The T List: Six things we recommend this week

Colorful lip balms, an upstate cafe serving up dumplings — and more.

View in browser|nytimes.com February 12, 2025 Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we're eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday, along with monthly travel and beauty guides, and the latest stories from our print issues. And you can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com. TRY THIS Tinted Lip Balms to Soothe and Brighten Clockwise from top left: U Beauty the Plasma Lip Compound in Fortune, $68, ubeauty.com; Chanel Rouge Coco Baume Shine in Tender Peach, $48, chanel.com; Glossier Balm Dotcom in Black Cherry, $16, glossier.com; Isamaya Metal Lip Balm in Bronzite, $32, isamaya.com; Victoria Beckham Beauty Posh Balm in Colette, $32, victoriabeckhambeauty.com; Eadem Le Chouchou Lip Softening Balm in Boba Bounce, $24, eadem.co. Courtesy of the brands By Laura Regensdorf In a season of weather extremes, the hardest-working accessory is lip balm. Compared with the rest of the face, the lips have a thinner protective barrier, which hastens moisture loss. Exposed to the elements and day-to-day wear — eating, talking, kissing (it is Valentine's month, after all) — the lips convey their discomfort in palpable ways. Matte lipstick can be unforgiving on a cracked canvas, so the ideal solution combines nourishment and tint. Lately, there are plenty of noteworthy options to slip into a coat pocket. Earlier this month, the London-based makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench released new shades of her namesake brand's Metal Lip Balm. Its foil-like finishes (Bronzite, Burnt Coral) give a punkish edge to a formula that's otherwise protective with castor oil and plant-based waxes. Another newcomer is Chanel's Rouge Coco Baume Shine, which features candy-bright colors and delivers hydration by way of olive leaf extract, shea butter and squalane. For a stone-fruit glaze, Glossier's Balm Dotcom now comes in Black Cherry, with old-school occlusives (petrolatum, beeswax) that weatherproof the lips. Victoria Beckham Beauty's Posh Balm, fortified with murumuru seed butter and a botanical lanolin alternative, gives a sheer wash of color in poppy red Colette and deep Cassis. Some balms incorporate gentle exfoliating ingredients to smooth and prime the lips for better ingredient absorption: U Beauty's Plasma Lip Compound borrows from the skin care playbook with salicylic acid and A.H.A.s alongside restorative peptides, and Eadem's Le Chouchou Lip Softening Balm — which comes in inviting neutrals like Boba Bounce and Fig Sauce — includes texture-refining hibiscus enzymes and lactic acid. STAY HERE A Newly Renovated Cornwall Cottage That Comes Stocked With Local Granola Left: in the kitchen of Plum Cottage, the Oxfordshire-based design studio Hám Interiors added hand-painted Delft tiles made by the Cornwall-based company Decorum. Right: the wood-burning fireplace in the living room. Will Slater By Katharine Sohn Over the past six years, Jess Alken-Theasby and her husband, Ash Alken-Theasby, have renovated a collection of rental homes in Cornwall, England's southwestern peninsula, under the company name Atlanta Trevone. This month they opened their latest, a two-bedroom cottage in the coastal town of Padstow. To update the 100-year-old property, the couple turned to the Oxfordshire-based design studio Hám Interiors, which brought in deep colors (the primary bedroom is painted a burnt orange) and nautical décor (a hand-carved wooden salmon hangs in the dining room). "I wanted it to feel like you could imagine an old family cooking in the kitchen surrounded by all their treasures: a favorite frilly lamp, a much-loved cushion leaning against the window," says Jess. The living room shelves are filled with worn books, and guests are invited to stoke the wood-burning fireplace. The kitchen is stocked with pots and pans as well as some breakfast essentials: a jar stuffed with homemade granola, plus Cornish scones, cream and jam. For those who'd rather eat out, two of the county's acclaimed chefs own places less than a 10-minute walk away: Rick Stein's the Seafood Restaurant and Paul Ainsworth at No6. From about $740 for three nights (the minimum stay), atlantatrevonebay.com. SEE THIS Issy Wood's Macabre Americana Paintings, on View in Beverly Hills Issy Wood's "America Allegory" (2024). © Issy Wood, courtesy of the artist and Michael Werner, Los Angeles By Laura Bannister This month at Michael Werner Gallery in Beverly Hills, the British artist Issy Wood will present 19 new oil paintings done in her self-described smudgy pointillism, all based on photographs depicting objects that are notably seductive in our consumer culture. There's a cropped rendering of a car's open doors, its camel upholstery bared like a jewel. On a velvet canvas, the ridges of a black foam roller become blocky tire treads. Wood zooms in on sumptuous but unsettling items whose surfaces can be charged with latent danger. The show's title, "Wet Reckless," borrowed from the name of a reduced D.U.I. charge in California, underscores this sentiment. Firearms, a recent fascination, are the show's most frequent subject. Some works combine menacing images of cylinders and triggers with friendly looking creatures and little gold bows. In "Smithnwesson24," a magnified gun is overlaid with cartoonish ghosts and what look like spectral bullets. "Any attempt to make a killing machine somehow whimsical is exactly the sort of doomed effort I like in art," says Wood. "Issy Wood: Wet Reckless" will be on view at Michael Werner Gallery from Feb. 15 through April 5, michaelwerner.com. WEAR THIS A Perfume Line That Embraces the Unexpected The bottle for the new perfume line Serviette was designed by the New York-based agency Studio Select.  