No. 63: The 2023 Gold Star Trophy Winners

Your favorite post is back.

I’m copy+pasting the intro from the 2022 Gold Star Trophy Winners for any new readers! Skip it if you’ve read it recently. || The roundup I look forward to every single year is here, friends. To be completely honest, I do this more for myself than for anyone else (picture the song “Remember” from You’ve Got Mail playing here) but I’m so grateful when my trial and error makes life easier for anyone reading this list. If you’re a new reader of the gold standard and find yourself wondering what help it can be for a stranger to tell you what they like, know that I’m a researcher by nature and a perfectionist by choice, so “I tried ___ so you don’t have to!” comes very naturally to me.

I don’t know a way to say this that isn’t braggy and gross, but in my decade of blogging, six years of which have been full-time, I believe I have built a reputation as someone who has recommendations people can trust. How do I know this, you ask? Because even after a year of being off of Instagram, I still get emails asking if someone should hem a pair of pants/if I like a certain perfume/how long the Veja sneakers will be uncomfortable/if I make any changes to a recipe and so on and so forth.

As a former stylist—first for Anthropologie and then on my own—I have spent years keeping an eye on the best new releases of clothing, skincare, makeup and all the things that matter without really mattering. I looked up one day somewhere around four years ago and realized I was straight-up drowning in stuff. Stuff I had bought to wear or use for a specific photo, stuff I had bought because an influencer doing a partnership promised me it’d fix my skin woes, stuff I had no need for and wouldn’t be reaching for more than a couple times…it was ugly.

The three ingredients of being married to a frugal man who keeps a pie chart of our itemized expenses pulled up on his laptop at all times, wanting to grow in contentment and leaving social media created a beautiful cocktail I like to call less. Less, but better. I’m writing this intro after finishing the curated list so less might warrant an eye roll, but many of the things listed are items I’ve owned for years or things I’ve loved and repurchased again and again.

For one more teeny layer of background to help you, The vast majority of things I own and use from household materials and skincare are non-toxic. I’m not going to give a huge description of why I loved certain things and what they do because we’d both be here all day, you know? Oh, and I made myself limit it to seven because seven always feels right (even though to be real, for some categories seven felt like a lot.) Okay. Let’s do this.

Some items in this post are affiliate links. If you shop them, I may earn a commission given by the brands at no cost to you.

---

7 most used apps: I don’t know if anyone needs this information but I find it interesting so here goes nothin: I check the Turbulence Tracker app every single day. I don’t know exactly what this says about me? I don’t know—every time I see that it’s a really rough travel day, I thank the Lord that I’m not flying and go on my merry way. Other apps I loved and utilzed most this year would have to be the Baby Connect app which I’ve used with each baby thus far (O and I talked about it in a podcast here) the Streaks app as a habit tracker, Pinterest was utilized multiple times a day as I continued to design our home, and Wonder Weeks is super helpful and informative because babies are unpredictable. Tezza remains my longtime favorite photo editing app and Canva Pro allows me to do what I do.

7 Favorite Fiction Books This Year: The Overnight Guest, Behind Closed Doors, The Housemaid, The Silent Patient, Greenwich Park, Tom Lake (except the audiobook version read by Meryl Streep!) and the rest of the fiction I read (mostly thrillers) weren’t Gold Trophy Winners.