Is 37 too early for your first facelift?

And other questions that Cassandra Grey plans on answering.

Hello everyone. It’s Cami Fateh here again. Anna and I are putting together the newsletter for you while Emily is trying OOO.

On Sunday, one of my roommates and I decided that we should make a trip to the Upper East Side. We had been battling Sunday scaries downtown among hordes of tourists exiting the subway, a line around the block for an unknown brand activation, and the teenagers who crowd the Blank Street “Green Room” in search of cookies and cream flavored matcha lattes. We ventured uptown, where we enjoyed a fabulous brunch without needing a reservation, bought matching slippers at Zitomer, and admired the window presentations at the Ralph Lauren flagship store on Madison Avenue. It felt refreshingly luxurious and quiet.

Another thing I love about the Upper East Side is its vast array of delightful, nostalgic independent retailers. There’s Tiny Doll House, a dedicated dollhouse and miniatures store founded by a former attorney that

Emilia Petrarca

covered in Shop Rat last year, the aptly-named Love All Tennis that sells “retro chic” tennis-wear (founded by an HBS grad who grew up playing tennis in Seal Harbor Maine in the ‘80s), and the decadent luxury interiors store KRB that provides “dope” window shopping, according to Guy Trebay.

Violet Grey, the cosmetics store founded by Cassandra Huysentruyt Grey which opened uptown earlier this year, is the latest addition to the Upper East Side’s chic rank of shops. Grey founded Violet Grey as a digital-first beauty retailer in 2013. Newer projects include Violet Lab, an incubator for products and brands, and, most recently, perfume label Madame Grey, featuring “a very-sought-after limited-edition parfum” that retails for $1,100.

Grey and private equity investor Sherif Guirgis repurchased Violet Grey from Farfetch in September 2024 (the online retailer acquired it in 2022 and Cassandra stayed on as founder and “Creator-in-Residence”), and they opened the Upper East Side store this June. According to Glossy, Grey and Guirgis are planning on opening 20 new stores over the next three to four years, offering a “white glove e-commerce” experience, and looking to expand internationally.

In today’s newsletter, you can read my conversation with

Cassandra Grey

— who launched a Substack this week — about entrepreneurship, her beauty habits, and the $1,100 perfume.

Also in today’s letter: Palantir is selling merch, The Guardian and Lingua Franca are selling $380 cashmere crewnecks, and we’ve hit peak butter yellow.

---

CAMI FATEH: As a store that carries high end brands, how do you reach that audience that historically wants to stay hidden — high-end clientele?

CASSANDRA GREY: Oh, our Close Friends of VIOLET, our elusive high-end clientele. When they want privacy (and they often do), we close the doors and hand them the keys, or we bring VIOLET to them with our very own “Avon Tupperware”–style salon at home. There is a set I personally shop for, keeping their world-class routines on track, slipping in the newest skincare innovations, makeup-artist heroes before they launch, and opening my black book on command: VIOLET-CODED aestheticians, surgeons, dermatologists, hair stylists and colorists, makeup artists, facelift acupuncturists, brow and lash whisperers, longevity specialists, injectors, Korean wellness guides, lymphatic magicians, medical and red-carpet manicurists, astrologers, Hoffman teachers, sleep and sexual-wellness experts—lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

CF: What are your thoughts on Gen Alpha’s growing interest in skin care... and why should we care?

CG: It’s never too early to hydrate or meditate.

CF: What’s your “death row meal” but for beauty products?

CG: My “last-look kit”? Fara Homidi’s Essential Bronzer Compact — I’m addicted; two swipes and I look freshly back from Antibes. L’Oréal Elnett hairspray, the European formula only; I smuggle cans home from Paris for the scent, the texture, the joy. And my six-step dental ritual. My expensive-but-worth-it teeth are my favorite feature, and bad breath is top of my fear list, so I treat them like couture.

CF: What are people getting wrong about injectables and surgery right now? Are there any misconceptions that concern you more than others?

CG: This is the topic of my entire Letter this week: “Is 37 too early or the opportune time for a first facelift?” and the easy truth about Dr. Levine. All the more reason to subscribe to Please Note by me.

CF: What treatments and services are you interested in right now?

CG: I’ll admit I’m deeply into, verging on obsessed with, body contouring, extravagant facelifts, elite sleep, and acupuncture.

CF: In this Vogue story, you said that you feel like you look even better now than you did when (Sub)Mercer opened 22 years ago. What has changed in your routine and lifestyle? What do you prefer about the present day?

