My Weekly Media Roundup #1

Notes on the online self , Gourmand Perfumes , Style , YouTube videos , Recent Saves and more

Jun 23, 2025

A few months ago I opened up about being chronically online, constantly consuming random content on TikTok and other socials , content that often left me feeling mentally cluttered and uninspired. But things have shifted. I’ve become much more intentional about what I consume, carefully curating what I read, watch, and listen to.

Today, I’m excited to share everything I’ve consumed this week from niche hyperfixations to ultra specific content gems that sparked my curiosity and creativity. This isn’t just a random list: it’s a thoughtfully curated selection

This type of post will become part of a paid content series available on my online store. It’ll be formatted in a downloadable PDF or a paid post .

You can get my June Edit Guide packed with curated recs, Substack reads, YouTube recs and more 💌

Articles :

The term “Gourmand,” typically used to describe a person who enjoys eating (and perhaps eats too much), is now hitched to a beauty trend that doesn’t involve eating at all. Instead of cluing us into the joy of biting into a flaky croissant, gourmands divorce the smell of delicious food from the act of eating it.
With just one spray, gourmands fulfill the demands of both femininity and diet culture. They make us smell sweet, palatable, and appealing. They make us consumable and help us restrict our consumption. They are the literal fumes we run on, delaying the point at which we eventually, inevitably, must eat

To boost your self-esteem, write about chapters of your life

In a recent paper in the Journal of Personality, Kristina L Steiner at Denison University in Ohio and her colleagues looked into these questions and reported that writing about chapters in your life does indeed lead to a modest, temporary self-esteem boost, and that in fact this benefit arises regardless of how positive your stories are. However, there were no effects on self-concept clarity, and many questions on this topic remain for future study.

On Trophies

The woman I saw was walking through the Marais, a quartier that, across the three months I lived there, I’d grown to loathe for its transition from a Lemaire-appropriate post-industrial urban space into relentless Emily in Paris . She was wearing a dark trench coat, the toning bag in contrasting texture, slung across her chest. She was tall, her long dark hair streamed behind her, adding an extra texture, as did her dark glasses. She was Baudelaire’s Parisienne: “Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,”(“À une passante,” Le Fleurs du mal, 1857,
I didn’t want to become the woman. But somehow I thought the bag could be me, without the whole look. Was this what Freud calls transference, where the patient sees the therapist “through a haze of associations,” to which the therapist attempts to provide “an alternative script”? No, it was more like its reverse. I didn’t project Freud’s family feeling onto my passante, but intuited that something of her could rub off on me, not her entirety but… well, I don’t know.
A trophy is the notion of fashion as a treat, a reward. But for whom? Bags are a trophy for designers. More than use, the bag signals membership of the fashion club. Look at how, at every fashion show, celebs will turn up wearing one item from the collection. And more often than not, it’s the bag, because bags are easy to put on, take off, pass around. Bags fit everyone.