Cerebral & Embodied
A Reading Roundup for the Weekend
Venus of the Mind is a newsletter for lovers of beauty and culture.🌀✨
A guide to this publication and its offerings can be found here.
Reader’s Delight
Most people don’t go into facials asking about reading recommendations. Unless I’m their facialist and they’re a regular to the treatment room. As a recovering almost-academic with a penchant for pretty things, at any given time my reading list is a literary magpie’s dream.
Below is what I’ve read lately (along with what I’m currently reading) that’s running through my mind as I roll towels and prep products for my weekend round of clients.
But First, a Tangent.
This rose has absolutely nothing to do with reading…until one thinks about all the ways that exist to read a rose. A rose can be read through sight, through scent, through touch (watch out for the thorns!), through memory (what I’m doing right now in this newsletter), and even through taste…thinking of this scene in the original adaptation of Como agua para chocolate.
I saw her today when I went to get the mail and just had to stand with her for a moment. Blooming through November winds, chilly mornings, and even colder nights, she persists!
Currently Reading: Books
Passing Strange by Ellen Klages, a sci-fi/fantasy blend that takes place in 1940s San Francisco. Features a spell for time travel, pulp-noir vibes, and women on the run who fall in love.
I facilitate a Sapphic Sunday Book Club at Friends to Lovers Bookstore, this is our November read.
The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry, by Arabelle Sicardi. This is a non-fiction deep dive into the fascinating socio-political connections, histories, and implications that weigh on beauty as a cultural practice on a global scale.
This book is also a masterclass in writing as a craft.
Between the interactive and textured cover design plus the scented pages of the book (I purchased from Books Are Magic to get a scented and signed copy) the physical book itself is an object of beauty. Reading it has been a deeply sensorial experience.
Paid subscribers of Inside the Treatment Room participate in an online beauty bookclub, this is our January 2026 read.
Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume by Mandy Aftel
Between a life changing visit to LabSolue in Rome earlier this year (details coming in a winter newsletter!) and conversations with other estheticians about the chemistry of different aromatherapy formulations, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our bodies make sense of scent.
Don’t be surprised if one day I have a spiritual awakening that leads me to retire from esthetics and go make perfumes in some tiny Italian town like this guy.
Poetics of Relation, by Èdouard Glissant
I return to Glissant’s work often and I’m currently revisiting this text as I finish up my in-depth Puerto Rico travelogue for paid subscribers. I am always thinking about the politics of place and how cultural mythologies are intertwined into the lived experiences that come with regionalism as shaped by the vestiges of colonialism.
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, by Silvia Federici
In an ADHD (diagnosed!) tragedy, I misplaced my hard copy of this book three years ago during a move and have since been returning to this text via a bootlegged pdf that I have saved from my college days.
I am currently reviewing sections of Federici’s classic work for the same reason that I’m re-reading Glissant, to write a long-form newsletter that weaves together skincare, island vacations, and observations on patterns of capitalist extraction.
Recently Read: Two Articles, an Essay, and a Profile.
The Secret History of Guerlain’s Shalimar Perfume, by Arabelle Sicardi for Harper’s Bazaar
WOW. Just wow. Imagine being able to write in a way that the reader feels like they can smell every top, middle, and base note through a screen. This is power.
For anyone who enjoys archival research, the vintage perfume ads in this piece are an absolute treat.
When Injectables Go Wrong and Why Dissolving Might be the Reset You Need, by Sara Kitnick for the LA Times
Sonia Vargas, an esthetician who is on my bucket list of experts to one day see and learn from, was interviewed for this piece.
Getting Real About Injectables, by Fedora Abu for Late Filing
I’m new to Fedora’s writing and I am OBSESSED.
This piece pairs well with the previous LA Times article as a counterpoint. Being able to sit with multiple perspectives around a subject is a good form of brain exercise. Fedora’s anecdotal and journalistic experience makes for a refreshing take on what is often a hackneyed conversation around injectables.
In my line of work, many estheticians fall along a binary whenever their clients ask them about neuro-modulators and fillers. Estheticians DO NOT inject (very much beyond our scope) but we are often working adjacent to dermatologists, cosmetic surgeons, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners who are all professionals that do inject. Some of my peers are all for it (ie: the medspa girlies), others are staunchly against it (ie: the wholistic babes). Some of us are more integrative in how we view cosmetic medicine, I belong to this third grouping.
I see injectables as creative tools. Like any such tool some people approach body modification conservatively and with artful techniques; others have no good sense and suffer from the curse of bad taste. Additionally, often missing from the conversation around injectables is that these tools are not just used out of vanity. Botox can be used for pain management and incontinence. Filler can have reconstructive purposes after undergoing cancer treatment or traumatic injuries. Scarring from a traumatic injury is the reason I first went in for filler over a year ago. It was one of the best investments I’d ever made. I went in with unfiltered pictures of myself before my accident as points of reference and left looking like me again.
Happy Hour With Young Miko, by Bianca Nieves for The Cut
A very fun, cute, funky fresh read!
I have this bookmarked partly out of fandom and partly out of research as I’m working on a piece about the aestheticism of sapphic desire in contemporary pop music.
