The Observer Magazine

THE NEW CURIOSITY SHOP

The interiors of JW Anderson’s new store on Pimlico Road, London, have the qualities of a Vermeer painting: luminous, peaceful, domestic – the interiors you’d expect in a tastefully appointed home, rather than a retail space. Shelves sit against a...

Acne scars bounce back

My immediate review coming out of yesterday’s screening of Marty Supreme was, “And he goes out with Kylie Jenner.” Admittedly, I’m no great critic, because I always have an absolutely lovely time at the cinema, middle-centre seat, little snacks, that...

Warming to saunas

As a 31-year-old homebody who has never been a party girl, I can’t decide if it was kismet or karma that my first sauna trip was scheduled 10 hours after the biggest bender of my adult life. In August, I had booked an hour of alternating heat and ice...

Damned lyes and statistics

My interest in the damage done by the beauty industry tends to focus on psychic injury. This is the stuff that grips me, largely because I feel it acutely myself, the severity for me depending on hormones, or the shape of the internet I’ve seen that...

Scrolling v knitting

My personal goals for 2025 were platitudinously straightforward: to work harder and to get outside to fix my growing screentime. Since the pandemic, the hours I’d spend staring at my phone had started to creep up, to the point where I’d begun to dread...

The dark side of white

Do you know what I thought of when I saw Pantone’s new colour of the year, Cloud Dancer? I thought of the flash we’ll see at the end of the world. That blanched bleached white, like we’re closing our eyes to a terrible explosion which, I suppose, we...

Facing up to the future

There’s a Ukrainian model called Anastasia Pokreshchuk who, having first injected facial fillers a decade ago, is now known for having (according to the Sun) “the world’s biggest cheeks”. To spend time with her on Instagram as she rotates before a ring...

Grooms with a view

Much has been written about the tradwife. Too much, perhaps, the discourse now leaking bloodily from our ears, from the sides of our mouths, our appetite for the stuff worthy itself, I think, of discourse. We have been mesmerised by all of it – by the...

An after-dark issue for night owls

Eva Wiseman

A couple of years ago in the dead of winter, we drove to an immersive bubble show in an industrial park near Wembley. The sky was spitting that mean, icy sort of rain – it was halfway through the Christmas holidays, with the hangover of lockdown still...

NIGEL SLATER makes gorgonzola tarts

Eva Wiseman

My love of auctions is adorable, expensive and pathological. Growing up, my parents bought furniture and paintings and glasses very cheaply at our local auction house – when I moved back to the area with my partner and started to populate my own flat,...

DARK MATERIALS

Lauren Joseph on the chefs cooking with black foods

Eva Wiseman

There was a time when I thought of myself as a movie lover. A person for whom films were important. It’s a simple and popular way to make yourself seem interesting, with the added benefit that you get to watch telly. I once took two weeks off work to...

The comfort of chocolate tarts and pear crumbles

Eva Wiseman

Last week saw the publication of the largest study of Botox patients ever conducted in the UK. Almost 1,000 people were surveyed on their experience of some of the 900,000 injections performed each year at one of the UK’S 16,000 non-surgical cosmetic...

Eva Wiseman

No but seriously, what’s going on, we have become… untethered? It’s evident not just in projects of active dis- or misinformation (about violence against women, or immigration, or propaganda synthesising Israel with Jewish people, etc), but also in a...

Eva Wiseman

A muggy day on Oxford Street and I slipped into a shop that sold soap in order to take advantage of the air conditioning. There was a lot of soap, I thought, faintly. A lot of soap. I was early for a meeting, so drifted through the store with a merry...

Sarah Manavis

My memories of this summer won’t live on in the form of Mediterranean souvenirs, scars from scuffed knees or a string of pleasant hangovers, but instead two ratty notebooks filled with my most mortifying, innermost aspirations. That is because, next...

The ‘airport aesthetic’ that’s about you – not your destination

Top-handle bags to carry you through to next season

Sarah Manavis

My stomach dropped. A groan escaped. I clicked a headline and scrolled frantically, looking for the last thing I wanted to see. I heard myself whisper “no” as I realised the worst had happened: a newspaper had included my neighbourhood on a list of...

Eva Wiseman

A byline photo never dies. There you stand grimly grinning for years and years – the subjects you write about shift and change, but the photo never ages. And I was fine with that! Of course I was. I was absolutely fine with me being the walking,...

