She stood before her gold trimmed vanity in a silk and lace slip the colour of freshly churned butter, her hair a tragic, glamorous mess, the kind only champagne induced naps could produce. Her mascara had surrendered hours ago, the French smoky eye… a technique that, like marrying for money, involved far more work than imagined.

She pointed at herself in the mirror, the way her mother used to point at her before saying something that turned out to be completely right. “There you are,” she said, slurring only slightly. “Never shop for lingerie when you’re ovulating. It’s like grocery shopping on an empty stomach.”

Her reflection didn’t argue. No one ever did.

Across the room, her unconditional love watched her with the bored concern of a family who’d seen far worse. The fat white cat, Perry, blinked, slowly, judgmentally. The baby deer chewed a pearl necklace with childlike determination. And the bunny, small and morally ambiguous, was in the middle of pushing her perfume bottle off the vanity for attention.

Another little black dress flew into the night. This time the exclusive Coco Chanel 1926 original. Below, her long-suffering housekeeper Anne-Marie called up, “Miss Claudette, please! The villagers think it’s raining Chanel!” “Well let them!” Claudette shouted back. “It’s called economic stimulation!”

She strutted over to the wall, a gallery of faded grandiose posters. “Le Dernier Baiser à Saint-Tropez”, a pouty-lipped Claudette in a scandalously small swimsuit. “L’Heure de l’Amour”, her eyes full of manufactured tragedy, clutching a man with an impossibly square jaw, blue-eyed and sun-browned the way men only are in the South in a certain summer of their lives. Her gaze settled on “La Chasseresse de Cœurs.” She had been the star. The poster promised a “wild, untameable passion.” The only thing currently wild and untameable in her life was the bunny, now aggressively humping her slipper.

She took a long, dramatic swig from a nearly empty bottle of Krug and gracefully fell across her Moroccan rug, surrounded by high-fashion debris and scattered rose petals from past admirers, some soft, some dried into a prickly confetti, and a silver cigarette case monogrammed with someone else’s initials. It was a composition of beautiful decay, the kind you only find in rooms where a woman has been truly, magnificently crashing out.

Claudette lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling the way you only do when you’ve run out of things to throw. She needed a partner in crime, a best friend with the inconvenient quality of being a one true love. Not the pill variety, although she had plenty of those stashed in her Baccarat crystal jar. No, she needed an actual, breathing, preferably foreign, preferably charming man. One who did not already have a wife, or someone waiting in the countryside… although if he was Italian she could give up one, or both.

Margaux from the village, twenty-two years old with frankly unreasonable cheekbones, was getting married for the second time this summer alone. Every woman Claudette knew was either exchanging vows or pretending they didn’t want to, which amounted to the same exhausting conversation at every after party. Meanwhile, Claudette would be here, growing slowly into the kind of woman people described as formidable and such a shame, ordering room service for two at the Hôtel de Paris and eating both. All to finally be read as, ‘Claudette Beaumont, Who Was Very Beautiful, Which In The End Was Not Quite Enough.’ She looked at the cat. The cat blinked. “Don’t get comfortable,” she told him. “My future husband might be allergic.”

Right on cue, a frantic horn sounded through the estate. Claudette ran to the window in a flurry of pastel yellow and tousled blonde as a cream Bentley convertible screeched to a halt on the gravel below, nearly flattening Anne-Marie, still wrestling the goat who looked far too comfortable in the Dior Bar Jacket. The door swung open and a whirlwind of Pucci prints and oversized sunglasses emerged, dark hair catching the last of the evening light. She was absolute determination and beauty, wrapped in silk.

“Claudette, ma chérie! I got your distress signal... or maybe it was just the scent of Coco Chanel No. 5 and expensive regret on the wind.” It was Loulou de la Falaise-adjacent, a force of nature who had been a shoemaker, a model, an artist, and briefly, the third wife of an Italian prince. Claudette waved down.

“Loulou! Did you leave the count? He was a ghastly bore, always talking about horse breeding.”

“Oh, the count is ancient history, darling. I left him for his polo pony. He had much better calves. Now, help me up! I have a case of Krug and a man I borrowed from Monaco, but he can wait in the car.”

Loulou burst through the doors as ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ started playing and everything was slow motion, to be fair she always had impeccable timing. She paused in the doorway for effect, one hand on the frame, sunglasses still on, surveying the wreckage before her. “Wonderful,” Loulou declared, tossing her purse onto the pile. She skipped the mess entirely and went straight to Claudette’s face, holding it between her hands like a Greek grandmother. “I haven’t seen that look since the screening at Cannes,” she said quietly, giving Claudette’s button nose a tap.