Maxime Poiblanc By Osman Can Yerebakan Trey Taylor was working as an editor for the British culture magazine The Face when he began making scented candles in his apartment during the pandemic. Eventually he began taking fragrance-making lessons with the Brooklyn-based perfumer Marissa Zappas, who introduced him to essential oils and helped him mix formulas. Now, after four years of experimentation, Taylor has landed on a set of scents that make up his new line, Serviette. Each one features an unexpected ingredient. "Like a person, a scent must have something compelling — maybe sometimes off-putting — that draws us," says Taylor. Byronic Hero features rose oud, which offers a finish similar to diesel exhaust. Ruche combines raspberry and the sharp herby scent of galbana, an ancient woody plant grown in Turkey for its resin. Frisson d'Hiver mixes bergamot and camphor, while Sour Diesel blends the titular marijuana strain with Egyptian geranium. Taylor chose the name Serviette ("napkin" in French) in part because it was once a term that marked class division in England. Working-class people would say "serviette," while the elite used the term "napkin." Taylor sees it as a symbol of unseen yet powerful societal expectations, the kind he hopes to explore and disrupt through Serviette's scents. Also, he adds, "it's just a fun word to say." From $40 for the Discovery Set; available at serviette.nyc and at Stéle boutiques in New York. EAT HERE A New Upstate Cafe Serving Asian Dishes and Pantry Goods An array of dumplings, cakes, steamed and baked buns, spring rolls and coffee drinks from Lucky Catskills, a new cafe in Tannersville, N.Y., focused on Asian cuisine. Olivia Wood By Shannon Adducci When Patty Wu moved to the Catskills from Brooklyn in 2020, she quickly began to miss the cafes of Manhattan's Chinatown that she'd frequented since childhood. "Every weekend my family and I would go to Manhattan to see a movie and have some dim sum," says Wu, who emigrated from Taiwan in the '70s and grew up in Woodside, Queens. "I remember the typical Chinatown cafe would have coffee and a variety of savory and sweet pastries, like pork buns and custard buns and Asian bread. You'd have a snack and take something to go." In December, Wu channeled those memories into the opening of Lucky Catskills, a cafe and provisions shop in the mountain town of Tannersville. Wu, who also runs the home goods boutique Sundry and the restaurant Tabla nearby, has combined her love of Asian flavors and dishes into small bites that rotate from week to week. The menu might include pork-and-chive dumplings, steamed red bean buns and custard buns, vegetarian radish cakes and ramens and rice bowls (most recently lu rou fan, a Taiwanese dish of pork belly and rice with pickled mustard greens and a stewed egg). A Vietnamese-inspired coffee menu features various condensed milk flavors, including black sesame and red bean, plus an in-house condensed oat milk made from scratch (drip coffee is made with chicory-flavored Café du Monde). There's also a wall stocked with a rotating selection of packaged snacks, like tempura-battered seaweed, Turtle Chips and Japanese sodas. instagram.com/luckycatskills. VISIT THIS Symbolic Speakers at Duke University's Nasher Museum Cannupa Hanska Luger's "Department of the Interior" (2023), from his Speechless series. © Cannupa Hanska Luger, courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Photo: Wendy McEahern By Christopher Kuo In 2022, during a residency at the University of California, San Diego, the New Mexico-based artist Cannupa Hanska Luger had intended to work with clay, but the air was too humid for the drying process. Instead, he began tinkering with steel, creating the metal frames for a set of speakers. That was the genesis of Luger's upcoming exhibition "Speechless" at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in North Carolina, which explores themes of Indigenous history, colonization and the power dynamics intrinsic to communication. Luger, who was born on Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota, found inspiration in structures created by Indigenous people in the South Pacific in the 1940s. During World War II, the Allied powers transferred loads of cargo to islands, including Vanuatu and Fiji. When the Western military left, islanders created makeshift imitations of the infrastructure — control towers built from bamboo, a plane carved from wood — in the hope that this ritual would cause more cargo to arrive. These would later be referred to as cargo cults. In "Speechless," lodgepole and white pine beams converge to form a radio tower, surrounded by speakers whose parts have been replaced with colorful ceramics, handblown glass and synthetic hair, rendering them unable to produce sound. The exhibition is meant to be both an indictment of American materialism and a tribute to Indigenous artists who have been silenced by Eurocentric institutions, says Luger. "What does it mean to be a speaker who nobody's listening to?" he asks. "Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless" is on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C., from Feb. 13 to July 6, nasher.duke.edu. FROM T'S INSTAGRAM The Artist Who Turned Her Studio Into a Family Archive DeSean McClinton-Holland The artist Allison Janae Hamilton is greeted by seven generations of women in her family every time she enters her Chelsea, Manhattan, studio. Hamilton, who worked in the fashion industry before she began to make paintings, films and installations inspired by landscapes in the American South, grew up in Florida and visited her family's farm in Carroll County, Tenn., every summer. A few years ago, she began digitizing copies of ancestral records — letters, yearbooks, handwritten recipes — all stored in boxes and albums on the property. Most prized are the photographs that show relatives on the farm as they feed animals and raise children. When "everyone has been born and passed away" on the same land, "you have just a massive amount of artifacts," she says. About four dozen photos, many in vintage frames, look down on Hamilton as she works at her wooden desk. "There's a frequency I'm able to tap into just by being surrounded by them while I'm working," she says. Click here for Julia Halperin's full story on Hamilton's collection and its impact on her art, and follow us on Instagram. And if you read one thing on tmagazine.com this week, make it: Blaine Davis By Design A New York Home Designed for a Real-Life Couple and Their Imaginary Muse How to revive an 18th-century upstate farmhouse without resorting to cliché? By pretending a made-up person lives there too. By Alice Newell-Hanson and Blaine Davis Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for T Magazine from The New York Times. To stop receiving T Magazine, unsubscribe. 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