Find Deep Reading lists for each episode at phoebe.substack.com
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Deep Read #49 is with Annie Kreighbaum, a creative director and beauty-world architect who helped shape Glossier in its defining era and is now building KRAUM, a brand that begins with five exquisitely small makeup brushes made to her exacting specifications in Japan — what she half-jokingly calls a “vanity project,” for reasons that become clear as we talk. We revisit the optimism and extravagant funding energy of 2016, and the skills she honed in that moment — instinct, language, taste, and the discipline of editing — before turning to the bigger thesis behind KRAUM: not just better tools, but a slower, more intentional approach to getting ready. We also discuss fast beauty, permanence, her resistance to AI as a shortcut in creative work, and the books that shape her thinking.
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