Claudette threw herself onto the chaise with the full commitment of a woman who had studied tragedy professionally. “It’s official tomorrow, Loulou. My twenties are dead, like my great aunt Celine, she died at thirty after three failed films and no love, all alone. It’s me, I am her reincarnated. I’m accepting my fate.” Claudette rose with grace and a shrug. “So it seems we must have a proper funeral. I can’t bear the thought of missing the actual thing.”

“A funeral!” Loulou’s eyes lit up with a particular brightness. “I have a eulogy I’ve been workshopping for years. Not for you specifically, but it will absolutely work.”

Claudette raised her glass. “To my tragic twenties, wild and frankly, disappointing. May they rest in more peace than they ever gave me.”

By midnight, the room was a sea of petals, silk, discarded heels and piles of ash. The baby deer, now wearing the pearl necklace, had fallen asleep under a pile of coats. Claudette donned a dramatic, black lace veil from her mother’s 1920s collection ‘for the mourning,’ and they danced and danced on the chaise, scattering more wine and more wine and then rose petals, forget-me-rather-than-nots.

Loulou stood up on the dining table, steadied herself against the chandelier, she wore three fur coats, a lingerie set and her impossibly long legs from her dear friend Yves Mathieu-Saint-Laurent’s launch collection, the legs weren’t YSL but they looked like they were. She looked down at Claudette who was currently trying to smoke a cigarette with her toes and tapped on her glass.

“Thirties… Audrey Hepburn was thirty-two for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Marilyn was thirty-three for Some Like It Hot. Coco Chanel was seventy when she reopened her house.” She paused to take a long sip. “And Simone de Beauvoir? Forty-one years young when she wrote that book, you know the one, so scandalous the Vatican banned it. Which, if you ask me, is the only review that ever made me want to open a book.”

Claudette had stopped trying to smoke with her toes. She looked up with doe eyes, the deer beside her doing the exact same.

“The world has always been very certain about when a woman is finished.” Loulou’s voice dropped half a register. “And the women worth remembering have always had the very good sense to disagree. Violently, if necessary.”

She opened her fur coat with the exposé of a woman it would have been a shame not to.

“You were pretty at twenty-two, darling, every idiot is pretty at twenty-two. But this…”

She gestured at the general magnificent wreckage of Claudette.

“This takes years.“

She raised her coupe.

“Everyone forgets the bad reviews, ma chérie. They only ever remember that you were magnificent.”

Claudette looked at Loulou, then at the clock, then back at Loulou. “You know, Loulou,” she slurred, her wine-blushed lips doing that thing they did in La Chasseresse de Cœurs. "Maybe…"

Anna-Marie slammed open the grand wooden doorway, causing the animals to scatter behind Claudette. She was wearing everything from the lawn, layered in a way even Courrèges wouldn’t think of, the Dior Bar Jacket on top, three scarves wound into a magnificent headdress. The goat peeked out from beneath the piles of fabric between her legs. In her hands, trembling, a copy of Le Monde.

“Miss Claudette,” she said. “You have died.”

Claudette looked at her own hands as if checking, briefly getting distracted by a chip in her French manicure.

The headline read: CLAUDETTE BEAUMONT, THE END. A local journalist, Jerry, the sneaky one that’s always sleeping in the rose bushes near the window with a suspicious adoration for Miss Beaumont, overheard the funeral preparations, scurried back to the printers and had filed the story at eleven. Claudette read it twice, “The end? That’s it, Jerry? After all these years.” By midnight it had run, and by five past midnight, the gravel driveway was full.

The cicadas had gone quiet, and the women walked to the window. Everything felt still, the way nights do before a storm.

Directors, producers, the count Loulou had left, three of Claudette’s former leading men, a duchess of uncertain origin and what appeared to be the entire population of Saint-Tropez and half of Paris, candlelit and moving up the drive in the blue-dark of midnight like the last scene of a Visconti film. A field of black that looked, from above, like the kind of crowd that only gathered for someone worth the candles. Which, Claudette thought watching from the window, was the nicest thing anyone had arranged for her in years.

Claudette looked at the crowd. Then at Loulou.

Loulou looked at the crowd. Then at Claudette.

“Well,” said Claudette.

“Well,” said Loulou.

They burst into laughter.

“We do have the champagne,” said Claudette.

“We have several cases,” shrugged Loulou.

“And the string quartet is already paid for.”

“They’re setting up in the garden as we speak.”

Claudette straightened her black lace veil, pulled her slip down far enough to be acceptable, slid on her original Ferragamo Invisible wedges and stepped out onto the balcony. Four hundred people collectively looked up, there were a few cries and a few faints, Claudette was beaming, flushed by the attention.

“Mes amis,” she announced. “I’m devastated to report that I’m not dead. I am thirty. Which I’ve been told, is the same thing.” She raised her glass. “The party is through the grand doors. There will be copious amounts of champagne and I intend to be hired by at least one of you before sunrise, or no one leaves.”

