My Year Of Work And Epilation
Annie Kreighbaum breaks her silence. Plus, get smooth legs just in time for summer!
The last All Of My Opinions Are Your Own newsletter was sent on March 7. Don’t be mad! I paused payments. Crucially too, I changed the name. To make the transition less jarring, I haven’t yet updated the iconography. This will happen in due time.
So what have I been doing the past several months, if not writing you little emails?
At the top of the priority list was asking for people to give me money in exchange for a small part of my business, which doesn’t yet exist by most definitions—also known as pre-seed fundraising. This was right when Trump first announced the global tariffs, which caused great mental anguish for myself and for many investors, evidently.
Other issues investors consider when deciding whether or not to buy a piece of my imaginary business, while we march toward industrialized feudalism and a possible nuclear event:
“Can it scale?”
Me: Of course!
“Like an app?”
Me: No.
“Have consumer brands, particularly in beauty, had great PR lately in terms of M&As and general profitability?”
Me: No. Except Rhode.
“Is the founder famous?”
Me: No. But…
Now’s my chance to tell investors that, while my Instagram following is D-list at best, I have a rather impressive Substack audience. This is usually right after I explain what Substack is.
Has anyone else noticed that it’s much harder to get people’s attention on Instagram than it used to be? I’ve never posted with much consistency, but one thing remained true for over a decade: a selfie always hit. Not so, anymore. I’m getting 500 likes on a selfie these days, and I seem to lose followers at the same rate as I gain them. If my ego wasn’t so massive, I’d be questioning whether people even **liked** me in real life.
Substack, however, is an entirely new world. Before the hiatus, I kind of felt like the Rhode of Substack, and I didn’t have to learn any choreography or use trending audio to get there. Some of you found me purely through Substack, and not because my 2013 Lindsay Lohan mugshot makeup tutorial changed your life in high school. Fascinating. My audience keeps growing without me even trying—despite my absence! Specifically, my paying audience spiked despite not sending a newsletter for weeks. I assume this means people were paying me not to write, so I’ll have to consider this further.
Your ears must have really been burning because I brag to anyone who will listen that I have the highest concentration of important tastemakers, and can count some of the richest, most discerning people on earth as subscribers. You are a very attractive asset to a potential company, and thus to a potential investor. . .
All of which is to say, you are now my captive audience, my potential customers. You’re along for the startup ride, because despite the odds, I did raise enough money to launch my company. It’s well past the imaginary stage, and this little newsletter has become what we in the business like to call a “marketing channel.”
As such, things are going to start looking a bit different around these parts. You’ll notice I changed the name to Vanity Project. This is not the name of my yet-to-launch company (though there are conceptual sympathies), I just felt the previous name was a bit of a flop. Sorry, we just felt it was a flop; the same rules still apply as when you first signed up: we agree on everything, share the same opinions. One love, one brain. Dissent will not be tolerated.
Nothing will change much in terms of content, beyond increased regularity. To be clear, Vanity Project is a completely different entity to my new company. It’s editorial, not commercial, and will remain pure to the vision of its editor—me (though, for tax purposes, both are commercial businesses). They will operate like church and state, in that they will be inextricably linked. Understand?
Slowly, newsletter by newsletter, you will become brainwashed according to my gorgeous agenda. You’ll continue to think this is just an educational, very funny, and well-written—harmless, even—piece of media that you get each week which won’t leave you depressed, or try to sell you something. You will be mistaken. Once my company launches, you are going to be so pilled on my point of view, the demand for my products will be, frankly, insatiable. (+ I’ll try not to depress you.)
Even the men reading this—you’ll continue to say, “Sure, it’s a ‘beauty’ newsletter, but it’s also about product design and startup stuff. Not just girly stuff.” Wrong. And if you unsubscribe now, I have one question: when did you first start hating women?
For everyone who endures, still thinking this is all fun and games and makeup, know that, subconsciously, I’ll further endear you to me as a person, sharing small details and anecdotes from my personal life to make myself seem more relatable, imperfect. To curry sympathy. I don’t just want your money, I want your mental and emotional investment as well. This isn’t a “community” I’m building, this is a cult.
