The Gas Station #30

The perfect Christmas dress, the funniest thing I've watched in forever, I tried the FaceStim, and the ongoing myth of the ‘fertility cliff’ at 35

Hi all,

The tree is up, my presents have all been bought, and I’m off to a Christmas party this evening. Feeling festive and so is this newsletter! I hope you are too…

Style

• If you loved Chanel’s subway show (who didn’t?), here are some great styling tips to take from it, including a wrapped waist, menswear inspired layers, mixing checks, and statement vests.

• After much research, I’ve concluded this DÔEN frock is the perfect Christmas dress - for a party or the day itself. With its red silk, white lace and bow, it’s bordering on festive twee but it swerves cliché by just being so damn pretty.

DÔEN dress

• Random style inspo of the week: I love this cold weather outfit stylist Jamie Mizrahi is wearing while she takes her client Jeremy Allen White shopping. Here’s hoping she tells him to pull his beanie down.

Culture

• Best thing I watched this week? Honestly, Blackadder Goes Forth. I’d only ever seen snippets of the BBC’s 1989 First World War comedy sitcom while growing up (and was familiar with its famous ending) but I’d never watched the whole thing properly before. I’d parked it in my mind with other ‘classic’ British comedies like Fawlty Towers which I do not find funny at all. But this was fucking hilarious, I was crying with laughter (until I was just crying). Consider me 36 years late to the party. Curiously it’s not on BBC iPlayer but it is streaming on NOW. I also watched Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt which is pretty entertaining but ultimately a big old mess that doesn’t seem to know what it is trying to say about cancel culture; nice outfits though. And finally, in a bid to get in the Yuletide spirit, I endured Prime Video’s new comedy, Oh. What. Fun., starring Michelle Pfeiffer as an under-appreciated mother over the holidays. Being tied up in Christmas tree lights while someone force feeds you those gingerbread flavoured Doritos might be more festive than watching this. To quote Rowan Atkinson’s Captain Blackadder, it’s “about as funny as getting an arrow through the neck and discovering there’s a gas bill tied to it”.

  

  Oh, Dominic Sessa and Jason Schwartzman, why?

• Curious to know if anyone here reads romance novels? I only ask because I don’t usually but I picked up a popular one by a trendy imprint - I’d prefer not to say which - and it was so appallingly bad I thought that it couldn’t be indicative of all modern romance. If you’re a lover, send me your recs! I want in.

• While I’m an elder millennial, I grew up with Gen X culture and so ‘Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation?’ (gift link) really stoked some nostalgia for the pop culture of my teen years: Daria! My So-Called Life! Reality Bites! (The last of which I still quote weekly with my friend Jack). I felt 15 again.

Beauty

• This week I tried out a newish procedure called the FaceStim at Pfeffer Sal, a charming skin clinic in Fitzrovia (I say charming because it’s tucked away in a very cute, English-looking mews and even inside it is less sterile and more whimsical than most skin clinics). FaceStim is a non-invasive facial treatment that uses radiofrequency and targeted muscle stimulation to lift, tighten, tone, and rejuvenate facial skin and muscles - they describe it as a ‘workout for the face’ - to boost collagen, define jawlines, lift brows, and reduce wrinkles aka look snatched. It starts not unlike a normal facial, all relaxing with lovely herbal smells, and then they turn things up a notch. It’s hard to describe what the FaceStim feels like, a bit like pinching and non-voluntary twitching? It doesn’t hurt at all but it’s a strange sensation. When working on my neck, my arm started spasming (not scary, just funny tbh). It’s totally safe and I could see such great results - my face looked lifted afterwards. A set of six treatments apparently will give you results that last for months but I had just the one which they told me will last for seven days so expect to see me out all week showing off my new snatched look. I would definitely recommend it for your wedding or some other big event.

  

  What the FaceStim looks like vs what it feels like

• I wanted to give a shout out to my former Refinery29 colleague Jacqueline Kilikita who just launched a Substack called Beauty In Sight. She is such a brilliant and talented beauty editor and writer with a wealth of knowledge so, if that’s your thing, or indeed you have followed her work, do subscribe. I also want to platform her because it’s so hard for new newsletters to get noticed on Substack these days. When I launched my Substack two years ago I was featured in the ‘Recently launched’ section at the end of The Substack Post which goes out to all users weekly and I recall it getting me a fair number of subscribers. If I launched today it’s, er, unlikely I would make the cut - last week Substack only announced new launches by Keir Starmer, Kamala Harris and The New Yorker. Times have changed.

Life

• The ever-excellent Jess Cartner-Morley on how the aesthetics of Christmas have changed this year, “a Christmas vibe shift: let’s call it Ho-Ho-Home Alone”. All-white themes and zeitgeist decorations are out, while tartan pyjamas, ‘Ralph Lauren Christmas’, and candy-cane striped baubles are in. “The vibe is cosy, but also unashamedly jolly”.

• Margot Robbie’s London recs are really quite relatable: Hampstead Heath, The Fat Badger and The Pelican pubs, and the Jack the Ripper walking tour. I quite agree! I did the last one when I was pregnant and in need of social activities outside of the pub.

Motherhood

• I love the eight-part series, Motherhood: The Playlist, on Instagram by Amber Horsburgh exploring musicians and motherhood, telling stories such as Halsey being instructed by the industry to hide her pregnancy, Lauryn Hill writing The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill while she had a small baby, how Lily Allen claimed having children ruined her career, and how motherhood became part of Eryka Badhu’s music (she also became a doula). It’s excellently executed and so, so fascinating. Hard recommend.

• This is a really good list of Christmas films to watch divided into categories for toddlers and kids, tweens and teens, and the whole family. We did The Muppets Christmas Carol at the weekend and it was perfect. Now my son keeps asking to watch more of “the green frog and the pig with hair”.

• I’m always banging on about how it is essentially misinformation that women will struggle to get pregnant after 35, something that the media often likes to reinforce, so I appreciated this balanced and thorough piece, ‘Does the ‘Fertility Cliff’ Really Hit at 35?’ (gift link). While there are risks and exceptions, even healthcare professionals are stumped and frustrated as to why this magic number of 35 continues to be bandied around.

  Related reading:

  I’m an ‘old’ mother and it’s been the best

Hope you’re having a great week,

Gillian