Imaan HAMMAM

Photographs by RENELL MEDRANO Styling by MARIKA-ELLA AMES

Sora CHOI

Photographs by AMY TROOST Styling by VIRGINIE BENARROCH

Jill KORTLEVE

Photographs by JOSH OLINS Styling by TONY IRVINE

Lauren HUTTON

Photographs by CASS BIRD Styling by KATELYN GRAY

IT’S EASY TO SAY THAT BEAUTY is everywhere, but it’s often difficult to find. Beauty, though, isn’t just about what’s visible on the surfaces of things. Despite all of the efforts to reduce it to a set of standards to achieve or aspire to, beauty isn’t purely about the physical or the aesthetic. It can be an emotion, a sensation, an instinct, a spirit. Feeling beautiful often has much less to do with external validation than with something much more inward. Beauty doesn’t conform; it isn’t fixed. In many ways, beauty is about how we experience and reckon with the fragility of our lives, bodies, relationships, and environments—the myth of everlasting beauty—because what’s truly eternal is that process. This issue explores beauty from that perspective: the way we find beauty in art, science, triumph, tragedy, age, and evolution; in the rituals we create, the commitments we make, the connections we forge, and the stories we tell; in the world and in ourselves.