Welcome to The Looker

Joanna Coles, the Chief Creative & Content Officer of the Daily Beast, welcomes you to The Looker—a new editorial vertical dedicated to beauty, style, longevity, and ambition.

Once upon a time, only actors worried about how they looked onscreen. Now we’re all starring in our own 24/7 reality series, on Zoom, on TikTok, on FaceTime, under the unflattering fluorescent glow of an airport Starbucks. Our faces are content. Our bodies are branding. The fantasy of reinvention is no longer reserved for the rich and famous. It’s available via telehealth and Klarna.

Which is why we at the Daily Beast, long obsessed with power and politics, are expanding our curiosity to another battlefield: how we show up in the world. The Looker is our new style, beauty, and wellness site. The place where we talk about what it means to be seen, and how to feel good about it.

As someone who spent 12 years editing fashion magazines and as a mentor on Project Runway: All Stars, I will be both a contributor and an avid reader. Like you, I face these issues every day, and to be honest, they’ve grown more intense since we launched our successful “The Daily Beast” and “Inside Trump’s Head” podcasts on YouTube.

How do you “do” but not “overdo”? How do we look like our best selves, not like everyone else? Is it even possible to age gracefully in a world that rewards looking ageless?

The Looker will explore these tensions. We’ll go inside the clinics, the TikToks, and the cultural shifts reshaping how we see ourselves. We’ll talk to surgeons and skeptics, dermatologists and philosophers, influencers and everyday people navigating the beauty-industrial complex with equal parts curiosity and fatigue. We’ll ask the big questions: What’s the line between empowerment and pressure? Between self-expression and conformity? And when does “self-care” become self-surveillance?

And it’s not just women anymore. Men account for nearly 30 percent of cosmetic procedures. The cultural permission to care about how you look has, at last, gone gender-neutral. The old stigma of vanity as weakness has given way to a new pragmatism: presentation as power. Whether you’re running for president, pitching a startup, or surviving a family group text, appearance has become part of our personal infrastructure. It’s not superficial. It’s strategic.

So, yes, The Looker is about beauty. But it’s also about agency. About the choices we make when we stare into that tiny camera lens or face up to the world, and what those choices say about us. Visibility is the new power.

I look in the mirror and see laugh lines like cat’s whiskers and wonder, do I blast them out of existence or embrace the results of a social life full of laughter? The scar from my recent hip replacement—should I leave it to fade or highlight it with a serpent tattoo? If I’d never seen an advertisement, what would be my ideal of beauty?

We can’t know. But here at The Looker, we’re interested in the fun of transformation, experimentation, the permission to explore and evolve. No judgment. We believe beauty should be joyful and surprising, and that style is a form of intelligence. That a good haircut can change your attitude, and the right lipstick can feel like you’re kissing the world.

So no time to waste. Let’s get into it!