The string quartet played until someone replaced them with six dancers from the Moulin Rouge who had arrived with the man Loulou left in the car. The garden smelled of jasmine and spilled Krug and the particular kind of cigarette smoke that only exists at parties that have gone on long enough to become something else entirely. Brigitte Bardot danced on the fountain barefoot. Candles burned down to nothing and the champagne ran out twice and was replenished both times by men in fedoras through means nobody thought to question.

A famous director danced with the baby deer on hind legs, she now wore the pearl necklace and bore the experience with considerable dignity. Perry surveyed the entire scene, vetting every male near Claudette for cat allergies. One sneeze and he was escorted to the ‘back house’, don’t ask. The bunny, sensing its moment, disappeared entirely and was later discovered asleep inside a director’s hat, which was considered either a very bad or very good omen depending on who you asked.

At some point past three in the morning, a giant sized wedding cake rolled in the doors. It had been commissioned for the ceremony of the Comtesse de Villeneuve, who was marrying a very rich, very boring man the following afternoon at the church in the village. Across the top tier, in pink piped lettering, someone had written: 30, unsuccessfully hiding ‘Just Married’.

Margaux burst in behind the cake, still in her silk dressing gown, cheekbones first. “Nobody touch that cake.” She stuck one long finger straight into a tier, and froze.

The crowd went silent.

Claudette popped from the top tier in a shower of buttercream, landing directly on Margaux, colourful confetti, Chanel blue satin bows attached to her arms and the barely-there new Réard bikini that wasn’t due in the shops until June. She was holding a glass of champagne she had somehow kept upright through the entire ascent, and she threw the male tuxedo figurine into the crowd, and the women fought to catch it as though it were the bouquet at a wedding. Margaux caught it. She looked at it for a long moment, then licked the buttercream off it, and said nothing at all.

Obviously, the crowd went absolutely wild.

Loulou, standing on the table again because that was simply where she did her best work, raised her glass.

“To thirty,” she said. “The only figure that matters.”

And by dawn, Claudette Beaumont had signed on to what would become the most celebrated film of 1963.

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At some point in your twenties, someone tells you that you have a ‘look’. (In other words, ‘I love that for you.’) You either take it as a compliment and stick to the same recipe or you take it as a slight, and spend the next decade dyeing your hair every possible colour in pursuit for something more. (Always working out your original colour was the one.)

Then you hit thirty, you look around your wardrobe and feel a sense of having misplaced something important.

That something is taste. You never lost it and you always had it, you just stopped listening to it.

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I spent most of my twenties dressing for other people, thinking I was dressing for myself. The eras were endless, with a special mention to the King Kylie era. But as you age, your body changes, (unfortunately your mother isn’t lying to you). I got boobs, a waist, womanhood had most definitely arrived, and all my size six clothes, quite literally, got left behind on the other side of the world. Resulting in two suitcases that went from weekly crash outs to a genuinely life changing rebrand.

It started with getting really good at basics, learning the brands that actually aligned with my personality and becoming loyal to them, CouCou Intimates, Agnes B, a quietly fabulous French label that nobody talks about enough (thank god), it became a foundation. I was staying in the South of France for weeks and months at a time, French inspired basics in good quality, just fit day to day. Mixed with a dangerous thrift shop in Japan (hello vintage Chanel awakening), rewatching old films, visiting IDEA’s secret book room in Soho to sift through old magazines. I started paying attention to the women I actually found interesting, rather than the women I thought I should want to look like. I’m still figuring it out honestly. I don’t think it ever really stops, let me know?

For some reason the word ‘taste’ makes people uncomfortable, probably because it implies to have taste means someone else doesn't, but I don’t think that’s what it is. It's more like a feeling, the reason you keep reaching for the same piece, the thing that runs through all your choices even when you can't explain it. The films you choose, the colours that stop you, the way you speak, it’s the real you.

My dad is a hoarder of all things old films, the posters, the magazines. It made me infatuated with the women of the past, French films, the icons, always had this style to them, so utterly sexy and captivating. These icons built something so ‘theirs’, that sixty years later we’re still attempting to recreate it from their archive images. Jackie Kennedy, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin. Women who existed before Pinterest, who became Pinterest.

For Jackie, France wasn’t an aesthetic choice, she studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris in the fifties as part of a junior year abroad programme. She was fluent in French, read French literature, and was living the culture during the early years of her life.

She had a borderline manic obsession with the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, she renovated the White House with French references throughout, because she genuinely loved it, it was natural.

One year she arrived in Paris with JFK, and the French Prime Minister was more interested in meeting her than the President, whether that was for her love of France or something else entirely. She gave her speech in flawless French and the crowd lost their minds. JFK then introduced himself at the press conference as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”

The pillbox hat, the big sunglasses, it only worked because the influence was genuine, it wasn’t aesthetic, it was a real intellectual ‘Love Story’.

