Redefinining Beauty, Rejecting Facial Scrutiny...
& teaching younger women that real beauty is individuality, confidence, and joy. ❤️
A note from Donna 💌
Happy Monday!
I had a hectic week last week - my parents arrived from the UK for their annual 3 month stay - yes you read that right! And my eldest son turned 15 so I’m just finishing clearing up after his birthday party. Fun times that I will always cherish.
Those that follow The Beauty Ed® on Instagram may have seen this post last Friday - one where I was raging about two aestheticians publicly critiquing Victoria Beckham’s face.
Watching her features being dissected, debated and ‘improved’ felt like a perfect snapshot of what beauty culture gets so wrong. We’ve normalised analysing women’s faces as if they’re public property, and when even someone like Victoria - a beautiful, accomplished woman and mother - can be reduced to a checklist of “flaws,” what hope does that leave for the rest of us? How is any of us meant to feel “enough” in the mirror?
This theme runs right through today’s newsletter. In our Goosebumps section, Gia, one of our Gen Z contributors, shares an experience that feels written straight from the soul of The Beauty Ed®, Her reflections from the Absolute Collagen press event reinforces why this platform exists: to champion a softer, saner beauty culture. One where your face is never a problem to be solved. One that celebrates real connection, real emotion, and real life (yes, according to Hayley’s Goosebumps, that absolutely includes pizza 🍕).
My own Goosebumps touch on this too. The world is already loud enough about what’s “wrong” with women. The Beauty Ed® will always be the voice reminding you what’s right - at every age.
With love,
Donna x 🐞
👄 Where’s my lip balm?
Cos you know, wherever we go, our lip balms go too: they are like our emotional support beauty comforters.
This week, lovely Gia took her Dior lip balm to a beauty press event in London…
“Wherever I go, my lip balm comes with me; it’s a non-negotiable. This week, it was Christian Dior Le Baume in my bag, traveling with me to central London, right by my old UCL campus, for a collagen panel.
I am a lifelong lip-balm girl, but what I love about Le Baume is that it’s genuinely multi-use. Yes, it’s lovely on the lips, but I actually reach for it more on my hands, especially if I’m already wearing lipstick and don’t want to ruin the look. My hands get annoyingly sensitive in the colder months, and this is one of the few things that calms them without feeling sticky or heavy.
I use it before lipstick, before bed, and always under my Laneige Lip Sleeping Mask. It just works. And, of course, my mother (a woman who treats Dior counters like holy ground) is the one who put it into my life.”
-Gia xo
Time for some…
🥁 GOOSEBUMPS
the people, places, things that we are loving this week
💌 Donna
Kate Winslet’s Interview in The Times
Kate Winslet’s reflections on the state of beauty today, shared in this article by The Times are the reason for my goosebumps this week.
Young women have no concept of what being beautiful is.
Kate Winslet
It’s a sentiment that I strongly agree with - and one of the reasons why The Beauty Ed® Substack exists.
A core part of what makes this platform unique is the inclusion of younger contributors. I wanted to bring the next generation into this space so they could learn early what so many of us only discovered much later: that beauty isn’t something you ‘fix’. Not your face, your features, nor your weight. These values sit at the heart of The Beauty Ed®, and passing them on feels more important now than ever.
Because the perception of beauty today is warped. Filters, AI, social media - they have all shaped a landscape in which many young women can’t recognise true beauty when they see it, especially in themselves.
My mission is to help shift that.
To teach young women that beauty is about celebrating themselves - their individuality, their quirks, the details that make them unmistakably who they are. I want them to know, early and confidently, that your face is not a project, your worth is not tied to your wrinkles as you age, and beauty is not handed to you by the world or a high-street aesthetician. It’s something you define for yourself.
Ever since I created The Beauty Ed® on Instagram 15 years ago, it has been a space where women of every age are not scrutinised. Where aging isn’t a flaw to correct. Where your face is never an assignment to be graded. A place where individuality leads the conversation. Where beauty is something to understand and celebrate - not fear. We must all remember that!
