Glossier is about not shaming however you interpret beauty. Glossier is for the girl on YouTube who has a 50-step beauty routine and leaves the house with a full face of makeup every day because that’s how she feels best. And it’s for someone who puts on moisturizer and leaves because that’s how she feels best.”

The way Weiss tells it, Glossier sprang organically out of Into the Gloss’s community, but the company also smartly positioned itself at the nexus of a few big trends. Search for "no makeup tutorial" on YouTube and you’ll find almost 2.6 million videos; "natural makeup tutorial" gets 1.2 million results. Korean beauty, which emphasizes flawless skin above all else, is booming stateside; in 2015, South Korea exported more than $2.6 billion of cosmetics goods, up from $1 billion in 2012, according to the BBC. Glossier was ahead of the curve, but the number of products to help women look like they woke up like this could fill a Sephora.

“[M]aybe it’s because Glossier feels inclusive, like any of us could be a cool Glossier girl,” adding, parenthetically, “all I’ve ever wanted to be is a cool girl, but the sad truth is I’m just a try-hard bitch.” Wouldn’t you know it, Glossier even has a slogan for that exact state of mind: “Everyone says they're ‘low maintenance.' (It's okay, neither are we.)”

low-key whiplash

The Devil Wears Prada wants to give you the keys to the fashion closet — before she started eating carbs again.

n person, Weiss’s voice has a sturdier timbre than you might expect from her delicate frame. She’s luminous and slight, but authoritative in the breadth of her knowledge about the industry and Glossier’s game plan.

it’s an attainable kind of indulgence.

laziness in this case means studied effortlessness, not puffy and greasy-haired, six hours deep into a Netflix binge still caked with the remnants of last night’s mascara.

lit-from-within effect that plays up features instead of masking flaws, though of course this works better when your “flaw” is a cute scar, winsome snaggletooth, or freckles — not cystic acne, purple under-eye bags, or a hirsute chin.

To understand what

beautiful but not too intimidating, appreciably ambitious but almost always smiling, neurotic — but in a charming way

hella ’grammable Soho headquarters.

This summer, I paid $22 to make my face look like a freshly glazed doughnut.

after all

Last year President Obama signed a $600 million border-security bill into law, which included a thousand new Border Patrol agents, more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, updated communications equipment, and unmanned surveillance

his

a deceptively quaint name for a place like this: a ramshackle settlement under a canopy of firs, laundry hanging from the trees, overturned buckets for chairs.

Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians, and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese—everything you learned in sixth-grade social studies about the great American melting pot. And with each group came a new wave of anti-immigrant, pro-Anglo rage.

Wash the apple before you bite into it, because that's the way you were raised. Germs, pesticides, dirt, gunk, it doesn't matter—just wash it. The fingerprints, too, go down the drain with the rest. It's easy to forget that there are people who harvest our food. Sometimes, maybe, we are reminded of the seasons and the sun and the way of the apple tree, and if we multiply that by millions of apple trees, times millions of tomato plants, times all the other fruits and vegetables, we realize, holy potato chips, that's a lot of picking. Without 1 million people on the ground, on ladders, in bushes—armies of pickers swooping in like bees—all the tilling, planting, and fertilizing of America's $144 billion horticultural production is for naught. The fruit falls to the ground and rots.

And you? You were born king or you were born peasant, and that got decided long before you fell out of your mama's womb, so don't bother worrying about it.

That was how he taught them.

of course

while I was on the floor groping under the seat for nickels, dimes, and pennies.

one morestop

Readers are not shy with suggestions, and the suggestions are often good but also closer to the passions of the reader than to this writer’s

too reasonable

with absolutely no idea that I was building the shells of future pieces of writing.

1+1 = 2.6 and ABC/D

In any case, one plus one should add up to more than two.

How much cool truth there is in that essay is in the eye of the reader.

That is no way to start a writing project, let me tell you. You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there