CG: At 22, I had an insatiable taste for high-stakes poker, Nat Shermans, designer cocaine, and gin & tonics.

Now I’m super into my sobriety, my sleep, and my meditation and daily manifestation practice; burning Madame Grey’s Aries candle (The Zodiacs collection coming soon); listening to Justin Bieber on noise-canceling headphones; gobbling up my son with kisses and skipping through Central Park; walking, dancing, and scrolling Zillow, StreetEasy, Feed Me and The Voice Of Reason with Carole Radziwill on Substack.

CF: Which founders, artists and creative people do you admire? What habits or traits are you trying to embody?

CG: I admire anyone intent on being the best at what they do, anyone in the arena, winning or wiping out; I’m often most impressed by the wipeouts who get back up. I gravitate to founders and artists who are decisive and who treat creativity as limitless when they let the process be led by God or source. I think of God as intuition, the Wizard of Oz truth that it’s been there all along and we can access it anytime. Caffeine does help too.

CF: What are your daily habits and rituals? What habits are you trying to add or break away from?

CG: My astrologer gave me a journal of daily manifestations tailored to my chart. I manifest and meditate every morning. On school days I walk my son to school. I keep an elaborate sleep ritual because I’m vain and sleep is the most important step in my skincare routine. Everything in between is inconsistent, and that’s what I’m working on. I’m most productive with predictability; I’m at my best when my schedule is scheduling.

CF: 20 new stores over the next 3-4 years is ambitious — not that you can’t do it. What’s the plan regarding commercial leases, a notoriously difficult part of having a brick-and-mortar business?

CG: I can’t take credit for VIOLET GREY’s IRL ambitions. I advise and open doors; my partner Sherif Gurgis and his management team handles the hard, unglamorous work—leases included—and they’re far smarter and better at execution than I am. My lane is vision and recruiting exceptional people to build it. That’s my business superpower. I’m most proud of the execution teams we’re building at VIOLET GREY, VIOLET LAB, and my obsession since 2011: the Madame Grey Estate.

CF: Speaking of the Madame Grey Estate, we see you quietly launched an $1,100 perfume called Madame Grey Parfum and Kris Jenner, Sienna Miller and Scarlett Johansson are fans. Why is it so expensive?

CG: The Madame Grey Parfum is expensive because we only make 1,100 hand-crafted bottles at a time; each one is signed, dated, collectible—art, really. The ingredients are rare, and the sex appeal is priceless. We also made a hair parfum, Pour Cheveux Strip-Tease Shine, for $100 for our baddies who want that stripper hair—handle with caution. Who doesn’t like their perfume expensive, their eyeliner a little dirty, and their Yankees cap worn-in?

CF: What’s the difference between Violet Grey today and the brand that was owned by Farfetch? Where did each or either of them succeed more than the other?

CG: Nothing quite takes the peanuts out of peanut butter like taking the director off the film they cast, wrote, and funded.

Please Note: This may not be the perfect introductory letter but done is better than perfect.

---

---

• “Palantir Wants to Be a Lifestyle Brand,” according to Wired. The company sells self-deportation tracking tools to ICE, and now, tote bags, tees, and baseball caps. I recently discovered that The Palantir Foundation has its own attempt at a magazine called The Republic, which I haven’t seen reported on anywhere else. A peek into their masthead: CEO Alex Karp is listed as Chairman; the Executive Editors include a former Bloomberg editor who attended Columbia J-School and a former Department of Defense speechwriter; and the contributing editors include a current Palantir intern. Many of the magazine’s contributions come from undergraduate students at Ivy Leagues or Ivy-adjacents. I asked Mark Krotov, the publisher of n+1, if he’d heard of the magazine, and he has not, despite his interest in “esoterically/evilly funded journals of all kinds.” He told Feed Me, “I don’t even recognize any familiar names among the editors or contributors — everyone seems to be either a Palantir employee or a security analyst.” However, he found that the former Department of Defense speechwriter who edits the journal is also the author of a coming-of-age-novel. Talk about well-roundedness.

• We’ve hit peak butter yellow. Stay with me here: Molly Baz, Crocs, and DTC cookware brand Our Place have collabed on a butter yellow collection of pots, pans, and charms (for both Crocs and cookware grips). This is very Disney adult to me.