Now that we have that out of the way, you’re probably wondering what else I’ve been doing as I’ve neglected you these past few months. Working, a lot. Cults don’t grow on trees!
For the first time ever, I’ve committed myself to staying in NYC the entire year to lock in. One of the perks of living here is that long-distance friends tend to come to you, so it’s actually been less painful than I imagined—especially when I consider not having plans to leave during the hottest part of summer. For once, I don’t feel claustrophobic. I used to always need a trip to look forward to because the thought of being trapped indefinitely on an island of humid piss was too much to bear. Currently, I feel a sustained happiness, something I haven’t felt in so long that I was convinced I was experiencing mania. I love making things.
Hobbies, I know, are still an important part of a healthy lifestyle, so I’ve jumped back into a project which I haven’t touched in years: epilation.
For the uninitiated, epilation is performed with an epilator, a handheld motorized device which consists of a spinning wheel of pinchers. You press it against your body in strokes like an electric razor, except instead of cutting your body hair, it tweezes each strand, yanking it free from the root. Once you get past the intense pain, redness, swelling, and weeks of infected ingrown hairs, you will discover why this is the choice hair removal solution amongst elite foreign hotties. If you’ve never considered or even heard of one, you are woefully American.
I’ve owned three epilators in my lifetime, with my new Braun Silk Epil 7 being number four. This is my second of this model, and third Braun overall. I tried a Panasonic most recently, but at the end of the day, there’s something about the precise forcefulness of German engineering that really lends itself to a device like an epilator.
The first time using it is the worst it will ever be, but if can commit to treating your legs like they’re literally covered in open wounds for six weeks, all the while continuing to subject yourself to the hungry hungry tweezing wheel, it will be as though you never had leg hair to begin with.
While you shouldn’t experience any bleeding or tearing of the skin, I recommend using an aftershave-type antiseptic after epilating to clean the hair follicles. It’s not like waxing in that it will remove a thin layer of skin cells all over the surface, so this shouldn’t be too harsh.
You’ll probably be swollen and have red bumps all over for the first several days—don’t exfoliate, be gentle. Wear only loose clothing. No leggings. Use something like aftersun lotion (I use a Korean gel with a high percentage of the ingredient cica) to calm skin. Once irritation subsides, exfoliate diligently. Twice a week, use a physical exfoliant, or do what I do and use a mostly-dry towel on damp skin after showering. I just rub my legs, especially ankles and shins, with enough pressure to get little ropes of dead skin to slough off. Other days, splash a chemical exfoliant all over, like Paula’s Choice Skin Perfecting liquid or The Ordinary Glycolic Acid, decanted into a spray bottle. Release any stubborn ingrown hairs with diabetic lancets and not the nearest safety pin, you filthy animal. Use Dial antibacterial soap while they heal.
When you begin this journey, it may seem as though you’re having to epilate more frequently than you imagined. This is because of your natural hair regrowth cycle. Like on our heads, your body hair sheds naturally. So the first time, you only removed the hairs which were exposed, not the ones that hadn’t yet broken though. Epilation is superior to waxing in many ways, one of which is that you don’t have to let your hair grow long to do it—you can remove hairs less than 1mm. After about a month, you should see a huge drop in the need to epilate.
My legs have a beautiful ombre of dark to white blonde hairs, so I’m not a candidate for laser. Electrolysis seems extreme. If this is you, don’t be scared. Truly, only the first minute hurts, because your leg will pretty much go numb from shock. I figure it’s the same as with eyebrow plucking—the first few times are excruciating, then it doesn’t phase you at all. If you do it enough, the hairs will stop growing back completely. This is my goal with epilation.
Those familiar with my oeuvre will know that I did, at times, shave with single use, or a single-blade razors. The issue is that I cut myself so much shaving that I was ruining all of my sheets and towels. Truly, it’s like peeling carrots every time I shave the sinewy parts of my ankles and shin bones. And for what? To have to do it all over again in two days?
Anyway, it’s so good to be back in touch.
—Annie
Thank god she’s back
Love this cult hiiiiiii