Sephora teens are teens who hang out at Sephora — and they’re a point of cultural anxiety because 1) they’re buying a lot of makeup and skincare products and 2) we have complex and contradictory feelings about when we should start caring about makeup and skincare products, even though absolutely everything in our culture tells young people they should’ve started caring about these things yesterday. Do Sephora Teens just want a public place to hang out without their parents? Didn’t we also play around with makeup at their age? But wait where are they getting all of this money? I I was so thrilled when Elise Hu — author of a whole book on the contemporary skin care industry and mother of three teen/tween girls — agreed to come on as co-host for this episode… and I can’t wait for your thoughts.

• Follow Elise Hu on Instagram and read her interview with Culture Study re: her book Flawless

• Direct link to Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital (code CULTURE gets you 10% off)

• Elise’s piece in The Atlantic re: Sephora Teens

• Elise’s installment of NPR’s Life Kit on how to create a skin care routine

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• Trad wives, featuring a co-host who used to be one

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE and ROMANCE BOOKSTORES

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

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• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

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