The best, but easily most stressful, time of the year is just around the corner.

When I lived in the US, I loved that summer and the holiday season were two equally wonderful but completely separate passages of time. When summer falls in the middle of the year, you’re blessed with the space to enjoy summer for what it is, without allocating energy (and money!) to office parties, Christmas, family gatherings, and New Year’s Eve. Summer gets to be the standalone joy it deserves to be with the freedom to commit to weekends away and late nights ‘just because it’s summer’.

Back home, this is deeply not the case, and I’m already starting to feel the anxiety that always comes with this time of year, as everything good happens all at once. Meanwhile in New York, it’s fall and friends are upstate, sending me photos from Phoenicia Diner that make me teary with nostalgia, missing them and a season that could never properly be replicated anywhere in Australia. It always felt so lovely to close out the year with weather and holidays that call for wholesome food, early nights, and generally cosy behaviour.

This is all to say: it’s a weird time of year, especially for people currently undergoing some form of, what I like to call, cultural jet lag. Like anyone who’s spent a substantial amount of time living in both hemispheres, I’m constantly untangling the feelings of wanting to be in two places at once—even during Australian summer.

Messy feelings aside, I have a few things to recommend this week…

A Skincare And Foundation Hybrid That Actually Lives Up To The Hype

Many moons ago, my friend Harling tested out Ilia’s Super Serum Skin Tint after hearing about it from a reader via Man Repeller’s text line (RIP). The serum’s claim to fame was that it could replicate Zoom’s “touch up my appearance” filter IRL. Harling loved it, and since then I’ve been meaning to try it.

I mentioned last week that I’d finally purchased the product—and how surprised I was by the accuracy of Mecca’s online shade-matching tool—so I figured I should ~circle back~ and let you know my thoughts.

I bought the skin tint hoping it be a good replacement for Biologique Recherche’s Sérums de Teint, which I was lucky enough to try when it launched in the US (but is too expensive for me to justify buying). I wanted a tinted product that doubled as skincare and was sheerer than a foundation or CC Cream—and Ilia’s tint is just that.

While the Ilia product doesn’t leave my skin quite as juicy as Biologique Recherche’s, and is about 2% more matte than I’d like it to be, it still gets the tick of approval!

A New York Times Piece On How COVID Changed Our Dreams

COVID dreams—we all had ‘em! In fact, one reason I wanted to include a link to this story is to avoid trying to remember everyone I’ve spoken to about weird dreams in the last 18 months. The sheer number of those conversations is enough to assure me it was a universal experience, so here you all go!

In this feature, Brooke Jarvis explores why we dream, focusing on dream patterns following traumatic events, like the pandemic and 9/11. It’s a long read, but a good read for anyone who thinks about the science of dreaming a lot (me).

People quarantining alone often dreamed what she calls “exaggerated scenarios of isolation, of abandonment”: being held in prison or marooned on a spaceship. One person was sent on a solo trip to Mars for which she had decidedly not volunteered. In contrast, people who found themselves stuck inside with what suddenly felt like too many people had the opposite dream: losing control of their homes to crowds.

And A Newsletter For All The Gilmore Girls Fans (And Love-Haters)

While I generally sit firmly in the just let people enjoy things!!! camp, and try my best to avoid getting swept up in the negativity that is the internet’s hive mind, when I came across the Gilmore Women newsletter (recommended by Ann Friedman in her newsletter this week) I let my values temporarily fall by the wayside.

I grew up on Gilmore Girls and, at this very moment, have a mental list of friends who I know I could text about the show at any time and get an instant excitable reply. Of course, that doesn’t mean I can’t see the many missteps the characters, and show in general, took throughout its seven seasons.

I’ve been wanting to re-watch the show for a while now, so was excited when I came across this backlog of critical but loving recaps from Maggie Mertens and Megan Burbank.

There’s just something about a show that centered smart, funny, independent women at a time when that just wasn’t done that often that drew bookish, driven millennial girls like a moth to the flame. Now, I wonder if I would have been so OK with caring about school, or wanting to go to a good college, or hell, even wanting to work in journalism, if I hadn’t had Gilmore Girls as an influencing force. But now, 20 years since the first episode aired, and four years after a lackluster reboot, I’m ready to face this thing I love to find out why it had to end SO BADLY, and whether it was really just bad all along?

I’m going to end this week’s issue with a small favour, I hope you don’t mind.

If you love/like/moderately enjoy reading She’ll Be Right each Monday, it would mean the world to me if you shared it with a friend who you think might also love/like/enjoy it.

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Thank you, as always!

Gyan x

She'll Be Right

The most wonderful time of the year…