Eva Wiseman

It was about half six and we were ferrying dishes of chicken to a table of children when my phone rang. It was the Natwest fraud department, calls were being recorded for monitoring purposes I made wide-mouthed mimes to our guests, who hushed, briefly,...

Eva Wiseman

Whenever I’m in a semi-public bathroom – a Costa in Camden, a Starbucks near the river – I always think about the pregnancy tests that have been performed in its cubicles. The hurried march from Boots next door, or Poundland at a push, an urgent,...

Eva Wiseman

Eleven years ago this week, I was advised to take to my bed. Which, even then, seemed retro. My pregnancy was “complicated” or one of those other words you see on doctors’ letters that describe you lightly as a “pleasant woman” – the pregnancy was...

Eva Wiseman

Last week the Supreme Court ruled that the wife of a wealthy financier was not entitled to half the £78m he gave her to avoid inheritance tax, because he’d made the money before they got married. It’s set a precedent for how divorcing couples divide...

Eva Wiseman

This heat is doing funny things to us. Straight men are gossiping on Lime bikes. Whole women are lying flat on the little wall outside Aldi dreaming of being jet washed like a patio. Babies are rotating. The air is swampy and yellow – you must push...

Eva Wiseman

When I read news of the reigning Miss England walking out of this year’s Miss World competition, I was shocked. Not so much about the walking out, more... that Miss World still exists? Anyway, what happened was this: Milla Magee, who’s 24 and lives in...

Eva Wiseman

Last week, the Tate rolled out the UK Aids Memorial Quilt across the floor of the vast Turbine Hall. Created in the 1980s, it is made up of 42 panels, and each of those panels is made up of a collection of smaller panels, 6ft by 3ft, a size used...

Eva Wiseman

What is the state of the wife? Not the state of your wife, necessarily (although would it have killed her, would it actually have killed her to pull a comb through her hair), but of wifedom itself, the whole Harpic-scented project. We are living...

Eva Wiseman

Two moments from the depths of half term: scrolling with my kids through videos of animals doing unlikely and adorable things (such as the parrot who waddles along the back of a sofa to announce “Hi babe” and “I love you” into the camera, and who we...

Eva Wiseman

As the sun sets on another mental health awareness week (this year’s theme: community), a question arises – can we have too much mental health awareness? Maybe that sounds deliberately provocative, or Daily Mail-ish, or mean. Like, “Can we have too...

Eva Wiseman

I’d run out of murder podcasts on my little run yesterday and found myself jogging through the woods listening to Malcolm and Simone Collins discuss birth rates, why screens improve kids’ mental health and whether “a rise in gays precedes...

Eva Wiseman

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: you don’t have to sell your old clothes. Sure, yes, I know someone you were talking to on the bus said she got £90 for her daughter’s coat on Depop, and there was a mum in the Sun the other day who makes five...

Eva Wiseman

In 2018, after 56 years of trading as Weight Watchers, the company changed its name to WW, which, it said, “doesn’t stand for anything”. And I guess that should have been a sign, really. A sign to those with half an eye on diet culture and its...

Eva Wiseman

Here’s how you start: you take your head down to the studs. Face lift, little nose job, full veneers on those filed-down teeth, filler in the lips, filler in the cheeks, inject enough Botox that you reduce your ability to interpret emotional stimuli...

Eva Wiseman

There is a gaping void at the centre of my life and it’s called Topshop. A void, a maw, a grand and starving absence. When the big Topshop closed in 2021, I was unprepared for the hole it would leave. It was only shirts after all. Shirts, little tops,...

Body of work

We know muscles move us but, as author Bonnie Tsui reveals, it’s in ways we never imagined

Who stole all the cheese?

Posh cheddar, smoked salmon, gourmet ham… The inside story on the astonishing boom in luxury food heists

Snow White’s sparked outrage, but no one’s talking about beauty?

Last week I took my daughter to see the new Snow White film and on the train she told me how all the girls had been called into a special assembly. It was to tell them that makeup was strictly forbidden – some girls (she discreetly told me their names,...

Striving for efficiency is all very well, but it leaves no time to live

A recent Apple update saw people waking up to their emails summarised for efficiency, thus creating light uproar, amusement and a series of small domestic mysteries to be untangled on the bus. A man in America shared a message from his mum, who’d told...

When did being too earnest become a crime – and why?