Bardot is complicated and her later controversy is real. I would be lying if I pretended she hadn’t shaped my style in ways I was too young to question when I first discovered her.

In Saint-Tropez in the 1950s, she was a girl from Paris who wore a bikini on a beach when women simply didn’t, who wore white cotton dresses and piled up her hair in the perfect mix of big and messy, she lived so specifically, and so physically in her world, that everything she touched became a reference image for… I think it will be forever. She was the South of France before anyone added ‘core’ to the end of it.

And then there is Miss Birkin. The great irony of French style’s famous icon is that she was English, straight from Maida Vale, she was an outsider who absorbed Paris by living in it. She became ‘it’ so completely that she is now the it girl.

Marisa Meltzer, who wrote a biography of her life (‘It Girl’, highly recommend), calls her “nonchalance personified.” Which is of course the most useless thing anyone could tell you to be. Birkin didn’t just look the best ever in a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt, she cut her Paco Rabanne chainmail skirt shorter herself because she wanted more leg, she wore accidental transparent dresses to premieres with nothing underneath, she last minute pinned a dress backwards for Cannes Film Festival because it looked better that way.

It's easy to look at archival photos and just see glamour, forgetting how much courage the ordinary things actually required.

Saint-Tropez, 1962. The morning is soft and already warm.

She’s up before anyone, padding across cool tile in a broderie anglaise that barely exists on her skin. The market opens early and the basket is by the door. She grabs it without thinking because it holds everything. Outside the light is doing just what the South of France light does in summer, turning everything slightly golden, slightly washed. She’s just covered enough to leave the house.

Nobody has invented the word aesthetic yet. She’s going to buy bread.

That basket is now on a three year waitlist. The Hermès Birkin requires a trip to Paris, a spend history, and the right contact… she grabbed it because it was by the door.

The reason most Birkin bags don't look like Jane's is because they weren't worn in the heat of a hot French day, thrown around in a boat and then filled with cigarettes, apples, books and baby nappies. It would be falling apart, battered. Without the actual life the bag just ends up feeling like an (extortionate) costume.

And that's the thing, so did the rebellion. The old rules were at least visible, so cutting the skirt shorter or showing up in transparent dress meant something. You can't manufacture that kind of aura. It only exists when the life behind it is real.

We have no shock left, you can scroll through a hundred different 'GRWM’s' before your morning coffee... Follow anyone, wear anything… or nothing at all, it’s impossible to know where to begin. The algorithm curates your freedom so precisely that you end up in the same world as everyone else, and maybe not fully believing it, but convincing yourself you got there on your own.

Controversy isn’t taste and it never was, it’s just good marketing. Some look back at Birkin and see a provocateur, but mostly they were just getting dressed.

So if it isn’t controversy maybe it’s simplicity? Hello, CBK tsunami. In a world of noise, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy offered a rule book we know all too well, quality basics, a capsule wardrobe as a complete philosophy. People didn’t fall for it because it was new (how long have we been reviving the 90s for now?), they fell for it because the world has too much choice.

Taste can’t be bought by a stylist and you can’t plan the moment that changes everything. You only understand how your taste formed after it’s already happened.

Today’s problem is the algorithm, it’s me placing affiliate links directly in this Substack you’re reading and earning 12% commission off it. It’s taste that has been saved to your favourites of the month, and immediately served back to you in a curated carousel, a very good way to never develop taste at all.

So I asked you, and between your answers and everything I've been figuring out myself, here's where I'd actually start.

01 // Get the hell out of your hometown immediately.

Travel is expensive and a luxury, I know, but it should be the first luxury you prioritise. Wake up in a new city, walk and don’t cab, find a random espresso spot on a busy street and just watch. One woman said “every new country is a whole new era unlocked” and I have to agree. The deep South of France, Coastal Italy, Tokyo and New York have changed the way I think about everything. You need new references for your eyes.

02 // Study deeeeply, with physical media, old films, vintage magazines, art galleries, museums.

Films, I beg you, cinema is better than therapy. Watch across different genres and eras until you find the energy that feels like yours and then go deep, comedy, drama, romance, French new wave. Some of my favourites: Some Like It Hot, La Piscine with Jane Birkin, and if old Hollywood isn’t your era, Sex and the City was every woman’s first fashion awakening and Uptown Girls, 13 Going on 30, the 2000s had a wholeeee thing going on too. I’ll do a full film list one day, lmk the films that inspired you in the comments.

Then magazines, one of my favourite things to hoard, thanks dad. Find your birthday Vogue, what was September 1994? What was on the cover and what were women actually wearing? Go into a vintage magazine shop (If you’re in London, IDEA in Soho has an insane vintage magazine selection. They’re also online here.) and sift through the ones whose covers stop you, then actually read them properly. It’s genuinely fascinating to see what women found exciting from a completely different era.

