The 2024 HALOSCOPE Gift Guide
$300 perfume! Rings made from teeth! And some notes on gift guide fatigue.
Hi there, sailor. Now that I am back from my self-imposed exile, I can share with you one of my favorite HALOSCOPE things we do every year: the 2024 Gift Guide, with picks across fashion, beauty, jewelry, living, and more, selected by myself and other HS staffers. The guide contains items that I’d personally recommend through Mermaid Café, too. And it’s 100% free! No paywall. Just good vibes.
I also want to take a moment, here, to write about gift guide fatigue. T.M. Brown wrote a great article about it for the Times that I urge you to read.
Gift guides feel, for a writer or merely a vague Internet personality, like a no-lose situation: people read your work because they’re interested in your taste; you have thoughts and feelings and predilections when it comes to shopping; why not help people — while helping yourself — through an authority-building shopping guide? This is what you often see, this language of helping, of deliverance, of the idea that the writer is performing a selfless good deed by telling you Old Navy jeans are 25% off this month. But I don’t see any real abnegation in it.
I think the gift guides that carry real weight come from the places and people who know what they’re talking about re: shopping; who aren’t encouraging you to blind-buy; and, too, write about shopping throughout the other eleven months of the year. I’m talking about anything from Magasin to The Cut Shop, where Christmas gift guides feel constitutional to the overall work and aren’t merely incidental. (I’m hoping to grow HALOSCOPE in that way.) It’s one of the many reasons you’re receiving the HALOSCOPE Gift Guide and not the Mermaid Café Gift Guide — frankly, they cover the same taste-groundwork, and I don’t see an MC gift guide being additive for you when you’re dodging 10,000 other shopping lists in your inbox. I’d rather just talk to you about what you’re reading and where you’re shopping and hear what you have to say. (So tell me!)
I also agree with Daisy Alioto in the Times piece, who articulates quite perfectly: “Just don’t read them.” There it is! If a gift guide hits your inbox and you know you’re not going to read it (even this one), hit archive and move on. Gift guides have been around as long as the magazine itself, and now that more and more writers are flocking to Substack, they’re becoming just as ubiquitous here. Crafting a gift guide — curating, writing, formatting — takes effort, but in the words of Anthony Bourdain, it’s no cleaning squid. Your time and attention are as valuable as the creators you support. You’ve got good taste, sailor. Be generous and discerning with it.
Another thing: remember that paid subscribers can DM me and ask me questions anytime, whether something personal or something they’d like me to answer in a future letter — just let me know. I want to do more of this stuff going into 2025, because I think the style dilemmas that plague us individually plague us all (and, as a Capricorn, I love giving advice).
That’s all from me. Though I will link pre-OFF MENU to this incredible giant ring necklace from Marland Backus that I can’t stop thinking about. One of you needs to wear this to a holiday party with a dishy cocktail dress. And a song before I go…
See you on Friday. ꩜