Text Nellie Eden

Our editor Nellie Eden invites you to celebrate Dazed Beauty’s magick one year anniversary

Welcome to Witch Week, a campaign dedicated to exploring how witchcraft, magick and beauty intersect. Discover photo stories shot featuring real witches in NYC, a modern reimagining of the witch, and one witch’s mission to get a tan, as well as in-depth features exploring herbology, science and alchemy, and male witches. Elsewhere, we’ve created three special covers to celebrate the campaign and our one year anniversary – something wicked this way comes. We’ve recently celebrated our one year anniversary. It’s been an emotional ride. I’m not sure the internet was expecting us when we arrived, and now, just over 12 months later it’s incredible to look back at the unique and indelible mark we’ve already left on the beauty industry, and the remarkable platform we’ve opened up for our community and beyond. No one day is the same at Dazed Beauty, whether we’re 3D scanning Kate Moss’s head, or building custom algorithms to merge with Kylie Jenner’s face, we hope to remain radical in the face of blandness, stoic in the downwind of predictability, and steadfast in our pledge to put individuality and self-expression first. We are Instagram, we are the industry, we are you and me. To quote Bunny Kinney, our editor-in-chief, from his original editor’s letter from last year, Dazed Beauty is: “A space for us to document, deconstruct, and experiment with beauty in all its forms, in every dimension, and tell the stories of the lived experience each one of us has in our own individual bodies as we navigate the world, both online and off.” We hope we’ve remained true to our promise of remaining challenging, anti-establishment, diverse and exciting.

Photography Etienne Saint-Denis, styling Taylor Thoroski

Welcoming you then to our big birthday bash: Witch Week. A whole seven days of witchiness, magick, and transformation complete with three huge digital covers. We began to plot Witch Week after being inspired by the etymology of the word glamour, which originates from the Scottish word gramarye around 1720. As Grace McGrade puts it in her edifying article, “a glamer (or glamour) is considered a spell that would affect the eyesight of the beholder, making objects or people appear beautiful or fascinating.” Taking that as a starting point, we’ve cast three spells on four famous faces for our moving covers. Grimes is transformed into fantasy characters that reflect the beauty and magic of destruction and dystopia by Isamaya Ffrench and Ben Ditto. Alexa Demie of Euphoria fame becomes a modern sickle-wielding Wednesday Addams witch, courtesy of director Bunny Kinney, and Lily McMenamy and Alton Mason transfigure into vampires at the hand of Ivar Wigan for our final cover. Beyond our bewitching covers, we have a cauldron-load of magick; spells, incantations, essays, short films, quizzes, and spellbinding photo stories. The decision to focus on magick was twofold. Magick presents an exciting mode of expression, a mystical crystal ball through which to imagine parallel universes, creatures, futures, and of course identity – but it’s also an increasingly important doctrine which young people are adopting to live within as a way to navigate this increasingly nervous planet. It’s a natural extension of wellness and spirituality for 2019. It’s non-essentialist, anti-capitalist and broadly speaking, infused with a sparkling positivity and care. We’ve asked lots of practising witches, young and old, from across the world, from varying backgrounds and belief systems, to contribute their thoughts and feelings to the week and what’s become abundantly clear is that for the next generation (marked by their secularity) magick has become increasingly important. I found it inspiring to discover how inclusive and personal witchcraft is, and I have found the stories and lessons from young witches touching, and enticing.

Jess Maybury Photography Raphael Bliss, Art direction Ami Evelyn Hughes