Donna x
🍕 Hayley
Pizza at Lucali
New York is known for many beautiful things and food is one of the hottest topics. The hard thing is how to decide what’s hyped up and what’s actually worth it. Well let me tell you, this is WORTH it.
Lucali is a Brooklyn institution - just about 10 tables, cash only, three menu items, BYOB, one hour only at your table before the next rush comes. (P.S. the likes of Beyonce, Jay Z and Bella Hadid have been known to pop in for a meal.. and the one and only El Prez, Dave Portnoy, rates it in his top “One Bite” pizzas).
In order to get a table at this iconic, yet simply delicious restaurant you need to get in line around 3pm as they start taking names at 4pm. Each hour has slots so you can pick which you want- I obviously picked 5pm for myself and my boyfriend because I was drooling thinking about it!
My goosebumps started before I even walked in the door as I was remembering the time I went years ago and it did not disappoint. We got their spicy vodka pasta, a pizza (half margarita/ half pepperoni) and the star of the show…. drum roll… their calzone!
Lucali also has a newer location in South Beach, Miami, and I think Donna will need to take a trip to that one to report back as the menu is much more extensive there!
New York is such a special place because through all the bad that’s portrayed on the news it really is a city of friendship. In line I met a man and his fiancé who just went to City Hall to get their marriage license, there was a mom taking her son there for the first time, and a solo diner simply enjoying the experience.
That is the reason I can’t find a way to leave this magical city. There is a certain comradery that I really haven’t found elsewhere. For me it’s always New York or Nowhere.
Xoxo Hayley
✨ Gia
Absolute Collagen Panel
I didn’t expect to walk into the Absolute Collagen panel and feel so much. Beauty events can be glossy, rehearsed, a little too self-assured. But this one felt different from the moment I sat down; notebook balanced on my knee, surrounded by women who did not intimidate me, but instead made me feel held. There was this quiet hum of lived experience in the room, the kind that makes you sit up a little straighter because you know you’re in good company.
Then Maxine (co-founder) opened with a sentence that landed straight in my chest:
“We are an emotional brand led by science.”
It was the emotion that caught me. Not as a marketing word, not as a softness to apologise for, but as a guiding principle. And suddenly, I understood why the brand cuts through all the noise: it’s not pretending to be detached or clinical. It’s built from connections. And the connection between Maxine, Darcy (co-founder), and the wider Absoluter community is the brand’s true backbone, this sense of familial openness, of women recognising themselves in one another.
It didn’t feel hierarchical or performative; it felt like a circle. A space where experience was shared rather than shown off, and where the founders stood not above but among the women who love their brand.
When Maxine began to speak about her youth as a fine art student, the years of feeling blurred at the edges, losing herself without realising it, I found myself writing in short, frantic lines.
Her later project, “Dare to Go Bare,” wasn’t about stripping back; it was about confronting the parts of herself she’d been dressing up for other people.
“No makeup.”
“I cut all my hair off.”
“I’d ask myself every morning: Who do people want me to be today?”
Those phrases are still sitting on the page in my handwriting, heavy, steady, underlined.
Because every woman I know, at some point, has lived that very question. And hearing her speak, I felt that familiar ache of recognition: the realisation that so much of womanhood is a negotiation with the version of yourself that makes others comfortable.
The panel gathered around her: Co-founder (and daughter) Darcy, Dr Pyal Patel, precise and generous as she unpacked the dermatology behind collagen; trichologist Eva Proudman, grounding everything in practicality; nutritionist Jenna Hope, making sense of the internal; and lastly Dr Dave, the man behind the science, whose explanations somehow felt both technical and human.
And yet, the science wasn’t the thing that gave me goosebumps.
It was the atmosphere.
The sincerity.
The feeling of women shaping a brand that is both deeply personal and genuinely informed.
I left with a notebook full of scribbles, a head full of thoughts, and this very clear sense that Absolute Collagen is not trying to reinvent anyone.
It’s trying to help women return to themselves, the version that exists before the world tells you who to be.
Stay tuned, the full insider breakdown is coming. This panel deserves space. And honesty. And the kind of writing that only happens when something moves you first.
Love Gia xo
Have a great week everyone - and look out for some great articles from the team ❤️🐞
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