03 // Find a woman who makes you feel something and study her like a subject.

It doesn’t have to be a celebrity or a character, it can be your mother, your cool aunt, it doesn’t even have to be a woman, maybe it’s your Italian grandfather. One woman said “I consist of every person I like” and I think that’s exactly right. Another described dressing like objects would if they were a person. Which is abstract and insane but totally makes sense. What would your lampshade wear? What would the South of France at seven in the morning wear?

04 // Just stand in front of your wardrobe.

DO IT. One woman said “Playing dress up with only music in the background, no phone, no Pinterest.” Just as if you were 18 getting ready for a house party with your girlfriend and a bottle of passion pop (is that only Australian?), make it fun again. Cut tops into skirts and skirts into tops. Mix and match shoes (Very SJP of you.)

05 // Most of all trust your instincts and the feeling before you understand it.

One of my favourite comments was “Buy the bits that make you go OOH when you see them and figure out how to wear them later.” That includes your body, learning what you actually want to accentuate rather than what you think you should. Now go test your instincts through thrifting, it trains this muscle in a way that curated shopping can’t. When nobody has organised the rails for you in a perfectly curated ‘in-season’ fashion, you have to trust yourself, and pray it fits. If it fits, taste becomes fate!

06 // The capsule wardrobe everyone harps on about is actually good advice.

But it doesn’t mean you need the same COS t-shirt and the same Frame jeans as everyone else (although, ngl, they are good). A capsule just means a base you actually want to work from, which you know by now. Build your own or you will end up at square one again. If you want to see mine, I curated a list here, which I’m aware defeats the point entirely, but here we are.

My fiancé has a place in the South of France, we go four times a year and spend the whole of August there. It’s the complete opposite to St Tropez in all the best ways. A small village with the faint blue hue of the great Pyrenees mountains in the background. One day I decided I wanted to go up there, to the top of it, with zero hiking experience and a 6 dollar head torch from Decathalon.

It was a rogue last minute trip, I wore cotton pointelle, light long sleeve tops with a perfect boat neck, mini skirts and my mother in laws iconic hiking boots that have no label. It felt authentic, sexy but me.

That was my basket at the door moment.

Bringing it back to London was the hard part, how do you turn cotton pointelle and vintage hiking boots into a city autumn? A lot of trialling, layering, coats, vintage. Lots of vintage. Take it one season at a time.

Birkin, Kennedy, Bardot, none of them had better taste than you. They just had more life happening to them. Birkin didn’t second guess the basket and Jackie didn’t tone down the sunglasses for anyone. They were just being themselves. They became iconic in retrospect.

Real taste requires confidence. The pile of vintage magazines and the Italian grandfather, yes, but also trusting yourself enough to wear the thing that's only yours.

As someone in my comments put it: "Maturing isn't always about changing your taste. Sometimes it's about having the courage to honour it."

Caitlin x

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I stopped smoking. I stopped drinking. So surely I can do anything, right?

In the most vain spirit, I’m on a mission to be the hottest I’ve ever been by 35. Sue me. And when I say hot, I don't mean just looks. I mean making life my bitch.

Because here's what nobody warned me about turning 30: I look around and realise that every woman I find truly inspiring and devastatingly beautiful is not in her 20s. She’s in her 30s. Her 40s. Look at the women in Sex and the City. Desperate Housewives. They are playing women in their 30s, 40s, even 50s, and I am obsessed with every single one of them and it’s not youth that’s doing it. What is the secret?

I asked you. Not promoted brands. Not paid influencers. I went to the only place where women tell the truth… my comments section. I fed alllll 1000 comments into an AI and asked it to tally up your juicy secrets.

So here it is, advice by YOU.

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01 // First, the obvious one. And yes, it deserves to go first.

Retinol. Retinal. Tretinoin. AKA Gods gift to women. The winner by a landslide, mentioned nearly twice as often as anything else, by women who typed it like they'd been holding it in.

It's Vitamin A. In various forms, at various strengths, going by various names. And before we go any further, they are not all the same thing, and this distinction matters more than most people will tell you.

Retinol is the over-the-counter entry point, the one you start with in your twenties, mostly as prevention. In your thirties, you’re correcting now, and that calls for something stronger. Retinal converts faster in the skin, results you can actually see. Tretinoin, prescription Retin-A, is the gold standard. Forty years of clinical data. The one dermatologists use themselves. And the one a commenter who spent years working in dermatology described simply: “It’s trial and error for your skin type, but always invest in your skin.”

