When you’re beating yourself up and striving for perfection, it makes it hard to improve. And really, all we can and should be focused on is improving every day. When you let go of trying to be perfect and instead love and accept yourself for who you are and where you are; and give yourself some grace, you can have a better chance at improving the things you so desperately want to improve.

What products can you not live without right now? 

I’ve been using Olay’s Nighttime Body Wash and Conditioner before bed, and they pretty much rejuvenate your body overnight. The retinol in the formulas kind of flush out all that dead skin, and create you anew. But you do have to do your own research when it comes to retinol, because it’s not a one size fits all. For me, though, it’s been great. My skin has become more moisturized.

Olay Cleansing & Renewing Nighttime Body Wash with Retinol

Olay Nighttime Rinse-off Body Conditioner with Retinol

How do you gas yourself up on days when you’re not feeling confident?

First off, it’s the company you keep. People emanate energies, and in return, who we are, our thoughts, and our patterns mirror those around us. So I make sure good positive people surround me. Also, I dress up. I feel like makeup and clothing can sometimes take you out of a slump. But at the end of the day, nobody is perfect. We all came into this world naked—no clothes, no makeup ―nothing. And that journey of going in and out of loving ourselves through the imperfections can get hard. So sometimes, it’s within.

Who are the women inspiring you the most right now?

My mother and my sister are very beautiful to me for the simple reason that they are 100% themselves. They own who they are at every moment. My sister taught me that being funny and being goofy is beautiful and cool. It was my first time seeing an alternative Black girl. And as a Black girl, those things were not very everyday or accepted. My mom has always been a powerhouse. She never allowed other people’s intimidation of her to stop her from being who she is. And stop her from shining.

And then, as a third person, Queen Latifah, because she shows that beauty is really, truly from within. Every time I was around Queen, she treated everybody with kindness, no matter who they were. She always acknowledged me, and she made me feel like I was important and unique. And I wanted to have that kind of beauty inside. So it enforced me to pay that forward.

If you’re looking for some warm apple pie entertainment during these chilly winter months, look no further than Netflix’s Firefly Lane. The TV series is based on Kristin Hannah’s popular novel and stars (brunette) Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke as beloved best friends Tully and Kate. Read Netflix’s official description, below: 

“The greatest love story of all can be between friends. When unlikely duo Tully (Katherine Heigl) and Kate (Sarah Chalke) meet at age 14, they couldn’t be more different. Tully is the brash and bold girl you can’t ignore, while Kate is the mousy shy girl you never notice. But when a tragedy brings them together, they are bonded for life—forever inseparable best friends. Together they experience 30 years of ups and downs—triumphs and disappointments, heartbreak and joy, and a love triangle that strains their friendship. One goes on to fabulous wealth and fame, the other chooses marriage and motherhood—but through the decades, their bond remains, until it faces the ultimate test. ” 

Netflix released the first trailer for Firefly Lane in January. Check it out: 

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m immediately picking up on some Sweet Magnolias vibes. A touching story about lifelong female friendship? Set (at least partially) in a quaint, small town? With gooey, pull-at-your-heartstrings dialogue? Sounds like exactly the kind of content we need during These Trying Times. 

There’s also a time-jumping element to the show, as we see Tully and Kate as both teens and adults. This Is Us fans know that format well and will no-doubt enjoy the context it provides to Firefly Lane‘s story. 

Firefly Lane is Heigl’s first major TV role since starring in the last two seasons of Suits, where she played Samantha Wheeler. Chalke, meanwhile, is best known for her work on Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, and voicing Beth on Rick and Morty. 

Firefly Lane hits Netflix on February 3. 

Secret Service agents stood guard around Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s palatial Washington, DC, home night and day, prepared to protect the couple from shootings, bombs, and any other security threats. 

They were not allowed to use the couple’s toilet. 

The Washington Post reports that the tax-payer-funded security detail that guarded members of the extended first family throughout Donald Trump’s presidency was forced to use porta-potties,  or even, incredibly, to leave the Trump-Kushner home to go to the bathrooms inside the nearby homes of Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama and Vice President Mike Pence. A solution was found when the Secret Service rented a nearby studio apartment, just so that agents could go to the bathroom. The cost to the government was $3,000 a month, a grand total of over $100,000 dollars, to date. 

The Kushner-Trump home, the Post notes, has more than six bathrooms. That’s more than one bathroom for each family member in the house. Two law-enforcement officials told the Post about the bathroom situation, while neighbors confirmed that they saw a porta-potty was used by the officers and then eventually taken away. A spokesperson for the White House denied the story, claiming that the decision was made by Secret Service officials, not the Trump-Kushners. But the neighbor who ended up renting her house to the Secret Service told the paper that it all started when agents knocked on her door and asked to use the bathroom, seemingly having no other option. 

