I wash my face in the morning with Dermalogica Special Cleansing Gel, then moisturize with the Blue Cocoon from May Lindstrom — it’s been my go-to skin-care product for about four years. I finish with the Rodan + Fields Essentials Sunscreen. Day to day, I typically don’t wear makeup. If anything, I’ll use Armani Beauty Luminous Silk Concealer as needed and a gloss or balm rather than a lipstick — I’ve been using Vaseline forever. But if I’m ever taking it up a notch for an event, typically someone else is applying the makeup and I gravitate toward a red lip rather than a dramatic eye. Armani makes a nice true red that I’ve been using. I’m more consistent with Armani’s Sì Eau de Parfum — it’s part of my routine.
I have this one product from Rodan + Fields’s Spotless line that I’ve used for a really long time: It’s a face wash that helps with breakouts, especially if you’re wearing makeup a lot. I’ll only use it at night because it’s more drying. If I have a spot that is really annoying, I’ll use a zit sticker from CosRx. I don’t love using soap on my skin. My mom taught me the benefits of an apple cider vinegar bath — you pour half a bottle in the tub. It sounds disgusting but it’s really good for the pH of your skin.
I don’t place a lot of importance on hair products, I’ll just steal them from hotels, but my stylist Tommy Buckett always uses Iles Formula Finishing Serum. He just cut a foot of hair off my head for a role. I thought I was going to miss it but it’s really empowering. I feel more like myself with short hair.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Jeanette Cutlack didn’t plan to be a chef. She also didn’t really plan to live on Mull, the wild island off the west coast of Scotland, but fell for the area after her first visit in 2008. Two months after that trip, she relocated from Brighton on England’s south coast to the Scottish Hebrides. For a while she ran a bed-and-breakfast from her rented farmhouse and slowly began cooking dinners for guests, too. In 2018, Cutlack heard that her neighbor was selling her croft, the Scottish term for a small piece of farmland. “It was 50 acres sloping down to Loch Tuath with a roofless ruin, but I imagined sheep on the hillside and growing food there,” Cutlack says. She enlisted an old friend, the architect Edward Farleigh-Dastmalchi, to transform it into Croft 3, the restaurant she’s been running for the past year. The stone barn was restored using salvaged basalt, with picture windows framing the view out to sea, and it now serves as the dining hall with six communal tables made from a single Douglas fir tree. A timber-clad extension houses the kitchen, which turns out plates of homemade haggis, local shellfish and venison gnocchi. After its first summer season, Croft 3 is now serving up Sunday roasts and curry nights. Next year, Cutlack plans to tend to those first sheep and create poly tunnels to grow produce, as well as build a new home on the land. croft3mull.co.uk.
Gift This
Ocean-Inspired Tableware From a Brooklyn Silversmith
The North Carolina-born metalsmith Heath Wagoner went to school to be a painter but, after he took a course in metalwork, changed majors. Now 35 and based in Brooklyn, Wagoner — whose résumé includes work for the jeweler Pamela Love and the clothing brand Dion Lee — specializes in handcrafted sterling silver and brass objects for the table, from custom flatware sets to condiment spoons. Many of the pieces in his collection are inspired by the sea; his father was a fisherman and crabber, and Wagoner was once an ocean rescue lifeguard. There are sterling silver cocktail picks fashioned after an oyster shell he found on a beach and a matchbox that evokes a sardine tin. The cutlery’s geometric shapes call to mind the flatware of Alexander Calder. Wagoner says he routinely uses the pieces he makes and hopes others will, too, rather than saving them for a special occasion. “It’s not too fussy,” he says. “Bring it out for a weeknight dinner.” Prices start at $80 for a sterling silver sardine fork, heathwagoner.com.
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A Spanish Artist’s Meditation on Femininity
To create her escapist landscapes, the Madrid-based artist Violeta Maya starts by drenching raw canvases in water. She then spreads them on the floor and, as they begin to dry, spontaneously applies pigments and acrylic paints that tint the surface, resulting in fluid shapes and mesmerizing hues. Maya considers the process a form of meditation. Next week at Alzueta Gallery in Barcelona, Maya’s solo exhibition will feature 17 paintings that she created earlier this year during an artistic residency at Alzueta’s space on Spain’s Costa Brava, a humid environment that slowed the usual drying process of the artist’s canvases, resulting in unusual compositions. She also sought to explore her beliefs around femininity by experimenting with shades of pink that she’d been repelled by in the past. The paintings will be accompanied by ceramic sculptures and a large central installation featuring hand-painted fabrics. “Precisamente Porque el Rosa Me Incomoda” (“Precisely Because Pink Makes Me Uncomfortable”) will be on view from Dec. 13, 2023, to Jan. 17, 2024, alzuetagallery.com.
The Nigerian designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello, who is based in Lagos, met his latest collaborators while he was looking to repair the damaged Mitsubishi Outlander he’d just bought from the United States. On the outskirts of the city, in a town called Owode Onirin, he found a resourceful community of self-taught metalsmiths and auto engineers. In 2022, Marcus-Bello — whose process-heavy design practice includes both art objects and furniture — spent three months in Owode Onirin, learning about their processes and sharing his own technical expertise in return. The result of their time together, titled “Oríkì (Act II): Tales by Moonlight,” is now on display at Design Miami with the Los Angeles-based gallery Marta. The collection — including a bench, a stool and a five-foot-wide circle fabricated from recycled sand-cast aluminum — references the industrial design of auto parts. The name is drawn from a seminal Nigerian children’s TV show popular in the ’90s. Marcus-Bello is also showing “Omi Iyọ,” a wall sculpture and installation at the entrance of the design fair inspired by the ongoing, generational displacement and mass migration of people around the world. The piece, a solid mass of reflective stainless steel, shaped like a half-disc with an opening on its rounded side, will be filled with salt, symbolizing the Atlantic Ocean, across which many migrants’ journeys are made. The salt will flow to the ground over the course of the five-day show. Marcus-Bello’s works will be on view throughout Design Miami, Dec. 5 to 10, designmiami.com.
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Silk Handbags With Cosmic Embroidery
Leslie Mugnier grew up near the ocean in Biarritz, France, where she developed a connection to nature — the water and moon especially — that influenced her handbag line, Lunier, which launched in September. Now based in Paris, Mugnier developed her interest in fashion while working in international events for Christian Dior. With the goal of reflecting what she calls the “beauty and harmony” of the environment, she designed an array of structured silk bags in colors ranging from bright copper to rosy pink and deep blue. Each one features embroidered cosmic motifs: sun rays emanate from the top of the Selene style, while shooting stars and moons adorn the body of the larger Cosmos bag. “You can find at least one phase of the moon within the construction of each design,” Mugnier says. For an added earthly touch, some of the Selene Mini styles have handles embedded with amazonite, white chalcedony and sodalite stones. From about $642, lunier.fr.