The brands my community swears by: Medik8 Crystal Retinal, start at 1, work through 3, 6, 10, 20, the progression is the point. SkinCeuticals 0.3%. A313 for the women who want real results without the price tag. Revision Retinol Complete. And for the Korean skincare obsessives, Anua PDRN paired with niacinamide and azelaic acid. For prescription tret, go to your dermatologist. Start at .025%, work up to .1% over time. Don't rush it.

The rules everyone agreed on: start low, start slow. One to two nights a week before you build up. Never skip SPF. Always do your research. And do not, under any circumstances, start retinal before you have used retinol first.

If you're in your twenties and haven't started, this is your sign. If you're in your thirties and feel behind, you're not, you’re just in time.

02 // The one nobody talks about as a beauty tip. But should.

Leave the relationship that is ageing you.

I’m not being dramatic, it was literally the second thing that came up, almost as frequently as retinol. “An epic heartbreak at 30/31 which changes the trajectory of your life and the glow up is OBSCENE.”

Toxic relationships cause chronic stress which elevates cortisol. Elevated cortisol breaks down collagen and destroys your sleep. The women in my comments weren’t being coocoo when they connected leaving a bad relationship to glowing up. They were describing a biological reality.

One woman put it in a way I keep thinking about: “Learned to work with myself instead of against myself. I’m 36 and I look better than I ever did when I was younger.”

The most underrated beauty tip is protecting your peace. A non-negotiable.

03 // I know you don’t want to hear it.

Strength training. I’m sorry. I know. But the data was so overwhelming on this one.

It came up… literally in third place. The specific reason women kept giving: it changes your body composition in your 30s in a way that nothing else does. You stop chasing smaller. You start building something. One woman lost 35 pounds in a year. Another said she can fit into clothes she couldn’t touch for years after just two months. Multiple women said health issues they’d had for years started resolving. “I swear strength training like reverses ageing,” said one.

The combination that came up most: strength training three to four times a week paired with Pilates once or twice. Not one or the other. Both. The strength for your body composition, the Pilates for your posture, your core, the way you carry yourself.

And movement in general, the OG 10,000 steps, walking in nature, ballet, barre, swimming. The message underneath all of it was the same: move your body every single day, not at 5am if that’s not who you are. Just consistently.

04// The supplements. Because your comments basically wrote a prescription.

This is where it got specific. And I mean specific.

For your skin: Vitamin C supplement in the morning paired with SPF. Omega 3 for inflammation. Collagen in whatever format you’ll actually take consistently, the brand matters less than the habit. Astaxanthin, a powerful antioxidant, came up specifically. And Liposomal Glutathione, the bioavailable form, the one that actually gets absorbed, mentioned with genuine enthusiasm.

For your sleep and nervous system: Magnesium glycinate at night. For sleep, for bloating, for the low-level anxiety that nobody names but everyone has.

For your hair: Biotin, consistently. And two that came up with real conviction, Lustriva, two women called it transformative, and Biosil combined with Life Extension Skin Restoring Ceramides. One woman called this her “magic combo.” I looked it up. She’s not wrong.

Worth noting separately: Vitamin D with K2. Almost everyone in the UK is deficient. Almost nobody talks about it. Get your levels checked. And again, always do your own research.

Then the diet pattern that kept appearing underneath all of it: low sugar, minimal alcohol, high protein, no coffee on an empty stomach. Not a diet. Just a pattern. The women who looked best weren’t restricting. They were choosing differently.

05 // Probably what you expected to be first. But not the conversation you expected.

Botox. I am not here to tell you what to do with your face. But I will tell you what multiple women said, because the conversation was more nuanced than the internet usually allows it to be.

The pro camp: start in your early 30s, twice a year, find an injector whose work you actually like. "Get that post-Botox glow, nothing beats it." "Botox and polynucleotides, no foundation ever because it sits in the lines."

The counter camp was smaller but specific. "Botox paralyses muscles which means you'll need to upkeep it forever." "Retinol over Botox every time, I'm 30 with a baby face, never had it." "I'm 36 and look better than I ever did. Find joy. Don't do too much."

What I will say is this: the women almost never led with Botox. They led with retinal, with strength training, with leaving the situation that was stressing them out. The Botox, if they used it, was the final five percent. Not the foundation.

06 // The one that’s free.

Sleep. Eight hours.

“8hrs sleep minimum.” “Sleep as much as you can.” “Nightlife is your biggest enemy.”

Here’s what’s actually happening when you don’t sleep: cortisol rises, collagen breaks down, human growth hormone, (the thing that repairs your skin overnight), doesn’t get released properly. Your body does its best work between 10pm and 2am.

The most boring beauty tip is also the most powerful one. Go to bed.

