On the Art of Noticing Things: An Introduction
I should explain how this happened.
There’s a café in Neukölln—I’ll spare you the name because it’s the kind of place that would immediately make you roll your eyes—that serves very good flat whites and has exactly the right number of plants to seem curated without trying too hard. I go there sometimes to read, or to pretend to read while actually listening to other people’s conversations.
I’m not proud of this. I’m also not not proud of it. eavesdropping is a lost art, and Berlin cafés are essentially live theater if you’re willing to sit still long enough.
That’s where I first heard about Sophie.
She was sitting at the table next to mine with a friend—a woman I now know to be Laura, the one who got married—and they were talking about something I couldn’t quite follow. There were references to “the fitting room incident.” To YouTube tutorials. To something called “skincare quarantine.” The word “niacinamide” came up several times, which I assumed was a medical condition.
I kept my nose in my book. I am not proud of this either.
Over the following weeks, I kept seeing Sophie around. Same café. Once at the DM on Sonnenallee, where she was standing in the skincare aisle looking genuinely distressed in a way that made me want to either help or leave very quickly. I did neither. I bought dish soap and left.
I didn’t think much of it until Laura posted something on Instagram about Sophie’s “beauty journey,” which made me laugh because the phrase sounded like it belonged in a corporate retreat presentation. Then Sophie started sending me messages. Because Laura, it turns out, had mentioned that I “always seemed to be around” and “maybe would be interested.” Laura and I are not close. Laura and I are, I think, acquaintances who have been accidentally complicit in each other’s lives through some combination of mutual friends and geographic convenience.
Sophie asked if I’d want to write about it. Her actual words were: “You seem like someone who notices things.”
I am not sure if that’s a compliment or a warning about my general level of social engagement.
I said yes anyway.
What I Kept Noticing
Here’s the thing about being a man in this context: you start to notice things you’ve never noticed before because you’ve suddenly been given permission to look.
Not in a creepy way. I should be clear about that. I’m not standing in cafés cataloguing women. But Sophie mentioned her routine one evening—we were sitting at that same Neukölln place, drinking wine that cost more than I wanted to pay—and I realized I had never once, in my entire life, thought about what goes into the morning routine of anyone I knew.
My morning routine is approximately eleven minutes and involves putting on clothes that may or may not be clean and occasionally checking if I have deodorant left. Sophie described something that sounded, to me, like a military operation. Steps. Products. Waiting periods. Things that needed to “sink in.”
“There are waiting periods,” I said, because I am the kind of person who says things out loud when he should be thinking them.
“Yes,” Sophie said. She did not elaborate.
I went home that night and looked at my bathroom cabinet for the first time in what I suspect was several months. There were products in there that had belonged to previous tenants. There was definitely something growing in a bottle of shower gel. I am not exaggerating about the shower gel.
I realized I had been living adjacent to an entire world that simply did not include me, and that I had never even noticed the door.
Why I'm Writing This
I want to be honest about something: I am slightly uncomfortable with the fact that I—a man, a stranger, someone who genuinely cannot tell the difference between a toner and a serum without looking it up—is going to be writing about this.
I asked Sophie about this. She said: “Good. Uncomfortable is interesting.”
She may be wrong. This whole thing may be a disaster. But I’ve spent thirty-something years walking past a world that operates in parallel to my own, and I’ve never stopped to ask what any of it actually means. So I thought: why not start now?
This isn’t going to be a “beauty blog” in the traditional sense. I won’t be recommending products. I won’t be doing “get ready with me” posts, if only because my “getting ready” routine would make for a very short video. What I want to do is investigate the same way I investigate anything that puzzles me: by asking questions, by talking to people who actually know things, by trying to figure out what’s real and what’s marketing and whether the two are even distinguishable.
Sophie has agreed to let me follow along. She’ll tell me about her products. Her routines. What works and what doesn’t. And I’ll bring the perspective of someone who genuinely does not know what he is doing, which I suspect is actually a useful perspective.
What Comes Next
In the coming weeks, Sophie is going to walk me through her actual routine. The products she uses. The ones that disappointed her. The ones that surprised her. The ones she bought because the packaging was nice and has since learned nothing about what they actually do.
I am going to ask the questions a man would ask, which I suspect are either obvious or offensive, possibly both. I will try to be useful. I will mostly be confused.
There’s also an entire industry out there that I knew nothing about—the creams and serums and “actives” and whatever a “essence” is—and I think I want to understand what all of it actually is, or whether it matters at all. Sophie seems to think some of it works. She seems to think some of it is nonsense. I am hoping she will explain the difference, because I cannot.
We’ll see how this goes.
Sophie says: “If you write something stupid, I’ll correct you.”
I appreciate that.