A New Year's Eve Prayer...

The new packaging we launched this year has the pillars of the brand blind-embossed on each side of the box: MIND, SKIN, SOUL. If you have a box from a recent order, run your thumb over the letters. Let them sink in and everything they signify...which is everything! You are allowed to feed all three of them, each and every day, in any way that helps your energy rise. I hope that when you buy your next Vanderohe product and take the box in your hands, those words meet you as a symbolic reminder of the parts of you that deserve your love and attention. 

I recently found a four-leaf clover inside my phone case, which had been there since the summer, when I slipped it in for safe-keeping for my daughter. I'd completely forgotten about it and carried it with me, without intention. It felt all the more powerful and symbolic, therefore, when I found it. 

It struck me as a rather sweet and simple way of carrying, or preserving, a moment of time: slip a leaf in a diary; a flower into a book or passport. Let them serve as a reminder of places and moments when you were rooted to something/someone/some place special and meaningful. They just might provide a certain Proustian magic to any given moment. 

You'll know by now that I love, trust and believe in CurrentBody products. I've seen them work. I recently bought their Radio Frequency device and it's a dream to use. I used to pay a small fortune to visit Keren Bartov's salon in Notting Hill for them to use a radio frequency device on my face for about 10 minutes. For the price of less than one session at the salon, I can now use it every week, with the same instant results. It's a heat-generating device and your skin will flush red afterwards, but it goes down quickly and leaves your skin looking and feeling really plump. 

This coming year, I’m practising 30% off. My instinct is always to race, to sprint, to go the extra mile, but I no longer believe that intensity leads to optimal health. Balance does. Listening does. Leaving space for calm does. Taking 30% off — a phrase I've borrowed from a close and wise friend — is now a practice I intend to keep.

I’ve just finished On Immunity: An Inoculationby Eula Biss. It’s a clear-eyed exploration of fear, responsibility and care, written with intellectual steadiness. What I admire most about Biss’s approach is her refusal to simplify a complex subject. Rather than arguing from panic or authority, she writes from curiosity, holding science, history, ethics and personal experience in careful balance. I wish I'd encountered this book when my children were babies — it would have offered me a grounded way of thinking about decisions that were very much shaped by fear and noise. It’s a book about immunity, yes, but it's also about trust, collective responsibility and what it means to care for one another within systems larger than ourselves.