Hello and happy Thursday, everyone. It's Jen. You're listening to Fat Mascara. So Thursday is our interview episode always and as we discussed last week, Jess is moving this week. Like as we speak, she's on a boat on our way to New Jersey. No, just kidding. She's not taking a boat to take you moving trucks, but she's not here with me for this interview today, which is a bummer because Jess and I have known our guest, Val Monro,

for years, and she is one of our favorite writers. I was going to say beauty writers, but I'm just going to say writers period. So you might have heard of Val Valerie Monroe's her full name. You might have heard of Val because of her column, Ask Val, which was an O the Oprah magazine. For years, she was the beauty director there for actually 16 years. She's also written for and worked at red book self and parenting. And her work appears in numerous anthologies as well, I'll link to her website so you can read some of her essays, some of her some of her, my favorite pieces of hers are actually on her website, which is great.

So that does all the homework for you. But the reason we're having her on now is because this year she launched a newsletter on sub stack. It's called how not to f up your face, though she uses the full f word. And that's why freaking love Val Monroe. So you can subscribe to that on sub stack and we'll put a link on the blog for that as well. And Val says that her purpose and I love this is that she wants to shift the way people think about beauty to shift the beauty arena from self criticism to self compassion.

And we really touch on that in this interview. We talk a lot about the concept of aging, but more importantly, the concept of self love and how to treat yourself and look at yourself in the mirror. I learned about mirror meditating, which I'm already looking into way more and you'll learn about that as well. And of course, here about some of Val's favorite products. It's just a really great interview. I left with my heart lifted, feeling really happy. And I hope the interview does the same for you.

Val, I've already introduced our listeners to you. They know who you are. But they don't really know how, why should they listen to you? You have a newsletter, which I'm going to say on air as how not to f up your face. That's good. What do you say when you talk to people about? You know, I started just to say how not to f up your face because there were some people who were somewhat offended, but just kind of taken it back by hearing the word fucking a normal conversation or in a conversation about beauty or whatever. So I figured.

It's probably good idea when I'm not talking to my friends, not that you're not one of my friends, but to say how not to f up your face. It's a better way to put it.

I love it. And it makes you stop. And it also, like you said, it's not the kind of language you usually hear around beauty. But that's kind of always been what you've done. So tell people. So what makes you an expert? Why are you starting this?

You know, I was afraid you were going to ask me what makes me an expert because I've always felt like I'm not exactly a real beauty editor because being the having the platform at the open magazine kind of protected me in a way from what a lot of other beauty editors in the media have had to deal with, which is having to please the advertising industry, as well as the beauty industry. And because

from the very beginning because Oprah is Oprah, I never really had to deal with that because she's been the ghost who laid the golden egg. And I was able to

to write what we believed was the truth about the beauty industry to take a different position than many other beauty editors because of her. So just a little bit of background and briefly she never when she started the magazine in 2000.

She didn't want to have beauty in the magazine at all. She didn't understand what the relationship between beauty and the advertising industry was. And so she, she said, I don't want to have it because I hate the way it treats.

It makes readers want to come back to learn how to be fixed month after month makes women feel terrible about themselves.

So I want to do something completely different and I hadn't had no experience in the beauty industry and the editor at the time Amy gross brilliant Amy gross hired me because I had no experience and she wanted a fresh voice who could kind of learn along with the readership.

What the beauty industry was about and to take to take a different approach to it to have a different kind of platform than was typical in the industry.

So that's how I got started and why I was able to write I think more honestly about beauty than other beauty editors at the time and I wasn't kind of trapped in that idea that we had to always be reporting on trends and products even though we did because we did have to get beauty advertising because that's basically we're kept all magazines of float.

But I was given so much more latitude about what I could write about.

So when you started that job you maybe I'll just call you like a layperson you were like the rest of the people that listen to this podcast maybe that you know what you know about beauty but not everything when you left though you've been years of interviewing experts and things like that.

Did your beauty philosophy change from like 2000 or whenever you started to your last day at the magazine.

Yeah totally yeah and I I would call myself a civilian.

Yeah so you know when I went into it I was as starry eyed as everybody else about about you know products and what the beauty industry you know promotes as what it can do by the time I left I was more gimled eyed about the industry.

So basically what the new what led me to start writing this newsletter because I realized there was so much so much hype in the beauty industry and basically that's that's what it produces the best in my humble opinion.

And and the reason that that I started the newsletter was that so many of my friends were just asking me like does this work does this work and and they were I never thought that I knew very much about the industry compared to.

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