When I wake up, I wash my face with Relevant Complete Cleansing Serum, which is part of the skin-care line I founded in 2022. I love it because it’s hydrating and doesn’t strip your skin. Three times a week I exfoliate with The Things We Do Gly Glow Scrub. I follow up with the Relevant Beam + Glow Eye Serum, which I use all around my eyes but also on the fine lines around my mouth. I use the Sunburst C+ Superfruit Serum, and then I finish with Relevant’s One & Done Everyday Cream With SPF 40. It doesn’t leave a cast on the skin, and you can reapply it over makeup. In the shower, I use Saltair’s Exotic Pulp body wash and República’s Sugar Body Polish. I was not into bar soaps for a while, but the beauty retailer I co-founded, Thirteen Lune, now carries Gently. I love Karité’s Hydrating Body Cream and Goop’s Afterglow Body Oil — my skin just drinks those up. I’ve been using Kiehl’s Creme de Corps since college.
I’m a five-to-seven-minute makeup girl. I suffer from dark circles, so I start with the orange shade of our Rele-Fix Priming Color Corrector under my eyes and anywhere I have hyperpigmentation. Then I’ll go in with our Rele-Wand, which is a three-in-one concealer, foundation and contour. On my lashes, I use Ami Colé’s Lash-Amplifying Mascara. For lips, I use Ctzn Cosmetics’ Lipstroke liner. For my birthday, our head merchant got me a Chanel Rouge Coco in the shade Attraction that she monogrammed with my name. That’s my red lip for going out. I’m obsessed with Damone Roberts for eyebrows. I put on his Brow Gain every night, and I can tell that my brows are starting to grow back. I also use his brow pencils. The first thing I do when I get home in the evening is use Relevant’s Melt it Off Balm Cleanser with a microfiber cloth. I use the complete cleansing serum again to double cleanse. Overnight, I’ll wear our Lights Out Resting Mask and Sarah Happ’s Dream Slip Overnight Lip Mask.
I only wash my hair once a week and like to wear a lot of different styles — my natural hair, braids, locs, etc. — so the key for me is hydration and protection. I use Pattern’s Treatment Mask and Hydrating Mist. I really like the Lolavie products, too, especially the Restorative Shampoo, Glossing Detangler and Perfecting Leave-In. I use Inala by Lala Anthony’s Power Potion Serum on my scalp and Shaz and Kik’s Back to Your Roots Prewash once a week. I love Camille Roses’s products — I think she has the best textured-hair products on the market. When it comes to tools, I love the MZ Skincare Light Therapy Mask — I swear, I’m glowing after I take it off. Once a week I’ll use the Joanna Vargas Twilight Face Mask with the Dr. Madh Cryo Tools. For fragrance, I wear 13 Stems by Relevant every single day. It’s very clean and earthy but has these amazing floral notes like freesia and violet leaf.
The pine-shrouded slopes of Himachal Pradesh are a world away from the clamor of Mumbai, where the chef Prateek Sadhu established himself at the top of India’s culinary landscape. But the Kashmiri chef was always more content outside of the city, frequently absconding to the Himalayas to forage dandelion greens for tasting menus at his restaurant Masque. “Whether I was in Copenhagen or New York or Mumbai, the mountains were always home,” he says. “This is where I want to cook, this is where I want to live.” As of late November, he no longer commutes for his ingredients: Sadhu’s passions have taken root in Naar, an ambitious 18-seat restaurant near the town of Kasauli where he can pop outside to pick lemons or drive to source shiitakes “the size of my head” from a nearby scientist turned mushroom farmer. He wants the menu to tell the story of the Himalayas, which results in dishes like Kashmiri-inspired chicken-liver skewers glazed in mustard and vinegar or braised lamb smoked over juniper from Ladakh. Set among the farm terraces at Amaya — a 25-acre boutique hotel that opened in 2022 — Naar offers only prix fixe meals, lasting about three-hours, and served in a cozy oak- and teak-clad open kitchen designed to resemble a traditional mountain home. restaurantnaar.com.