This refusal to provide law enforcement officers with even the basic human necessities is at odds with Ivanka Trump’s public posture. The first daughter and presidential advisor has been loudly pro-cop and dismissive of the massive movement to hold police forces accountable for killing people. The first daughter and the vice president pointedly traveled to Minneapolis to visit “Cops for Trump” groups in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. They met with officers who were “negatively impacted by crime and violent extremism”—though Ivanka apparently did not hear stories that moved her enough to allow those protecting her safety the dignity of access to a toilet. 

Jared Kushner’s public comments on law enforcement have largely been limited to mocking its critics. When NBA players refused to play in August in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, Kushner commented that the players “are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work.” The agents guarding Kushner, on the other hand, were not so fortunate—before the $3,000/month bathroom was rented, the security detail occasionally popped into neighborhood businesses to avail themselves of the facilities. 

Yet Kushner and Trump have gone out of their way to present themselves as deeply concerned with the treatment of police officers and similar authorities. Introducing her father at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Ivanka Trump declared that she stands for a country “where law enforcement is respected.” Right—so respected that they have to take their breaks in a porta-potty. 

It would be kind of funny, except Trump’s habit of speaking out of both sides of her mouth as long as it benefits herself and her father’s administration has real dangerous consequences. Care for the safety of law enforcement officers only matters to Trump when it’s politically expedient. When a mob of rioters flooded the Capitol building last week, she tweeted calling the group “American patriots.” She deleted the tweet, and said that she didn’t condone violence. But that day, those pro-Trump rioters, encouraged over the years by her father and continually endorsed by Ivanka Trump’s pro-Trump campaigning, reportedly beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher. 

For more than four years, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have sold us on the idea that they’re the perfect American family. In reality, you even want to share a bathroom with them. 

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter. 

It makes sense that Marvel—a studio that makes movies like television, telling connected stories over a series of feature-length episodes with a rotating cast of core characters—would make its first sitcom be about television itself. WandaVision, out January 15 on Disney+, is a show-within-a-show that plays with the tropes and formulas of the medium to create…something. An exploration of the American nuclear family in the nuclear age, perhaps? I can’t be sure where the story is headed from the first three episodes, which were made available to review, but there’s potential for greatness. Charming and a little romantic, WandaVision is a delight to watch.

You don’t need to know every in and out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to follow the show, but I’m not sure it makes much sense unless you understand the basics of the two main characters, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany), so here they are: Wanda is the Scarlet Witch, a telekinetic/magical Avenger from the former USSR who was experimented on along with her twin, who also had powers, but died. Vision used to be Jarvis, an artificial intelligence that Tony Stark created, but thanks to some sort of technological event (possibly alien?) he became a man of sorts. He doesn’t eat and he has a crystal in his head that, in one of the Avenger movies, has to be destroyed and kills him. (Apparently, Vision’s “return from the dead” will be explained in a future episode.) Wanda is a witch; Vision is her robot lover. Let’s get to it. 

WandaVision introduces us to the two as happy newlyweds moving to the suburbs in 1950s America. Visually and tonally, the first and second episodes replicate I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, though plot-wise hew closer to ‘60s-set Bewitched as the couple’s secret powers threaten their efforts to assimilate into the neighborhood. Its classic sitcom shenanigans: Vision brings his boss home for dinner on the night Wanda thought was their anniversary, then gets drunk (from chewing gum) on the day they’re supposed to perform at the local talent show.

What I found the most impressive is how they played with sitcom tropes without mocking them. At work, Vision doesn’t know what his company does, only that it has to do with data. It’s a send-up of post-war America, when a generation of men returned home to find that while they’d been trained to save the world (Vision, too, has performed heroic functions), they were now expected to be pencil-pushers in gray suits. Wanda clocks the oldest fake in the sitcom book—a married couple that sleeps in separate beds—and remedies it with a wave of her hand. I was glad to see the sitcom in all its formulaic glory embraced here. More than that, I was delighted that Wanda and Vision really love each other. The Marvel universe is rife with neg-heavy banter, quasi-couples, and barely-there marriages that exist mostly offscreen to motivate the avenging spouse. How nice it is to spend time with a happy and mutually supportive couple. This half of the show even manages to have that rarest quality in superhero stories: It’s funny!

Of course, there’s another side of the coin. Hanging over everything in WandaVision’s town of WestView is thinly-veiled Cold War anxiety. The neighborhood is suspicious of anyone unconventional and mid-episode “commercials” tell us military giant Stark Industries and crypto-Nazi spy society Hydra both exist in this universe. A mysterious symbol—a sword in a circle—crops up again and again, as do flashes of red, often tied to something vaguely militaristic or technological. By the end of the first episode, we know Wanda and Vision are being observed.