that kind of trajectory for herself. But as the entertainment industry shifted from films toward “content,” and the pandemic, strikes and changing economics accelerated that transition, Burnett began questioning how much of her career she wan

For most of my life, I thought love worked like a promotion. The older I got, the more successful I became, the more I knew myself, the more beautiful and confident I felt, surely I would become more lovable too. There was always something else I could become, and I was strangely convinced that love was waiting for me at the finish line. So I kept becoming. I became more ambitious, more independent, more outspoken, more comfortable with myself. I thought I was building a bett

Hot girl pickles. Man Cereal. Beer Girl. Somehow, even the most ordinary things we consume started developing a gender identity. It is easy to dismiss this as another quirk of internet culture. Of course a pickle company wants to call its product something with ‘hot girl’ in the name. Of course a cereal brand wants to appeal specifically to men. We live in an era where everything needs a personality before it can become content. But the sudden return of aggressively gendered

At the 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the women took the runway, the microphone, the fantasy bra, and perhaps something much bigger: the right to define what being a woman looks like. I watched the 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show last night, and I kept coming back to one thought: where the hell were the men? Not the men in the audience. They were there, of course, watching and cheering. Timothée Chalamet, for instance, was there to watch Kylie Jenner make her

We scroll, react and forget. This is the critical thinking we're practising these days. We can even scroll past genocide the same way we scroll past a shoe advert. Take Afghan women, for example. Weeks ago, this was the only topic people were sharing on their socials. Guess what? This has been happening for five years. Women banned from school, from raising their voices in public, from leaving home without a male relative at their side, barely break through the algorithm befo

I have read every eldest daughter essay on the internet, and I'd like that on the record before I start criticising them. It's a genre now, not a topic, with conventions, the way locked-room mysteries are a genre. Substacks that publish nothing else. An audio clip about being tired since 1998 with hundreds of thousands of videos under it. Tote bags, which is how you know a feeling has completed its journey into a market. I'm not standing outside this thing. I'm deep inside it

I recently got engaged, and the first thing everyone asks is when the wedding is. But they’re really asking something much harder: when will you decide that this is actually forever? The truth is, I don’t even know if I want a wedding. We may be the first generation to enter marriage knowing exactly how it can end, and choosing it anyway. I don’t even need to share the statistics. We all know them. Divorce is not some distant possibility we’ve heard about. We grew up with it.

A crush, by definition, is “a strong but temporary feeling of liking someone romantically”. But in reality, it is a peculiar kind of cruel experiment. Some would even call it a curse. Like Andie Anderson in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and after being a victim of the crush infection for longer than I would like to admit, I decided that, in the same way she explains how to get rid of a man using the typical behaviours that women exhibit and men hate, I would create something

Maybe it's not youth I'm drawn to. Maybe it's the possibility of someone who hasn't yet been convinced that love has to get smaller as you get older. I have reached a rather inconvenient conclusion about myself. I don't think I want to date older men, ever... Actually, let me correct that: I know I don't want to date older men. And before everyone starts preparing their angry little spreadsheets about age gaps, maturity, fertility, emotional intelligence blablabla and

Reading has always existed as a means for me to get out of my own head and go somewhere else. Learning something and, God forbid, developing some empathy for people whose stories are unlike mine are just natural, positive by-products. Regularly reading for pleasure was never something I thought was particularly exceptional until I realised how common it had become for my friends and family to say they hadn't picked up a book in weeks, months or even years.

Everyone goes through pain differently, but there are some experiences that become eerily similar among people who have fallen in love with a narcissist. Different faces, relationships, stories, and somehow you hear the same sentences. Taylor Swift’s Patient Zero feels like one of those sentences made into a song, and watching Dakota Johnson move through the highs, the confusion, the fights, the fear and eventually the physical weight of it, there is an uncomfortable familiar

As adolescents, women are introduced to sex from a very male-centric perspective. It is a world that we will partake in for the rest of our lives but, for some reason, never fully belong to. Sexuality was almost a costume that was given to us from time to time to serve the desires of the male gaze, but we were never really allowed to wear it long enough to understand what it meant. Or what it felt like to us, not to them. Sexuality seemed to inherently belong to men, and it w

There are certain things about the men in our lives that we all seem to encounter at least once. Maybe we just don't talk about them enough. Or maybe we've become so used to them that we've stopped questioning them.