10 Things That Delighted Us Last Week: Quince Carry-ons and Prada-ish Backpacks

Strategist senior writer Lauren Ro is usually a big proponent of traveling with a roomy tote, but her recent trip to Utah’s national parks called for something more serious: a backpack. She had thought most of them were dorky — save for Prada’s nylon backpack — until she came across Uniqlo’s minimalist multi-pocket backpack that actually bears a resemblance to Prada’s. Along with fitting everything she needed, from a camera to her kids’ headphones, it was easy to clean. “It got dusty from the parks’ red sands, but all I had to do was give it a good shake and it was ready to go,” she says.

When the price of our longtime Best in Class button-down increased from $125 to $145 last year, our writer Ambar Pardilla started wondering if there was anything better out there for less. It turns out there was: L.L.Bean’s Wrinkle-Free Pinpoint Oxford Shirt, which, at $80, is nearly half the price of our old favorite (which has now been marked up to $165). Despite its “wrinkle free” name, it doesn’t come out of the dryer perfectly smooth, but it’s still pretty good. “It’s impressive how much less wrinkled it was compared with the others,” Pardilla writes. As for the shirt itself, she says, “The white resembles the stiff peaks of a meringue, and the collar appears starched (like a vicar’s, or Josh O’Connor’s Mr. Elton’s in Emma).”

For most of her life, Strategist beauty writer Krista Bennett DeMaio used her fingers to apply liquid foundation. “Plenty of makeup artists have told me I’d get a better result with a brush, but I always found my fingertips did a superior job blending and helping the product melt into my skin,” she writes. Still, when a publicist insisted Anisa’s triangular, slightly domed Pinnacle foundation brush was a game changer, she gave it a try — and it gave her a thinner, more even layer than she ever got before. “Now the only time I use my fingers to apply foundation is when I forget to pack this brush,” she says.

Strategist writer Brenley Goertzen has been looking for a sleek bag to use as an airplane carry-on that will fit under the seat in front of her. Out of the box, she says, the leather weekender from Quince is promising: “The leather is very soft, and the bag has tons of pockets: two outer zipper compartments and one large center compartment, which features three drop-in pockets and another zippered pocket.” Plus it has a sleeve that fits over her rolling-luggage handle.

When we asked dermatologist Angelo Landriscina about the beauty products he buys at the drugstore, the first that came to his mind was L’Oréal’s Wonder Water. “It’s lamellar water, which is a technology that was hot maybe four or five years ago, but it’s something I still stick by,” he told us. “You put it on after you shampoo, and it makes your hair extremely shiny.” He has tried other, more expensive versions, but this is the one he keeps coming back to.

As a mom and an early-childhood-learning specialist who has been taking her kids to restaurants and museums since they were newborns, Maggie Yolen understands that “the picture we paint in our head about an outing is usually quite different from the reality.” Sure, the easiest answer to calming the chaos is a screen, but, she says, “The better answer is: Come prepared.” Since that’s easier said than done, she made a list of everything she keeps in her bag to make sure she doesn’t cave to tablet temptation, from a radish-shaped teething ring for babies to these magnetic dolls that make pretending play easy to achieve in any setting.

If you were to run into opera singer Joyce DiDonato, odds are she would be wearing this flow-y dress, which she says is practical and washes well. “I fly in it quite a lot. I rehearse in it. I’m literally wearing it now,” she told us. “You feel flirty and feminine but casual. It’s a perfect dress in my opinion.”

For a while, Strategist writer Erin Schwartz was on the fence about this steam cleaner — primarily because it was a pain to drain. So they relegated it to a back closet where it collected dust until they procrastinated so badly on bathroom cleaning that they decided to give it another chance. “What followed was the quickest, most painless 30-minute bathroom deep clean I’ve ever done,” they write. The PureClean was able to renew small stone tiles with craggy surfaces, sealed marble tiles, and all sorts of molding and caulk. Going forward, they write, “I’m now all in.”

When Brooks Reitz and his wife, Erin, walked into the Niwaki gardening shop’s London location for a browse, Erin tried on a pair of its Kojima trousers and loved them so much she wore them out of the store. “Cut from a 12-ounce mid-weight Japanese denim with a scant and imperceptible 2 percent stretch, they look like a proper pair of trousers but feel like sweatpants,” Brooks writes. Needless to say, he quickly fell in love with the pants too, and the couple shared them until squabbling about who had first dibs led to him buy his own pair. “Now, there are many occasions where we both leave the house wearing the same pants,” he says. “We call them our ‘family pants.’”

Apple’s M-Series MacBook Air has long been our tech writer Jordan McMahon’s default recommendation for anyone who needs a new laptop. But after trying Apple’s new MacBook Neo, which he says “feels as premium as you would expect of an Apple laptop,” it’s his new answer: “Even at my busiest, the Neo didn’t slow down until I pushed it to some absurd limits by opening a large batch of photos in the Darkroom app while running Slack, playing a few YouTube videos in the background, and opening over 25 tabs in my browser.”

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