Other honourable mentions:

• SPF - every single day, not just summer, non-negotiable

• Microneedling - came up repeatedly, at home and in-clinic

• Get your hormones checked - estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, know your numbers

• 10k steps - unglamorous, effective, free

• Red light therapy - the obsessives swear by it

• Regular facials - a relationship with a good facialist came up more than once

• Lymphatic drainage massage - monthly, consistently

• Polynucleotides / PRF - the treatment the aesthetics world is quietly moving towards

• Meditation and breathwork - more than a wellness cliché, it came up

• Nature walks - specifically nature, not just walking

• Colour analysis - know your palette, dress accordingly

• Dress how you want - came up a few times

• Solo travel - the ones who moved or travelled alone mentioned it like it changed something fundamental

• Go fully sober - a small but passionate camp

• Blueberries, kiwis, cranberries - someone's breakfast is doing something

• Face yoga - divided opinion but a loyal following

• Castor oil - under the eyes specifically

• A beagle named Danny - mentioned once, no further elaboration, we respect it

• Living with cat - same energy

The women who glowed up hardest in their 30s weren’t the ones who found the best products. They were the ones who made the biggest life changes. They quit jobs. They moved cities. They started strength training not to be smaller but to feel strong. They picked up hobbies. They protected their peace like it was the most valuable thing they owned, because, as it turns out, it is.

“I have a fun life. I keep developing my interests. I stay social. Honestly having a fun life keeps you feeling and appearing youthful in a deeper way. I’m 40,” said one woman, and I think about that comment more than any of the skincare ones.

The most beautiful women in the comments weren’t the ones who had found the perfect routine. They were the ones who had found themselves. And then taken very good care of her.

The full product list, every skincare product, every brand mentioned, is linked here. I’ll keep updating ShopMy as I find new things worth adding.

And if you want to add your own tip to the data set, drop it in the comments. I’m still collecting.

Caitlin x

Disclaimer: This is a tally of comments from my community, not medical advice. Always do your own research and consult a professional for anything health related.

There’s something in them that isn’t performing. Something that has been fed. You can’t quite name it but you feel it, the girl who spends her Wednesday evenings at a pottery wheel and comes back covered in clay and a whole new aura, the girl who’s teaching herself French for no reason other than she wants to watch Jane Birkin in a new light, the girl who captures short films on her Super 8 just because she sees the world that way. They didn't start doing it for content. They started doing it for their life. That’s the whole difference. That’s everything.

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I was an only child. Which means from a very young age, I learned the most important skill nobody teaches you in school: how to keep yourself company. You just had to figure out what you actually liked, who you actually were and what lit you up. So I drew. I beaded. I watched my dad’s old Avengers series in black and white at 13. And I collected My Scene dolls, which if you know, you know, Madison, Chelsea and Delancey lived out entire storylines, Chelsea throwing a party that Delancey definitely wasn’t invited to, Hudson somehow always at the centre of it. I wasn’t doing these things because someone told me to. I did them because I was 13 and the afternoon was long and nothing else made sense.

There is a version of you, probably around age 11, 12, maybe 13, who had a very clear opinion about what was worth her time. She wasn’t thinking about whether it was marketable. She just knew. She loved things without apology, without strategy, without needing them to be anything other than what they were. She had a thing. Maybe many things. And somewhere between then and now, she was talked out of them, a slow steady accumulation of growing up, of being perceived, of learning to want things that are less embarrassing to explain at dinner parties. I think about her a lot.

I think there is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from having nothing that belongs just to you. And I think a lot of women, especially in their twenties, are living there without quite knowing it, filling the silence with scrolling and socialising and being perfectly fine, and wondering why something still feels a little lost. A hobby won’t fix your life. But it will give you something to be excited about. And sometimes that’s the thing you didn’t know you were missing.

So here, in no particular order, are some of the ones I find most chic.

Drawing. Girls who create things have a certain type of aura. You really just have to let go of your perfectionism.

Reading. Escaping reality and learning all at the same time. Plus there is something so chic about having a half-read book in every handbag.

Journaling. 90% of people don’t actually know what they want until they write it down.

Ballet or any dance. Posture says everything. And discipline will take you further than motivation ever could.

Knitting or crochet. Slow hobbies make you present in a way that nothing else does. Also nothing beats saying thanks, I made it.

Upcycling furniture. There is something so sexy about seeing the potential in something old and making it new.

Leatherworking. Bookbinding. Making your own journal. Your deepest thoughts deserve to live in something you made by hand.

Sourdough. Yes I know. But there is something almost alchemical about fermentation, about learning to work with time and temperature and a living thing. It’s giving domestic goddess with a chemistry degree and I stand by that entirely.

Ikebana — Japanese floral arrangement. It teaches you that the space you leave is just as important as the flowers you add.

Birdwatching. Hear me out. There is something deeply, quietly chic about being completely unreachable in a field with a pair of vintage binoculars. It’s for the girl who is exhausted from being perceived and would rather do the perceiving.

