Thank you for joining me in celebrating Verily’s 10th anniversary!
Ten years after our first print issue dropped in 2012, we are thrilled to once again connect with you in print. Amid a constantly changing world of media, many have expressed a hope to once again hold a copy of Verily in their hands. It makes sense. We want to be a place where you can read helpful, thought-provoking articles, in a form that invites a human conversation more than a web comment, reflection rather than divided attention, and stability in the face of the unpredictable world of social media and tech. In great part due to your persistence in asking for it, Verily is once again returning to print.
Yes! Coming to a mailbox near you in 2023 is the new quarterly Verily Magazine. Spread the word, and, if you haven’t already, secure your subscription at Members.VerilyMag.com. While you’re at it, grab some gift subscriptions for your friends and loved ones. I know it’s not as free as the web, but your subscription is paying for something valuable that can’t be found on the web. And we truly couldn’t do this without you.
We also couldn’t have done it without so many people who have brought Verily this far, who I am grateful to feature in these pages. To celebrate this exciting new chapter on our 10th anniversary, we have produced this special stand-alone issue featuring some of our best articles and features from the past decade. Many of these articles, photos, and illustrations have, up to this point, lived only online. I think you’ll agree with me that the printed page unlocks something new and beautiful about them!
I look forward to hearing what you think. As always, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at ohhello@verilymag.com. Truly, I can’t wait to hear what you think and to embark on this journey with you.
Verily Yours,
MARY ROSE SOMAR RIBA EDITOR IN CHIEF
Here is Inez today. That’s how old Verily is!
You know what ten years looks like? Ten years ago, this first photo was taken, when I was about ten weeks pregnant with my daughter Inez.
Learn to tell your trapezes from your sheaths, and discover the best styles for your shape.
BY JANET SAHM EASTERFashion commentary on blogs and in magazines is full of jargon. When it comes to describing clothes, much of it can seem like mumbo jumbo. What’s the difference between a shift and a sheath dress, a-line and trapeze, shirt-waist, drop-waist, and empire?
We’re here to decode some of the terminology surrounding dress silhouettes, plus what works best for your body.
This article by Janet Sahm Easter was originally published on October 13, 2014, at VerilyMag.com
This is the trickiest distinction, as both are simple, uncomplicated dresses that fall straight down from your shoulders. I only recently learned that the di erence between the two is that a shift dress is less fitted than a sheath dress. Who knew?
A sheath dress is form-fitting and shaped by darts. (Darts are a V-shaped tuck used to help shape the fabric of a garment to the contours of the body, most commonly seen over the bust area.) Sheath dresses look best on those with hourglass shapes or heart shapes, as the slightly more form-fitting silhouette highlights your proportions.
A shift dress simply falls straight down from your shoulders, meaning it’s a bit more flow-y over your hips and waist. Shift dresses look best on those with a column or straight, boxy shape, who can more easily pull o a looser fit without looking like they’re drowning.
A-line is the holy grail for every body shape. A-line skirts or dresses are fitted at your natural waist and gradually widen toward the hem to create a triangular shape that fans out slightly. This flattering shape pulls double duty: it draws the eyes to the waist for pear (larger on bottom) and heart shapes (larger on top), which de-emphasizes the hips and adds the appearance of curves for those with boyish or boxy body types.
A trapeze dress has a triangular shape as well, but instead of starting at your waist, the silhouette begins at your shoulders and flairs out over your form. It has an easy, breezy, almost tent-like look and feel. This silhouette is best for long, lean, and somewhat boxy body shapes as you won’t drown in all the fabric and shapelessness, but rather the dress will hang and flow beautifully.
Start with a clean, moisturized face to apply your desired coverage. Brianna’s skin looked fresh and youthful with a slight dewiness. We recommend Urban Decay Stay Naked Weightless Liquid Foundation for its lightweight texture, wide range of shades, and fluid texture that evens the skin without looking heavy.
Keeping with the blue undertones, a mauve blush adds a subtle flush of warmth and dimension to the center of your face.
Glossier Cloud Paint in Haze is a blue-pink shade that complements the purple shadow and ties the look together.
Purple eyeshadow has strong roots in the makeup junky community, but beginners are usually intimidated by this bold look. But lets give it a shot! Step out of your comfort zone to try plums and violets, these shades complement almost every complexion from fair to deep tones.
Aveda Petal Essence Eye Color Trio in Violet Bloom is a versatile palette to start with. Fairer tones can use the champagne shade as a base. After applying the base, gently push the medium purple over it for the desired hue. Deeper tones can start with the medium purple as the base and layer the darker purple over it for a dense shade of plum that will make the eyes pop. Use a clean brush to blend so the color looks even.
