Nara

Perhaps it’s a little comical to admit that Nara Smith inspired my desire to take up ceramics, but that is indeed the truth.

Nara Smith, for example, calls for beef tallow and beeswax in a recipe for her homemade moisturizer.

She lived alone in Nara after her husband died in 1979.

It’s part Nara Smith, the German and South African supermodel who is now TikTok-famous for her gorgeous, tedious recipes for everything from gum to chips to real meals, and part Gwyneth Paltrow, who preaches her style of eating and sells it in batches that can be shipped direct to your doorstep, as if by a deity of celebrity fitness.

Nara Smith is idolized and also ridiculed, but the unbothered serenity she channels in every video is eerily effective.