Covet This
A Luxurious Train Trip Through Malaysia
Following a four-year pandemic-induced pause, the Eastern & Oriental Express train plans to relaunch its service in February with two new seasonal routes between Singapore and Malaysia. From November to February, one three-day journey will travel west from Singapore to the city of Kuala Lumpur, the coastal village of Langkawi (where you can go snorkeling at the Pulau Payar Marine Park) and to the island of Penang. Then, from March to October, another three-day itinerary heads toward the eastern side of the peninsula, stopping at the Taman Negara National Park, home to tigers, leopards and Sumatran rhinos. The train line’s 15 carriages have been redesigned and now come decked out with traditional Malaysian embroidery and silks. For dinner, the chef André Chiang serves a menu that highlights the different cultures of the region with dishes such as laksa bouillabaisse, black-bone chicken consommé and tea-smoked duck breast. Three-night trips on the Eastern & Oriental Express, a Belmond Train, Southeast Asia start at $3,410 per person, belmond.com.
Wear This
Jewelry That Evokes Bygone Glamour
The designer Jesse Marlo Lazowski learned about the jewelry industry from an early age through her great-aunt Toby Langerman. After surviving the holocaust, Langerman immigrated to the United States where she eventually opened an antique jewelry business in Brookline, Mass., selling Victorian, Art Deco and Egyptian Revival pieces. Lazowski’s exposure to jewelry history and a 2012 mother-daughter trip to Rajasthan, India — which led her to design her first collection with artisans in Jaipur — laid the foundation for her line, Marlo Laz, which she debuted in 2014. The brand’s new 25-piece collection, Moonstruck, pays homage to Oliver Herford’s 1900 poem of the same name. Among the pieces is a one-of-a-kind three-strand pearl-and-champagne diamond necklace featuring an antique cameo that was discovered by Lazowski’s great-aunt 25 years ago. The collection also includes a celestial rivière necklace, crafted with white diamonds set in blackened gold, accompanied by matching drop earrings. Throughout the collection, Lazowski incorporates colored gemstones like smoky topaz, deep red rubies and prasiolite, a light sea green quartz. Price on request, marlolaz.com.
While many chefs prize locally sourced meat, Anna Higham is focused on flour. “We will know when it was milled, who milled it, where the grain is from and how it’s grown,” says Higham of the wheat she’ll turn to soda bread and hand pies at Quince, her first solo bakery. The opening, planned for early February in London’s Islington neighborhood, follows a “year of long delays and surprises,” says Higham, but it’s been buoyed by London’s hospitality community. Higham, who rose through the ranks of the city’s top restaurants, most recently baking at the River Café, has a reputation for supporting female chefs across town. Karma came around: she crowdfunded the money to start the bakery in just 28 days. She hopes it will feel “like a village bakery,” she says, one visited for daily bread, not just the camera-loving pretty pastry. The loaves she developed during an autumn spent at the restaurant and mill Landrace in Somerset (which will supply Quince with those pedigreed bags of flour) should help. Yeasted brown butter buns, preserved tomato flatbread, and whole grain miche will be menu regulars. But fans of the chewy brown butter cakes she created while running the Lyle’s pastry kitchen, or her renditions of the River Café’s seasonal sorbets, can swing by for sweeter offerings, too. As in Higham’s first book, “The Last Bite” (2022), fruit will shine. “I’m quite excited to barter local fruit for bread,” says Higham, who is set on filling custard tarts with quince supplied by Londoners with fruiting trees in their communal gardens. quincebakery.co.uk.
See This
The Ndebele Artist Esther Mahlangu Turns Her Work Into Tapestries
For centuries, women from the Ndebele tribe in the region of Mpumalanga in South Africa, east of Johannesburg, have painted the facades of their houses with colorful geometric patterns bordered by exacting black lines, typically using chicken feathers as brushes. On a trip in 2017 to search out those painted houses, the Lisbon- and Rajasthan-based art director Alexandra de Cadaval met the Ndebele artist Esther Mahlangu. The two women kept in touch over the years and eventually decided to collaborate on a series of 10 tapestries displaying Mahlangu’s designs. It took three years to find the right weavers and complete the collection (there are 20 editions of each piece) but, as of December, they are being shown at the Galerie du Passage in Paris. “We chose the Indian dhurrie technique because it’s also a traditional heritage practice,” de Cadaval explains. “And they are incredibly precise, so they could get those black lines perfect.” The tapestries are on view and available for purchase until Jan. 20, alexandracadaval.com.