Line the eyes with a bright blue pencil on the upper and lower lash line, keeping the line thin and as close to the lashes as possible.
Nyx Cosmetics Slim Eye Pencil in Satin Blue is a sky-blue liner that is as bright as it is budgetfriendly! Add a few coats of your favorite black mascara, and the eyes are complete.
The Style Mixology feature in our August–September 2013 issue introduced us to the magic of mixing prints to create truly inspirational outfits. But our love for this spread doesn’t stop there. Makeup artist Alexis Ansell created a fresh and colorful look on our model Brianna Michelle, with purple shadow, electric blue liner, and a mauve blush—and now we’re ready to try this at home!
Paired with bold eyes, it’s best to keep the lips toned down. A simple plum-toned gloss like Smashbox Gloss Angeles Lip Gloss in Celeb Sighting will look good on everyone. For those with lots of natural pigment in the lips, this gloss will brighten your natural color and add a creamy sheen. For those with a more neutral natural lip color, this shade infuses a berry glow that is oh-so-feminine.
Today, most couples live together before marriage—more than 75 percent. Many people will live with di erent partners during their twenties and thirties, too. While it’s common, it doesn’t mean the trend is good. In fact, those who live together before they have decided and planned on marriage report less happy marriages later on and are more likely to divorce.
It’s true that there may be some benefits of living together. You may discover some of the faults your partner has or learn ways that you are incompatible. But the risk for many is that you may stay with this person because of inertia even if he or she doesn’t ultimately pass your test. My colleagues at the University of Denver and I call this phenomenon “sliding versus deciding.”
Living together may make it harder to know if you’ve found “the one,” for a number of reasons.
Living together makes it harder to break up.
This sounds obvious, but we don’t think about it when we sign a new lease together. My research with more than 1,200 people in their twenties and thirties shows that moving in together increases your chances of staying together, but it doesn’t increase how committed or interested you feel. It increases the number of constraints in a relationship—things that may make you stuck or make it hard to disentangle—like pooling finances, adopting a pet, co-mingling kitchenware, or buying furniture together. But there isn’t a corresponding increase in how much you want to marry your partner.
For most couples, living together increases discord.
Research shows that living together is associated with more conflict than either dating or being married. The reason for this is that while living together, couples deal with the same issues dating couples commonly face (time spent together, friends, jealousy, commitment) as well as issues common to married couples (household contributions, money, in-laws, raising children). These married-couple issues are easier to deal with when there is already a long-term commitment to the future—as there is in marriage. Living together defies the typical evolution of couple issues and may make it seem like there is more conflict in a relationship than there would be otherwise. Living together may instill a breakup mentality that can hurt later marriage.
Often, partners move in together with ideas about how they will split up furniture, books, finances, and pets in the event of a breakup. This mentality can make it harder to fully commit later on, because it becomes habit to think about what the end of the relationship will be like. Early research in this field has shown that living together made marriage seem less attractive. Making a decision to marry and spend a lifetime with someone means giving up these plans for “what if.” But when “what if” is engrained from the beginning of living together, it may be more di cult to change that thinking, even after marrying.
When researchers exclude menstruating, pregnant, and breastfeeding women from trials, women become second-class patients.
BY GRACE EMILY STARK
The lack of clinical drug testing on pregnant women has gotten more press than usual lately, owing to the recent Covid-19 vaccine trials. But did you know that all women of reproductive age have been historically under-sampled in clinical trials? The inclusion/exclusion criteria for the recent Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials had specific exclusions for women
of reproductive age: the researchers tested on neither pregnant nor breastfeeding women (going so far as to require proof of a negative pregnancy test) and required a commitment from all premenopausal women to use birth control.
But the exclusion of fertile and pregnant women from participating in drug trials should
concern us. The vast majority of women will be pregnant someday, and a woman’s other health conditions do not simply vanish because she becomes pregnant, and neither (in most cases) does her need for treatment. Yet, while it is estimated that over half of pregnant women take prescription drugs, and that 64 to 90 percent of pregnant women take some sort of
Reflecting on the past 10 years, looking ahead to the next
BY VERILY MAGAZINEAt Verily, one of the most delightful aspects of our commitment to creating authentic and relatable media for women is producing original photoshoots. While you’ll find no Photoshopping of women’s bodies or faces here, you’re sure to find gorgeous and aspirational looks, capturing both the joys of dressing up and the dignity of our models. Here are some of our favorite moments from the past ten years of Verily’s print and web style photography.
