sort of.

The Beholder is a podcast and blog where we unpack what we want from our beauty lives, get educated on our options, and celebrate doing our best. The idea emerged from a simple question: What do I actually want from my beauty life? Like so many woman, I began asking myself this question when I hit 40. But really, this all started the day my mom died.

I’m Deenie Hartzog-Mislock, a Mississippi-born beauty editor, marketing copywriter, and narrative essayist with 20 years of experience at Vogue, Bon Appétit, and beyond. My mother was my North Star and, alongside my Lebanese aunts, laid the foundation for my obsession with beauty. Cold creams, oils, and exfoliators. Hair tools, handbags, and a great pair of shoes—this was our shared language.

After my mom’s abrput death, I was desperate to find a rhythm amid throat-catching grief. I turned to something familiar: a beauty routine. The connection to my mother soothed me. The repetition buoyed me. The pursuit of an elevated aesthetic gave me something else to think about. My grief addiction wasn’t sex or drugs or booze. It was beauty.

As a beauty editor, I receive daily press emails about this new cream and that breakthrough treatment. As a marketing copywriter, I spend my days thinking of the best language to convince consumers to buy what we’re selling. As a narrative essay writer, I am consumed by storytelling, human nature, and the psychology of desire. As a grieving daughter, I just want people to live their full, authentic lives before it’s too late.

In today’s performance economy, we’re being hit on all sides. Social media, FaceTime, and Zoom have forced us to stare back at ourselves more than any human should. We’re overinfluenced, overstimulated, and drowning in an oversaturated beauty market, me included—and I want talk about it.

My mission is to help people connect to their own desire around beauty (and beyond) through nuanced conversations that resist binary thinking, education without agenda, and honest explorations of our insecurities, as well as our assuredness. Here we can be contradictory and curious. Beauty can be frivolous and profound. We are never one thing.

After my mom died, I became acutely aware that nothing matters, yet everything that matters matters immensely. I decided: I don’t want to spend another minute worrying about anyone else’s opinion of my choices, especially as it pertains to the decisions I make about my appearance. I’ll do whatever the hell I want—and you should, too.

The Beholder was born in memory of my mother, but is powered by an eagerness to reclaim our voices and know that, at the end of it all, we made ourselves feel beautiful. This life won’t last forever.