I’m spiraling

Last week, despite tube strikes and the kind of minor logistical upset that usually keeps The English firmly at home, legions of the i-D community showed up in London to celebrate the launch of our inaugural beauty zine. Dressed in Chopova Lowena, Simone Rocha, August Barron, these gorgeous young things gathered at Mayfair’s crimson-lit Nikita to raise a glass to the issue, and to our cover star, Tyla. There was, naturally, an ice sculpture: inside was a perfectly preserved copy of the issue. Condensation covered icy pink KIKO lipglosses that decorated the base. A kind of shrine to early ’00s beauty. A feat of engineering, honestly. Anyway, I digress. The long and short of it is I’ve been orbiting the beauty industry for over 12 years now, long enough to have witnessed its more awkward adolescence. We were trying, often unsuccessfully, to make beauty communications feel cool, or at least culturally relevant, while wedged between airport retail monotony, vaguely herbal spa branding, and early attempts at “inclusivity” that rang hollow more often than not. Around 2017, it felt dry. Beige, even. Then, post-COVID, something cracked open. Beauty stopped being niche, or coded, or even particularly aspirational. It became participatory. Suddenly, everyone had a stake. From at-home dye jobs and Korean skincare rabbit holes to “mental health walks” that doubled as rituals of self-care, beauty expanded into the everyday. And, crucially, the people with money noticed. The gaze shifted from hype sneakers to serums, from drops to routines. A new kind of currency emerged. Since then, we have watched celebrity brands barrel toward billion-dollar valuations, influencers build cosmetic empires from their bedrooms, and the broader wellness and longevity space swell into something closer to a belief system than a category. And underneath all of that, as always, limitless networks of subcultures and counter- culture beauty movements gathering around newfangled platforms like TikTok. And yet, it still feels like we are in the early chapters. Phase one, maybe. Which is precisely why now feels like the right moment to step back from the beauty aisle and take stock of how deeply this world is shaping culture, in ways fashion, right now, can only slightly envy. Enter our big, bold zine. A space where we can document beauty as it actually exists today, messy, obsessive, hyper-online, deeply personal. Sometimes bonkers, sometimes thoughtful, often both at once. If it feels a little breathless, that is because it is. Inside, you will find FaceTimes (because that is where the real beauty tea lives) with icons turned beauty moguls like Martha Stewart, workout guru Tracy Anderson, conversations with “scene” heroes like Haley Williams, and reflections from global figures like Kiko Mizuhara. At the centre is Tyla, whose story, traced from her childhood in South Africa to global pop phenomenon, anchors the issue with something more intimate. She talks to Laetitia Lotthé about beauty not as a fixed ideal, but as something lived, tied to hair, to heritage, to memory. She reflects on growing up experimenting, figuring it out in real time, how beauty was never about perfection, but about expression. About feeling like yourself, even as “yourself” keeps shifting. That elasticity, that refusal to be pinned down, is exactly what makes her such a compelling figure right now. Elsewhere, the zine spirals outward. A whirlpool centre-spread that reads like a Where’s Waldo of beauty culture, looksmaxxers, makeup It girls, medieval hair tutorials, and yes, forcing our Editor-in-Chief, Thom, to eat and review every David bar on the market. It is chaotic. It is dense. It is very online. It is the point. So, who cares? Well, clearly, a lot of you do. And we do too. Because what is happening in beauty right now mirrors something bigger. The power structures are shifting. There is a renewed appetite for DIY, for things you can make, tweak, claim as your own. A move away from prescribed aesthetics toward something more instinctive, more individual. If fashion has long been about self-styling, then beauty is where self-fashioning begins, and in many ways, where it lands most intimately. And maybe that is because, at its best, beauty is not about transformation so much as revelation. As our global beauty editor Marcelo Gutierrez has put it, it is about “expanding beauty’s visual language and pushing the conversation forward”, not flattening it into something uniform, but stretching it until more people can see themselves inside it. Our mission if to is establish beauty at i-D as place where industry giants and “internet people” can actually meet, on relatively equal footing, and swap notes. From where I am scrolling, beauty does not trickle down anymore. It bubbles up, mutates, gets remixed in real time. It belongs to the people. And this zine is our attempt to keep up.