A series of photos that circulated around awards season made the internet roundly do its nut. I will describe them, and you will see how earnestness has gone violently out of style. The first picture accompanied a quote from Jeremy Strong responding to...

Going on maternity leave? Don’t expect it to be a bundle of joy

When I started to approach my second maternity leave, five years after the first, my main feeling was not excitement but dread. That low, leaden kind of panic, which grew inside me alongside my son’s new fingernails and feet. I’m thinking about it...

Open up and let the shame in… It will set you free

Halfway around the Tate’s new Leigh Bowery show, my friend, Sophie, said to me, “Wait, why does this look like history when it feels like only 10 minutes ago?” We were admiring photos taken at nightclubs and while we were very much not there, in the...

Our hard-won rights are being erased one letter at a time

I type this through nervous laughter but, haha, should we all be learning how to perform abortions? Just in case? Should we all perhaps, have a little stash of mifepristone in our makeup bags, a secret number in our phone? Something is happening in the...

Want to stay sane? Try switching off your news alerts

How are you not going mad?” is a thing I’ve heard recently. “How are you not talking about this all the time, how are you merrily, some say stupidly, going about your business as if the world did not feel like a coin in an arcade 2p machine, being...

Cancer, comedy & me

Mark Steel has spent the last year fighting for his life. How on earth did he find humour in that?

Is it time we rang the alarm on the perils of internet door cameras?

Where once the suburbs were characterised by net curtains and the drone of lawn mowers, now they are defined by Ring doorbells. An unsleeping gaze is fixed on our gnomes and driveways, our children walking home and our midday deliveries. The houses...

For all human life in microcosm, catch a long-distance train

Yesterday I was on a train for six hours – three there, three back, through two time zones and three weather conditions, and all of it without my headphones. Around me, passengers built little homes for themselves out of laptops and crisps, a whole...

Pelicot’s trial shines a light on the banality of gender-based violence

A friend of mine says that she has found herself unable to have sex with her boyfriend after following the Pelicot rape trial. Something uncomfortable has shifted within her. I hear similar things from many women I know – people quitting dating, people...

Eva Wiseman

It is with mixed emotions that I announce the end of baldness. Rest in pates, old friend. This year will see the very last generation of men who, having arrived at their 30s, are forced to accept the loss of their hair, with all their future sons and...

Eva Wiseman

Last summer, I fell and cracked four of my front teeth. Pieces chipped off at unhelpful times, I spat small shards politely into the sink and cursed every uneven paving stone and every apple, too. The dentist told me we wouldn’t know whether root...

Heavenly havens

Put yourself first with our ultimate guide to the 30 best spas – from luxurious urban escapes to holistic getaways and indulgent country breaks

‘We have an open marriage. But now I feel left out’

Contributors

Emma Cook is assistant editor and travel editor on the Observer magazine. This week she writes about the mystery of pain, and what happens if you can’t feel it at all (p14) – also the subject of her debut psychological thriller You Can’t Hurt Me...

First-class cheats

Inside the shocking AI crisis that’s turning students and universities against each other

Joe Lycett

‘Having a baby has unlocked an obsession with washing’

Contributors

Journalist Elle Hunt writes regularly for the Guardian and Observer, as well as Kinfolk and New Scientist. She lives in Norwich with two lively Cornish rex cats (though she’s a dog person at heart). Here, she reports on the huge number of cats that are...

Contributors

Elizabeth Sankey is a filmmaker, writer and musician from London. Her credits include Romantic Comedy and Boobs. With her band, Summer Camp, she has released four studio albums. Her latest film is Witches, and here she explains how she fell under their...

‘I have had a wild, chaotic, beautiful life’

Actor and director Rebecca Hall reflects on race, regrets and how she learned to be herself

Words from the wise

“We’ll let you into a secret”: 27 amazing people, from Joan Armatrading to Stephen King, pass on the one piece of life-changing advice that never lets them down

The Observer Magazine Fur and loathing

Could America’s ‘childless cat ladies’ hold the key to the presidential election? By Gaby Hinsliff

Rob Beckett

‘All comedians are broken – it’s what drives us to achieve’

Unknown Algarve

Exploring Portugal’s Atlantic coast

‘It’s personal, it’s political, it’s the stuff of life’

Julianne Moore reflects on family, friendship and mortality

‘I don’t play by the rules’

Actor Adam Pearson on Oscar dreams and the power of disability