Letter writing. There’s something so magical about moving across the world and writing letters to the people you love, letters they can keep in a drawer and read again ten years from now.

Film club, but the real kind. Go to the cinema once a week. Find the ones that play old films. Talk about it after in unnecessary detail. Have opinions. Change your mind. Argue about it over dinner.

Scrapbooking your year. There’s something rare and romantic about having something physical to show.

Hosting, properly. Learn how to make a table feel like an event. There is nothing more generous than someone who has made an art out of welcome.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, in the flour on the counter and the half-finished sketch and the sourdough that didn’t rise and the film you watched alone on a Tuesday and loved, you remember something important. You are a person with an inner life. Not a ‘5-9 routine’, not a girl who is broadly fine and busy and keeping up, a person who is interested, in the world, in making things, in the slow and private pleasure of getting better at something for no reason at all.

Start by asking your inner child what she loved at 13.

Caitlin x

This brings me to the new era.

If you’re reading this, you likely found me during the creator phase of this brand. Maybe you came for the big sister advice, the ‘how to stay hot’ guides, or the marketing templates.

Before this I spent years in the depths of fashion marketing, building worlds for other people, pitching strategies, and launching campaigns. I learnt how the machine works. And I’ve decided to stop building other peoples worlds and start curating my own.

On the surface, Club Femme Fatale is a dissection of culture, cinema, and the art of being “in the know.” But at its core, it isn’t just a newsletter or a brand. It’s actually an adult animated TV show in pre-production.

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Think Valley of the Dolls birthed a mix of Charlie’s Angels and Sex and the City, but animated, and everyone is wearing Archive Miu Miu.

Why animation? Because reality is bleak, and animation is the only medium that pushes the boundaries far enough. I looked around and realised the animation I needed as a woman didn't exist yet. So I’m going to make it.

Everything you see here, the articles, the community, the visual identity, is the research and development for a fictional universe, I am building the IP in real-time. By being here, you aren't just an audience; you are the co-curators. What we obsess over here converts directly into the script.

To launch this new platform, I released the framework I’m using to keep my brain from melting in 2026:

Femme Girls, The 2026 Issue.

This isn’t a planner (I’m not a life coach). Think of it as an operating system for the next 11 months, the way a multi million dollar company would think. It’s for the girls who are ready to stop being characters in someone else’s story and start directing.

My second piece, “The ROI of Hobbies,” drops this Sunday. And next week, I start posting the fiction that ties this whole experiment together (scary).

So welcome to a world in progress.

Caitlin x

There was a time I thought I had “made it.” Global marketing manager at a fashion brand, salary, structure, a title that sounded big enough to make my frenemies jealous and had me travel internationally 4 times a year. What more do you need? I told myself this was adulthood. Alexa play ‘Suddenly I See’ by KT Tunstall. This was what my 13 year old self dreamt about.

But I had no equity. No ownership. No real power. I was building someone else’s empire while convincing myself it was mine. If you’d asked me then, I would have said “I’m just learning to start my own brand one day.” And maybe I would have. But honestly, I probably would have stayed till they added ‘Senior’ to my title and be told I’m part of the “family.”

Until I fell in love with a boy from London (cue upcoming Netflix series), quit my job, packed two suitcases, moved across the world, and realised how dangerous a small mindset can really be. Because once you see how big life can get, you can’t unsee it.

According to the Lunar Calendar, we’re technically still in the Year of the Snake. Which feels right. The louder energy, the Fire Horse, doesn’t arrive until Feb 17. January IS the trial. A soft launch of the self. Not the year itself, but the audit before it. A month to notice what feels off, what feels performative and what feels like a subscription you forgot you were paying for.

This past month, I’ve been building something called “Femme Girls, The 2026 Issue.” This is a 34-page editorial template that treats your life like a creative project, a syllabus. Something to guide you on how to “Make 2026 Your Bitch.”

Inside it, there’s:

The Audit - a brutally honest inventory of what (and who) doesn’t get to cross the lunar year with you.

The Strategy - focusing on major moves instead of vague goals you’ll forget by March.

The Visual Identity - your space, your work, your aesthetic, the internal architecture of how your life looks and feels.

The Hobby Stack - because being interesting online is easy; being interesting offline is a craft.

The Vision Board - not just collage, but psychology; how visualisation actually works and how to quietly bend your algorithms in your favour.

Some sneak peaks below:

So are you sold? Cause I am. The full template is for paid subscribers, the real ones know how much I have done for free. It’s £5, less than a coffee, less than the price of every impulse purchase you made this month let’s be real. Consider it a membership card to a Club of femmes that want to make life their bitch. A curated space for the femmes who are committed to the cause. Every month there will be a new template, a new fiction piece (I want to test my script writing with you!) and lots of tips like how to stay hot in your 30s, because a little vanity is very much accepted here.

Your download is waiting below <33

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