About Vanity or Vice
Beauty can be fun. It can also survive a follow-up question.
Vanity or Vice exists because I like beauty enough to enjoy it and enough to get suspicious the moment someone starts promising miracles under very flattering lighting. Both of those can be true at once. Most of the internet insists you pick one.
How I ended up doing this
I’ve spent more than a decade — and, honestly, closer to a year’s salary — inside the beauty and treatment world as a customer. Not as an observer. I’ve bought the serum, booked the treatment, sat through the consult, and done the thing more than once where you fall for a result you want and hand over the card before you’ve asked a single useful question. Cart fully ahead of horse. It happens to smart people. It happened to me.
Some of it was worth it. Some of it was expensive weather. A few things I would do again tomorrow; others I think about the way you think about a bad haircut with a four-figure price tag. That is the actual education — not a certificate, a decade of receipts.
More usefully, I have no chair to fill and no package to sell. Nothing on this site is a step toward booking you for anything. I paid retail, same as you.
The point isn’t a credential. The homework is. What kept bothering me was the missing middle: products described without context, treatments sold with gorgeous before-and-afters and almost no conversation about upkeep, downtime, cost, uncertainty, or who ought to ask more questions before booking. Luxury got treated like evidence. Wanting something got treated like a character flaw. Neither one is useful.
So this became the place where both things get to be true: you can want the serum, the treatment, the ritual, the beautiful packaging, the very nice spa day, and still ask what it does, what it costs over the years, what the evidence actually says, what the maintenance really looks like, and whether it’s the right call for you and a qualified provider.
Why I love this subject
Beauty is personal, and it’s allowed to be playful, confidence-building, comforting, a little indulgent, and occasionally ridiculous in the best possible way. I have no interest in stripping that out in the name of sounding Serious. I just don’t think enjoying beauty means switching off your judgment at the door.
I like the little rituals. I like learning why two ingredients behave completely differently. I like a treatment that genuinely earns its place, and I especially like working out whether the expensive thing is actually better or just wearing a heavier jar. Mostly I like handing people enough context to make a real decision, without making them feel foolish for caring about their own face in the first place.
One person, no pretend medical board
I’m Rachel. I have a full-time career outside publishing, and Vanity or Vice is a solo operation: I research, write, edit, build, and maintain the whole thing myself. I’m not your provider, and an article here is never your treatment plan. When a question belongs with a dermatologist, a physician, an injector, or another qualified professional, my job is to help you ask it better — not to answer it from a browser tab.
I am also not the beauty police. I am not here to tell you the thing you want is silly, or that you should age gracefully, or that you would be prettier if you cared less. You are an adult with your own face and your own money. What I can do is hand you the questions I wish someone had handed me before I learned some of this the expensive way.
Meet Greer, our Virtual Editorial Host
Greer Vane is a fictional Virtual Editorial Host created to give Vanity or Vice a consistent public-facing presence in visual, social, and promotional content. She reflects the publication’s taste, curiosity, humor, and skeptical point of view, but she is not Rachel and she is not a digital clone of Rachel.
Greer does not inherit Rachel’s biography or claim Rachel’s treatments, purchases, results, travel, relationships, or other lived experiences as her own. The research, writing, editing, factual review, recommendations, and editorial responsibility remain human. Greer represents the point of view; she does not replace the person behind it.
We use a virtual host intentionally so the publication can have a recognizable human presence without turning private identities, family, homes, routines, or locations into public content. At Vanity or Vice, Greer can admire the bottle and still read the evidence — without a fictional patient history.
What you can expect here
- beauty without the shame;
- skepticism that doesn’t suck all the fun out of the room;
- cost, maintenance, burden, uncertainty, and evidence sitting in the same conversation as desire;
- sharper questions before you buy or book;
- full permission to decide the thing is wonderful, unnecessary, worth every penny, or absolutely not.
Beauty keeps the good lighting here. The claims just have to still look decent when the lights come back on.