• From the Feed Me Tip Line: a reader noted that the branding around Trump’s Gold Visa reminded them of David Protein Bars. According to design expert

  Elizabeth Goodspeed
  , both David Protein and trumpcard.gov use a free open-sourced Google Font called Instrument Serif, but “the deeper reference point” is ITC Garamond Condensed, which was used throughout ‘80s advertising and has been showing up in the past few years in work from Skims, Edie Parker, Graza, Vacation Sunscreen, and Aimé Leon Dore. As of August, Trump is also using it for the entire updated White House site.
  
  Goodspeed thinks Trump’s use of the typeface reflects his admin's rejection of Modernism—both Modernist design and Modernist social ideals. “Its use conjures Trump’s own 1980s heyday (where his taste is still frozen), as well as the broader conservative resurgence of that period (glossy excess and Reaganomics). Just like Obama’s use of Gotham cemented sans serifs as symbols of progressivism, Trump’s serif points backward. It’s consistent with his broader push for ‘classical’ forms, like his Executive Order on ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,’ which explicitly rejected Modernist building styles as ‘unappealing,’” said Goodspeed. Readers, if you want to dig into more typeface-talk, you can read Goodspeed’s article about ‘80s advertorial fonts here.

  

• The Guardian and Lingua Franca teamed up on a collection of sweaters “in support of independent journalism.” One sweater is emblazoned with “fiercely independent,” and another reads “for facts’ sake.” A portion of profits will benefit theguardian.org, their US-based non-profit that supports independent journalistic projects. The cotton Maxine Sweater is $275 and the cashmere crewneck is $380. I was more excited by the group photo of the newspaper’s editorial staff wearing the collection than the sweaters themselves. With Patrick Radden Keefe modeling for J. Crew and Liana Satenstein and the Throwing Fits guys walking in Colbo’s NYFW show, fashion brands are showing their love to working writers.

• Colossal Biosciences Inc., a biotechnology startup working to resurrect the dodo, has raised $120mm. Doesn’t seem like an entirely necessary mission.

• Have you ever wondered what a store with no hours, no staff, and real-time inventory control looks like? You can now visit a store called “Xpand” on Vienna’s biggest shopping street to experience it yourself. AI Secret summarized what this means for the larger retail and real estate landscape: “For landlords, that means instant tenants; for retailers, zero labor costs; for legacy chains, an existential margin squeeze. If the model works, expect high-traffic streets and transit hubs to swap human-run corner shops for autonomous pods that never close, never unionize, and never leak inventory.”

• Curbed reported on “The Disappointment of Downtown Brooklyn.” Architecture criticism is a tough beat to get right. Kudos to Justin Davidson, New York’s architecture and classical-music critic, for both his reporting on NYC zoning and for coming up with fun ways to call something ugly. “The irony of Downtown Brooklyn is that it provides city living for people who don’t much care for the city, except for the parts you can see from high up and far away,” he wrote.

• The photo dumps that followed Charli XCX’s wedding were refreshing to me. We talk a lot about the wedding industry at Feed Me HQ, particularly the exorbitant pricing and the increasingly huge rocks on people’s fingers. I hope these pictures inspire future brides to have more unfettered fun with their friends at their weddings.

  jeremyoharris

  

  A post shared by @jeremyoharris

• Mary Boone, the famed 1980s art dealer who went to prison for tax fraud in 2019, is back. She co-curated a new show called “Downtown/Uptown,” at Upper East Side gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan, paying tribute to New York’s eighties art scene. Of course it features Basquiat’s boxing bag that has Boone’s name scrawled on it. One thing about New York’s art scene is that it will always look back to the eighties, according to Max Lakin’s piece in the New York Times. “The ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ conception of the decade’s clubbing, yuppie excess, and drug intake that endures in the popular imagination is largely accurate,” he writes.

• I hate that I know exactly who Blythe Beardsley is without even looking at a picture of her. For those of you who spend less time online, she’s a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at the University of Arizona, and she stars in this video that came up on my TikTok FYP a few weeks ago. TikTok users in the comments were stunned by her beauty and managed to identify her. Today, she’s in the WSJ as the subject of an article by Sarah Spellings about how “Sorority Girls are Cashing In Big For Their Viral Rush Videos.” Beardsley was planning on studying to become a veterinarian, but now she feels like she should take advantage of the opportunity to “go down the influencer path” after brands started offering her free products and Australian clothing brand Showpo paid for her and her mother to attend NYFW.