12 Things That Delighted Us Last Week: From Twisted Tapers to Sex Pillows

While tubing mascaras have been around for a while, Strategist writer Arielle Avila noticed more and more brands — from drugstore to luxury — coming out with their own formulas this past year. To see how they stacked up against each other, she tested eight of the newest ones and found this one from UKLASH best lengthened and volumized her lashes and lasted all day. Plus, it’s buildable. “One swipe achieves a natural everyday look and a couple more gives me a dramatic eye,” she says.

Sure, when our sleep writer Amelia Jerden is testing a mattress, the main thing she’s thinking about is how she slept on it. But it was “Sex Week” at the Strategist, so she set out to see if there were such a thing as the best mattress for sex. According to Melanie Rose, host and the designer of the Netflix series How to Build a Sex Room, that would be the Saatva Classic (which happens to be our Best in Class pick, too). It’s “a crowd-pleasing innerspring that is bouncy but not too bouncy and also quite comfortable, thanks to its cushy Euro pillow top,” Jerden reports.

If you’re not ready to upgrade your mattress — or simply want to make sex more comfortable — you might consider adding a sex pillow to your setup. Liberator was the brand name Jerden heard most often from experts, and for good reason — “the company practically invented sex pillows as a product,” she says. The classic wedge shape can increase pleasure as well as help relieve pain or pressure from sex, author of Sexual Pleasure for Dummies Myisha Battle adds.

By the time Strategist contributor Hayley Folk was 28, she was having up to two or three UTIs per month. She tried everything she could to prevent them — from wearing only cotton underwear to thoroughly cleaning her sex toys — but nothing worked until she tried this organic balm. In the three years since, she’s never had a UTI: “I apply it after having sex, and sometimes before, to add a little moisture back to my vulva. It’s soothing, so occasionally I put it on just because it feels nice,” she says.

Strategist contributor Jennifer Cook counts jeans, loafers, and some variation of a button-up as her daily uniform. As such, her collection of dress shirts included a variety of fabrications, silhouettes, and colors spanning everything but a classic white oxford-cloth button-up. To address the hole in her wardrobe, she went on a hunt for a heavyweight, oversize white button-up that ended when she tried on this one from Sézane that made her exclaim, “Damn, this is good.” “It’s ideal for that easy-to-throw-on ensemble, especially on days when you want to feel put-together but getting dressed is hard,” she adds.

“Finding the right strap-on can be an intimidating endeavor, but spending the time to do your research and hone your preferences is very much worth it to find something that fits well and feels right on your body,” reports our writer Kitty Guo. To make the process easier, she chatted with experts about their favorite harnesses and dildos, including this posable one that can be bent into different shapes. “Anything that’s stiff and just points upward will always have a certain angle where it doesn’t work,” jewelry curator Dylan Reese explains. “Something that has a moldable core gives you a more customizable fit.”

“Scented candles get a lot of love around here” — especially around Valentine’s Day — but tapers deserve some too, says our senior kitchen and dining writer Emma Wartzman. This week, she added a few new expert-recommended options to our guide, including these twisty ones that are hand-dipped in Santa Barbara. “Each style comes in a variety of gorgeous colors, like an icy blue and a lilaclike mauve that I haven’t seen in other brands,” cookbook author Georgia Freedman says.

Romance novels get a lot of love, but our writer Tembe Denton-Hurst came across some real love stories for our nonfiction readers while searching for the sexiest romance novels. From a Brooklynite hosting a porn brunch to a restaurant owner sexting with a married man, The Cut’s “Sex Diaries” columnist Alyssa Shelasky’s “compilation of anonymous accounts features a range of people with varying levels of experience with nonmonogamy,” she writes.

Strategist senior editor Hilary Reid defines a a truly good New York winter boot as follows: “One that’s not a snow boot but can be worn in the snow and slush, not a going-out boot but can be worn out for dinner and to the office, and not explicitly outdoorsy-looking but that can be worn in the city’s 10-degrees-but-feels-like-minus-11-freezing-cold-pavement.” Until now, the style had eluded her, but she finally found a pair that fit all her criteria at Diane B. Shoes. “If you’re hunting for something similar, I recommend going in person — they have much more stock in store, and the people who work there are incredibly helpful,” she writes in her “Strategist Brain.”

It’s no secret that barrier repair isn’t the sexiest promise in skin care, but Strategist beauty writer Krista Bennett DeMaio says, “Without a healthy skin barrier, you don’t have healthy skin.” So if the thick moisturizer you’ve been using to address your dry, flaky, tight, or itchy skin isn’t working, you might want to double-check its ingredients: “Ideally, there’s a specific ratio of ceramides, cholesterol, and fatty acids — 3:1:1 — that closely matches skin’s natural makeup,” she says. (She recommends Skinfix’s Triple Lipid-Peptide Cream, which rebuilds the barrier over time.) You’ll want to add a hydrating serum like this one from Prequel, too. “These pull moisture into the skin, and then you lock it in with a barrier-repair cream,” she reports.

As our senior writer who covers everything from toys to strollers, Liza Corsillo had never found a company that specifically designs babyproofing products that look nice. So when she discovered Pom’s rather sleek strap locks, she immediately swapped out her old magnetic cabinet locks. “But because they’re made of a flexible soft silicone material, they can be helpful in a variety of situations — to hold a garbage can closed, to secure refrigerator or dishwasher doors, or to wrap around the corner of a dresser drawer,” she adds.

Over the years, we’ve named many of Dyson’s hairstyling tools — like the Supersonic — “Best in Class.” So it was only natural that the brand’s latest launch on the hair-care side of things would earn a spot in this week’s installment of “Don’t Dillydally.” “The foam-to-serum treatment promises a strengthened scalp barrier, including making the scalp less oily for those who have oily scalps,” says our writer Ambar Pardilla. (“It’s a lot cheaper than a new Airwrap, at least,” she adds.)

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