Jess Graves
SHOP MY BAG:
JESS
GRAVES
The Love List creator has an eye for elevated essentials.
- Written by
- Laura Regensdorf
The thrill of discovery is a powerful lure. Knee-high Khaite boots in black glazed leather. Toteme’s two-piece cashmere set that calls to mind a horizontally reclined transatlantic flight. A duo of U Beauty’s Resurfacing Flash Peel and The Super Intensive Face Oil for “expensive-looking barefaced skin.” The avid readers of Jess Graves’s The Love List—and there are a great many—encounter a steady stream of highbrow things to swoon over, delight in, buy. “It does get a little niche and obsessive sometimes,” Graves says, referring to her subscriber chat, where hyperfixations on cult brands swing from High Sport to Byredo. But there’s an underlying ethos of utility—better, not more. “I am perfectly happy to buy a $300 cream or a $900 pair of pants,” she says, speaking for her audience, “if they’re going to save me five minutes in the morning, make my life easier, become a backbone of my wardrobe.”
Graves, whose apartment overlooks Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, launched The Love List in 2006. This past spring, as her presence on Substack solidified, she mostly closed up her consulting business to focus on the newsletter full-time, along with longer-form essays she plans to collect in a forthcoming book. “I protect my mornings pretty fiercely—that’s my most productive writing time,” she says. “My email’s not pinging like crazy. My mind’s fresh.” Graves’s interest in beauty came early—she remembers the transformative effects of a seventh-grade blowout—though the landscape has, of course, changed. “I’m a millennial, so we weren’t going to Sephora as teenagers. We had Noxzema pads and Clearasil.” Now, her relationship to beauty is more like a conversation among friends, made easier with last year’s move from Atlanta. “Violet Grey was probably the first time I was introduced to Sofie Pavitt’s products,” she says, “and now Sofie’s a friend and my aesthetician.” Graves swears by the line’s cleanser and keeps her freezer stocked with Nice Ice toner pods—“very helpful this morning after too much Champagne last night.” It was Pavitt who wisely suggested paring down the number of active ingredients in her skin care routine, particularly helpful when dry New York winters are challenging enough. “Really, you only need a handful of very good, core products,” Graves says, as proved by the hit list in her BAG. “It doesn’t have to be complicated.”