“I think there are a lot of things we assume we have to do as women, in terms of modifications of our body, clothing, makeup or plastic surgery, which is becoming more commonplace especially for younger women. A lot of what I hear is, ‘Well, if it makes me feel better I should do it.’ But while that may be legitimate, I think we have to think about what our notion of feeling good is based on. And we need to look at all the things that are often presented from the lens of what men think women should look like.”
—MAYIM BIALIK (MAY 14, 2017)
“About three days [after 9/11], Jim said, ‘I have to go to the comedy club and do a spot.’ And I thought, are you kidding me? This is not the time. But Jim said, ‘This is the time to do it.’ When I saw people flocking to the comedy clubs, I realized we need that moment of community and communication with other people. Because we all share those joys of life together alongside the tragedy, it allows us to lift them up in despair.”
—JEANNIE GAFFIGAN (AUGUST 10,
“I think that there’s such a desire, especially from women, to make everything linear: If I do X, Y, and Z, this is the reward, and if I don’t, this is the punishment. But life pretty much never works that way. . . . Some days you’re up, some days you’re down, and that’s just a fact of life and gravity; you can’t do anything about that. You have to look at your life and your career with a much longer vision. The most successful people have to be resilient because otherwise, the first time you hit a road bump you’re just going to fall apart.”
—SARAH KUNST (APRIL 13, 2016)“You are not a failure for not having a thigh gap. More to the point: You are most likely not supposed to have a thigh gap. Exercise and diet industries target women in ways that convince us we can and should be engaged in a constant battle with what is, in large part, a biological reality. . . . You will be much more successful if you simply make healthy changes in your lifestyle that make you feel better and that you enjoy.”
—MEGHAN MURPHY (JANUARY 22, 2016)2016)
“I need to learn how to say ‘no’ more— that’s one of the biggest lessons for me. My ultimate desire is to build a thriving business that I love but not leave my life in a whirlwind in the process. Everyone I have ever admired was successful but often exhausted. I’m determined to be successful without being worn out. They don’t have to be one and the same, and I need to be levelheaded for myself, for my relationships, and for my team.”
—HILARY RUSHFORD
(JUNE 10, 2014)
“Human rights have always been very important to me, but I think a lot of times we feel like a problem is so big that we can’t possibly be a part of the solution. Over the past several years of being immersed in the fashion industry, I’ve seen how many of the large-scale mainstream retailers do not take this into account when making major material and production decisions. I felt like I needed to at least do something small to counteract the process.”
—JESSIE ARTIGUE(APRIL 26, 2017)
“I definitely have very much appreciated my life as a competitive athlete, which has facilitated an understanding of setting a goal and how to work toward that goal and be disciplined. And I think today our society encourages competitiveness by way of social media and our constant connectedness to other peoples’ highlight reels. So I’ve tried to spend the last couple years not being in a competitive mindset all the time. I’ve prioritized inner peace, not seeing where you fall in the pecking order. I think finding the di erence between competitiveness and striving after one’s own personal goal is hugely important in our culture.”
“I think that the way we talk about modesty today has become a bit of a parody, centering as it does around what others think. Look at that girl from Virginia who was just kicked out of prom because of her short dress, told that she might cause others to have ‘impure thoughts.’ We’ve really lost sight of the main point here. Modesty isn’t something that women do for men; it’s about having a deeper sense of yourself. To me, the real harm of being preened to be a sex object for strangers from age five is not with the male strangers. The real harm is that which is done to the girls’ sense of self—never having that opportunity to develop herself personally, with the constant emphasis on looking ‘hot.’ That’s the real tragedy here, and that’s why I was motivated to try to paint a picture of a compelling alternative.”
—WENDY SHALIT (MAY 21, 2014)
‘Instead of resolving to achieve work–life balance, it’s better to ask this question: What do I want to do more of with my nonworking time? People want to exercise more. They want to read more. They want to get together with friends. They want to volunteer. This is what people are talking about when they say they want to be ‘balanced.’
We presume that making space for these enjoyable activities requires working less, but the truth is that there are plenty of people with challenging jobs who exercise, read, and have meaningful relationships with their friends, family, and community. Instead, making space for these things requires being better stewards of time. It means resolving to spend nonworking time on higher-value things, rather than easy things, such as turning on the TV. The best way to do that is to be a bit more strategic about the 168 hours you have each week.”
—LAURA VANDERKAM
—MERYL DAVIS (AUGUST 5, 2019)
“For artists like me that live in this digital world, it is very easy to get caught up in likes, clicks, and views, and to feel as though that is what determines your worth. I think at the end of the day we have to step back and remember why we’re doing this—to make great art, and not be too swayed by the numbers.”
—KINA GRANNIS
(APRIL 22, 2014)
(JUNE 13, 2016)
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